social science
drorzel | August 10, 2011There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym "STEM") getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren't quite the data you would really like to have, and I think it's worth poking at them a little, not to deny the validity of the results, but to point out the inherent limitations of the process.
The first is a study of lifetime earnings in various fields that includes this graph showing that women with a Ph.D. earn about the same amount as men with a…
drorzel | May 9, 2011A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don't want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of "hot" shooting-- a player who had made his previous couple of shots was, if anything, slightly less likely to make the next one. Lehrer writes:
Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame. Once a player makes two shots in a row - an utterly unremarkable event…
drorzel | May 3, 2011I recently participated in a survey of higher education professionals about various aspects of the job. It was very clearly designed by and aimed at scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to the point where answering questions honestly made me feel like a Bad Person.
For example, there were numerous questions about teaching methods that just aren't applicable to what I teach-- things like learning through community service. while there is some truth to the old cliche that you never really learn something until you have to teach it, something like turning a bunch of would-be engineers…
dgreen | March 18, 2011Jack Hassard wishes us well (and tasks us with being as provocative as we can) in his blog named after his book, The Art of Teaching Science (Oxford, 2004). Summarizing his own approach to science education, he credits Jacob Bronowski as his main inspiration, especially his belief that reasoning and imagination work closely together. Hassard quotes Bronowski at perhaps his most provocative: "You may have been told, you may still have the feeling that E=mc2 is not an imaginative statement. If so, you are mistaken."
Georgia Tech's Mark Guzdial, in his Computing Education blog, takes exception…
cagapakis | October 24, 2010Nick pointed me to a fabulous podcast series by CBC radio called "How To Think About Science." Each episode is a long and fascinating interview with a prominent scholar of science--scientists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians who explore how science is done, how scientists work, and how scientific ideas and facts are communicated. Check it out!
drorzel | September 27, 2010It's that time of year again-- the Swedes will be handing out money to famous scientists, with the announcements of who's getting what starting one week from today. Thus, the traditional Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Picking Contest:
Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog.
The usual terms and conditions apply. If you don't have anything you'd like to guest-post about, you can exchange your guest post for a signed copy of How to Teach Physics…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times's investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using "Value Added Modeling," which basically looks at how much a student's scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and Kevin Drum has some reactions of his own, along with links to two posts from Kevin Carey, who blogs about this stuff regularly. Finally, Crooked Timber has a post about a recent study showing that value-added models aren't that great (as CT is one of the few political…
drorzel | July 6, 2010As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won't solve the problem, but it'll give me something to point to the next time I get asked.
So, what communications skills should scientists have? The answer depends on what kind of science you're going to do, and what you want to do with it.
First and foremost, though: If you want to be a successful scientist, you need good communications skills. Full stop.…
sschoenbaum | June 24, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: "Inside the Outbreaks", Mark Pendergrast's wonderful history of the Centers for Disease Control's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), can be read on many levels. I confess that as a former EIS officer (1967-1969), personally familiar with most of the "elite medical detectives" of the first few decades, I tended to read it "between the lines". I found myself recalling many personal incidents, interactions with others, and themes mentioned but not necessarily fully developed in the book. I'd like to consider a couple of those here:
Early on in "Inside the Outbreaks…
edyong | March 15, 2010We all know that as we type on our keyboards or click our mice, we leave behind fingerprints that could be used to deduce our identities. But these prints aren't the only remnants of our presence. Bacteria from our skins also linger on the things we touch and they could act as a sort of living fingerprint.
The thriving community of bacteria and other microscopic passengers on our skin has many traits of interest to a forensic scientist. For a start, they are remarkably personal in their membership and stable over time. Just 13% of the bacteria on my palm also live on yours, and even…
edyong | March 12, 2010This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
For all the millions that are poured into electoral campaigns, a voter's choice can be influenced by the subtlest of signals. Israeli scientists have found that even subliminal exposure to national flags can shift a person's political views and even who they vote for. They managed to affect the attitudes of volunteers to the Israeli-Palestine conflict by showing them the Israeli flag for just 16 thousandths of a second, barely long enough for the image to consciously register.
