society
clock | August 22, 2009'How to get strangers to talk to you' instead of 'How to talk to strangers'? I find this blog post and slide-show quite interesting. I see how it may apply to introverts - and I sure am not one of them - but I can also see how much of it applies equally well to extroverts like me, almost as a reminder to keep one's over-extroverted mannerisms under control:
The Shy Connector
View more documents from Sacha Chua.
drorzel | August 21, 2009So, I was checking to see that last night's Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column:
I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It's unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to perfectly screen all their content before serving ads to our blogs, especially given the sheer number of crank ads that are out there.
I am within my rights, however, to call out garbage when I see it. Particularly quantum garbage (though I'm no fan of fly-by-night Internet pseudo-universities, either),…
drorzel | August 20, 2009... to write a guest post at the Science and Entertainment Exchange blog. So I did, on science communication:
I was asked to write a guest-blog post about "increased incentives for scientists to develop their communications skills." I'm happy to oblige, but in typical ornery-blogger fashion, the first thing I want to do is take issue with the question's phrasing. While it's commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that's very far from the truth.
It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other…
drorzel | August 19, 2009The results, however, are amusing for the rest of us:
It's nice to see somebody in a safe district taking advantage of essentially having tenure. We could use more of this.
clock | August 2, 2009SciBling Walt Crawford indulges himself in some prognosticating about the (non)demise of various physical means of delivering information: music, films, magazine, newspapers and books. He takes a cautious, conservative tack there, for the most part. I am supposed to be the wide-eyed digi-evangelists around here, but I was nodding along and, surprising to me, agreeing with much of what he wrote.
But I'd like to follow-up on this with some additional caveats and thoughts of my own. You may have to read Walt's post first for the context, as this will be a direct riff off of him.
Regarded as some…
grrlscientist | July 29, 2009tags: TEDTalks, politics, society, Why Societies Collapse, Jared Diamond, streaming video
Why do societies fail? In this video, Jared Diamond uses lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana to talk about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it [22:42]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
drorzel | July 28, 2009There's an interesting report at Inside Higher Ed today on a study of religiosity and college. Some of the results will probably come as a surprise to many people around ScienceBlogs:
# The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or who view religion as more important in their lives. The researchers speculate that there may be a "nagging theory" in which fellow churchgoers encourage the students to attend college.
# Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity --…
razib | July 27, 2009
Update: The author of the paper clears up confusions.
Update: Here's the paper. End Update
The British media is abuzz with another paper from Satoshi Kanazawa, the evolutionary psychologist who has great marketing savvy. I can't find the study online anyway, so here is the Times Online:
In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was…
drorzel | July 20, 2009The Internet has been all abuzz today over the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Tor has the best one-stop collection of reminiscences, but there are plenty of others. They're roughly equally split between "Wasn't that the coolest thing ever?" and "Isn't it a shame we stopped going.
I was a bit over -2 when the Moon landing happened, so I have no personal recollections to offer. It's a significant enough anniversary for a geek like myself, though, that I wouldn't want it to pass completely without comment.
Personally, while I have some sympathy for the laments that we stopped sending…
drorzel | July 16, 2009This isn't actually about a literal or metaphorical smackdown-- it's more about a distinction in language, related to a number of the comments that have been made regarding Unscientific America. (Yeah, I know. I'll find something else to talk about soon.)
The issue is most clearly laid out by Janet, who writes:
In addition to the research, the grant writing, the manuscript drafting, the student training, the classroom teaching, the paper and grant refereeing, and the always rewarding committee work, academic scientists should be working hard to communicate with the public, to generate their…
drorzel | July 16, 2009The most unfortunate thing about the furor over Unscientific America is that the vast majority of the shouting concerns a relatively small portion of the actual argument of the book. Far too much attention is being spent on the question of whether Chris and Sheril are fair to Myers and Dawkins, and not nearly enough is spent on the (to my mind more important) sections about political and media culture. Which is a shame, because unlike most bloggers, they make some fairly concrete suggestions about what ought to be done to address the problems they describe.
