Uncategorized
grrlscientist | April 7, 2010tags: Seed Media Group, online media, science news, science writing, public outreach, education, announcement, press release
Yesterday, The Mothership (Scienceblogs.com), released their traffic figures from the launch of the site in January 2006 through the first quarter of 2010. These numbers are quite impressive, regardless of which universe you inhabit [free PDF]:
Visits for the quarter ending March 31 grew by 41% year-over-year to approximately 13 million, and page views topped 25 million. Monthly unique visitors grew to 2.4 million worldwide and in the US surpassed 2 million for the…
cortex | April 6, 2010There's a neat list of variables that reliably (at least reliably in the lab) increase certain forms of creativity. There is, for instance, the blue room effect, and the benefit of spatial distance, and the bonus of living abroad, and the perk of thinking like a 7-year old. Here's a new creative strategy:
Previous research has characterized insight as the product of internal processes, and has thus investigated the cognitive and motivational processes that immediately precede it. In this research, however, we investigate whether insight can be catalyzed by a cultural artifact, an external…
gregladen | April 6, 2010Science Blogs grows bigger. See this PDF file for details.
Also, tell us what is wrong with the graph!?!?
gregladen | April 6, 2010A piece in the Star Tribune by my friend John Funk:
Friends and family members were grieving Monday for a 20-year-old Marine from Rochester, Minn., whose death Friday in Afghanistan was called "a horrible loss" by his family pastor....
Click Here for the Whole Story
cwilcox | April 6, 2010A little while back I wrote an article about a recent study which largely blamed farmed Tilapia for the loss of native biodiversity in Fijian waterways. I have since received e-mails from Gerald Billings, the Head of Aquaculture at the Ministry of Fisheries and Forests in Fiji. He expressed his concern over the paper's intent and subsequent findings. As a scientist, I believe strongly in impartiality, so I've posted the entirety of his response to the study after the fold for you to read if you wish. I don't like the idea of supporting bickering between governments and conservation…
gregladen | April 6, 2010A few years ago, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, working for Reuters in Iraq, were killed along with several other non-military personnel in a very badly botched US military operation. Much more recently, Wikileaks has released the half hour long video taken from one of the US helicopters involved in the massacre.
You need to go here and read the story, and watch the long version of the video (pasted below). Especially if you are a tax-paying US citizen, because this is your war. This is you pulling the trigger.
gregladen | April 6, 2010Oh wait, sorry, they weren't "women" exactly ...
they were High School Students. Beaten by school officials. But wait, they weren't really "beaten" exactly ... they were "paddled." Oh, and the fashion choice ... they were prom dresses that were to revealing, breaking a school dress code that a neckline would not go below the "breastbone" and a hem would not go above six inches above the ankle.
So they were actually high school girls paddled by school officials because they were not Amish-looking enough.
The story is here. Strangely, the story is not about the beating of 17 women, but…
tlambert | April 6, 2010Saturday's Science Show was on the AAAS Symposium on climate change scepticism. Speakers are Riley Dunlap, William Freudenburg, Naomi Oreskes and Stephen Schneider.
Hat tip Bernard J.
agelman | April 6, 2010Sociologists Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher claim:
Using nationally-representative data from the [1994] General Social Survey, we [Conley and Rauscher] find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.
But economists Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee have found the exact opposite:
We [Oswald and Powdthavee] document evidence that having daughters leads people to be more sympathetic to left-wing parties. Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make…
illconsidered | April 6, 2010[editor's note: an initial name confusion had the orignal version of this article referring to Jay Rogers instead of the actual author of the AEI piece Jay Richards. This has been fixed and as well a no longer relevant paragraph has been removed. Apologies for any confusion.]
[Preliminary Note: Coby asked me to edit this essay for a guest post on "A Few Things Ill Considered" (AFTIC). The original post is here, but this version cleans up the salty language (I'm kind of a roughneck and freely curse on this forum) and polishes up the content and provides the links to the relevant source…
illconsidered | April 6, 2010A commenter here a couple of months ago posted a link to a truly great resource of paleoclimate proxy reconstructions covering various time periods all including the time of the Medieval Warm Period, or MWP.
The MWP was a time of generally warmer temperatures in the North Atlantic region lasting from roughly 950AD to 1250AD. It was once thought to have been global in extent and perhaps as warm as or warmer than today. Notably, the 1990 IPCC report contained a rough, manually drawn schematic of global temperatures over the last 1100 years that placed the MWP well above the current global…
agelman | April 5, 2010A few months ago, Yu-Sung and I summarized some survey results from the 1993-1996 General Social Survey. 56% of respondents said they attended an amateur or professional sports event" during the past twelve months, and it turned out that they were quite a bit more Republican than other Americans but not much different in their liberal-conservative ideology:
Then, the other day, someone pointed me to this analysis by Reid Wilson of a survey of TV sports watchers. (Click the image below to see it in full size.)
The graph is very well done. In particular, the red and blue coloring (…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
This week's edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) has been published at two separate locations: "Scientia Pro Publica 24: Origins Edition" by Andrew at 360 Degree Skeptic and by Andrew at Southern Fried Science. This twin edition is christened (by me): "The Twin Sons of Different Mothers" edition, or perhaps "The Revenge of the Andrews".
How did this happen? I wonder. Haven't I sent out enough emails about this blog carnival, the host schedule…
gregladen | April 5, 2010... you are going to have to take a century or two of snark from us atheists. Like this:
cortex | April 5, 2010Jon Mooallem had a really interesting article in the Times Magazine yesterday. It reviewed some recent research on animal "homosexuality," with an emphasis on scientists who argue that same-sex behavior is not a single adaptation or mutation, but rather reflects a panoply of different instincts, spandrels, and evolutionary accidents:
Something similar may be happening with what we perceive to be homosexual sex in an array of animal species: we may be grouping together a big grab bag of behaviors based on only a superficial similarity. Within the logic of each species, or group of species,…
cortex | April 4, 2010I've got a new essay in the WSJ about Tiger Woods, the hazards of playing against a superstar, and why we choke in high-pressure situations. The subplot of the piece is the positive feedback loop of success, or why winning in the past makes us more likely to win in the future. Every underdog, it turns out, has to rage against the natural insecurities of the mind (take note, Butler):
Competitors playing a match against Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, often came down with a mysterious affliction known as "Fischer-fear." Even fellow grandmasters were vulnerable to…
cwilcox | April 4, 2010These little guys are my Stepmom's baby chickens. Aren't they adorable?
Photo by Sue Wilcox
Happy Easter Everyone!
pharyngula | April 4, 2010Sometimes I feel sorry for Michael Ruse. Usually I don't — and I definitely don't when he flees to the safety of the baby pen at HuffPo to cry about how mean everyone is to him. Now he is bleating about the criticisms given to Ayala for accepting a Templeton Prize.
The Templeton Foundation was begun by the late Sir John Templeton, who made a great deal of money by starting mutual funds, and is essentially devoted to the promotion of the interaction and harmony between science and religion. It is hardly too strong a term to say that it is an object of derision by many of today's scientists,…