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Inequality Aversion

The ultimatum game is a simple experiment with profound implications. The game goes like this: one person (the proposer) is given ten dollars and told to share it with another person (the responder). The proposer can divide the money however they like, but if the responder rejects the offer then both players end up with nothing. When economists first started playing this game in the early 1980s, they assumed that this elementary exchange would always generate the same outcome. The proposer would offer the responder approximately $1â¯a minimal amountâ¯and the responder would accept it. After…

Learning from Mistakes

In the latest Mind Matters, the psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn review some interesting new work by Nate Kornell and colleagues, which looked at the advantages of learning through error. Conventional pedagogy assumes that the best way to teach children is to have them repeatedly practice once they know the right answer, so that the correct response gets embedded into the brain. (According to this approach, it's important to avoid mistakes while learning so that our mistakes get accidentally reinforced.) But this error-free process turns out to be inefficient: Kids learn…

The Beginner Mind

Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and philosopher at UC-Berkeley, has a wonderful op-ed over at the NY Times on the surprising intelligence of infants: New studies demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults. Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old…

Morality and Distractions

Over at Mind Matters we recently featured an interesting article by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Adina Roskies (two philosophers at Dartmouth) reviewing a recent paper by Joshua Greene, et. al. The paper tested the dual-process model of morality, which argues that every moral decision is the result of a tug-of-war between the "rational" brain (centered in the prefrontal cortex) and the "emotional" brain, rooted in areas like the amygdala and insula. In their study Greene et al. give subjects difficult moral dilemmas in which one alternative leads to better consequences (such as more lives…

Profiling Psychopaths

It's good to have Gladwell back. I've missed his writing these last few months. (To learn about his next book, check out Kottke.) His article this week was on the (pseudo)science that is criminal profiling: In the case of Derrick Todd Lee, the Baton Rouge serial killer, the F.B.I. profile described the offender as a white male blue-collar worker, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, who "wants to be seen as someone who is attractive and appealing to women." The profile went on, "However, his level of sophistication in interacting with women, especially women who are above him in the…

Geese and Ganders

In my post about Pastor Jones and the Quran burning, I wrote that I'm a First Amendment maximalist, and so defend the right of someone to burn a Quran, but noted also that Jones' actions were clearly intended as a provocation, and that a smart lawyer could probably convince a court that Jones' actions fall into the "fighting words" exception to the First Amendment. Jones has a right to express his distaste for Islam and for Muslims, but he hasn't got a right to inspire a riot, and it isn't inherently unfair to hold him accountable for the predictable results of his actions. Setting aside…

De Waal states it plain

Franz De Waal wades into the science/religion fuss with a great post at the New York Times: The God-Science Shouting Match: A Response: To have a productive debate, religion needs to recognize the power of the scientific method and the truths it has revealed, but its opponents need to recognize that one cannot simply dismiss a social phenomenon found in every major society. If humans are inherently religious, or at least show rituals related to the supernatural, there is a big question to be answered. The issue is not whether or not God exists — which I find to be a monumentally uninteresting…

Disco. does creationism

The Disco. 'Stute is upset. Not only has disco been overtaken by that rap music, but you can't even hear the good stuff any more. Also, no one returns their phone calls. Atheist Richard Dawkins dodges Debate Challenge: Ray Comfort, author of the Amazon.com’s best seller, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think – is offering $20,000 to Richard Dawkins (probably the world’s most famous atheist) simply for Dawkins to appear in a public debate on the issue of the beginnings of the universe with him. However, it seems Prof Dawkins would rather keep his tirades against God…

Further adventures in moral monstering

Martin Cothran, the hateful bigot who touted the words of an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier on Holocaust Remembrance Day, is confused. He cannot fathom why I called him a moral monster. The reason is simple. On June 4, less than a week after George Tiller was shot and killed in his church, Cothran advocated that "the murder of abortionists" be "safe and legal." This is disgusting. Cothran offers no particular defense for the conscienceless (and tasteless, natch) attempt at justifying cold-blooded murder. Like Scott Roeder, who pulled the trigger on George Tiller, Cothran is "deadly…

