Politics
drorzel | May 7, 2014I've seen a few links passed around to this Tom Siegfried post about science literacy, which is mostly a familiar story about how polls show most Americans giving incorrect answers to science questions. The sort of stuff you find in the NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators report. What's getting the social-media attention, though, is this paragraph near the end:
In fact, I’d contend (and have contended) that the problem with science education is not that it fails to inculcate enough facts, but that it tries to inculcate too many. Science classes in high school and intro classes in…
oracknows | May 1, 2014Yesterday, the CDC held a Twitter party for National Infant Immunization Week, which is, conveniently enough, this week. Our old "friend" Ginger Taylor tried to call in her squadron of flying antivaccine monkeys to fling poo at what should have been a celebration of the success of vaccines; so I sent up the Bat Signal, the better to attract some voices of reason to the sliming of the #CDCvax hashtag used for the Twitter party to counter the antivaccine quacks. P.Z. Myers picked up the call too, and the rest is history. I almost felt sorry for Ginger and her fellow antivaccine loons, as they…
oracknows | April 27, 2014Naturopathy is a pseudodiscipline that resembles a Chinese menu of quackery, in which naturopaths select one from column A and two from column B, with each column containing a list of modalities ranging from pure quackery like homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine to mundane modalities that naturopaths embrace, "rebrand" as "alternative," and woo-ify and oversell in the process, such as nutrition and lifestyle interventions like exercise. Despite this, naturopaths are deluded enough to believe themselves qualified to be primary care practitioners. Worse, they've been having some success…
drorzel | April 26, 2014While I'm complaining about statisticulation in social media, I was puzzled by the graph in Kevin Drum's recent post about college wage gaps, which is reproduced as the "featured image" above, and also copied below for those reading via RSS. I don't dispute the general phenomenon this is describing-- that the top 10% of college grads earn way more than the average, and the bottom 10% way less, and somewhat less than high school grads-- but I'm baffled about what was done to generate this graph.
Specifically, I'm puzzled by the vertical axis, which is labeled "Real hourly wage (natural log)."…
catdynamics | April 25, 2014Why you might sometimes care about the sex lives of strangers.
A snarky comment over on an evanescent social media site lead me to shoot back from the hip, but on reflection, unusually enough, I decided I liked the retort enough to preserve it in more permanent intertoobz form.
The discussion was on oligarchy and extremes of wealth, and the comment was essentially that this was a private matter, and that the income, or wealth, of an individual was not a matter of public interest - that it was a prurient obsession of no more relevance than the identity of their sexual partners or preferences…
drorzel | April 25, 2014Via a mailing list, probably via this Tyler Cowen post, an awful statistic about adjunct faculty:
35 years ago there were 44% more tenured faculty than adjuncts. Today there are 76% more adjuncts than tenured faculty, via @chronicle
— Ángel Cabrera (@CabreraAngel) April 25, 2014
This is awful in two ways. First, it's obviously a sad comment on the state of the college teaching profession. More importantly, though, it's a classic abuse of statistics, using a really confusing presentation of the numbers to exaggerate an effect that doesn't really need it.
Here, let's try this as a poll, since…
drorzel | April 25, 2014A collection of miscellaneous stuff with an academic inclination from the past week or so:
-- We gave an exam last night in introductory E&M (I'm teaching one of five sections this term), so we've spent a lot of time this week on exam review. One thing that might be worth mentioning here is the way I run review sessions, which I don't think is entirely original to me, but which generally gets a "Huh. That's a good idea." when I explain it to other faculty, so wherever I got it from isn't well known.
What I do is: at the start of the review session (either a regular class period given over…
oracknows | April 25, 2014I was torn about what to blog about today. There were lots of things floating around that caught my eye and appear worthy of of a little taste of Insolence, either Respectful or not-so-Respectful, so much so that I couldn't decide. None of them really stuck out. Then I saw this news story pop up in my Google Alerts, Houston-area doctor grateful for time spent with Pope John Paul II:
My first thought was that Stanislaw Burzynski must have one hell of a publicist. Either that, or he has a good buddy at KHOU in Houston. My second thought was of a bill that was recently…
esiegel | April 24, 2014“One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.” -Frank Zappa
I want you to think about your deep, personal convictions. Think about your values, the issues that you feel define you at your core, and your most strongly held beliefs. What, if anything, would compel you to change them?
Image credit: Boise Weekly, via http://www.boiseweekly.com/boise/idahos-epidemic-of-fear-vaccination-li….
Is there any evidence that you could be presented with that would sway you?
Honestly, I sure hope so!…
catdynamics | April 22, 2014"The wonderful thing about Tiggers
Is Tiggers are wonderful things..."
Tigger was my favourite on the Hundred Acre Campus.
"...bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy
Fun, fun, fun, fun, FUN!"
Recently I was at a meeting, and a comment was made about how someone was being negative.
Not only was this a bit of a bummer, total downer, harshing everyone's mellow.
It actually violated our Code of Mututal Respect and Cooperation!
Namely Article 9: "Have a positive attitude"
Huh?
