Search Content

Displaying results 56651 - 56700 of 87947

The project of being a grown-up scientist (part 1).

I'm writing this post (and the posts following it, so the bites are of reasonable size) at the urging of Bill Hooker, with whom I've talked about these issues in real life. The idea of becoming a grown-up in the scientific community is a thread that runs through a lot of my posts (and also guides my thinking as I teach my "Ethics in Science" class), but it turns out I hadn't written a proper post to explain the idea. This set of posts will at least serve as a first attempt. When I started graduate school in chemistry a hundred years ago (give or take), I was acutely aware of the chasm…

Friday Sprog Blogging: nighthawks.

We've arrived at the portion of the school year in which it is dark when I walk the Free-Ride offspring home. This means that a good bit of our observation during the walk depends on our ears instead of our eyes. Elder offspring: (in response to the high-pitched screech-y song of a bird-like shadow swooping above us) I wonder if that was a nighthawk. Dr. Free-Ride: I don't know. I'm no kind of expert on bird songs. I'm not even sure how I'd tell a bird from a bat when it's this dark. Younger offspring: A bat is a mammal. Dr. Free-Ride: I know that a bat is a mammal. But, in the dark, I'm…

Pack your bags: assessing young scientists' commitment to science.

DrugMonkey has a poll up asking for reader reports of the science career advice they have gotten firsthand. Here's the framing of the poll: It boils down to what I see as traditional scientific career counselling to the effect that there is something wrong or inadvisable about staying in the same geographical location or University when a scientist move across the training stages. From undergrad to grad, grad to postdoc or postdoc to faculty. First, if you've gotten advice on your scientific career, go respond to the poll. Then, come back and we'll chat. Now, if one's goal is to become a…

Friday Sprog Blogging: taking physics for a spin.

Dr. Free-Ride: So tell me about that device of yours? How did you make it and what does it do? Elder offspring: There is a cut piece of a drinking straw. You also need two pieces of tin foil and a long string. Dr. Free-Ride: That's really aluminum foil, isn't it? Elder offspring: They call it tin foil. Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I've been meaning to have a word with "them" about that. Anyway, how did you assemble the device. Elder offspring: First, you put the string through the piece of straw. Then, you pinch the pieces of foil into bow shapes (like bow-ties), and then you tie the ends if the…

Silence is the enemy: addressing the causes.

Yesterday, in my first post about the Silence is the Enemy campaign, I wrote: Addressing rape directly. From the point of view of ethics, you'd think this would be a very short discussion. It is wrong to commit sexual violence. It is wrong to act out your frustration or your sense of entitlement or your need to feel that there is something in your life that is within your control on the body of another human being. It is wrong to treat a woman or a child (or another man) as less than fully human. Anyone who would argue otherwise could only be a moral monster. Or thoroughly steeped in a…

Perhaps this line of work is not for you...

Over the long weekend, I came across a bunch of things that in normal times I would have blogged about, but because I was trying to chill, work a little on the yard, and also work a bit on grants, I intentionally took Monday off of blogging. As I get back into the swing of things, work-wise, blogging-wise, and otherwise, I thought it would be a good thing to make sure not to miss at least one thing I saw that doesn't require a fill Orac-length discussion but should be pointed out nonetheless. It's a little blurb that appeared on the antivaccine website complaining about vaccination…

Latest Research Shows That Clouds Do NOT Cause Global Warming

The question of whether clouds are the cause of global warming has been settled: No, they are not. The question was raised in July in a paper by Spencer and Braswell, published in the Peer Reviewed Journal Remote Sensing called "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance." (See this.) Spencer and Braswell's paper claimed that the Earth's temperature was not really rising due to fossil carbon in the form of CO2 being pushed into atmosphere. Rather, they said, any variation we see in global temperature is a result of natural…

Bonus Woo: Global prayer

This one didn't seem big enough to deserve the full Your Friday Dose of Woo treatment, but I certainly don't want to let this additional bit of religious woo go by unnoticed: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - March 27, 2007. Regardless of creed, ethnicity, age or culture, throughout history people have steadfastly believed in the power of prayer. Now a team of scientists and over a million people around the world will put this belief to the test. From May 15th through May 29th the "Breakthrough Celebration: Compassion to Action" will be the largest interfaith global meditation and prayer for peace…