Massimo Pigliucci is so very rude

Massimo Pigliucci has written a book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), that actually sounds very interesting — it takes a strong skeptic's approach to truth claims. What really makes it sound worth reading, though, is a review by Carlin Romano that pans it, Pigliucci, and a whole great legion of scientists irritated with the public endorsement of nonsense: Romano complains that we're on "ego trips." Why? Because Pigliucci expresses such strong certainty about the conclusions of science. Here's the heart of the review. It's a lot of aggravating piss-…

Race, IQ and adaptation

Like the little boy who can't help sticking his finger into the socket, Dan MacArthur is talking about race, IQ & genetics again. He quotes an exchange in nature where a researcher states: So, given that we have logical reason to hypothesize about differences in cognitive abilities, why would we expect to measure these by using a single number such as IQ, which suggests there must be a hierarchy of cognitive function? The prediction surely is that each population will adapt to be better at the particular cognitive tasks that are most important for survival in its own environment. If this…

Reader Survey Results, day 1

Since I asked regular readers to fill out a survey, I've received over 300 responses. My own experience with these surveys is that about 50% of the total responses come within 24 hours. Next weekend I'll put up the .csv file with all the data, and present some of my analyses as well. But below the fold I've placed the raw frequency data if you are curious; there isn't likely to be any major changes in proportions with the next 300 respondents, and there weren't any great surprises. Here's a foretaste of weirdness in the survey data that I'll present next week. 66 respondents claimed they…

Save Detroit?

Yesterday I implored the country not to save Detroit. Today Daniel Gross argues that Detroit's Big Three Are a National Disgrace: But we still need to save them. This is the only part which I think is on point: But General Motors wouldn't be a typical bankruptcy. GM's management argues that the very act of filing for bankruptcy eliminates the possibility of recovery since people would be reluctant to purchase expensive, long-lived assets (cars and trucks) from a bankrupt entity. And because of GM's size and the place it occupies in the supply chain, the company's failure would likely…

The Prison of War & Peace

A few days ago I began a survey of Martin Nowak's treatment of modern game theory in his book Evolutionary Dynamics. Today I'm going to hit the Prisoner's Dilemma. Roughly, this scenario is one where two individuals are isolated, and if they both keep their mouths shut (cooperate) they get off, but, if one rats the other out while the other keeps silent, the silent partner is screwed while the snitch gets off. If both of them rat the other out they get a prison sentence, but a lighter one than if they had kept silent while the other ratted them out. In other words: ratting the other person…

Books: "Biased Embryos and Evolution" by Wallace Arthur

This is a post from June 28, 2005, reviewing one of my favourite new evolution books: Ever since I read Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny in about 1992 or 1993., I knew I wanted to do research that has something to do with evolution, development and timing. Well, when I applied to grad school, I could choose between evolution OR development OR timing, but not any combination of two or more - the true evo-devo folks were just not available for me at that precise moment in history. I chose timing and than worked dilligently to infuse my work with as much evolution and development as I could. I…

Books: "Biased Embryos and Evolution" by Wallace Arthur

This is a post from June 28, 2005, reviewing one of my favourite new evolution books (reposted here): Ever since I read Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny in about 1992 or 1993., I knew I wanted to do research that has something to do with evolution, development and timing. Well, when I applied to grad school, I could choose between evolution OR development OR timing, but not any combination of two or more - the true evo-devo folks were just not available for me at that precise moment in history. I chose timing and than worked dilligently to infuse my work with as much evolution and development…

The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving our Natural World

tags: The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, marine biology, environment, conservation, Jacques Cousteau, Susan Schiefelbein, book review . . . I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round many voices. Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . . "Ulysses" Alfred, Lord Tennyson In the ten years before he died, world-famous…

Answering Indian Cowboy

Indian Cowboy left a comment on a thread below and I'm moving it up here so it doesn't get lost. It was in response to some of the conservative catchphrases that I and others came up with for the refrigerator magnet game. In particular, he seems to be responding to two catchphrases I pointed out, "judicial activism" and "smaller government". Unfortunately, I think he's missing my point and jumping to false conclusions about my political views. In short, he thinks I'm PZ; I beg to differ. I'm not sure I should even bother, considering my lovely reception at PZ's blog a couple weeks ago, but…

