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Are Children "Natural Scientists" or not?

Neil deGrasse Tyson if famous for telling us that children are natural scientists, and cautioning us to be careful not to ruin that thing about them. He makes a good case. No one ever thought, I think, that he meant that children were born resistant to the sorts of biases that scientists actively eschew, or with a developed sense of probability theory that all scientists need to evaluate their work and the work of others, and those other tools that scientists get trained in for several years before they can really call themselves scientists. He mean, rather ... how shall I put this. Oh hell…

Matt Entenza's Claim Rejected By Three Judge Panel

The 2000 election was probably won by Al Gore. But George Bush was put into office anyway. Imagine what this world would be like had Gore been ensconced in the white house? The Tea Party would probably have emerged sooner and madder, but less organized; global climate change would have become a widely accepted issue to do something about within a couple of years, instead of much later (cuz, you know, that hasn’t even happened yet). We probably wouldn’t have had this war in Iraq. If Gore had continued Clinton’s policy dealing with Al Qaida and Osama Bin Laden (no relation) there probably…

Which works better, Acupuncture or Changa?

Acupuncture is the ancient East Asian practice of poking people with needles in specific places and in specific ways in order to produce any one of a very wide range of results that could generally be classified as medicinal or health related. I don't know much about it, but Wikipedia tells us: Its general theory is based on the premise that bodily functions are regulated by the flow of an energy-like entity called qi. Acupuncture aims to correct imbalances in the flow of qi by stimulation of anatomical locations on or under the skin called acupuncture points, most of which are connected by…

Neither a Neuroscientist Nor a Statistician

A bunch of people I follow on social media were buzzing about this blog post yesterday, taking Jonah Lerher to task for "getting spun" in researching and writing this column in the Wall Street Journal about this paper on the "wisdom of crowds" effect. The effect in question is a staple of pop psychology these days, and claims that an aggregate of many guesses by people with little or no information will often turn out to be a very reasonable estimate of the true value. The new paper aims to show the influence of social effects, and in particular, that providing people with information about…

What Does "Negative Temperature" Mean, Anyway?

The most talked-about physics paper last week was probably Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom (that link goes to the paywalled journal; there's also a free arxiv preprint from which the above figure is taken). It's a catchy but easily misinterpreted title-- Negative absolute temperature! Below Absolute Zero! Thermodynamics is wrong!-- that obscures the more subtle points of what's going on here. So, in the interest of clarity, I'm going to attempt an explanation, over the course of a few posts, but given my schedule these days, that might spread over a couple of…

Farah Confirms His Ignorance Yet Again

Joseph Farah, the blowhard owner of the Worldnutdaily, is once again demonstrating that one need not let little things like ignorance of the subject stand in the way of pontificating about that subject. In this case, the subject is evolution and his ignorance of that subject is on display for all to see. He begins with the standard blather about how no criticism of evolution is allowed: It used to be that science followed facts. Today, at least as far as evolution goes, facts follow theories. When inconvenient facts are discovered, they are simply adapted to fit the theories. The theories…

Another Nutball Rabbi

Thanks to Bartholomew for linking me to this blog by a rabbi named Lazer Brody who almost makes Yehuda Levin seem sane by comparison. He is allied with Levin in trying to destroy the rights of gay Israelis to march through any means necessary, including violence. In this post, he talks of Levin's partnership with equally authoritarian Muslims in trying to make sure no gay person has the right to protest and march that everyone else has: What brings Rabbi Levin and Sheikh Temimi together? Temimi says, "The Gay Pride marches promoted by the highest levels of the Zionist Government... a wild…

It just works my ass

If your iPod Touch does not work on your Windows XP, you can ... A. Uninstall and reinstall everything (Hint: Don't actually try ANY of this, it doesn't work!): Okay well I spent about an hour on the phone with Apple trying to fix this problem. The guy I talked to seemed to have delt with this problem before. He tould me that Apple was getting numerous calls about the iPod touch not connecting with iTunes. So here is the solution that worked for me. The first thing you must do it uninstall iTunes and Quicktime using the controll pannel, add/remove hardware, on your windows computer. Once…

Marriage Equality!