Evolution vs. Creationism: The Book

A life science teacher should not have to know about creationism to teach evolution, other than to the extent that you may cover the history of evolutionary biology, and begin in the days before science took center stage and natural philosophy was dragged off with one of those big vaudeville hooks. But, unfortunately, you do have to know something about it, about how to recognize it, how to argue with it, and about the legal and professional context of managing creationism among your students, your peers, and your bosses. One of the most important resources a life science teacher or an…

Primitive Cultures are Simple, while Civilization is Complex: Part 2

In the first part of this discussion, I reminded you that we are talking about "falsehoods." "Falsehood" is a term I and others have co-opted and have used for well over a decade in anthropology and biology courses across the land. The idea is to identify a statement that, when uttered in some particular demographic or sociocultural context, invokes a relatively consistent set of meanings in the minds of those present, such that those meanings are at least iffy, probably wrong, and often (but certainly not always) offensive and destructive in some way. Such a construct ... this falsehood…

What's in the air?

Good question ... what IS in the air? The simple answer is that the air ... the Earth's atmosphere ... is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there's dirt. I want to talk a little about the oxygen, one of the other gases (carbon dioxide to be exact), the water vapor, and the dirt. Oxygen The oxygen is one of the most important parts to us because we (and all the other animals) need it to breath. To me, what is most interesting about the oxygen is that in the old days ... before any animals or plants evolved but life…

Early, somewhat controversial hominid walked like an Australopith

The ape human split is a bit of a moving target. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were geneticists who placed it at very recent (close to 4 million years ago) and palaeoanthropologists, using fossils, who placed it at much earlier. During the 1980s, the ape-human split moved back in time because of the importance of sivapithecus, then later in time when Sivapithecus slipped and fell out of the hominid/hominin (human ancestor) family tree. Meanwhile the geneticists were moving towards a more and more recent split. At one point not too long ago, all the evidence converged with the split…

Polar Bears and Global Warming

The pending federal decision about whether to protect the polar bear as a threatened species is as much about climate science as it is about climate change. The US Fish and Wildlife service is contemplating the listing of the obviusly endangered polar bear as a threatened species. Well, duh... The problem for them (the US Federal Government, which has been converted over the last 7 years into a right wing think tank) is that the main threat to the polar bear is global warming, and there are still plenty of individuals in charge of the US that want to deny global warming. But, with…

Jared Lee Loughner a "Manchurian candidate"? Adams goes further down the rabbit hole

Remember how early this morning I posted about Mike Adam's despicable and ghoulish attempt to seize on the tragedy of the shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) by Jared Lee Loughner as a way of blaming the pharmaceutical industry and government for his violent rampage and intentionally conflating the decrying of violent rhetoric that might have helped to inspire a probably mentally ill individual to commit an act of mass murder? At the time, I observed that, whenever I think that Mike Adams has gone as low as he can go, he always manages to prove me wrong and go even lower…

Something to be thankful for: No anti-vaccine propaganda with my Harry Potter

It's Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S., and, despite the crappy economy, there are still things to be thankful for. For instance, skeptical activism can still be effective. Remember how on Sunday Skepchick Elyse put out the call to Skepchic readers to complain to movie theaters that were reportedly going to be airing a public service announcement from the anti-vaccine group SafeMinds? (Actually, "public service announcement" is a misnomer; it should be called a public disservice announcement.) This was a truly disgusting and deceptive bit of misinformation that I discussed as part of the anti…

Idiotic comment of the week

In a nod to fellow ScienceBlogger Ed Brayton, with his hilarious Dumbass Quote of the Day, I hereby inaugurate the "Idiotic Comment of the Week," culled from this very blog. I don't guarantee that I'll do it every week, but when I see neuron-necrosing idiocy below and beyond the usual call of pseudoscientists and quackery boosters who occasionally like to try to match their "wits" (such as they are) with my reality- and science-based commenters, usually to hilarious effect, I'll give it the "honor" it deserves. This week, despite highly intense competition (thanks to a recent infestation of…

