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cortex | January 27, 2010For the most part, self-control is seen as an individual trait, a measure of personal discipline. If you lack self-control, then it's your own fault, a character flaw built into the brain.
However, according to a new study by Michelle vanDellen, a psychologist at the University of Georgia, self-control contains a large social component; the ability to resist temptation is contagious. The paper consists of five clever studies, each of which demonstrates the influence of our peer group on our self-control decisions. For instance, in one study 71 undergraduates watched a stranger exert self-…
gregladen | January 27, 2010Negotiating with dog god...
Judaism is a religion of scepticism, made for and used by sceptics. The relationship with Jews and God is not a one-way thing in which God says 'thou-shalt-not' and everyone jumps. It's a constantly evolving contract. It's not inappropriate to remind ourselves, especially today, how a panel of rabbis in Auschwitz put God on trial and found him guilty. Such an action would hardly be possible in a religion in which obedience is unquestioning, unthinking.
This is at Henry Gee's joint. Go piss on his rug!!!11!!
(Only kidding about the part about the rug.)
mspringer | January 27, 2010Let's say you wanted to kill NASA. You couldn't just blink it out of existence I Dream Of Jeannie style, but you might be able to strangle it to death in bureaucracy. How might you do it?
For starters, you might completely scrap any attempt to return humans to the moon. You might completely scrap any attempt to put men on Mars. Having gotten rid of most of the inspiration that keeps the agency in the public eye, you could make sure there was no chance of reversing course on any reasonable timetable by scrapping the agency's previous research and cancelling development on the rockets and…
agelman | January 26, 2010Following up on our recent discussion (see also here) about estimates of war deaths, Megan Price pointed me to this report, where she, Anita Gohdes, Megan Price, and Patrick Ball write:
Several media organizations including Reuters, Foreign Policy and New Scientist covered the January 21 release of the 2009 Human Security Report (HSR) entitled, "The Shrinking Cost of War." The main thesis of the HRS authors, Andrew Mack et al, is that "nationwide mortality rates actually fall during most wars" and that "today's wars rarely kill enough people to reverse the decline in peacetime mortality that…
gregladen | January 26, 2010Librarians & Scientists: YMMV
...people (and more so engineers and scientists) consult their friends first, then their files, then after trying everything else, consult the library. It's sort of the library/librarian as goalie metaphor (you know, 10 other people missed the ball so the goalie has to save it).
Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians
Stephanie Willen Brown and I did our level best to bust some stereotypes and suggest some points of contact during our (lightly-attended) session. I think we did a reasonably good job of it; I only wish we could have reached more people.
mspringer | January 26, 2010I'm a bit bogged down in Mathematica code at the moment and have already choked the memory to death on a relatively high-performance machine doing what I thought would be a straightforward electric field calculation. Rechecking everything is taking some time, which distracts from writing here.
In the meantime I'd like to point out a few good links to read about my favorite subfield of physics - laser physics. This year represents the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser, and it would indeed be pretty hard to come up with a more important piece of physics for the modern world.…
cortex | January 26, 2010Cable news is not good for the soul. People make fun of Jersey Shore, but at least those randy kids don't reinforce our deep-seated political biases. A new paper by Shawn Powers of USC and Mohammed el-Nawawy of Queens University of Charlotte looked at the effect of international cable news on the ideology of its viewers. Not surprisingly, they found that people were only interested in "news" that didn't contradict what they already believed:
Powers and el-Nawawy show that global media consumers tuned in to international news media that they thought would further substantiate their opinions…
agelman | January 26, 2010You've all heard about how you can predict all sorts of things, from movie grosses to flu trends, using search results. I earlier blogged about the research of Yahoo's Sharad Goel, Jake Hofman, Sebastien Lahaie, David Pennock, and Duncan Watts in this area. Since then, they've written a research article.
Here's a picture:
And here's their story:
We [Goel et al.] investigate the degree to which search behavior predicts the commercial success of cultural products, namely movies, video games, and songs. In contrast with previous work that has focused on realtime reporting of current trends,…
cwilcox | January 26, 2010Man's best friend is much more than a household companion - for centuries, artificial selection in dogs has made them prime examples of the possibilities of evolution. A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin recognized how the incredibly diverse dogs supported his revolutionary theory in his famous book On The Origin Of Species. At the time, he believed that dogs varied so much that they must have been domesticated from multiple canine species. Even still, he speculated that:
if... it could be shown that the greyhound, bloodhound, terrier, spaniel and bull-dog, which we all know propagate…
tqa | January 25, 2010
There's never enough light.