Explosives and Sandefur, Round 4

Sandefur writes: Yes, I know Brayton claims not to be a Kerry supporter, but so did Andrew Sullivan. There is a real difference between the two. Sullivan was a Bush supporter who slowly swung over to being a Kerry supporter (rather reluctantly), and for many of the same reasons I've criticized the administration. He was a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq, but has been appalled by how incompetently it's been handled by the administration. I, on the other hand, was never a Bush supporter, and I've made clear several times that I am voting Libertarian this year, as I have in every election…

Slaughter a Cow Every 28 Days: How the Bible Ruined Western Society

In which I explain how Abrahamic religious tradition, ingrained in Western society since before its very history began, explains some of the special ways in which we can be so dumb. Leviticus, the ancient Biblical law, does not give us a lot of room for negotiation, and I think this may help explain the illogical way in which most Westerners approach the realities of society and culture. Leviticus asserts that human behavior intersects with the law of god in a black and white fashion. We tend to see our fellow human beings as wonderful or terrible. A recent news story serves as an…

Jonathan Wells knows nothing about development, part II

Yesterday, I pointed out that Jonathan Wells was grossly ignorant of basic ideas in evo-devo. This isn't too surprising; he's a creationist, he has an agenda to destroy evolutionary biology, and he's going to rail against evolution…same ol', same ol'. That's nothing, though. Wells and his fellows at the Discovery Institute have an even more radical goal of fighting natural, material explanations of many other phenomena, and his latest screed at the DI house organ is against natural explanations of development. Not evolution, not evo-devo, just plain basic developmental biology—apparently, he…

Report on the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, Part Three

An interesting exchange took place during the Q and A of a talk entitled “Georgia Public School Board Members' Beliefs Concerning the Inclusion of Creationism in the Science Curriculum.” The speaker was Kathie Morgan of LIberty University. The talk itself was unremarkable, even by the crushingly low standards of creationist scholarship. The premise was that there are ways of bringing creationism into the classroom, in the form of supplementary materials beyond what the state requirements mandate, that do not run afoul of any Supreme Court rulings. Morgan and her colleagues decided to…

Joe Mercola: 15 years of promoting quackery

Let's travel back in time fifteen years. It's a time that, for me, at times seems as though it were just yesterday while at other times it seems like truly ancient history. Back then, certainly, I wasn't the blogging powerhouse that I am today. I didn't even know what blogging was because it was so much in its infancy that few people knew what it was. In fact, it was only around 14 years ago that I first discovered Usenet, that vast, sprawling, brawling assortment of discussion groups where I cut my skeptical teeth, so to speak, discovering, as I did, alt.revisionism (often abbrievated a.r.…

Scientific fraud and journal article retractions

A week ago, I took someone who has normally been a hero of mine, Brian Deer, to task for what I considered to be a seriously cheap shot at scientists based on no hard data, at least no hard data that he bothered to present. To make a long, Orac-ian magnum opus short, Deer advocated increased governmental regulation of science in the U.K. based apparently on anecdotes like that of Andrew Wakefield. Worse, rather than presenting even the limited data that exist regarding the prevalence of scientific fraud, he chose instead to devote too much of his limited word count to characterizing…

You can't have naturopathy without homeopathy

Sometimes a comment in the comment thread after one of my posts ends up turning into the inspiration for another post. This is especially likely to happen if I respond to that comment and end up writing a comment of myself that seems way too good to waste, forever buried in the comments where, as soon as the commenting on the post dies down, it remains, unread again. So it was after my post on the "integration" of quackery into academic medical centers. In that post, I applied some of my inimitable not-so-Respectful Insolence to a deal between Georgetown University, what should be a bastion…

More acupuncture quackademic medicine infiltrates PLoS ONE

I hate to do this to Bora again. I really do. I'm also getting tired of blogging all these crappy acupuncture studies. I really am. However, sometimes a skeptic's gotta do what a skeptic's gotta do, and this is one of those times. As you may recall, a mere week ago I was disturbed to have discovered the publication of a truly horrifically bad acupuncture study in PLoS ONE. It had all the hallmarks of quackademic medicine: an implausible hypothesis, trying to correlate mystical concepts of meridians and qi to anatomy and failing miserably, and dubious statistical modeling. That PLoS ONE…