The Chromium-6 Fraud

In 1987 Zhang JianDong published a study linking chromium-6 in drinking water to cancer. In 1997 he published a new study retracting his findings --- further analysis showed that chromium-6 wasn't to blame. All part of the normal progress of science you would think. Except for a few small things. 1. Zhang did not write the 1997 retraction published under his name. 2. Zhang did not agree with the conclusions of the 1997 study. 3. The 1997 study was actually written by consultants from ChemRisk hired by PG&E. And PG&E was being sued for…

The Weather Makers

Tim Flannery has a new book The Weather Makers on climate change. You can read an extract here. Naturally this has prompted the usual pieces on how global warming totally isn't happening. First we have William Kininmonth, who writes: The science linking human activities to climate change is simplistic and his arguments are assisted by the fact we are in a period of apparent warming. ... The focus on carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change overlooks the importance of water vapour as a greenhouse gas and the hydrological cycle's role in regulating the temperatures of our climate system.…

The difference between the newbie and the old pro

Grant season is upon us. Every day that I'm not in the clinic and the O.R., I find myself holed up in my office pounding my head against my monitor trying to write just that perfect mixture of preliminary data, blarney, and grantsmanship to persuade the Powers That Be to give me just a taste of that increasingly precious and scarce elixir of life for my lab, grant money. All I want is just enough to keep my lab going another couple of years and to try to add another person to my lab. Right now, I'm working on an grant to go to the Army for breast cancer research and a grant to a private…

Christopher Wanjek reads Kevin Trudeau's latest book so that you don't have to

It's not your Friday Dose of Woo yet, but fear not. You'll get your weekly dose of woo in due course. Kevin Trudeau is arguably the most prominent snakeoil salesmen of our time. I've leafed through his first book, Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About at the bookstore and recoiled at the conspiracy-mongering, lies, and self-promotion (a lot of discussions in the book urge you to pay for access to his website to get more information). As you may know, he's now released a followup book More Natural Cures Revealed. Fortunately, Christopher Wanjek has read it so that I don't have to…

You must be kidding, Mr Unwin

Here's another review of Dawkins' The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It's unbelievable, as if the critic hadn't actually read the book. Here's the hed/dek: Dawkins needs to show some doubt Scientists work in a field full of uncertainties. So how can some be so sure God doesn't exist? asks Stephen Unwin Uh, what? Two things immediately come to mind: certainty isn't a claim Dawkins makes anywhere, and…Stephen Unwin???!? Unwin is a remarkably silly man, as anyone who has read his book, The Probability of God will know. Unwin goes on with some very strange inferences. It is clear that on…

This doesn't happen every day: A study author comments in a humble surgeon's blog

Over the last couple of days, I've blogged a bit about a study by Paul Shattuck that shows how useless it is to try to use special education classification numbers as a means of proving the existence of an "autism epidemic." Well, at the risk of driving at least one person away, I'm going to comment one last time on this study. (And the answer to that person's question is that I'll blog about this topic when there's something going on that interests me enough to blog about it. He is perfectly free to ignore my posts on the topic if they annoy him so.) In any case, Paul Shattuck himself showed…

Stupidity of lying

I'm angry so today you get what you came for... I wrote a post on Autism and Vaccines a while back that went through why there are people still arguing about this and took the position that I don't think that there is a link between autism and thimerosal but that some of the arguments that people on the other side make do have some validity, though not compelling. I specifically ended the post saying that I fully believe that all children should get vaccinated, that mine are, and that in any event thimerosal isn't in the single dose shots anymore. I won't go into the whole thing here but…

The Sunday Night Poem - Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenburg

[Editor's Note: "Please enjoy this little blurb on the famous German Romantic poet Novalis, and send money, but quickly." This message was found in a bottle off the coast of southern Florida. We presume it is from the C. O., still off on his relaxing holiday. Here is the remainder of his note:] Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenburg (wrote under the pen name of Novalis) was born in Oberwiederstedt, Prussian Saxony, into a family of Protestant Lower Saxon nobility. His father was a director of a salt mine. At the age of ten Novalis was sent to a religious school but he did not adjust to…

How Do You Value What Didn't Happen?

Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled it "understanding trillions," and started a list of examples. And when I learned that the US GDP in 2006 was 13T and the derivative market, estimated in June 2007, was valued at 500T, I quickly got a sense of the potential drain of the derivative market (in which money is spent on items without real value...my definition, please correct me if I am wrong). I…

Strange Travels, Part 10: Political Panels Galore

My adventures in NY Chicago, continued: Second day of the month A Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) at the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago(Note: This butterfly has nothing to do with the convention or the following post, but it was too lovely a shot to leave out.) The YearlyKos convention is in full swing, Before the science rumpus begins, it’s time for coffee with Justin Cole of Media Matters. About a dozen or so bloggers from Colorado and a few other places gather to discuss the way breaking news is handled by the media. Concerns about newspaper stories with a conservative bias…

Botanical Art Blooms in Colorado Galleries

What is sprouting this spring on the Denver art scene? This past month, the botanical illustrations of Susan Rubin were on display at the Spark Gallery, in the Santa Fe art district. This area, along one of the oldest stretches of road in the west, recently experienced urban renewal and has grown to become one of Denver's hippest new cultural scenes. The gallery, one of the oldest installations in the area, is the perfect fusion of classic southwest and contemporary art. Outside, the stucco walls have been painted a deep grey, while the indoor space is light, open and airy. The setting was a…

Riding the waves of three

Why does chaos always strike in threes? I've spent the past three days* dealing with what I can only describe as personal chaos. Of course, I don't mean it in the classic sense; I haven't been floating in a void of disarray. (It just feels like it sometimes.) Rather, I refer to the variables in life... those which we knew were possible, but seem unbelievable when they occur. I'm still seeking order (riding the waves, with a touch of battle, here and there) so it will be a few days before I have time to write. In the meantime, I'd like to share a few bits from my old site--about chaos, of…

The luxury of time

One night last week, with not a whole lot going on, I strolled into the MICU to say hello to my friend Tom, who was working overnight. "Wanna go for coffee?" I asked. "Can't," he said, leaning against the nurse's station. "Probably gonna code the lady in room five sometime in the next half hour." I thought he was kidding; people anticipating an impending resuscitation are usually too preoccupied to lean on things. He saw my raised eyebrow and explained: the woman had been terminally ill for months. At her daughter's insistence, she had had every life-prolonging intervention, even beyond the…

Why scientific meetings?

So I've been at the Geological Society of America annual meeting for a day and a half. The main part of the meeting just began this morning; yesterday I went to a short course about science education research. And now, after half a morning of talks, I'm taking a break to 1) revise things in my own talk and 2) blog. I spent a lot of yesterday morning looking through the program, making plans for the rest of the week. (And no, I haven't followed through on all of them. That would have been impossible unless I could clone myself, unfortunately.) But although I am terrible about making plans and…

Biased reporting from CNSNews

Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com writes a very pro-Lott piece on the dispute between Lott and Ayres and Donohue. Probably the most notable feature is what is not mentioned---there is nothing about the coding errors Lott made. We can be sure that Donohue mentioned the problem to Johnson, but Lott had nothing to say on the matter and Johnson chose not to mention it. [Update: I checked with Donohue and he told me that he didn't get to mentioning the coding errors. My mistake. It is still true that Lott did not use this chance to dispute the allegation of…

Chocolate chip cookie tectonics, take two

My reviewers commenters on yesterday's post on chocolate chip cookie deformation had some great points. (Some of them also seem to have been very hungry. For those who want me to experiment more, and to get to analyze the results: looks like I've got something that I can promise once the Donors Choose challenge rolls around.) Key criticism #1, from DDeden: First the cookies puffed up, and then they collapsed. While they puffed up, their surface area increased [No, it decreased!], so the cookie crust was pulled apart. When the cookies collapsed, the surface area decreased again [No, it…

Finding Atlanta, Part 2

Anyhoo... The week before we left for Atlanta, Heather and I stayed with my parents, who drove back up to PA to help us load our moving truck. The day before we got there, it snowed about a foot, making it impossible to even get the Subarus up there, much less the truck. We had to hire someone to come out, clear the driveway and then tow the moving truck up to the house, which took all day. Packing took all night. The following morning, on four hours of sleep, we left for Atlanta. The icing on the cake, the very rock bottom, was the fiasco involving our remote choice of residence. We signed a…

You Got Activism in My Art! You Got Art in My Activism!