So, has anything been happening lately? Well, the Supreme Court got a big one right. Marriage equality is now the law of the land, which is a very good thing. There will be pockets of resistance for a while to come, but mostly this news has been met with the yawn it deserves. Of course gay people should have their marriages recognized by the state. Most people have figured that out by now. You can find the text of the decision and the dissents here. The legal argument seems pretty straightforward to me. Writing at The New Republic, Brian Beutler spells it out: As both a moral and…

World Open, Part Three

Ever wonder what it looks like to have 300 games of chess going on in one room? There was a second ballroom, almost as large, which was also filled with players. Well, we have arrived at round eight. In the prior seven rounds I had scored three wins, two losses, one draw, and one win by forfeit. I was riding high after winning my two previous games. Alas, we have reached the final day of the tournament, when the games are a bit earlier than normal. I don't like doing anything early in the morning, much less play a hard game of chess. Across the board from me was a kid who was eye-…

My Review of Inglourious Basterds

I have been a huge Quentin Tarantino fan ever since seeing Reservoir Dogs in college. I have loved all of his movies, with Jackie Brown being the only item in the corpus that gets a rating below brilliant. So you can imagine my excitement over the premiere of Inglourious Basterds. I almost never go to movies on Friday or Saturday nights since I hate crowds, but for this I made an exception. There are only the most minor of spoilers below the fold. Really, the movie advertisements give away more than I am about to. Short review: Tarantino is a genius. If he doesn't win Best Everything…

One in Three College Students Is Coasting. This Is News?

There's been a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing in academic circles this week over the release of a book claiming college students are "Academically Adrift" (see also the follow-up story here). The headline findings, as summarized by Inside Higher Ed are: * 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college. * 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college. * Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements.…

Building Genetic Medicine: A Discussion with STS and Public Policy Scholar Shobita Parthasarathy

Part 1 | 2 | 3 --- The World's Fair sits down with Shobita Parthasarathy, author of Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (MIT Press, 2007), Assistant Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Co-Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the University of Michigan. Shobita Parthasarathy's research focuses on the comparative politics of science and technology in the United States and abroad, with a focus on issues related to genetics and biotechnology. She is particularly interested in…

What's New in the Social Studies of Science?

Social Studies of Science is a premier peer-reviewed journal in the field of STS. Here is the table of contents + abstracts for its latest issue, Volume 37, Issue 3, 2007. Perhaps something will catch your eye: 1. Wendy Faulkner: "`Nuts and Bolts and People': Gender-Troubled Engineering Identities," 331-356 Engineers have two types of stories about what constitutes `real' engineering. In sociological terms, one is technicist, the other heterogeneous. How and where boundaries are drawn between `the technical' and `the social' in engineering identities and practices is a central concern for…

Reflections on American Academy's Report: Do Scientists Understand the Public?

Held in over 30 countries, the World Wide Views on Global Warming initiative represents the state-of-the-art in new approaches to public engagement, the subject of several recent reports and meetings. This video features a short documentary on the Australian event. Over the weekend, my friend Chris Mooney contributed an excellent op-ed to the Washington Post pegged to an American Academy of Arts and Sciences event yesterday. The op-ed previewed a longer essay by Chris released at the event in which he described some of the major themes expressed in the transcripts of three meetings convened…

The Climate Change Generation? Report Challenges Assumptions About Younger Americans

Americans under the age of 35 have grown up during an era of ever more certain climate science, increasing news attention, alarming entertainment portrayals, and growing environmental activism, yet on a number of key indicators, this demographic group remains less engaged on the issue than older Americans. A survey report released today challenges conventional wisdom that younger Americans as a group are more concerned and active on the issue of climate change than their older counterparts. The analysis of nationally representative data collected in January of this year is timed for release…

The Caveman Mystique: Pop Darwinism and the Masculine Excuse, with author Martha McCaughey

