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Symbols, Numbers, Tools and Attention: Does the Parietal Lobe Do Everything?

Symbols redirect attention - in some ways, that is their intended purpose - but this "reorienting" is a surprisingly literal and involuntary effect. Even when we know symbols are irrelevant to our current circumstances, they still influence our behavior. A simple experiment demonstrates this nicely. Hommel et al. showed that letters appearing in unpredictable locations can be identified more quickly when their location is compatible with a preceeding symbol - even if those symbols are totally irrelevant to the task, and subjects are explicitly told to ignore them! For example, a letter…

Breaking Down the Brain: Problems with the Logic of Double Dissociations

Suppose that one day your computer's hard drive stops working, but everything else about the machine is fine. Your friend has an identical computer in which the hard drive works fine, but the keyboard suddenly stopped working. Based on this "double dissociation" between the two different problems, can you safely assume that the "hard drive system" and the "keyboard system" rely on distinct underlying mechanisms? For years, cognitive neuropsychologists have felt safe in making equivalent assumptions about brain damage. If one type of damage leads to difficulty on task A, but not task B, and…

The Evolution of Hip Hop (by Natural Selection)

When most people think of evolutionary biology the first thing that comes to mind probably isn't lyrical poetry. However one of the earliest proponents of evolution, none other than Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, presented his vision for the origin of life in the form of an epic poem in 1803. In his critically acclaimed work The Temple of Nature Darwin mused on the natural history of human beings: Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd, Of language, reason, and reflection proud, With brow erect who scorns this earthly sod, And styles himself the image of his God; Arose from…

Neurotoxin in Veggie Burgers, Infant Formula? Yes and No.

Yesterday Kiera Butler, associate editor at Mother Jones, posted an article claiming that soy-based veggie burgers and infant formula are "made with the chemical hexane, an EPA-registered air pollutant and neurotoxin." She based her conclusions on a report put out by The Cornucopia Institute, an organization committed to "ecological principles and economic wisdom underlying sustainable and organic agriculture." If you've heard about hexane before, it was likely in the context of gasoline--the air pollutant is also a byproduct of gas refining. But in 2007, grain processors were responsible…

The Canals of Mars

The space-heads among you have undoubtedly heard about the Curiosity rover's first significant discovery: the remnants of an ancient streambed on Mars, which would seem to indicate the presence of water in the planet's history. This jagged pile of alluvial rock and dust may not look like much, but it brings to mind one of my favorite pieces of Martian historical arcana. For a time in the late 19th century, it was believed that there were canals on Mars. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who observed Mars in 1877, was the first to describe, name, and lovingly illustrate mysterious…

A simple way to get the antiscience crowd to come around?

Chris Mooney- a man with his heart in the right place and absolutely no idea what do do after that. Don't get me wrong, I like the guy. He's a force for good when dissecting a scientific issue for the public. But Mooney has been trucking out this same "communication" bullshit for a few years now. As usual, nothing much is offered other than "listen to them". I agree, communication is important, and scientists need to listen as much as talk. Ok..... then what? If, as he says, so many people only consider science as a small part of forming their opinions, what makes him think that they'…

Guest Post: In search of a sand crab

Today's post is by the fantastic and phenomenal Zen Faulkes. Be sure to check out his blog after you read it! Note; I'm writing this guest post because this week, I'll be a visitor in Christie's current stomping grounds, Hawaii, attending the summer meeting of The Crustacean Society. Christie, meanwhile, is on the mainland. Since we are sort of switching places, we thought it might be fun to switch blogs. So here I am at Observations, and she's promised me a guest post for my blog, NeuroDojo. Hawaii is famous for its beaches. When most people see a beach, they think of relaxation. Tanning,…

When is a science/religion dispute about more than science and religion?