It's always the vaccines: Harold Ramis and autoimmune vasculitis

Last week, one of my favorite comedians and filmmakers of all time passed away unexpectedly. I'm referring, of course, to Harold Ramis, whose work ranged from movies like National Lampoon's Animal House (the first R-rated movie I ever saw, actually), to gems like Ghostbusters and and Groundhog Day. In fact, in retrospect, when I posted about Brian Hooker and the antivaccine movement trying to resurrect the hoary corpse of the conspiracy theory that the CDC is some how "covering up" data that would prove that the antivaccine cranks were right all along about mercury in vaccines as a cause…

Contrary to impressions (and Donald Trump's antivaccine views) most Americans support vaccine mandates

Being as involved as I have been refuting antivaccine pseudoscience as I've been over the last 12 years, I frequently forget that antivaccine views are not the mainstream. It's an easy thing to do. If you were to immerse yourself in the antivaccine echo chamber as much as I do, you too would start to think that enormous swaths of the country, if not an outright majority, think that vaccines cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, asthma, a wide variety of neurological disorders, and basically every autoimmune disease under the sun. I know that that's not true, but often it doesn't feel…

On accommodationism

Jerry Coyne is right: Nobody who has followed Dawkins’s work and writing could possibly think he’s an accommodationist Or rather, he's probably right. I've never been clear what "accommodationist" means, it seems to adapt itself in perfect Calvinball style to suit whatever enemy someone might have. Thus, when Eugenie Scott answers the question "Are science and religion compatible?": I don't have to address that as a philosophical question, I can address that as an empirical question. It's obvious that it is. Because there are many people who are scientists who are also people of faith. There…

Simple Lempel-Ziv Compression in Erlang

I decided to do a little bit of something useful with Erlang, both to have some code to show, and to get some sense of what it's like writing something beyond a completely trivial example. Because the capabilities of Erlang shine when you get into low-level bit oriented things, I thought that writing a bit of data compression code would be make for a good example. I'm going to present it in two parts: first a simple but stupid version of the algorithm; and then the encoding part, which into bit twiddling, and potentially gets more interesting. I'm going to use a simple version of Lempel-Ziv…

In which David Freedman criticizes health journalism and simultaneously destroys my irony meter

About a year and a half ago, I applied a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence to a a clueless article about the the "triumph" of New Age medicine. The article channeled the worst fallacies of apologists for alternative medicine. Basically, its whole idea appeared to be that, even if most of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" is quackery (which it most certainly is), it doesn't matter because allegedly it's making patients better because its practitioners take the time to talk to them in a way that most doctors do not. In brief, the article was…

Tax Thresholds: Why the horror stories about the Obama tax plan are lies

Watching news reports about President Obama's proposed tax changes, I've seen a number of variations on a very annoying theme, which involves a very stupid math error. A typical example is this story on ABC news, which contains a non-correction correction: President Barack Obama's tax proposal -- which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more -- has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay in an attempt to avoid paying higher taxes on every dollar they earn over the quarter million dollar mark. A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette,…

Why Harvard's Skocpol Is Full of It

And by "it", I don't mean the good stuff. Harvard dean Theda Skocpol has announced a new initiative to improve undergraduate teaching at Harvard. I'll believe it when I see it--which means it will never happen. Here's why. The short version is that every year (give or take), some prestigious university announces that they are going to improve teaching. And then it never happens. At this point, it's not cynical to assume the worst, it's cynical to announce a 'new teaching initiative.' In response to this announcement, Aspazia and Steve Gimbel both describe how teaching isn't rewarded…

Religion, good and bad and all that

John Wilkins has a good post on religion, I tend to agree with its general thrust though I might quibble with details. Not being gifted with much marginal time right now, a few quick thoughts: 1) I believe that institutional organized religion, e.g., Christianity, Islam, etc., can increase the magnitude of a social vector, but has little influence on its direction. For example in relation to slavery religion was a force for inflaming both abolitionist enthusiasm and justifying the holding of other humans in bondage. Religion doesn't do good or evil, humans do, religion is simply a 'virus of…

