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Lefty and Righty excesses of pseudo-science

Since Chris Mooney's book has just come out in paperback and the critics often invoke false equivalence between abuses of science on the Right and the Left, I thought this would be a good time to repost this August 05, 2005 post (reposted here on January 16, 2006): According to Michael Shermer there are: - science - borderlands science - psuedoscience, and - nonsense Science is a methodology of figuring out, with as great confidence as possible, how the world works. Evolutionary theory is one of the biggest, strongest and best-supported bodies of all of science. Borderland Science refers to…

Did I frame that wrong?

As you know, the last several days saw quite a flurry of blog posts about framing science. I posted my thoughts here and I keep updating my post with links to all the new posts as they show up (except the expected drivel by William Dembski, some minor creaitonists and Lubos Motl). Some of the other bloggers ignored my post, many linked to it without comment, and many linked to it with positive commentary - with two exceptions. One was Larry Moran (who probably skimmed it quickly, found what he did not like in it with his own frame of mind at the time, and used it as a starting point to…

Oiled SeaBirds: To Kill Or Not To Kill? What Is The Ethical Thing To Do?

tags: ecology, marine biology, conservation biology, endangered species, environmental toxicology, seabirds, marine mammals, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club Bird rescue personnel Danene Birtell (L) and Heather Nevill (R) hold an oiled brown pelican, found on Storm Island in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, that will be washed at the treatment facility at Fort Jackson, Louisiana, USA. BP has contracted bird rescue groups to rehabilitate wildlife affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The birds are examined, thoroughly washed and then allowed to…

Volcanoes, Tree Rings, and Climate Models: This is how science works.

Mark Your Cosmic Calendar: 774/775 One wonders if anyone felt it. Did Charlemagne feel it as he led his forces across Pagan Saxon Westphalia, knocking down Irminsuls and making everyone pretend to be Christian or else? Did the people of Bagdad, just becoming the world’s largest city, notice anything aside from their own metro-bigness? Did the Abbasid Caliph Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi have the impression something cosmic was going on that year, other than his own ascendancy to power? Or was it mainly some of the Nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere that were changed, not forever but…

Reviewing Unscientific America, Part One

The science blogosphere has been buzzing about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, the new book by former SciBlings Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. For whatever reason everyone else seems to have received their review copies before I did, and I did not want to weigh in until I had read the book. That has now happened, so I offer my review. There is too much to address in one post, so I will do three. In the first I will adress what I take to be the broad themes of the book. In the second I will specifically address Chapter Eight, which addresses…

A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 2

Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2. SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading. IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I'm an idiot, please tell me why! Having, in the past chapter (hopefully) convinced us that…

Learn Quantum Theory in Ten Minutes

So you want to learn quantum theory in ten minutes? Well I certainly can't give you the full theory in all its wonder and all its gory detail in that time, but I can give you a light version of the quantum theory in about that time. And won't that impress your friends! To learn quantum theory you first need to learn classical theory. (Walk slowly little grasshopper.) What classical theory should we talk about: mechanics or general relativity or maybe electromagnetism? None of those! Those are crazy overwhelming and intimidating classical theories. Instead we can take a classical theory…

A tale of three arms

Once upon a time, deep in the Precambrian, this was the planet of worms. Well, actually, this was, is, and always will be the planet of bacteria, but if you filter your perspective to just organisms above a particular size, and if you're an animal writing about it in the modern day with a chauvinistic attitude that allows you to ignore that it was also a planet of algae, that would become a planet of plants, on a world that also is built of soil formed by lichens and saturated with fungus…if you ignore all that, OK, it was a planet of worms. Late in the Precambrian, the oceans were full of…

"Piltdown" medicine: Andrew Wakefield's scientific fraud was worse than previously thought

Pity poor Andrew Wakefield. 2010 was a terrible year for him, and 2011 is starting out almost as bad. In February 2010, the General Medical Council in the U.K. recommended that Wakefield be stripped of his license to practice medicine in the U.K. because of scientific misconduct related to his infamous 1998 case series published in The Lancet, even going so far as to refer to him as irresponsible and dishonest, and in May 2010 he was. This case series, thanks to Wakefield's scientific incompetence and fraud, coupled with his flair for self-promotion and enabled by the sensationalistic…

Basic science? We doctors don't need no steekin' basic science!