Jason Rosenhouse asks us if we think there's anything wrong with the following sentence, taken from Thomas Dixon's book Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction: 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 to produce and disseminate knowledge. Personally, I'm not actually sure that there's much wrong with that statement at all - at most, I'd question the use of the word "primarily". Jason, however, disagrees a bit more strenuously: Why was Pope…

That controversial O'Reilly interview with David Silverman

I've been privy to some of the behind-the-scenes arguments among atheists about this episode of the Bill O'Reilly show, in which they discuss (if anything is ever discussed with O'Reilly) an aggressive billboard sponsored by American Atheists. Most of the complaining I've heard has been about David Silverman's performance, and I think that's misplaced. Silverman was good: he's confident and a bit flippant, which is exactly what you need when dealing with a pompous blowhard like O'Reilly. Silverman isn't the problem, it's the sign, and he was stuck defending an awful message. That is one…

Another Bush Administration Backdoor Attack on Reproductive Rights.

Apparently, the Bush administration has come up with another way to attack reproductive rights. The department of Health and Human Services has come up with a draft regulation that changes a number of definitions in an effort to make it easier for people to refuse to provide people with abortions, or birth control, or even with a referral to another provider who would be willing to provide these services. The regulation is ostensibly intended to ensure that federally funded programs do not discriminate against people or institutions that have religious objections to abortion. This is a…

Dave, Andy, and Georgia and their unbelievable, ridiculous fable

David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom, three creationists working at the Creation "Museum", have written an outraged op-ed correcting some misconceptions about them. I read this far before I had to stop: For one, the guest columnist, Roger Guffey, claimed there were no "serious" scientists who are creationists. We are full-time Ph.D. researchers with the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis in Northern Kentucky, and we will be helping to design the full-scale Noah's Ark and other attractions to be built north of Lexington. There are thousands of serious scientists who doubt…

Life as a Leak, Part 1

This post has gotten so long I'm going to have to break it into pieces. Here's the first installment. You've read a million stories about the leaky pipeline. They all start out more or less like this: It is no secret that women are under-represented at every level of the science and technology (S&T) system. Statistics clearly show that, much like a 'leaky pipeline', women steadily drop out all along the system. Nor is it difficult to identify the causes of the leaks. They range from gender-based biases in hiring, evaluation, and promotion; to inadequate institutional support for…

"Just Say Know": Musings on Measuring Brains

Jane Curry was at the Penn State - Abington campus today to perform her one-woman play, "Just Say Know" as one of the Women's History Month events on the campus. A word about Jane: her website describes her as "an author, storyteller, performer, and recovering academic". She is indeed all of those, and more. She's an absolutely delightful person and if you aren't laughing within five minutes of talking with her, then you don't have a pulse. Or maybe your funny bone is just broken. Since Penn State - Abington is practically in my back yard, I had the pleasure of seeing Jane's show and…

Want Your Veterans Benefits? Then Sit Down and Shut the ---- Up.

Today, a United States Marine Corps panel delivered a message to all recently discharged veterans: if you want to maintain all of your benefits, you better sit down and shut the ---- up. The Marines, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of the freedoms of speech and free assembly, decided to penalize an Iraq war veteran for speaking out against the war by taking away his honorable discharge. Corporal Adam Kokesh will instead, if the panel's recommendation is upheld, receive a general discharge (under honorable conditions). For those who are unfamiliar with the military, a general…

Science and spirituality

New Scienceblogger Rob Knop has written a couple of posts explaining his own religious views and raising one of those questions that usually manages to get people worked up here: are science and spirituality compatible? That's a question that I've found myself thinking about more than usual lately, and with mixed feelings. I'm still not sure exactly where I stand on the whole religion thing, and I don't think I could describe my own views even at gunpoint. But I am comfortable saying this much: for at least some definitions of "spirituality," science and spirituality are compatible. I…

Science as a contact sport: Reviewed

Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the battle to save Earth's climate by Stephen Schneider National Geographic, 295 pages Not even Stephen Schneider could have anticipated how timely his new book, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the battle to save Earth's climate, would be. The histrionics generated by the theft and publication of the UEA emails suggests climatology is much rougher than even Australian rules football. Schneider was one of the first climatologists to understand the need to communicate what his research was showing with the general public. He appears in documentaries back…

New SHAPE guidelines for heart attack screening

"Why would I ever care about heart attack screening, Jake?" This is a reasonable question so let me put it this way: The ACS [American Cancer Society] recommends the following screening ages: 20 for breast cancer with mammography from age 40 (at least annually), 21 for cervical cancer (Pap test), 50 for colorectal cancer (several options), and 50 for prostate cancer (prostate-specific antigen test and digital rectal examination annually). What do we recommend for heart attacks? Well, basically we recommend that, unless you have some very serious risk factors, you wait until you have a heart…