For the Next Debate Thingee, Can the Moderator Be a Member of the Coalition of the Sane

By way of Michael Tomasky, I stumbled across this site hosted by presidential debate moderator Rev. Rick Warren (?!?). Here's what the good reverend has to say about evolution: What about dinosaurs? Question: How do they fit in with the idea that God created the world rather than the world evolving on it's own? Why doesn't the Bible talk about dinosaurs? Answer: The Bible tells in Genesis 1 that God made the world in seven days, and that he made all of the animals on the fifth day and the sixth day. All of the animals were created at the same time, so they all walked the earth at the same…

Obama, Clinton, and the Perils of Self-Projection

As I watch the Democratic primary lurch closely towards self-destruction, I keep asking myself why are so many Democrats projecting their fantasies onto two candidates whose feet are definitely made of clay? Granted, this has been going on since the start of the silly season (italics added): ...what I'm seeing is that many who identify strongly with a candidate hold opinions that are very different from the candidates. Now, there's [nothing] wrong with that per se: if your guiding star is to beat the Republicans, because you think any Democrat would be preferable to a Republican, then so be…

The Arc of Evolution Is Long and Rarely Bends Towards Advantageous Alleles: Why Does Popular Science Ignore Neutral Theory?

I came across this excellent article by Jerry Coyne, which is part book review, part defense of natural selection. I recommend it highly. But, in reading the article, I wondered why people are so threatened by natural selection. Because that's not the philosophically challenging part. Unless you're a biblical 'literalist', the idea of a creator dude who acts through the mechanism of natural selection isn't too theologically challenging. After all, traits that are beneficial (at least locally and in the short term) increase, while the deleterious ones decrease. Surely, this is the best…

I Thought Technocratic 'Centrists' Were Supposed to Be Competent: The Mayor Bloomberg Edition

So maybe NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg isn't a centrist? 'Centrists', who seem to be beloved by the Washington political press corpse and few others, typically style themselves to be common-sense people who just solve problems--consider them the up-scale version of the "jus' folks" flapdoodle purveyed by America's Party. Well, Mayor and presidential aspirant Bloomberg didn't seem to be able to plow the snow very well. Writes the Krugman: ...he's supposedly non-ideological, competent, able to transcend partisan divisions with a single bound. There's a recurrent fantasy about a Bloomberg third…

I get email

Man, those visits to Fargo and Maine sure stirred up a lot of people. I've just been getting an unusually large volume of mail lately, and it's about evenly split: half are saying "Yay, I'm going to read your blog every day!" and the other half are "You're going to burn in hell!" It seems appropriate, then, to at least acknowledge this flood by posting one of them. Nate is trying to pull a Ray Comfort on me. There's a reason why people call Comfort "Raytard", so he really isn't the right person to emulate. You Hi Paul, The ten commandments: 1. No other God's…. even yourself. 2. No…

Pandemic planning and "not getting it"

There are many local stories about pandemic flu planning and they all sound pretty much the same. Local officials saying they are making good progress but there's still much left to do and if a pandemic struck they'd be in trouble. Yawn. But every once in a while you read one where you say to yourself, "Some of this has sunk in. They're asking the right questions." Not often, or at least not often enough, but when we started talking about this no one was asking questions like this: Meals on Wheels delivers 850 meals a day in Rockingham County [New Hampshire], relying on 35-40 drivers and…

Tripoli 6 trial ends

The Tripoli 6 trial has ended without hearing the scientific evidence that could have exonerated the defendants, five Bulagarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused of intentionally infecting over 426 children with HIV in a hospital in Benghazi, Libya. The verdict on the case will be announced on December 19. These six unfortunate souls have now spent almost seven years in a Libyan prison, subjected to torture and now (again) an expected guilty verdict and sentence of death by firing squad. They are scapegoats for a failed Libyan health care system whose hygienic failings led to…

H5N1 and animal health

If you confront other people who think bird flu has gone away as a concern or read news articles to that effect, consider this. In April of this year there were 45 countries reporting infections in their bird or poultry populations. Now, four months later, there are 55. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) continues to warn us that the virus is spreading throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. The number of confirmed human cases now stands at 240, with 141 deaths. The true number is likely larger, although how much we don't know. So far it is still small compared with the SARS…

