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jgoldman | June 8, 2010Recent events have confused me, a little bit. In trying to figure this all out, I thought I'd pose a question to the readership:
Is it possible to ask an empirical question about the effects of a certain human-made product or activity, without implicitly condoning the existence of that product or activity?
Here are some examples that spring to mind:
Can we investigate the effects of offshore drilling on the ecosystem, even if we think offshore drilling is bad?
Can we investigate the effects of the burning of increasing amounts of fossil fuels on the environment, without implicitly supporting…
gregladen | June 8, 2010... and, since it will launch on my birthday I expect everyone to give me one!!!
It will have FaceTime video chat and a reasonable price tag of $199.
It will have two cameras, one flash, and the frame that holds it together is the antenna. There will also be an upgrade to (or new version of, depending on your views of such things) the operating system.
Details
gregladen | June 8, 2010I woke up this morning and the internet told me ...
According to this map, I live between Hasty and "I'm Alone" but I have relatives near Grouse, Knocemstiff, Weed Patch and Heist.
Will BP oil increase cancer on oiled beaches? Possibly.
This should be obvious, but there is now some support for the idea: Children raised by lesbians 'have fewer behavioural problems'
In case you've been waiting, Unscientific America in Paperback!. I just go mine. It's small, and papery. Perfect for beach reading. If you are a PZ Myers fan, this is a must read, but you'll probably want to borrow it rather…
gregladen | June 8, 2010... is an award-winning journalist and author and a recovering newspaper reporter. She writes about public health, medicine and food policy, and finds emerging diseases strangely exciting.
Visit Superbug, the latest Scienceblogs.com blog,and read her books: Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA and Beating Back the Devil
dgmacarthur | June 8, 2010Some worthwhile recent links from the world of personal genomics:
A great piece in Newsweek by Mary Carmichael summarising the recent regulatory furore over direct-to-consumer genetic testing, and the potential implications for the industry.
Emily Singer has two articles at MIT Technology Review summarising important messages from the Consumer Genetics Conference last week. Firstly, early results from the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative suggest that risk information from individual genetic test results is a stronger motivator for healthy behaviour than risk prediction from…
gregladen | June 8, 2010Who voted for this guy?
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | June 7, 2010A new intelligence test is out, and the results are in some cases quite expected, and in other cases somewhat surprising.
Briefly, the results indicate that women are smarter than men, people of retired age are smarter than 20 year olds, self declared "Republicans", "Democrats" and "Conservatives" are all about equally stupid, but "Moderates" are really dumb and "Liberals" are extraordinarily smart.
In a somewhat less rigorous version of the test, more differences are revealed: In this version, "Republicans" and "Conservatives" are morons, there is a reversal by age categories and the old…
gregladen | June 7, 2010A court in the Indian city of Bhopal has sentenced eight people to two years each in jail over a gas plant leak that killed thousands of people in 1984.
The convictions are the first since the disaster at the Union Carbide plant - the world's worst industrial accident.
The eight Indians, all former plant employees, were convicted of "death by negligence". One had already died - the others are expected to appeal.
more
jgoldman | June 7, 2010Maryn McKenna, and her blog Superbug 2.0 has been downloaded (uploaded?) into the Borg.
As she says:
What you can expect to see on Superbug: antimicrobial resistance of course, and all the things we do to make it worse. (Anyone want to talk about chain drugstores giving antibiotics away for free?) But also: infectious diseases, especially emerging ones; zoonotic diseases, and the bacterial and viral traffic between us and the species we share space with; food policy and food safety; and public health, and especially public health policy and politics. Most of all, expect Superbug to be an…
grrlscientist | June 7, 2010
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People); "Scientia Pro Publica 32: Biology Overload" has just been published by Philip at his blog, The Dichotomous Trekkie 2.0. This was Philip's first ever blog carnival, and he did an excellent job! So go there, leave some warm fuzzies for Philip, then read the linked essays and be sure to leave your comments on at least one of those essays, either telling those authors what they did well, or making suggestions for improvements in their writing.
After…
gregladen | June 6, 2010Whenever I sat at Joseph and Mary's dinner table, Mary showed a great deal of interest in my work. In between her frequent forays away from the dining room table to get this or that food item, or to issue instructions to a servant, or whatever, she would sit at the table across from me and ask questions.
"So, have you found anything interesting?" which is a standard question to which the answer was always "no" ... we do not want to give people the idea that they should head out into the bush with a shovel. "So, what to the Pygmies think of your research." And so on.
I remember that during…
gregladen | June 6, 2010Joseph and Mary, and Little Joe and Mary, and Grinker and I, sat around the table where most of the dinner had been laid out. Additional bits and pieces of the dinner would be brought out as needed shortly, but now it was time to pray.
So we held hands and bowed our heads, and Mary led a prayer to Jesus for the bounty we were about to receive and stuff, and we all said Amen and were about to dig in, when Mary interrupted with a tone of voice and a hand signal that made everyone stop with their forks in mid air.
This is a Repost in celebration of Missionary Weekend
"We have a new tradition we…
cortex | June 6, 2010I've got a review of The Shallows, a new book by Nicholas Carr on the internet and the brain, in the NY Times:
Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the "Phaedrus," he lamented the invention of books, which "create forgetfulness" in the soul. Instead of remembering for themselves, Socrates warned, new readers were blindly trusting in "external written characters." The library was ruining the mind.
Needless to say, the printing press only made things worse. In the 17th century, Robert Burton complained, in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," of the "vast chaos and…
gregladen | June 6, 2010 Actual missionaries As you may have noticed, I have written a series of posts about missionaries in eastern Zaire in the 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on my own personal experiences. These seven posts represent only a small number of these experiences, but they are more or less representative. They are meant to underscore the down side of missionary activities in Central Africa. To some extent, the negatives you may see in these essays are part of the reason for missionary activity being illegal in many countries (although the reasons for those laws varies considerably). It is my…
gregladen | June 6, 2010As I've mentioned previously, the study site I worked in was beyond the Peace Corps Line. It was beyond the Blender Line. And it was beyond the Beer Line. Out here in this arguably very remote area, we were never short of remoteness. Every year the study site become more and more remote, as roads deteriorated, air strips grew over, bridges became more and more questionable. Over the previous decades there had been more of a missionary presence in this area, but the missionaries had withdrawn and now only passed occasionally down the ribbon of mud we laughingly referred to as the "road…
gregladen | June 5, 2010It was a rare day that I was at the Ngodingodi research station at all ... usually I was off in the forest with the Efe Pygmies, up the road excavating an archaeological site. It was also rare that Grinker, my cultural anthropologist colleague, was at the research station. He was spending most of his time in the villages learning language and waiting around for the other shoe to drop (he studied conflict, so on the average day ... not much conflict).
But then an even rarer thing happened.
This is a Repost in celebration of Missionary Weekend
As we sat, being rare and chatting about the…