Statue of William Shakespeare
Leicester Square, London, England
11 January 2007
1/125 @ f/9; Pentax *ist DS; 55mm focal length
Technorati Tags: blogpix, Raw, shakespeare, statue
gregladen | January 25, 2010... the theory might diversify ...
Pat Robertson needs to watch this. In fact, this YouTube video needs to be attached to his eyes so he has to watch it again and again for all of his days .
Hat Tip Glen
gregladen | January 25, 2010I really need to be clear that as an atheist, I don't pretend to "know" that there are no supernatural entities. I agree with those who label themselves as agnostics that there is no way to ever know the unknowable with an absolute degree of 100% certainty. I think that those atheists who claim to know that there is no such thing as a supernatural realm are overstating their case by tiny degrees.
Read the rest here
edyong | January 25, 2010Look in any biomedical laboratory, and you will find HeLa cells. Over 50 million tonnes of these cells have been grown in churning vats of liquid all over the world. They have been one of the most important tools in modern medicine, pushing forward our understanding of cancer and other diseases, and underpinning the polio vaccine, IVF, cloning, and more. None of these advanced would have been feasible without HeLa. Most scientists have used or seen them but most have no idea about their origin. It's time to find out.
In early 1951, there was only one place in the world where HeLa cells could…
cwilcox | January 25, 2010By that, of course, I mean the more widely read internets: specificially, the Charlotte Observer's online content. They're featuring my blog this week in their science section. I knew I was going to be in print, but I didn't know I was going to be online, too! Totally cool. Anyhow, go check it out. And you can check out the full version of that blog right here.
cortex | January 25, 2010The Economist reviews an interesting new study that investigates the immorality of power:
In their first study, Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky asked 61 university students to write about a moment in their past when they were in a position of high or low power. Previous research has established that this is an effective way to "prime" people into feeling as if they are currently in such a position. Each group (high power and low power) was then split into two further groups. Half were asked to rate, on a nine-point morality scale (with one being highly immoral and nine being highly moral), how…
grrlscientist | January 24, 2010Overnight (well, overnight for my time zone), I received an email, beseeching me to submit a story or two to the carnival of evolution. I did that, but then decided to go one step further, to ask you to also submit a story of your own, or stories you've read, to this carnival -- afterall, there's no law that says you can't submit other people's writing if it's published on a blog. If you'd like to read the complete archives, you can access them from the Carnival of Evolution website (which looks much nicer than the Scientia Pro Publica website, sigh!) Oh, and while you're at it, keep in mind…
gregladen | January 24, 2010Camp Quest is a secular summer camp program, and the Minnesota Version of it has been growing in recent years, and needs volunteers to help. 2010 camping dates are June 25 to July 31, not too far from the Twin Cities.
Here's a brochure (PDF, 900K) with more info, and the web site is here.
If you are interested in volunteering your time please contact Minnesota Camp Quest by email.
I believe they will be happy to hear from volunteers interested in working for one week stints. According to Jeannette Watland, who is coordinating the camp this year, Camp Quest is "...rapidly expanding. In…
gregladen | January 24, 2010On Desiree Schell's Skeptically Speaking Radio with Quiche Moraine and Almost Diamond's Stephanie Zvan ...
... a panel discussion on skepticism and race. Is the face of modern skepticism really as monochrome as it appears? How do we make our message appeal to a broader, more diverse audience? And how do racial demographics influence belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal?
Our panel includes LaVerne Knight-West, Stephanie Zvan, and Girl 6.
CLICK HERE
By the way, here's an interview with Massimo.
agelman | January 23, 2010First the scientific story, then the journalist, then my thoughts.
Part 1: The scientific story
From the Daily News:
Spanking makes kids perform better in school, helps them become more successful: study
The research, by Calvin College psychology professor Marjorie Gunnoe, found that kids smacked before age 6 grew up to be more successful . . . Gunnoe, who interviewed 2,600 people about being smacked, told the [London] Daily Mail: "The claims that are made for not spanking children fail to hold up. I think of spanking as a dangerous tool, but then there are times when there is a job big…