The End of Punditry

This is a response to David Brooks' column in the New York Times, today: "The End of Philosophy". Other respondees include PZ Myers, Brian Leiter, James Smith, bottumupchange, Mark Liberman, and chaospet (who does a very nice cartoon summarising many of the problems with Brooks' column). Hume once wrote: "Reason is, and ought only to be, slave to the passions". By this he meant that reason is motivated by a moral sense, but at the same time Hume also wrote that one cannot derive a statement of "ought" from a statement of "is", which attempts at naturalising morality G. E. Moore called the "…

Teacher, there's a god in my evolutionary soup...

... shh, not so loud or everyone will want one. Here's a piece by Darksyde at Daily Kos in which he reports the outgoing EPA chair (who has overseen all manner of bad science and decisions, although that may not be his own fault) as saying "It's not a clean-cut division [between evolution and creation]. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes." It seems to me that theistic evolution is not exactly about God controlling evolution, although there may be plenty of biblical warrant for God…

Fallacies on fallacies

Many people are confused about what counts as a fallacy, including teachers of critical reasoning. Opponents of science often accuse pro-science writers of "the fallacy of authority" or "the ad hominem fallacy" when they are noted for having made silly and false claims before. I thought some words about what a fallacy actually is might be to the point. According to Archbishop Richard Whately, whose book The Elements of Logic, first published in 1828 from an encyclopedia article revitalised the modern study of logic in the English tradition, By a Fallacy is commonly understood, "any…

Even the Good Guys get it wrong!

Another guest post by Thony Christie John recently provided a link to a review of Steve Fuller’s newest book by Anthony Grayling. On the whole I find Professor Grayling’s comments excellent and applaud his put-down of Fuller but then in the last section of his review he goes and spoils it all, at least for me, by seriously abusing the history of science. As I recently took Rodney Stark to task for his misuse of the history of science in the cause of Christianity I feel obliged in the interest of fairness to do the same to Grayling. Just because I think he is on the right side does not give…

Casual Fridays: What charity gimmicks are most effective?

With hundreds of seemingly worthy charities out there, how do we decide which ones to donate to? Even if we eliminate charities that aren't effective, there are still too many choices, and too little money, to donate to all of them. In the Donors Choose campaign, bloggers are going to impressive lengths to coax their readers into giving. But do incentives such as this really work? We asked our readers, and 261 of them responded. That's the lowest response rate we've had this year, suggesting that many readers aren't much interested in charity, even when motivated by a cute photo of a child.…

Action and vision, or what psychedelic sunglasses tell us about how we see

Take a look at this short video clip. Can you tell which dot is blue and which is yellow? Click here to play Unless you have a rare vision impairment, this task should be easy for you. But read on, and we'll show you how you can become blind to this difference in as little as 40 minutes. The human visual system is amazingly adaptive to eye movements. Consider this: if you film a video from a moving car, the resulting image is so jiggly that it's unwatchable. But if you're riding in the car, even on a bumpy road, the outside world appears stable and smooth. Or take a camcorder and move it…

I get to start teaching again this week!

Oh, boy, it's been a while. I was out for the first few lectures (which I am grateful to my colleagues for covering), so in my introductory biology class I get to plunge straight in to Darwin, Darwin's finches, and Sean Carroll's The Making of the Fittest. No preludes, baby, I'm diving right in. And then I stumble across CreationConversations, which is kind of like the Ask A Biologist website, if it were staffed by idiots. People write in, and the gang there, which seems to be mostly junior league suck-ups to Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, tries to answer from the Biblical perspective. It's…

What's new with Written in Stone

I can't help it - every time I pass a bookstore, I wonder whether they are going to carry my book when it comes out this autumn. November is still a long way away - summer does not even officially begin until next week - but I can't help but wonder where my book will pop up and how it will be received. It is both exciting and anxiety-inducing. I try not to speculate too much about what will happen when Written in Stone comes out. It is not even entirely finished yet. Right now the original text and scribbled margin notes from the last copyedited version are being transformed into page proofs…