RangelMD asks: Do student doctors really need to know anatomy and that other basic science stuff? And Dr. RW chimes in sarcastically, Who needs all that basic science bunk? Naturally, as you might expect from recent posts, I can't resist putting my two cents in on this topic as well. The discussion was provoked by this article: TEACHING of basic anatomy in Australia's medical schools is so inadequate that students are increasingly unable to locate important body parts - and in some cases even confuse one vital organ with another. Senior doctors claim teaching hours for anatomy have been…

A case more disturbing than Terry Schiavo

A little more than a year ago, the entire nation was captivated by the case of Terri Schiavo. As you may remember, Ms. Schiavo was an unfortunate woman who lapsed into a persistent vegetative state after suffering anoxic brain damage after a cardiac arrest. Her husband insisted that she had stated that she never wanted to be kept alive in such a state; consequently, he fought to have her feeding tube removed. Her parents fought to have it left in. Eventually, her husband Michael Schiavo prevailed, and Ms. Schiavo died on March 31, 2005. In my mind, this was indeed a matter of personal…

The price of anti-vaccine fanaticism

Welcome back. I hope you and yours who celebrate Christmas have had a happy one. Ours was kind of mixed and bittersweet for reasons that I don't particularly feel like going into now, although sooner or later I will probably have to say something about it. In the meantime, as much as I hate to be a downer right after the holidays, when many of my readers have the day off and are looking forward to hanging out with family or friends or maybe attacking the Boxing Day sales in the U.K. or just the sales in the U.S. and elsewhere. However, just before the holidays and shortly before I gave a…

Dr. Robert Lanza and "biocentrism": Time to get out the paper bag again

I don't know if I need to get out the infamous paper bag or--even worse--the Doctor Doom mask out yet. As you may recall (if you are a long time reader, anyway) is that the mind-numbing stupidity of certain MDs has driven me to want to hide my face in utter shame at the embarrassment caused by my fellow physicians. Most frequently, it has been everyone's not-so-favorite creationist neurosurgeon with dualist tendencies, Dr. Michael Egnor. So bad was he that I compared him one time to Deepak Chopra. Damned if P.Z. hasn't led me to another highly embarrassing physician woo-meister. Worse, it's…

Mike Adams' 10 biggest lies about health care

It's good to be home. True, while I was away for five days, first to NECSS and then to the AACR Meeting, mail piled up, and I had to go through it last night. Also, just for the heck of it, my wife and I went out to dinner at a local diner. Finally, to complete the unwinding process, last night I sat on my posterior and watched a couple of shows that I had missed during my absence, while lazily searching the web for material to get me back into the blogging thing. Yes, I know I spent a fair amount of verbiage yesterday taking down a mountain of burning stupid by everybody's favorite science…

Vitamin C and cancer revisited

It's been quite a while since I wrote about this topic, but, quite frankly, I didn't think anything new was likely to come up that would interest me sufficiently to take it on again. I was almost right; it's been well over two years since the last time I discussed the issue of whether or not vitamin C has any role in treating cancer. When last I left the topic, two studies had been released that were being widely cited as a "vindication" of Linus Pauling. As you may recall, Pauling was the Nobel Laureate who succumbed to what's sometimes called the "Nobel disease" in that he turned into a…

A loss is felt

As I wing my way back home from San Diego, I've had a bit of time to digest what I saw and learned at the AACR meeting. Overall, it was an above average but definitely not outstanding meeting, and I may discuss specifics more at a later time. One key theme that seems to be increasingly emphasized is cancer prevention, and indeed the AACR launched a new journal, Cancer Prevention Research, dedicated to publishing high quality research on just that topic. This new emphasis on prevention is long overdue because once cancer has developed the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and even our best…

An anonymous critic complains to Orac's employers over his post on the murder of Alex Spourdalakis

Antivaccinationists, quacks, and apologists for antivaccinationists and quacks (but I repeat myself) seem to have an illusion that I'm just swimming in pharma lucre, that I sit in my underwear grinding out magnum opus-worthy after magnum opus-worthy blog posts, all so that I can rake in the cash hand over fist, lead a life of pure luxury, and enjoy ruthlessly crushing any hint of dissent regarding science-based medicine. Even if that assessment were completely true, as Lord Draconis Zeneca tells us that it is, it's not all easy being a prolific, logorrheic pharma shill servilely doing the…