The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates Over Sex, Violence, and Science (Routledge, 2007), with its author Martha McCaughey. McCaughey is a Professor of Sociology and the Director of Women's Studies at Appalachian State University. Professor McCaughey's work fits at the intersections of gender, sexuality, science, technology, social movements, and the media. I first met her during her tenure at Virginia Tech, where she distinguished herself as a leading feminist scholar in science studies, an atypically…

The Creation "Museum" makes it to the peer-reviewed literature

I'm afraid I don't have access to this specialty journal, Curator: The Museum Journal, so it's a good thing the author sent me a copy of his article on the modern treatment of human origins in museums. It's amusing, since part of it is a substantial comparison of the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington DC, but there is also a thorough discussion of Ken Ham's Creation "Museum" in Kentucky. The Creation Museum does not come off at all well. Asma highlights a couple of things that leapt out to me, as well. It's not really a museum —…

She ovulates hard for the money: lapdancing and economic evidence for estrus

Ask anyone who's spent any time in a strip club, and one of the things he will almost certainly not mention is the ovulatory state of his favorite gal. But, according to a recent paper by Geoffrey Miller et. al., how much money he spent on her may have more to do with where she is in her cycle than he'd comfortably acknowledge. Miller and his co-authors set out to see if they could find any economic evidence for human estrus, a period of increased sexual attractiveness, receptivity and proceptivity occuring around the time of peak fertility. The prevailing consensus is that human estrus has…

School's out - where are the kids?

Image by shanevaughn Today is the first day of summer vacation here in Ontario, and I assume that the summer break has begun in most other parts of North America as well.  That means that millions of kids are looking at 8 gloriously school-free weeks in July and August.  Now while physical activity promotion folks like myself would hope that all of these kids are going to spend their summer outside being physically active, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that that is not the case for most kids.  Since these are kids, parents obviously have a huge amount of control over the way they…

Massive Academic Fraud in Anesthesia Research

Several news agencies are reporting that a massive academic fraud case has surfaced. A single researcher apparently fabricated data used in the publication of at least 21 journal articles published over a 12-year period. After an internal reviewer raised concerns, Baystate Medical Center conducted an investigation into research conducted by Dr. Scott S. Reuben, who was - at that time - the chief of their acute pain service. As the phrase "at that time" suggests, the results of the investigation did not exonerate Dr. Reuben. Anything but, in fact. In late January, Baystate sent out a letter…

The Feminist Scientist

This is the third of three discussion posts for Week 1 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/archives.php>archives and clicking on "Joy of Science" under in the Category section. This post deals with the readings by Hubbard, Spanier, and Keller, as well as the NSF report "Beyond Bias and Barriers". Ruth Hubbard, Bonnie Spanier, and Evelyn Fox Keller each made the transition from practicing scientist to feminist critic of science. Hubbard addresses an issue that bothered me greatly when I…

Because We Don't Have To

I started this as a reply to a comment by Chris on my post Why Are All The White Men Sitting Together In The Other Conference Rooms? but it became a post of its own. Chris wrote: As someone who's attended quite a few engineering conferences, I find that sessions about the profession/discipline tend not to be very well attended, and not representative of the meeting attendees as a whole. For instance, sessions on engineering education tend to attract only a small fraction of the attendees that come to sessions about using steel reinforced concrete in bridge design or retroreflectivity in…

Pedophiles and the First Amendment: thoughts on a disgusting situation

Warning: This post contains commentary on an issue raised at another of the blogs on this network. The topic material involves pedophiles and first amendment rights, and is not suitable for all audiences. I know for a fact that it makes me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. A couple of days ago, Shelley Batts put up a post discussing Barack Obama's attempts to take legal action against a self-professed pedophile who put a press release photo of Obama's kids up on his website, along with commentary handicapping the 2008 presidential election based on the "cuteness" of the candidates underage…

Types, tokens, genera and species

In reading Jack Smart's excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on the Identity Theory, I was again struck by the role that the distinction between type and token plays in philosophy of mind. This distinction was originally made by Charles Sanders Peirce back in (if memory serves) the 1870s (he also distinguished "tone", but that hasn't traveled well). I think it may even apply to biological taxonomy and the species problem. Smart says that a type of mental state may, on some accounts, have different tokens. I won't get into this here (I'm a full blown identity theorist, and if folk…

Stuff I've been reading: My take on being Nick Hornby (if Mr Hornby did decide to provide some scientific commentary).

