sociology of science
Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don't expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their lifetime, then cites a commenter saying "Why the f*** are you working on it, then?" Tommaso offers a semi-quantitative way to determine whether some long-term project is worth the risk, which is amusing.
I was reminded of this when I looked at the Dennis…
I drove up to Montreal yesterday, and amid visits with anthropologist and Somatosphere founder Eugene Raikhel, anthropologist Allan Young, and Suparna Choudhury, talked about (among other things) the emerging new area of study they're calling "critical neuroscience."
What the heck is critical neuroscience? Well, one definition calls it
the attempt to assess and inform neuroscientific practice from a rich interdisciplinary perspective, and to categorize, evaluate and (begin to) manage the various risks resulting from neuroscience and its results and applications
.
Daniel Lende, one of the…