A "green" art show just opened up in Lexington titled "HOT: Artists Respond to Global Warming", where area artists wanted to "participate in the conversation about climate change" through their works. The objective of the show was to go beyond the informational and factual aspects and allow the artists to become true evaluators of the world around them, she said. The results include numerous media -- pottery, sculpture, oil paintings, watercolor paintings, fabric, and multimedia. The exhibit is laid out clearly, taking visitors from the immediately accessible depictions of global warming to…

Know Your Biomes IV: Tropical Savanna

A cheetah crouches, shoulders hunched, barely visible through golden stems. The antelope on the edge of the herd has stopped chewing, and scans the horizon with a nervous eye. As it takes a step forward to rejoin the safety of the group, the cheetah makes her move, bounding with impossibly huge leaps towards her prey. The entire herd is on the move with her first step, but the stray is dangerously lagging behind. It flies only for a few seconds before the cheetah leaps one final time, clinging to the young antelope's rump with all her strength, pulling the animal to the ground for the coup de…

Re: Lott update

[On Oct 7 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] However, that isn't what I was referring to when I wrote "mathematically impossible". Lott often goes on to claim that 3/4 of the times the DG User fires the shots are warning shots, that only 0.5% of DG uses involve a shot fired at the offender. Kleck's survey turned up about 200 incidents. Since Lott's survey had half the sample size of Kleck's, the most he could expect to find would be 100 incidents (slightly less if you allow for the slightly lower DGU incidence he found). 0.5% of 100 is 0.5. It is…

Fuel from Seaweed

I grew up on the coast of California, and I loved to surf. At my favorite break, Pleasure Point, the best waves were often at low tide, but low tide also meant seaweed. Lots of seaweed. [Source] The giant kelp of Monteray Bay is an astonishing organism. It's not actually a plant, it's a brown algae, and it can grow 12 inches per day. This rapid growth makes it an ideal resource, and a bane of surfers that get their fins caught in thick mats. You can't tell, but it was definitely kelp that made me fall, not the fact that I was too far forward and unable to turn. No, really... Brown algae…

Badass Bacteria vs Malaria

In the wild, as I wrote about last week, some strains of commensal bacteria in mosquitoes seem to confer some resistance to infection with Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria in humans. Not content to wait for for nature to get around to it, researchers at Johns Hopkins University decided to see if they could nudge the process along: Wolbachia Infections Are Virulent and Inhibit the Human Malaria Parasite Plasmodium Falciparum in Anopheles Gambiae Wolbachia is a type of bacterium that often infects insects, including mosquitoes, and causes incredibly strong immune responses, but no…

Tolerance isn't easy

Our immune system needs to be on a hair-trigger. When you breathe in a virus or a bacterium enters a cut on your arm, you don't want to mess around: (disclaimer: most of what George Carlin says in the rest of that clip is not supported by the science (though it's funny as hell)) But all of that heavy immunological artillery is dangerous, and when it's directed at the wrong target, there can be a lot of collateral damage. Some of the most important parts of the immune system are mechanisms of tolerance - teaching the immune system to ignore the things that aren't a threat. For the innate…

Happy Birthday, Lusi (the Drilling Totally Did It)

It's been two years* since the ground opened near Sidoarjo, Indonesia, spewing mud over the homes, farms, and businesses of tens of thousands of people. The disaster quickly acquired the rather endearing name of "Lusi", which is short for "lumpur" (Indonesian for mud) and "Sidoarjo". The two-year anniversary media bonanza has focused on the continuing plight of the refugees and the publication of a new paper analyzing GPS data around the mud volcano to determine that there is, indeed, going to be a big hole in the ground where the mud used to be. Chris Rowan has already blogged about that…

Adventures of Women in Science

Another day, another article about how women are biologically inferior to men when it comes to high-level math and science. The fact that this one comes from the New York Times Science section, a newspaper I typically respect very highly, is all the more tragic and frustrating. I don't have time today to write with as much depth and ferocity as I would like to, but I want to just say that I find it outrageous that the New York Times would publish something so obviously sexist and one-sided about such a complex, nuanced, and important topic under the headline "Daring to Discuss Women in…

Your doctor's only in it for the money. Right?

