Science
pharyngula | April 9, 2007Lucky Cambridge: a whole bunch of organizations, including Harvard, MIT, and the Cambridge public schools and libraries are collaborating to put on the Cambridge Science Festival—9 days of science activities around the town. That is exactly the kind of broadly supported activity in the service of science education that can make a difference in public perception. It's an excellent idea…now if only more communities had that kind of concentration of scientific organizations to make that kind of sustained activity possible.
(via Science Made Cool)
pharyngula | April 9, 2007To my dismay, even after a good night's sleep and a fresh perusal of the paper, after reading both of Greg Laden's thorough articles, Mooney's latest summary, Orac's claim that it's nothing but tailoring your message to your audience, and Nisbet's roundup of responses, I'm still hopelessly confused. What the heck is this paper telling me to do?
Here is my crude, primitive and confused understanding of frames. If I am an advocate for science, I should avoid saying, "I like science, and I strangle puppies!" I should say instead, "I like science, and I snuggle puppies!" OK so far, I can agree…
catdynamics | April 8, 2007'cause it is not art?
The WaPo did something interesting:
they convinced a top violinist to take his strad to the DC metro and busk at rush hour
seven people stopped to listen, twenty seven gave money total of $32.17 - $20 of that came from the one person out of 1000 who recognized the musician.
the good thing - every single child passing through turned to listen and tried to stop
the bad thing - every one of their parents dragged them away without stopping
- there are pubs in England where big time rock stars sometimes come and play unplugged and unannounced. I think Elvis Costello also…
oracknows | April 8, 2007After all the chatter that's been going on throughout ScienceBlogs about Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney's editorial, Framing Science, published in Science on Friday, I almost thought that there was nothing really left for me to say. Of course, regular readers of this blog know that there's rarely an issue that's been so thoroughly picked over by my fellow science bloggers (ScienceBloggers and otherwise) that I can't find something else to say about it. And I'll do it by, in effect, "framing" the issue in perhaps a slightly different way than Mooney and Nisbet did. But first, let's examine a bit…
evolgen | April 8, 2007Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney are arguing that science education is so fucked up and the press are so piss poor that scientists need to go swift boat vets in order win the public debates against anti-science types. According to Nisbet and Mooney, the general public are too stupid to understand the real science, so scientists need to dumb it down. And we can't rely on the press (which everyone calls "the media") to accurately communicate science, so we need to give them catch phrases and slogans. Scientists need ad wizards to convince the public that the earth is more than 10,000 years old,…
pharyngula | April 7, 2007
Abbie makes an excellent point on it the ongoing discussion of the Nisbet/Mooney paper: just how often do scientists get an opportunity to discuss their work to the public, anyway?
I have a few simple points to make.
1. Why are scientists being told so often that they're bad at communicating? Because, like, we aren't. Most scientists are awesome at communicating, just not on the terms dictated by Fox News.
Try grabbing some random person and telling them that they are expected to do a one hour presentation to an auditorium of 90 people on some specific, complex subject…tomorrow. Most will…
evolgen | April 6, 2007GAME PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER
Yesterday's game between Corporate and Charles Darwin was a battle between free market capitalism and the greatest naturalist of all time. The Corporate team is loaded with the world's top pharmaceutical and chemical companies. Darwin is the author of important works such as On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. To find out who came out on top, click through below the fold.
Everyone expected Darwin to start out with a heavy dose of the Origin. And if he didn't come heavy with that, he'd bring The Descent of Man. But Chuck use neither in the opening…
pharyngula | April 6, 2007Larry Moran criticizes a dramatic Youtube video that purports to show how evolution works. He asks if we think this helps or hurts the cause of evolution education. Speaking as an evo-devo guy (forgive me, Larry), I'd also say it hurts. Without understanding the mechanisms of morphological change underlying the simulation, it's useless. It doesn't explain anything about the roots of the variation it's demonstrating or the principles of the propagation of genetic change through a population — funny faces shift generation after generation, with no explanation given. It asserts change without…
pharyngula | April 6, 2007Jonathan Wells apparently felt the sting of my rebuttal of his assertions about Hox gene structure, because he has now repeated his erroneous interpretations at Dembski's creationist site. His strategy is to once again erect a straw man version of biologist's claims about genetic structure, show that biologists have refuted his dummy, and claim victory. The only real question here is whether he actually believes his historical revisions of what we've known about Hox genes, in which case he is merely ignorant, or whether he is knowingly painting a false picture, in which case he is a malicious…
drorzel | April 6, 2007Yesterday, on my way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio and Mike Greenberg made a bold assertion (paraphrased slightly):
Jackie Robinson is one of the ten most important Americans of the twentieth century. Not just sports figures, Americans.
Contrary sort that I am, my first thought was "I don't think I believe that."