How babies build a picture of the world

Here's a picture of our daughter Nora at about 3 months of age. She looks like she's fairly aware of the events going on around her (arguably more aware than she sometimes appears now, at age 12). However, as our knowledge of how infants begin to perceive the world around them has increased, we've learned that the world of a three-month-old literally looks different to them than the world we perceive as adults. That's because vision, which seems so obvious and instinctive, is actually an active process. When we perceive the world visually, we're not just passively "seeing" what's there, we're…

Are you kidding me? This is serious! Or, what psychologists have to say about writing e-mail

An old college friend and accomplished writer, John Scalzi, recently posted a list of writing tips for nonprofessionals, which I'd highly recommend for professionals and nonprofessionals alike. One of his most unusual suggestions is to "speak what you write" -- literally, to read your writing out loud before publishing, whether in a blog post or just an e-mail to friends. This, he argues, will not only help catch spelling and other errors (each of which Scalzi says decreases the writer's apparent IQ by 5 to 10 points), but also help you see whether you're conveying the meaning you intend. So…

Violent video games may be linked to aggression

With every new generation of violent video game, there seems to be a new outcry about the damage it may be doing to young minds. Yet there has been comparatively little research detailing exactly how video game violence actually corresponds to behavior in the real world. While Grand Theft Auto makes the headlines today, in the early 1990s, Wolfenstein 3D was the violent game of choice. That's when Craig Anderson of the University of Missouri-Columbia and Karen Dill of Lenoir-Rhyne College began the first major study to specifically address the issue of violent video games and aggression ("…

March of the mastodons

The skull of Gomphotherium, from Barbour's paper. Regular readers of this blog are well aware that the "March of Progress", a depiction of the single-file evolution of humans from an ape ancestor, is a biological bugbear that refuses to go away. Even though the Great Chain of Being ceased to be useful in explaining the natural world centuries ago vestiges of it still remain in illustrations that depict evolution as "onward and upward." We have long known that evolution is a branching process yet the straight-line version is frustratingly difficult to dig out. I was reminded of this while…

The problem with Shermer's endorsement

A mass of tusks, teeth, and bones. From William Buckland's Reliquiae diluvianae. The problem with a lot of folks tapped as "authorities" on Charles Darwin is that they don't seem to know much about history. We assume that eminent evolutionary biologists and vocal personalities in the creation/evolution public controversy have a firm grasp of the context and content of Darwin's work, but they often do not. I would much rather hear what Janet Browne, Adrian Desmond, or Martin Rudwick have to say about Victorian science than E.O. Wilson, James Watson, or Richard Dawkins. (Stephen Jay Gould…

Can sign language really help babies get along better?

Baby sign language is all the rage these days. Upscale day-care centers and nanny services promote it as a better way of understanding what babies want. Babies have been known to reliably produce signs as young as 5.5 months, and studies have shown that they reliably produce signs significantly earlier than spoken words. As we've reported here, there is no evidence that teaching sign language delays spoken language development. But is formal sign training effective? Some studies about baby sign language have been quite informal, with parents and caregivers inventing makeshift signs to "talk"…

What conductors are doing when they wave their hands around -- and what we get out of it

As a child (and like most children, I imagine) I used to think conducting an orchestra entailed something like what Bugs Bunny does in this video: Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than actually leading the musicians in any meaningful way. It wasn't until I married an amateur musician that I actually learned that the conductor could have an important influence on the way an orchestra sounds. But as Greta and I moved from place to place and she joined a variety of different ensembles, I…

Physician Self-Disclosure Unhelpful?

A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine caught my attention, because it has significant implications for stress management by physicians.  The study also generated a bit of attention in the popular media.  For example, this article in NYT: title="NYT permanent link via RSS" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/health/26doctors.html?ex=1340510400&en=f56fa2071d6a6fa7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">Study Says Chatty Doctors Forget Patients By GINA KOLATA Published: June 26, 2007 ...To their surprise, the researchers discovered that doctors talked…

The personal is political, and so I blog as me.