Alternative medicine is very profitable. Herbs and supplements are a multi-billion dollar industry. The practice of primary care medicine is not terribly lucrative, and adding on some "integrative medicine" can turn that around. A primary care doc can significantly increase their income by selling supplements and offering unproven tests and treatments. These are not covered by insurance, so patients must pay cash---and who doesn't love cash? But how can you get your pigeons to fly in the door? The folks out there selling miracle cures and spreading the ideology to support them have some…

Towards direct reading of DNA with protein nanopores: Oxford Nanopore demonstrates proof of principle

James Clarke, Hai-Chen Wu, Lakmal Jayasinghe, Alpesh Patel, Stuart Reid, Hagan Bayley (2009). Continuous base identification for single-molecule nanopore DNA sequencing Nature Nanotechnology DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2009.12 The clever boys and girls at Oxford Nanopore Technologies - one of the most quietly impressive contenders in the hotly-contested next-generation DNA sequencing race - have a new paper out in Nature Nanotechnology today. The paper demonstrates proof of principle for a crucial step in their approach to DNA sequencing, the accurate recognition of DNA bases as they pass through a…

Integrin Phosphorylation as an Off Switch for Integrin Activation

An individual cell inside the human body is in a dynamic environment: it not only has to anchor itself to its surroundings but also be able to communicate with them and respond as appropriate. One group of proteins--the integrins--play a central role in all of these tasks. The integrins are large (about 200,000 Da) membrane-spanning proteins, and each integrin consists of two subunits (alpha and beta). The vast majority of the integrin is located on the exterior of the cell, where it anchors the cell to the extracellular matrix. Each subunit has a short tail inside of the cell, and the…

Academic Research: Solving Puzzles or Solving Mysteries?

Earlier this year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for The New Yorker called "Open Secrets" in which he discussed the distinction between two types of problems: what he called "puzzles", which are simpler, and "mysteries", which are more complex. Building on the work of national security expert Gregory Treverton, he wrote: "Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large." "The problem of what…

They Probably Won't Taste as Good as Cotton Candy...

In this week's edition of PNAS, crop scientists at Texas A&M University report the engineering of cotton strains with edible seeds. Now, when I think of cotton, I generally think of clothes, especially the kind that really seem to like getting wrinkled in the drier. Not counting the unrelated--but still delicious--exception of cotton candy, food generally doesn't come to mind. However, the new PNAS paper from the lab of Keerti Rathore may mean that it's time to think outside of the (clothes) box when it comes to cotton, especially in addressing world hunger. According to the paper, for…

Universal Health Care, Duh!

From the archives: (21 January 2006) I had a great trip to the doctor the other day. I showed up for my appointment (one I had made only one day before), waited a few minutes, saw the doctor, and then I left. There was no paperwork, no long wait, no money exchanged, and no stress. Basically, there was nothing standing in the way of what I had come there for--medical care. And, no, I don't live in some fantasy world. I live in England. I love universal health care, and for me it's because of the small things. I never had any major problems with my health insurance in the U.S., but I still…

What Science Is (and what it is not)

William Harris came to my university to perpetuate misconceptions last September. I intended to write a summary of the experience, but I could never muster enough anti-venom to deal with his poison. In lieu of a formal treatment of Harris's bullshit, I've decided to (quite tardily) present a short description of what makes a discipline science. This is inspired by my inability get Harris to acknowledge that all scientific disciplines invoke observable causes to the events they attempt to explain. More after the jump. I will refrain from comparing supernatural and naturalistic explanations…

Creationists, climate change denialists, and racists and the credentialism strategy

Credentialism always makes for convenient excuses. We love to construct simple shortcuts in our cognitive models: someone has a Ph.D., they must be smart (I can tell you that one is wrong). Someone is a scientist, they must have all the right facts. And of course, the converse: we can use the absence of a Ph.D. or professional standing, to dismiss someone. Creationists are very concerned about this, and you see it over and over again: the desperate need to acquire a degree or title, even if it is from some unaccredited diploma mill or a correspondence school, in order to justify their wacky…

Whad'ya Know About Protists?

My advisor has recently got me listening to Whad'ya Know. My first reaction: It's like Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Only not as funny, not as interesting, and not as good. I've been downloading the podcasts for the past couple of weeks, and I'm not sure whether I'll keep subscribing in iTunes. I'm only bringing this up because last week's episode contained a very egregious example of someone knowing just enough biology to get themselves in trouble. The sad part was that the person should have known better. Why? She teaches biology at the university level. What happened? At the midpoint of the…