One of the monthly columns in The Believer, is written by none other than Nick Hornby, and is called "Stuff I've Been Reading: A Monthly Column." In it, he presents a list of books bought and a list of books read, and although I am nowhere near as voracious a reader, I thought it might be nice to follow suite (also some of my friends told me that that is what blogs are kind of for). Anyway, for clarity, here are the books I managed to get through these past two months. "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright (finished, reread actually - once a book club book) "Saturday" by Ian McEwan (…

Why having those annoying little siblings around constantly was probably good for you

This is a guest post by Martina Mustroph, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007 Rats are often useful models for understanding human behavior,. Testing drugs on rats before testing them on humans is particularly enticing because it is relatively free of ethical concerns (relative to drugging humans, at least), and the amount of drug required to achieve an effect is relatively small compared to the amount it would take to see an effect in a human. As rats' nervous systems are very similar to the human nervous system, they lend themselves really well to drug studies. Rats have been…

Discovery Channel besieged

A gunman with an explosive device is holding hostages at the Discovery Channel building until they give him what he wants. What does he want? Well, he's nuts, and his page of demands is loading very slowly, so here's what I was able to extract: The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY: 1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the…

Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study

The Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS) is a major NIH-sponsored study of the treatment of adolescents with depression, in which href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine" rel="tag">fluoxetine-only, rel="tag">cognitive-behavioral therapy only, combination treatment, and placebo are compared.  The study is expected to generate a number of papers.  One was published a few days ago in the Archives of General Psychiatry.  The paper is not yet open-access.  The study team, however, has a href="https://trialweb.dcri.duke.edu/tads/index.html">website with…

The story about my husband giving up his job

Hahahah, I foolishly thought that, when summer officially started, my life would settle down. Hohoho, so why don't I try to complicate things by, oh, I don't know, how about moving, and putting our house on the market? So here are some updates that give a somewhat authentic snapshot of what I'm doing right now, a perfect example of how work and "the rest of life" cannot be separated. As I glibly mentioned a few weeks ago, my husband has decided to go on academic leave. I wasn't sure how to blog about this as he had not yet made his decision public to the world (he had told his department…

The ethnobiology of voodoo zombification

The word "zombie" usually brings to mind the creatures depicted in numerous horror films - the mindless, rotting "living dead" who shuffle with their arms stretched out in front of them, devouring the flesh of their victims.    Zombies feature widely in popular culture, but the idea of the zombie originates in the Vodun religion. Popularly known as voodoo, this religion has been misrepresented and sensationalized, particularly in Hollywood films, according to which its followers practice bizarre rituals involving voodoo dolls and cannibalism. In reality, Vodun is a complex belief system…

Myth-bustin’ bad arguments about atheists

This apologist for religion, James Scofield, has written a bizarre essay titled 5 Myths Atheists Believe about Religion. It's a peculiar screed that assumes atheists are somehow aliens outside religious culture, looking in uncomprehendingly, needing some kind of correction in our perceptions — more so than the religious members of our culture, who are privileged to possess the true and secret information we do not have. Never mind that here in America we are deeply entangled everywhere in religion, tripping over it in our media, our politics, our commerce, and that many of us were brought up…

Women in Math, Science, and Engineering: Is It About the Numbers (And Not the Ones You Might Think)?

The uproar surrounding Larry Summers' remarks on women in science and engineering, made almost three years ago (man, I'm getting old!) has died down, but the literature on social/environmental factors responsible, at least in part, for the large gender disparities in math-heavy fields continues to grow at a steady pace, continually putting to lie many of his claims. This month's issue of Psychological Science contains two additions to that literature, one looking at the effect of experience on individual, and more importantly, gender differences in spatial attention, which is thought to be a…

Whoa, Missouri…you're not going to let this one pass, are you?