In particular, they make a fairly…
razib | July 15, 2009FuturePundit points me to an article about an older woman who had IVF treatment who has died, Spanish woman who gave birth through IVF at 66 dies:
A Spanish woman who became the world's oldest mother at the age of 66 has died of cancer just two-and-a-half years after giving birth to twins, raising fresh questions about the ethics of fertility treatment for women past natural childbearing age.
Some of the aspects of this case are sui generis, obviously. But as people have children later and later, I wonder as to the probabilities of larger proportions of individuals having their parents die…
drorzel | July 14, 2009I'm running way behind this morning for a variety of reasons, so I'm going to swipe another easy question and throw it back to the audience. this one's from Eric Lund, who asked:
If you could attend a dinner with any major political figure in the world, who would it be, and why?
The answer that makes this an easy question is "Barack Obama," who is currently the most major of world political figures, and comes off as almost too good to be true on tv. So I'd like to have dinner with him (after playing hoops for a while to work up an appetite), just to see if he's really that good.
But that's…
grrlscientist | July 12, 2009tags: politics, religion, fundamentalism, physical violence, Bill Maher, streaming video
"'This is what I believe.' 'Yeah, you believe it, and I'm going to say why it's dumb.'" ~ Bill Maher [2:17]
drorzel | July 9, 2009Just in time to feed into the discussion surrounding Unscientific America, there's a new Pew Research Poll about public attitudes toward science. As is usually the case with social-science data, there's something in here to bolster every opinion.
The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the fraction of people saying that "Science/ medicine/ technology" is the greatest achievement of the last 50 years has dropped from 47% to 27% since 1999. About half of that shifted to "Civil rights/ equal rights," which is hard to begrudge, but the other half seems…
drorzel | July 9, 2009I got a weirdly hostile comment to my popularization post last night:
You have some chutzpah. You are being paid, probably quite well, to do research! Journalists are paid, not nearly so well, to popularize research. It takes some nerve to take an extra year's salary, and to take time away from your real job---and then to complain about not being well-enough rewarded. If you want something to complain about, become a science journalist and see how well you are rewarded then. I'm sure you think that is beneath you, and that you do so much better a job---but the general audience you aim to…
drorzel | July 7, 2009Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday's post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don't get with a blog. I got distracted and didn't reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I'll promote it to a post so it doesn't get buried and forgotten:
Yes, but starting a wiki in order to put together a more coherent version of the ideas from the blog may have been equally effective. Blogging is not the only web publishing tool.
Of course, I realize that you still wouldn't get the benefits of the editorial…
drorzel | June 25, 2009Over at Skulls in the Stars, gg has a very good response to the polemic about the dullness of modern science that I talked about a few days ago. He takes issue with the claim that modern science is "dull" compared to some past Golden Age, and does a good job of it-- go read it.
I think he makes some very good points, but my own main problem with the piece is a different sort of thing. Fundamentally, the article strikes me as a "Fans are slans" argument dressed up ina lot of science-y jargon. And "fans are slans" arguments drive me nuts.
The basic argument is laid out in a comment by Bruce…
drorzel | June 19, 2009The smart-people blogosphere is all abuzz about questions from the French college entrance exams, with comments from Matt Yglesias, Dana Goldstein, and Kevin Drum, among others. The general tone of the commentary is summed up by Goldstein's question:
Could you ever imagine the SAT or ACT asking students to write an essay on such complex, intellectual topics?
The answer is "Sure. The answers would suck, but you could ask them."
And that's the important thing, here. What matters is not whether you ask ostentatiously intellectual questions of your students, but whether the answers they give are…
drorzel | June 12, 2009There's a nice write-up about the World Science Festival in the New York Times today:
The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at Lincoln Center Wednesday night. Over the next three days the curious will have to make painful choices: attend an investigation of the effects of music on the brain with a performance by Bobby McFerrin, or join a quest for a long-lost…