"Moneyball," politics, and science-based medicine

Regular readers probably know that I'm into more than just science, skepticism, and promoting science-based medicine (SBM). (If they're regular readers of my other, not-so-super-secret other project, they might also realize that they've seen this post before elsewhere. I had to stay out late for a work-related event and decided to tart it up and recycle. So sue me.) I'm also into science fiction (hence the very name of this blog, not to mention the pseudonym I use), computers, and baseball, not to mention politics (at least more than average). That's why our recent election, coming as it did…

NCCAM in the news: Why does it still exist?

I've made no secret of my admiration for Trine Tsouderos. Whether it be her investigations into the rank quackery of prominent members of the mercury militia wing of the anti-vaccine lunatic fringe, Mark and David Geier, who seem to think that chemical castration is a perfectly fine and dandy treatment for autism because testosterone binds mercury (it doesn't under physiological conditions) and prevents it from being removed by chelation therapy, the equally rank quackery that is the "autism biomed" movement, or the chronic Lyme disease underground, Tsouderos is one of the rare journalists…

A profound misunderstanding of the significance of cranks in science

I've spent a lot of time over the years looking at cranks, examining crank science (i.e., pseudoscience), and trying to figure out how to inoculate people against crankery. Because I'm a physician, I tend to do it mostly in the realm of medicine by critically examining "alternative" medical claims and discussing the scientific basis of medicine, both with respect to those "alternative" claims and to more conventional medical claims. However, I don't limit my skepticism and critical thinking just to medicine, although lately I think that I've been "specializing" too much, almost totally…

Sh*t Naturopaths Say, part 7: Mismanaging erectile dysfunction, collagen diseases, and gynecology

Welcome once again to Sh*t Naturopaths Say, my periodic look at what naturopaths say behind closed doors (metaphorically speaking). At least, it’s a look at what they say when they are discussing patient management with their peers. It is a series to which I can add new entires from time to time, thanks to Naturopathic Chat (NatChat, for short), a discussion forum with hundreds of naturopaths as members that also includes someone who goes by the ‘nym Naturowhat and occasionally leaks the content of the forum to a Pastbin. Also, it never hurts to remind my readers of the quackery that is…

Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree: Privileged white males harming African-Americans with antivaccine propaganda

There's always been a major thread of distrust of the medical profession in the African-American community, understandably so given the history of abuses such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which the natural progression of untreated syphilis was studied in African-American men for 40 years. It’s not just that experiment that’s responsible, either. During the time of slavery, slaves often served as the subjects of medical experimentation. Dr. Crawford Long, for instance, conducted most of his early experiments with ether on slaves, while Dr. Walter F. Jones used slaves to test a…

Stupid feels mighty good, am I ill?

This entry is somewhat unconvential, but I will place in the "brain & behavior" category because I want comments on my own feelings & attitudes from those who know some psychology. I am an individual with opinions about the world. I suppose you could say that I'm your typical individual with a scientific & operationally materialistic worldview. I'm also mildly right-of-center, and tend to have as many issues with Post Modern "progressives" thought as I do with Religious Right reactionaries. Like the Religious Right I do believe there are truths in this world which are sacred…

PeerJ formally announced: Innovative new business model for open access

I'm not one for posting publisher press releases on this blog (and embargoed ones at that!) but sometimes you just have to try something a little different. And this is such an occasion. Below is the press release for a new science publishing startup called PeerJ. It is founded by Peter Binfield, formerly of Public Library of Science, and Jason Hoyt, formerly of Mendeley. The core idea is that scholars will be able to pay one fee (starting at $99) and be able to publish on the PeerJ platform for life. The truly interesting aspect of this is that PeerJ is peer reviewed. It's kind of like a…

Kevin in China, part 2: Three Kinds of Natural Beauty in Jiuchong

Here is the first of Kevin's e-mailed reports from China, dated June 1-3, 2006. In it, you will be able to see pictures of some natural beauty he saw in China, then another kind of natural beauty he saw in China, then yet another kind of natural beauty he saw in China.... I love the way he writes - he should (will?) be a great blogger. What a combination of a travelogue, a personal diary, and lab notes of a research scientist - all in one, the three aspects of it connected seamlessly into a single narrative. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. So, without further ado, here is Kevin:…