There is such a thing as bad satire

Roger Ebert has revealed the purpose behind the peculiar creationist Q&A he posted the other day. I had suggested it was either poorly done satire or his site had been hacked. Ebert has now confessed that it was poorly done satire. He didn't say it was poorly done, of course. He says he was trying to show that people have lost their ability to detect satire, that we're unable to sense the 'invisible quotation marks' that surround such exercises, in the absence of overt declarations that it is satirical. To sense the irony, you have to sense the invisible quotation marks. I suspect…

A Harvest for 9.2 Billion

The number of people on Earth is expected to shoot up from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. How will we feed them? If we continue with current farming practices, vast amounts of wilderness will be lost, millions of birds and billions of insects will die, and farm workers will be exposed to more and more chemicals. And still, we will not have enough food. Clearly, there must be a better way. Some scientists and policymakers suggest that genetic engineering, a modern form of crop modification, will dramatically reduce our dependence on pesticides, enhance the health of our…

'Humanities Folks' Need to Pay Attention to STEM, and Vice Versa

Guest Blog by Adora Svitak USA Science & Engineering Festival Youth Advisory Board Member Note: See Adora as part of the Teen Inventors Panel at the Festival on the Lockheed Martin Stage!  When I was little, I hated a lot of things. I refused to practice piano or violin. I didn't eat my leafy vegetables. But most of all I hated math. By extension, I disliked anything that stank of equations: physics, chemistry, technology, engineering. After falling in love with Corinthian columns and the University of Washington's collegiate-Gothic buildings, I wanted to be an architect... until I…

SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST ADVISOR JAMES KAKALIOS

By Stacy Jannis Kavli Science Video Contest Manager The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts. Follow #SciInSciFi on twitter  for contest updates. James Kakalios is a physic professor at the University of Minnesota, lecturer, and author of the books, The Physics of Superheroes, and the Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics, which use science fiction, or speculative science, as…

Spotlight on Pluto by Science Author Dr. Fred Bortz

Today's  guest blog post is by Featured Science Author Dr. Fred Bortz Tune in Thursday, June 13th on our Facebook page at 10 am EST to discuss this post with Dr. Bortz!  More than ten years after it was posted at  the "Ask Dr. Fred" page "Why Isn't Pluto a Planet Anymore?" remains by far the most popular page at "Dr. Fred's Place" on the web, getting anywhere between 50 and 100 hits on a typical day. That's a lot of interest in an icy world that is smaller than the moon and so far away that sunlight takes at least 4 hours to reach it! What could possibly be so fascinating? The reason, of…

Indonesia sample sharing moves to World Health Assembly

Indonesia has just registered its 76th death and 95th case of bird flu, making it the country with more of each than any other nation. Not that you would know it by looking at the current WHO count of confirmed cases. That's because Indonesia hasn't sent WHO any viral isolates for confirmation since January. We've covered this too often to repeat the details (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for some background), but the issue is now front and center in this week's World Health Assembly, the official governing body of WHO convened in Geneva: The issue of sharing…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Framing spinning

I don't like getting involved in internecine warfare, least of all amongst my SciBlings. But a recent OpEd in WaPo by two fellow bloggers I admire, Matt Nisbet of Framing Science and Chris Mooney of The Intersection prompts me to set fingers to keyboard. It is Richard Dawkins that provoked it. Good for Dawkins. Once again he is exposing muddled thinking. And he didn't even have to write about it: Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins's arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More…

Bringing norovirus under cruise control

Most readers probably never gave much thought to tissue culture, the laboratory technique where cells or tissues are grown in flasks or other containers separated from the organism of origin. One of the reasons for doing this is to grow viruses, since a virus needs a host cell to replicate. It can't "live" on its own and doesn't grow in size. It just makes a copy of itself. Dog kidney cancer cells, for example, are used to grow influenza virus in flasks that also contain nutrient medium for the dog cells. Finding the right tissue culture system for a virus is an art in itself. For many…