Which is not to say that Robinson wasn't an important American of the twentieth century. I don't think there's any question that he's the most important twentieth century American from the world of sports (trailed by Muhammed Ali and Jesse Owens, and then a big step down…
pharyngula | April 5, 2007
Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a short policy paper in Science that criticizes scientists for how they communicate to the public. Mooney says that "many scientists don't really know what they're up against when suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and interactions with politicians" — I agree completely. We are not trained to be glib and glossy, and we simply do not come across as well as we could. We're also not really that interested, generally speaking, in the kind of presentation that plays well in 3 minutes on a news broadcast. It's more than a cosmetological failure, though;…
jrosenhouse | April 5, 2007One of the nice things about being a Big Shot science blogger is that sometimes people are willing to send you free copies of their books. One such person is John Farrell, who graciously sent me a copy of his book The Day Without Yesterday: Lematire, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, published by Thunder's Mouth Press. He sent me the book some time ago, and I owe him an apology for taking so long to review it.
This is a really excellent book. It is a combination of biography, focusing particularly on the often ignored Georges Lemaitre, and science popularization. The book traces…
jrosenhouse | April 5, 2007Sorry for the light blogging this week. I've been spending my time doing all of the things I should have done last week, but didn't because I was writing long blog entries about my experiences in Knoxville.
You might want to have a look at this brief but interesting article from today's New York Times. It describes some recent work on the genetics of dog size.
Here's how the article begins:
If it weren't for IGF-1, Paris Hilton's life would be a lot less elegant.
She'd be lugging around an Irish wolfhound in her purse.
Scientists have just discovered which gene fragment controls the size…
pharyngula | April 4, 2007On The Infidel Guy, Abby of ERV goes up against a ranting crackpot, Leonard Horowitz, who thinks AIDS is the product of a secret conspiracy. She handles herself very well. It's painful to listen to—Horowitz is a master of the bellowing Gumby style of discourse, and he believes in some very looney things. He's also smart enough, though, that he knows some of his stuff is going to go over as immensely kooky to an informed audience, and he gets evasive at several points.
Some highlights occur when he's called "Mr Horowitz", and he goes on an indignant tirade about his credentials. Another is…
oracknows | April 4, 2007Well, well, well, well.
I hadn't expected it. I really hadn't. After just shy of three weeks since I first made my challenge to Dr. Egnor to put up or shut up regarding certain claims of his that the "design inference" has been "of great value" in medicine and results in "the best medical research," I had pretty much given up trying to get an answer out of him. I had come to assume that either (1) Dr. Egnor had been either unaware of my challenge (although I tended to doubt it, given how many echoed it, or (2) he was simply ignoring it in favor of posting some amazingly bad reasoning. To…
pharyngula | April 3, 2007This evening, I am watching an episode of that marvelous and profane Western, Deadwood, as I type this; it is a most excellently compensatory distraction, allowing me to sublimate my urge to express myself in uncompromisingly vulgar terms on Pharyngula. This is an essential coping mechanism.
I have been reading Jonathan Wells again.
If you're familiar with Wells and with Deadwood, you know what I mean. You'll just have to imagine that I am Al Swearingen, the brutal bar-owner who uses obscenities as if they were lyric poetry, while Wells is E.B. Farnum, the unctuous rodent who earns the…
catdynamics | April 3, 2007Apparently Bee hives are suffering massive die offs in parts of the US
Colony Collapse Disorder.
It sound like something to keep an eye on, since honey bees are rather important both commercially and ecologically.
Lots of conjectures about causes, one that caught my attention as mildly plausible is that "nicotinoids", a (new?) class of pesticides, is weakening bee immune systems rendering them vulnerable to infection.
(Hm, nothing on them on wikipedia, curious, nor on neonicotinoids, here to make up for it is the wiki entry on Imidacloprid - one of the new nicotine based pesticides).
There is…
oracknows | April 3, 2007One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…
pharyngula | April 1, 2007I feel a bit peculiar watching these "bloggingheads" episodes — it's like sitting in on two people's private conversation, and by the nature of the medium, you can't even join in. And then the recent Althouse spectacle made me cringe — it was just too Jerry Springer, and I half-expected a tall bald bouncer to show up and make sure the trailer-trash harridan didn't actually claw anyone's eyes out.
The recent science episode with John Horgan and George Johnson makes me feel a little better about it, though; it's more of a chatty and casual intellectual conversation. It's still a bit limiting…
pharyngula | March 30, 2007I've been seeing this xkcd comic everywhere today, and it might be heresy to do this, but I have to disagree with part of it. It just didn't ring true.
Here's the original:
I'd have to add a third conclusion, the professional scientist.
In our favor, I would add that we'd cheerfully substitute a fly, a frog, or a mouse for the student if we could convince them to pull the lever for us.