Annals of McCain - Palin, XIX: anger management

It's common knowledge John McCain has an anger management problem. That's what's at the bottom of his oft repeated refrain that he wouldn't win the Miss Congeniality prize in the US Senate. It's not that he's a maverick. It's that he's nasty and impulsive and without any instinct for comity with his colleagues. He also doesn't like Barack Obama. That was quite evident long before the current presidential campaign. McCain set his sights on the nomination years ago and was busy laying the mythology of his candidacy as early as 2006 and before. "Ethics reform" was one of his narratives, but it…

Organismal size over evolutionary time is a constrained stochastic property

The intelligent design creationists are jubilant — a paper has been published that shows that organisms were front-loaded with genes for future function! It describes "'latent' or 'preexistent' evolutionary potential" in our history, they say. One small problem. The paper says nothing of the kind. It does mention latent potential, but it means something entirely different from something that is 'front-loaded', which is a sneaky little elision on the part of the creationists. There isn't even the faintest whiff of a teleological proposal in the paper at all, which makes me wonder if they even…

Even Dogs Can Go Local

We spent about 8 months looking for a suitable dog before we acquired Mac the Marshmallow last month. Until a little over a year ago, we had two American Working Farmcollies, half siblings. Rufus, our senior dog was an unusually large dog for his breed - half again the size of either parent or his sister, Mistress Quickly, and he died suddenly at 7 of a hidden heart condition that our vet says sometimes affects unusually large dogs. We knew that we did not want another farmcollie - or rather we did, we had loved Rufus, but that what we needed in working dog for our family was slightly…

The Road to Sildenafil - A history of artifical erections

The inability to achieve erection has been a source of consternation for men for, well, a really long time. But the recent history of treatments for impotence, wait, I mean Erectile Dysfunction, oh no, now they're calling it Male Sexual Dysfunction, represents a medical revolution. In the last 100 or so years, we've gone from nonspecific and largely ineffective treatments, to progressively more successful treatment, finally resulting in a highly specific and effective pharmaceutical solution to the problem. The goal of this post is to share a history of this unique field of medical…

New science journalism ecosystem: new inter-species interactions, new niches

Almost a year ago, Nature published a set of opinion articles, including Science journalism: Toppling the priesthood by Toby Murcott. I did not react at the time, but JR Minkel and Jessica Palmer did and got some interesting responses in the comments. The article was brought to my attention by Gozde Zorlu who is ruminating on the same ideas and will have a blog post about it shortly (and I will let you know when it's up). The article covers a lot of ground and has many layers. I finally read it and these are just some really quick thoughts, just to provoke discussion..... First, Murcott is…

Is a Parrot the Right Pet for You?

tags: National Pet Week 2008, companion pets, birds, parrots Odysseus, screaming his fool head off. Yellow-bibbed lory, Lorius chlorocercus Image: GrrlScientist 2008 [larger view]. Okay, as I promised yesterday, I am going to write a series of articles about parrots as pets. Even though I have lived with, bred, raised, trained and researched a variety of birds, I am focusing on parrots as pets because they are generally what people think of first when they talk about pet birds. The first thing to consider before you ever add a parrot to your household is whether a parrot would make a…

“You shouldn’t have to win the boss lottery”: The White House Summit on Working Families

While we take a breather during this holiday season, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on June 30, 2014. by Liz Borkowski, MPH Last week’s White House Summit on Working Families – hosted by the White House Council on Women and Girls, the Department of Labor, and the Center for American Progress – served both as a pitch to employers to adopt more family-friendly policies, and as a push for policies that require all employers to evolve for 21st-century realities. Wages, paid leave, flexibility, and caregiving were major topics in the day-long…

New Anti-Evolution Tactic?