Well. Yes, I knew we had a Code. But I had not internalised this particular requirement, and the more I thought about it the…
gregladen | April 22, 2014It is possible that this is the most important Earth Day. Earth Day is part of the process of broadening environmental awareness and causing positive change in how we treat our planet. We are at a juncture where we must make major changes in what we do or our Grandchildren, to the extent that they can take time away from the daunting task of survival in a post-Civilization world, will curse us.
I wrote a massive multpart blog post about Earth Day a four years ago, and here I'm giving you a slightly modified version of it, covering just a few aspects of the thing, and telling a couple of…
oracknows | April 20, 2014This might look somewhat familiar to people, but I have a good excuse. Yesterday was Easter, and, although by no stretch of the imagination can I be accused of being particularly religious, we still did have family to visit. Add to that the fact that I have a two talks to give today that as of Friday night I hadn't even started working on (OK, two versions of the same talk, which makes it perhaps 1.5 talks), and a little—shall we say?—creative recycling is in order. Even so, if you don't follow the other locales where my written meanderings may be found, it'll still be new to you. It all…
gregladen | April 8, 2014From NBC:
... Mohammad Musa Khan appeared in court in the city of Lahore last week, charged with attempted murder along with his father and grandfather after a mob protesting against gas cuts and price increases stoned police and gas company workers trying to collect overdue bills.
"Police are vindictive. Now they are trying to settle the issue on personal grounds, that's why I sent my grandson to Faisalabad for protection," the baby's grandfather, Muhammad Yasin, told Reuters, referring to a central Pakistani city.
The baby is on bail and due to appear at the next hearing on April 12 but…
oracknows | April 7, 2014Here I am, sitting on the balcony of my hotel room in sunny San Diego, as I get ready to head over to the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). The sun is rising over the mountains, and the only sound I hear is that of running water in the swimming pool below (well, that and traffic around the convention center, the odd siren, and the noise of air conditioner fans), and I need to produce something quick for the blog. Realizing that last week, I described myself as having fallen into a "rut," not because I thought my posts were substandard but rather because I…
drorzel | April 4, 2014Yesterday's frat boy post prompted some interesting discussion, one piece of which is a response from Matt "Dean Dad" Reed (also at Inside Higher Ed), who overlapped with me at Williams for a year, but had a very different reaction to the social scene there. His take mirrors mine from the other side, though, which suggests I'm not wildly off base.
The other chunk is a comment exchange on Facebook where some colleagues mentioned the problem of social exclusivity as an issue that I didn't address. And that's true-- as I was at a school without fraternities, where all organizations were formally…
drorzel | April 3, 2014I was invited to a dinner last night hosted by one of the umbrella organizations for fraternities on campus, with a stated goal of improving communication between faculty and frats. It ended up being kind of a weird crowd-- most of the non-students there were Deans of one sort or another; I think there was only one other regular faculty member there. I'm not sure quite how they drew up the invite list, but I suspect the two of us are probably among the most sympathetic faculty members-- I went to a school without frats, but the rugby club was functionally equivalent, and the other guy proudly…
oracknows | April 2, 2014As regular readers know, I was quite happy that Skeptical Inquirer (SI) agreed to publish articles by Bob Blaskiewicz and myself about the highly dubious cancer doctor in Houston known as Stanislaw Burzynski. Indeed, Bob and I have been busily doing our best to promote it, appearing on various podcasts, including Point of Inquiry and, most recently, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, where once again we've called on skeptics to help us put pressure on our elected officials to prevent Dr. Burzynski from continuing to take advantage of desperate cancer patients, many with incurable disease,…
jdupuis | April 1, 2014Added: Please note the date this post was published on.
After a couple of years of implementing some really amazing and progressive change at Elsevier, I've decided to refocus some of my advisory efforts over the next few years. As a result, I'll be taking on a senior advisory role for the Government of Canada. I'm thrilled to announce I'll stepping into a new position created just for me: Chief Advisor on Science Libraries.
In this capacity I'll be reporting directly to our brand new Minister of State for Science & Technology Ed Holder and one of my chief roles will be liaising with…
oracknows | March 30, 2014As I just mentioned a week ago, there used to be a time when I dreaded Autism Awareness Month, which begins tomorrow. The reason was simple. Several years ago to perhaps as recently as three years ago, I could always count on a flurry of stories about autism towards the end of March and the beginning of April about autism. That in and of itself isn't bad. Sometimes the stories were actually informative and useful. However, in variably there would be a flurry of truly aggravating stories in which the reporter, either through laziness, lack of ideas, or the desire to add some spice and…
oracknows | March 23, 2014As I sat down to write this bit of Insolence, I had at least two ideas for what I thought would be informative, entertaining, and timely posts. I also didn't want to have to write about Stanislaw Burzynski again after having just done so on Friday, having to note that the FDA caved, granting compassionate use exemptions to use antineoplastons (ANPs) to several patients who had been lobbying for just such exemptions. I already described why what the FDA did was horrifically cynical. When I first saw the message rejoicing of the FDA's decision in message on the Prayers for Elisha Facebook page…