These results are…
edyong | March 8, 2010Ever wonder if acts of kindness or malice really do ripple outwards? If you give up a seat on a train to a stranger, do they go onto "pay it forward" to others? Likewise, if you steal someone's seat, does the bad mood you engender topple over to other people like a set of malicious dominoes? We'd all probably assume that the answers to both questions were yes, but James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis think they have found experimental evidence for the contagious nature of cooperation and cheating.
The duo analysed data from an earlier psychological experiment by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter…
edyong | February 23, 2010I grew up in the days of the SNES and the Sega Megadrive. Even then, furious debates would rage about the harm (or lack thereof) that video games would inflict on growing children. A few decades later, little has changed. The debate still rages, fuelled more by the wisdom of repugnance than by data. With little regard for any actual evidence, pundits like Baroness Susan Greenfield, former Director of the Royal Institution, claim that video games negatively "rewire" our brains, infantilising us, depriving us of our very identities and even instigating the financial crisis.
Of course, the fact…
edyong | January 12, 2010For something intangible, a glance can be a powerful thing. It can carry the weight of culture and history, it can cause psychological harm, and it can act as a muzzle. Consider the relatively simple act of a man staring at a woman's body. This is such a common part of modern society that most of us rarely stop to think of its consequences, much less investigate it with a scientific lens.
Tamar Saguy is different. Leading a team of Israeli and US psychologists, she has shown that women become more silent if they think that men are focusing on their bodies. They showed that women who were…
edyong | December 22, 2009Thanks to those of you who've been taking part in these polls. For anyone who's just turned up, I've been trying to collate the best stories from this blog over the last year by asking people to vote in a number of different areas. This is the penultimate one and we're looking at social science (a fairly broad category, I admit).
Hidden beliefs in science stereotypes predict size of gender gap across 34 countries
Simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students
Enter Adam, the Robot Scientist
Ballet postures have become more extreme over time
Attendance…
edyong | December 17, 2009Those of us who have been on the receiving end of racial abuse know all too well that words can hurt. But they're also the tip of the iceberg. According to a study of popular US television, we're exposed to the spectre of racial bias on a regular basis, all without a single word being uttered.
When scenes are muted, body language and facial expressions are enough to convey more negative attitudes towards black characters compared to white ones. This bias is so subtle that we're largely unable to consciously identify it, yet so powerful that it can sway our own predispositions. In some ways…
edyong | November 30, 2009For many religious people, the popular question "What would Jesus do?" is essentially the same as "What would I do?" That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.
Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people's mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point…
edyong | November 23, 2009In the early days of the last US elections, Hillary Clinton's campaign was accused of deliberately darkening Barack Obama's skin in a TV ad. The implication was that by highlighting Obama's "blackness", Clinton's camp was trying to exploit negative associations that voters might have with darker skin. But you don't need editing software to do that - a fascinating new study suggest that people literally change the way they see a mixed-race politician, depending on whether the candidate represents their own political views.
Liberal American students tend to think that lighter photos of Barack…
edyong | October 23, 2009There is a deep hole in a tree trunk and within is a tasty dollop of sweet, nutritious honey. It's a worthwhile prize for any animal skilled or clever enough to reach it, and chimpanzees certainly have both of these qualities. But the solutions they find aren't always the same - they depend on cultural traditions.
Chimps from the Sonso community in Uganda are skilled at the use of sticks and unsurprisingly, they manufacture stick-based tools to reach the honey. Chimps from the Kanyawara community in a different part of Uganda have never been seen to use sticks in the wild. Instead, they…
edyong | September 29, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
For decades, scientists have realised that languages evolve in strikingly similar ways to genes and living things. Their words and grammars change and mutate over time, and new versions slowly rise to dominance while other face extinction.
In this evolutionary analogy, old texts like the Canterbury Tales are the English language's version of the fossil record. They preserve the existence of words that used to…