Okay, so I've been coblogging with ScienceWoman for a little over a week so far. Which means I've been blogging as me, with no pseudonym to hide behind for the same time. What do I think about it so far? It's terrifying. I haven't told many colleagues about this blog yet, and haven't had the nerve to add it to my email signature and such yet. Before I decided to blog as me, I went and talked to my department head to see what he thought. He was supportive of me blogging as an outreach activity, but recommended I talk with the communication/news service people to see if they had any…

Gene Genie Number 16

(Gene Genie logo created by by Ricardo Vidal) Welcome to the 16th edition of Gene Genie, the carnival of genes and genetic diseases. In this edition, genetics gets personal. The recent publication of Craig Venter's genome (and, before that, James Watson's) was big news. It ushered in the new era of personal genomics, to which a special section of this edition of Gene Genie is devoted. So, without further ado, let's take a look at the entries for this edition. Genes & genetic diseases First off, we have several posts about cancer genes. BRCA1 is a tumour suppressor gene that…

Red Sex, Blue Sex

In the current New Yorker, Margaret Talbot summarizes the gaping chasm in attitudes toward teenage sex in Red and Blue America: Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an…

Giving the gift of science education

Every year, I do my charitable giving at the holidays. It doesn't make much sense from a personal budget standpoint, since I'm always running out of money and time, but it just feels like a good thing to do. This year, I'm going to feature one recipient here on the blog, in the hopes of raising awareness of all the great local charities out there who don't get much press. Unlike my perennial favorites Doctors Without Borders and DonorsChoose - both wonderful organizations who do a lot of good, and have been featured on BioE already this year - or media groups like NPR and Wikimedia, there…

What does it mean to assess the credibility of science reporting? (And can we expect students to do so?)

I'm almost done grading a massive mound of papers by my freshman. There's the usual assortment of dismal writing, hilarious colloquialisms, and insight. It's been an exhausting task (minnow's teething hasn't helped), but also a useful one, because the papers have exposed the continuing misconceptions my students have about -ology. The assignment was to select a recent news article that was relevant to -ology, summarize it, and analyze it. Specifically, I wanted them to put the article in context, offer an opinion on the topic, and assess the credibility of the piece. Most students had no…

Activating a gene through pioneer transcripts

First up read yesterday's entry on Genomic Organization. Now that you've done that, let's talk about a paper that appeared in Nature about a month ago. The article is entitled: Stepwise chromatin remodelling by a cascade of transcription initiation of non-coding RNAs (link) Superficially you would look at this title and exclaim Wow another function for non-coding RNAs! Well not exactly. It would seem that everyone is going ga-ga over these non-coding RNAs, but if you dig deeper, something else is going on. Note that I'm not saying that the paper is crap, in fact the results are VERY…

Recent developements on how miRNAs affect mRNA translation.

miRNA and RNA interference is so hot right now ... I'm not in the field, but I do keep an eye on it. Right now the there is quite a few papers on how miRNAs regulate translation. There is some data that indicate that miRNA and the associated RISC complex (RNA Interference Silencing Complex) inhibits the ability of ribosomes from engaging targeted mRNAs. The initiation of protein synthesis would thus be blocked. Other data indicate that miRNAs inhibit the activity of ribosomes that are bound onto transcripts. In this second model miRNAs prevent the elongation step of protein synthesis. These…

Schwarzenegger signs Researcher Protection Act of 2008.

The past couple years in California have been scary ones for academic researchers who conduct research with animals (as well as for their neighbors), what with firebombs, home invasions, significant intentional damage to their properties and threats to their safety. In response to a ratcheting up of attacks from animals rights groups, universities have lobbied for the Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28. As described in Inside Higher Ed: The law is part of a campaign, including litigation against animal liberation groups…

Book review: Autism's False Prophets.

Paul A. Offit, M.D., Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. Columbia University Press, 2008. Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure examines the ways that uncertainties about autism's causes have played out in the spheres of medical treatment, liability lawsuits, political hearings, and media coverage. Offit's introduction describes the lay of the land in 1916, as polio epidemics raged. That lay of the land, with public fear and willingness to pursue strange, expensive, and dangerous treatments, evokes a…

What people know about animal care at my university.