Dembski links to a site called Origin of Life Fairness in Pubic Schools, which seems to be trying out a new argument against the teaching of evolution in public schools. I've heard various people use this argument in the past, but no one seriously propose this as a legal argument. It's really quite laughable. Their argument goes like this: A. The Supreme Court has said that atheism is a religion. B. Evolution = atheism C. Therefore it violates the establishment clause to teach evolution in schools. Let's quote them directly on the first claim: The entire origin of life debate concerning what…

Books on Climate Change

It is time to update the list of recommended books on climate change and global warming. I assume that with the holidays coming, you will want to give some people some science books, and climate change related books should be near the top of the list for you. I'm doing a separate post on evolution related books, and another on bird and nature books, as well. I'm going to keep this short and focus on a small number of books. To get on this list the book has to be good and current, with two notable exceptions (see below). Global Warming Books For Kids Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink!: A…

Where is everybody?

"If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody?" -Stephen Webb As egocentric as we are, we know that not only are we but one planet of many orbiting our Sun, but that when we look up in the heavens, every point of light we see is another chance -- another opportunity -- for planets, for life, and even for intelligence. Image credit: Ned Wright, COBE / DIRBE, and NASA. With hundreds of billions of stars (visible here in infrared wavelengths) in our galaxy alone, we have many, many chances for life to have evolved similarly to how it did here on Earth. With hundreds of billions…

Answering Sal Again

Sal Cordova has replied, kind of, to my post and to Jack Krebs' response to his questions, in a comment at Uncommon Descent. Let me first note that I was wrong about Cordova teaching at George Mason. I'm not sure why I had that in my head, but it's not true. I don't know what it is he does, but I do know that he hangs around the IDEA clubs at various Virginia colleges and lectures on ID frequently. I don't know him personally, but I can say that the friends I have who have met him say he's a very nice and gracious guy. Still, this stuff about these allegedly difficult questions putting our…

It's Time To Retire the Phrase “Gay Marriage”

There is no longer any need for the phrase “gay marriage.” There is just “marriage.” For a while we shall still have to put up with an occasional Kim Davis or right-wing judge who gets mopey about it, but most people have simply moved on. They either don't have a problem with marriage equality, or they don't care enough to do anything about it. It is the ones who do who are increasingly on the defensive. And well they should be. One reason public opinion turned around so quickly was the complete inability of the anti's to make any reasonable argument at all. Once you get beyond, “It'…

Adam and Eve, Continued

Let's continue with the discussion I started in yesterday's post. We are considering whether it is reasonable to persist in believing in the reality of Adam and Eve given the findings of modern science. The problem is that the Bible seems clear that at the time of their creation, Adam and Eve were the only human beings on the planet. But genetic analyses contradict this, pointing instead to the conclusion that the human population has never dipped below two thousand, at an absolute minimum. There are two broad strategies for avoiding this conflict: Deny the genetic evidence or deny that…

Tools of the Cold-Atom Trade: Magnetic Traps

We're getting toward the end of the cold-atom technologies in my original list, but that doesn't mean we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. On the contrary, the remaining tools are among the most important for producing and studying truly ultra-cold atoms. Wait, isn't what we've been talking about cold enough? There is, as always, more art than science in the naming of categories of things. "Cold" and "ultra-cold" get thrown around a lot in this business, and the dividing line isn't quite clear. Very roughly speaking, most people these days seem to use "cold" for the microkelving scale…

Mysteries of the Simulated Pendulum

Last week, I spent a bunch of time using VPython to simulate a simple pendulum, which was a fun way to fritter away several hours (yes, I'm a great big nerd), and led to some fun physics. I had a little more time to kill, so I did one of the things I mentioned as a possible follow-on, which turned out to be kind of baffling, in a good way. Last week's post was written very quickly, and thus ended up a little more jargon-y than I usually shoot for, so let me try to set the stage a little better for this one. the physical system I'm talking about is just a simple pendulum, a mass on the end of…

More on Science/Religion Disputes

My post about science/religion disputes has prompted responses from my SciBlings Bora Zivkovic and Mike Dunford (here and here respectively. Since they are among my favorite bloggers, it pains me to have to disagree with them. Alas, disagree I must. I will begin with Bora, since I fear he has misunderstood my central point. The starting point of my post was my disagreement with this statement from Thomas Dixon: Historians have shown that the Galileo affair, remembered by some as a clash between science and religion, was primarily about the enduring political question of who was authorized…

Climbing Mt. Scalable

The survey of abused words in quantum computing shows the word "exponential" as having an, um, exponential, lead over its competitors. My own personal choice for the most abused word was "scalable," a word that is, in my opinion, the least debated, but most important, concept in quantum computing today. A word which everyone uses but whose definition is strangely missing from all almost all papers that use the word. Here are some thoughts on this word, what it means to particular groups, and what I, in my own pomposity, think the word really should mean. Note the title of this post is…