Have you seen Missourie House Bill 291? Wow, it's pushing intelligent design, um, boldly. Like a gibbon that just sat down in a pool of sriracha sauce in a big tub of feces, that kind of "boldly". It starts by defining evolution in one paragraph, and by evolution we mean just common descent. It says nothing specific about mechanisms or evidence, and is most concerned that evolution denies "operation of any intelligence, supernatural event, God or theistic figure". And then we get 12 paragraphs defining Intelligent Design, which consist mainly of pointing to biological processes and phenomena…

The challenges of dialogue about animal research.

Earlier this month, I wrote a post on California's Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28. There, I noted that some opponents of the law expressed concerns that the real intent (and effect) of the law was not to protect those who do academic research with animals, but instead to curtail the exercise of free speech. I also wrote: I'm left not sure how I feel about this law. Will it have a certain psychological value, telling researchers that the state is behind them, even if it doesn't actually make much illegal that wasn't…

The women who taught me science.

Since March is Women's History Month, I thought it might be appropriate to recognize some women who were a part of my history -- namely, the women who taught me chemistry and physics. (This shouldn't be interpreted as a slight against the women who taught me biology -- I simply don't remember them as well -- nor against the men who taught me science. They made an impact on me, but this post isn't about them.) I didn't realize it until just now, but none of my science teachers in junior high or high school were women. That strikes me as kind of weird. In contrast, during my undergraduate…

Two more tragic tales of Burzynski patients

One of my newer blogging interests is the "alternative" cancer doctor named Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Although I had heard of him years ago, mainly in the context of his desperate patients tapping into the generosity of kind-hearted strangers to pay for his "antineoplaston" therapy, I hadn't really written much about him until very recently. About six months ago, Burzynski came to my attention because of his clinic's use of an Internet legal thug named Marc Stephens, who threatened skeptical bloggers with legal action after they had criticized the Burzynski Clinic and then later disavowed him…

Acupuncture: Not an "essential health benefit" in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

This week, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that can only be described as historic. Any of you out there (in the U.S. anyway; I realize that my readership is international) who have paid even a passing attention to the news can't help but avoid reporting, debate, and polemics related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which is often disparagingly referred to as "Obamacare." If the law is upheld, or even if most of the law is upheld, it will radically reshape health insurance in this country. Having spent 13 years in the trenches at cancer centers that see a high…

Variations on a theme of anti-vaccine nonsense

If there's one thing about anti-vaccine activists that is virtually their sine qua non, it's an utter lack of understanding of science. Actually, a more accurate description would be that it's a highly selective understanding of science. Nowhere do I find this to be the case as much as when I see anti-vaccine loons pulling what I like to call the "toxins gambit," or, as I've put it before, "Why are we injecting TOXINS into our babies?" It's a gambit that anti-vaccine activists seemingly never tire of, and it comes in a wide variety of forms, but they all have one of two things in common.…

Naturopathy advances in Hawaii

Naturopathy is quackery. That can't be said often enough. After all, any "discipline" that not only incorporates homeopathy as a major part of its training but also requires that its graduates pass a test with a section on homeopathy certainly can't be considered science-based. Actually, to be more accurate, naturopathy is probably at least 80% quackery and 20% science-based modalities like diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes rebranded and infused with woo. Moreover, whenever naturopaths are misguided enough not to know their limitations, leading them to treat real diseases (rather than…

Maya's Marvelous Acupuncture?

As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I didn't think that acupuncture was quackery, an ancient "Eastern" treatment that "evolved" from bloodletting not unlike bloodletting in ancient "Western" bloodletting. This time was, hard as it is to believe, less than eight years ago, right around the time just before I got involved with my not-so-super-secret other blog. I figured that, because acupuncture involves sticking needles into the body, maybe there might be something to it. That doesn't mean that I thought that there was something to it, only that back then I was a lot more…

When antivaccination pseudoscience turns threatening...