Likely, the throbbing mass of humanity at my university knows at least a little more than it did before last week, owing to an article in the student newspaper about the institutional animal care and use committee. (It was a front-page article, so the chances that it attracted eyeballs was reasonably good.) A few things that jumped out at me: The very existence of an IACUC is treated as news. It seems to be a big surprise that university researchers (and physiology professors) don't just order mice like they do whiteboard markers -- maybe because most of the students (and, perhaps, a…

Friday Sprog Blogging: summer outings in review

Even though August has barely started, it turns out that the Free-Ride offspring have already been to quite a number of museums and related centers of edutainment this summer. We review the line-up: The Exploratorium (also discussed here) Best thing to see: Elder offspring: The animals on the upper level. Younger offspring: Cute little robots. Best thing to do: Elder offspring:To watch how bugs can devour a mouse or bird and just leave the bones behind. Younger offspring: To feel the wiggly thing they used in the sand to shift it into different patterns. What I learned there: Elder…

Friday Sprog Blogging: roll the dice.

Sitting here on the calendar between Chinese New Year and Saint Patrick's Day, it seemed like a good time for the sprogs to do some investigations of gambling devices -- in particular, dice. Dr. Free-Ride: Will you roll dice for me? Younger offspring: Can I use the purple ones? Dr. Free-Ride: Sure. Hey, we're going to roll 36 times. Before we start rolling, can you make some guesses about how many of your rolls will come up as sixes? Younger offspring: Ummm ... I think three. Dr. Free-Ride: Really? How many do you think will come up as fives? Younger offspring: I don't really know. I…

When activists are also human: issues of consistency.

I'd like to take a moment to consider a recent comment on a fairly old post about a class meeting wherein my students and I considered some of the inconsistent views about animals with which people seem to walk around. Here's what the commenter said: "But, as one of my students put it, 'Some of these people who want to shut down the animal research facilities should put a sock in it while they're still eating meat.'" This suggests that your classroom discussion created a false impression in your students, perhaps due to your own false assumptions. I've campaigned for ten years to end harmful…

Friday Sprog Blogging: the power of words and the psychology of groups.

This is not a "cute" story. It's an infuriating story about a school climate gone mad. And, although I suspect an organizational psychologist could give a nuanced analysis of the situation, that's not my area of expertise, so I'm just going to tell the story. Elder offspring was sent to the Vice Principal's office yesterday. When the office called Dr. Free-Ride's better half about the incident, the crime they reported was "saying the B-word". I should say right now, if you're in earshot of an elementary or secondary school as you're reading this post, please don't read it out loud! I…

Having a family and an academic career: one blogger's experience (part 2).

Where we left off in part 1: In my fifth (and last) year of funding in my philosophy Ph.D. program, staring down 30, trying to finish a dissertation, and bracing myself for the rigors of the academic job market, I said to myself, "How could having a baby make things noticably more difficult?" Then I remembered: I'd have to tell my advisor. I would characterize my relationship with my graduate advisor as a pretty good one. He always found time to meet with me, gave me good suggestions about what to read, made useful comments on my writing, and really pressed me to figure out what my view was…

Friday Sprog Blogging: climate change and ecosystems.

Driving home with the Free-Ride offspring yesterday, we heard a story on the radio that caught out attention. (The radio story discusses newly published research that's featured on the cover of Nature this week.) When we got home, we had a chat about it. Dr. Free-Ride: What did you guys learn from that story on the radio about the yellow-bellied marmot? Elder offspring: That, in the short term, climate change is good for some species. Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me more about that. Elder offspring: Well, it made the marmots increase in size and numbers. Elder offspring: I was going to say that! .…

Good riddance to a pair of academic pretenses.

Following DrugMonkey's lead, I'm going to play along on the meme proposed by Female Science Professor: What tradition or other general characteristic of academia would you like to see eliminated completely? According to the rules, which I just invented, the things to be eliminated have to be of a general nature. So, for example, the answer "my department chair" or "my university's moronic president" are unacceptable unless you want to eliminate the general concept of department chairs or university presidents. The candidates for disposal can be anything to do with academia, from the most…