QIP 2009 Day 4 Liveblogging

Sorry to those who talked in the afternoon yesterday: I ran off to listen to Michael Nielsen talk at the Santa Fe Institute. Charles Marcus, "Holding quantum information in electron spins" Charlie gave a talk about the state of quantum computing in solid state quantum dot systems. Things Charlie talked about: T1 times of single electron spins of 1 second from Mark Kastner's group: arXiv:0707.1656. Those are long, and it would be awesome to have those for real working devices! Delft's work on single electron spin manipulations: "Driven coherent oscillations of a single electron spin in a…

Second New Last New Frontier

The second in a two-part distillation of a cover story about NASA, politics, and the new power generation that I just finished for the LA Alternative. To get up to speed, see the previous entry. The CEV -- Ares, or whatever -- is not the first attempt NASA has made to replace its Shuttle fleet with something more appealing to an electorate weaned on the Star Wars movies. The last ten years have seen a lot of blustery attempts at making a "Single Stage to Orbit" craft, that is to say, one which could be completely reusable and would not need expensive and heavy external fuel tanks. An SSTO,…

In the shadow of the Origin

Everyone knows that 1859 was the year in which Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published, but there was a significant event in September of that same year that is often overlooked. It involved the new understanding that humans and extinct mammals (like sabercats and mammoths) had lived alongside one another in ancient Europe. This may not seem like a particularly controversial point now (who today could imagine "cave men" without mammoths and woolly rhinoceros plodding about the landscape?) but during the first half of the 19th century it was…

Could It Be Magic? Extreme Apparent Mental Causation

Here at Mixing Memory, Just Science week has turned into Mostly Wegner week. But the set of studies I'm going to talk about in this post has received so much attention that I just can't resist. You may have encountered it in the New York Times (you can read it here without a subscription). Unfortunately for me, in beating me to it, the NYT also stole my planned title, causing me to go with Barry Manilow over Lovin' Spoonful, but c'est la vie. Oh, I should probably say what this is all about at some point. It's about magic. Specifically, magical thinking. We've all experienced it (don't say…

MRI: What is it good for?

We are being constantly bombarded with news stories containing pretty pictures of the brain, with headings such as "Brain's adventure centre located". Journalists now seem to refer routinely to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as "mind reading", and exaggerated claims about its powers abound, as do misleading, irresponsible and downright ridiculous stories about the technology. Take, for example, this article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Atlantic: The preliminary findings began to arrive a few days later, in a series of e-mails..."Carter: big amygdala response on both sides…

Injustice, misbehavior, and the scientist's social identity (part 3).

Let's wrap up our discussion on the Martinson et al. paper, "Scientists' Perceptions of Organizational Justice and Self-Reported Misbehaviors". [1] You'll recall that the research in this paper examined three hypotheses about academic scientists: Hypothesis 1: The greater the perceived distributive injustice in science, the greater the likelihood of a scientist engaging in misbehavior. (51) Hypothesis 2: The greater the perceived procedural injustice in science, the greater the likelihood of a scientist engaging in misbehavior. (52) Hypothesis 3: Perceptions of injustice are more…

Basic concepts: phase changes.

Some months ago I made a (seemingly idle) threat to follow up my basic concepts posts on polar and non-polar molecules and intermolecular forces with a post on phase changes. Finally it's here! Since the discussion here will be leaning on a number of the concepts discusses in the earlier posts, don't be afraid to click back to them to re-read any of the parts that seem rusty. First, in this post I'll only be discussing the three phases of matter taken for granted in intro chemistry classes, namely, solids, liquids, and gases. I won't be getting into more exotic things like plasmas; there…

Thoughts on university service.

Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad ponders faculty "service" in higher education. For those outside the ivy-covered bubble of academe, "service" usually means "committee work" or something like it. The usual concern is that, although committees are necessary to accomplish significant bits of the work of a college or university, no one likes serving on them and every faculty member has some task that would be a better use of his or her time than being on a committee. And, because "service" is frequently a piece of the faculty member's job performance that is regularly evaluated (for…