While I'm back on the topic of vaccines again (and that topic seems to me less and less rancorous these days, not because antivaccination "activists" have gotten any less loony but because the smoking cranks, at least the ones showing up on my blog these days, threaten to make antivaccinationists seem low key by comparison), it turns out that one of the premiere journals of medical research, Nature Medicine, has weighed in on the topic. If you want any more evidence that the antivaccination movement is becoming more and more like the radical animal rights movement in its willingness to try to…

Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings

There are two quick and fairly easy approaches to reducing US emissions of CO2 by several percent. These reduction would be at the household level, possibly decreasing the household cost of energy by between 20 and 30 percent (or more, depending on the household) and decreasing national total CO2 emissions by around 10% or so. But these approaches are nearly impossible to implement. Why? Because people are ignorant and selfish. The two methods are: 1) Replace existing technologies with more efficient ones and 2) Use energy less. I'm not talking about replacing technologies at a…

Another example of why I fear for the future of medicine

It's been a while since I wrote about this topic, but I fear for the future of medicine. Regular readers know what I'm talking about. The infiltration of various unscientific, pseudoscientific, and even anti-scientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities into academic medicine seems increasingly to be endangering science-based medicine. Worse, this infiltration of quackery seems at least as bad, if not worse, in academic medicine, so much so that Dr. R.W. coined a most exquisite term for the increasing prevalence of pseudoscience in medical academia: Quackademic medicine…

Lee Woodard on the Chad Jessop melanoma story: "Why would I promote a hoax?"

Ever since I started blogging about a story about a youth named Chad Jessop who, it was claimed, developed melanoma and cured himself of it with "natural" remedies, with the result that his mother was supposedly brought before the Orange County Superior Court and his mother thrown in maximum security prison and denied the right to hire her own attorney, I've been fascinated at the contortions of the person most recently responsible for spreading this story, a blogger who goes under the pseudonym of the Angry Scientist. For one thing, the first person to spread this story by e-mail, Thomas…

The gods are laughing at Tom Harris

Tim Blair responds to Mieszkowski's conclusion that "climate scientists say that, basically, Gore got it right" with a link to an article by Tom Harris who writes: Albert Einstein once said, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." While the gods must consider An Inconvenient Truth the ultimate comedy, real climate scientists are crying over Al Gore's new film. This is not just because the ex-vice-president commits numerous basic science mistakes. They are also concerned that many in the media and public will fail to…

Fearing the beast's return

Leave it to Dr. Charles to remind me of something that happened recently, albeit in a bit of a roundabout way. It's something I would rather have forgotten, but, when you dedicate your life to battling the beast that cancer, it is something that is inevitable and something a doctor has to learn to deal with in his cancer patients. Fear of the beast's return. Paradoxically, it was not anything sad at all that Dr. Charles wrote about, but rather the triumphs that we can have over breast cancer that can give a survivor her life back and how a woman who has undergone a mastectomy to beat her…

EpiWonk schools David Kirby in epidemiology so that Orac doesn't have to

At this stage of the game, I almost feel sorry for David Kirby. Think about it. He's made his name and what little fame he has (which isn't much outside of the tinhat crowd that thinks the guv'mint is intentionally poisoning their children with vaccines to make them all autistic) almost entirely on the basis of one book published over three years ago, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy. Of course, the question of whether mercury from the thimerosal preservative that used to be in vaccines, or vaccines themselves, cause autism has not been a…

"Green Our Vaccines": The fallacy of the perfect solution

Don't worry, faithful readers, my blogging about the "Green Our Vaccines" rally last week is reaching its end. If my poor neurons can take it, there are still the speeches of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Jay Gordon to be commented on in one more post (the latter of whom I used to consider somewhat reasonable albeit incorrect but who, if his speech and statements to the press at the "Green Our Vaccines" rally are any indication, has gone completely over to the dark side of antivaccinationism). Then that's probably about all I'll be able to take for a while. It'll be back to writing about…

Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Bold Social Experiment in Harlem

Steve Levitt links to this article by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer on an educational innovation to improve the education of ethnic minority children. Dobbie and Fryer write: Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) is arguably the most ambitious social experiment to alleviate poverty of our time. We [Dobbie and Fryer] provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ on educational outcomes, with an eye toward informing the long-standing debate whether schools alone can eliminate the achievement gap or whether the issues that poor children bring to school are too much for educators to…