Uncategorized
agelman | January 23, 2010Alan Turing is said to have invented a game that combines chess and middle-distance running. It goes like this: You make your move, then you run around the house, and the other player has to make his or her move before you return to your seat. I've never played the game but it sounds like fun. I've always thought, though, that the chess part has got to be much more important than the running part: the difference in time between a sprint and a slow jog is small enough that I'd think it would always make sense just to do the jog and save one's energy for the chess game.
But when I was…
gregladen | January 23, 2010When I first got involved with skepticism, I noticed that it was a total sausage fest. Except for one prominent group of women, the Skepchicks, the attention paid to women in the skeptical movement was slim. And how did I feel about the Skepchicks? A little jealous honestly....
must read here
gregladen | January 23, 2010I'm a woman, and I'm in technology, and I demand here and now that you stop catering to me. That's right, I'm talking to YOU: brands, marketers, PR flaks, hardware manufacturers, advocacy groups and the women and men in my industry. And while we're at it, stop referring to me and my female colleagues as "girls."
Visit this open thread.
gregladen | January 22, 2010Cats:
Dogs:
Oh, sorry, that second one was actually cats too. I guess cats win this week!
tqa | January 22, 2010
Patience - or, possibly, Fortitude
New York Public Library, New York
20 August 2007
1/90 sec @ f/5.6; Pentax *istDS
Technorati Tags: blogpix, new york city
agelman | January 22, 2010Stephen Dubner reports on an observational study of bike helmet laws, a study by Christopher. Carpenter and Mark Stehr that compares bicycling and accident rates among children among states that did and did not have helmet laws. In reading the data analysis, I'm reminded of the many discussions Bob Erikson and I have had about the importance, when fitting time-series cross-sectional models, of figuring out where your identification is coming from (this is an issue that's come up several times on this blog)--but I have no particular reason to doubt the estimates, which seem plausible enough…
agelman | January 22, 2010I posted a note the other day about the difference between internal and external coherence of political ideology. The basic idea is that, a particular person or small group can have an ideology (supporting positions A, B, C, and D, for example) that is perfectly internally coherent--that is, all these positions make sense given the underlying ideology--while being incoherent with other ideologies (for example, those people who support positions A, B, not-C, and not-D). What's striking to me is how strongly people can feel that their beliefs on a particular issue flow from their being a…
gregladen | January 22, 2010Remember this?
Divining sticks that consist essentially of an antenna not even attached to a radio (which might make it slihgtly useful for listening to music and stuff), and costing between 16 and 60 THOUSAND DOLLARS each, are being used as the main technology for detecting bombs at check points staffed by the Iraqi army. (source)
Well, now we have this ...
The boss of a British company that has sold million of dollars worth of "bomb detectors" to Iraq's security forces has been arrested on suspicion of fraud.
Jim McCormick, 53, the managing director of ATSC which is based in a former…
mspringer | January 22, 2010If you were to find the URL to the ScienceBlogs back end, you'd be presented with a logon prompt. Assuming you knew my username, and it wouldn't be hard to guess, all that stands in between you and a free ScienceBlogs platform to promote your favorite cause is a password. As such a good password is pretty important, and people correspondingly use good ones. Right?
Well, as you probably guessed the answer is no. Razib points out an article determining that the most common password is "123456". Many systems won't even let you pick out a password that terrible, but very often the passwords…
grrlscientist | January 22, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog…
gregladen | January 21, 2010... talking about some guy named "Bora" or something ...
I thought the same thing when I met Bora last year!
mspringer | January 21, 2010This is a little off the beaten path, but it's a silly little diversion with some classic "the press lacks numeracy skills" complaints as a bonus. Thomas Frank writing in the Wall Street Journal has written a rather wild piece - One Cross of Gold, Coming Up: How the government could get even with right-wing cranks.
It's mainly in a Modest Proposal sort of vein; I don't expect he's even a little serious. Still, fun to take a look at. His proposal runs more or less as follows:
1. All those right wing cranks are hoarding stashes of gold.
2. The federal government has lots of gold in Fort…
gregladen | January 20, 2010Cognitive Daily, the blog, is one of the blogs that made science blogs (both in general and at scienceblogs.com) a legitimate, valid enterprise instead of a bunch of random jackasses screwing around on the Internet. Like a nice hat on a man who could be part scoundrel or a great pair of shoes on a woman with ill intention, Cognitive Daily made the rest of us look ... valid. Like we shouldn't be taken off the air. Like we had a reason to call ourselves important.
But Cognitive Daily is now gone. Greta and Dave wrote their last post today, just a few minutes ago.
Crap. Now what are we…
gregladen | January 20, 2010Last Fourth of July Weekend, I attended Skepchicon, which is a "track" at a "con" (where a con is a thing where everyone dresses up like Darth Vader or a Twilight character or whatever). I was on the panel for a couple of sessions and participated in others, and had a blast.
The most interesting thing that those of us involved noticed, on later reflection, is the sophistication of the audience. This is not a case of capturing the interest of a few hundred crazy woo-meisters and trying to talk them into science. Rather, the audience largely consisted of skeptical type people who wanted to…
gregladen | January 20, 2010An exit survey of Massachusetts voters confirms that "decreased turnout among constituencies that historically have voted for progressive candidates," combined with a strong Republican performance among independents, delivered Scott Brown the margins he needed to win.
think progress
gregladen | January 20, 2010On the next episode of Skeptically Speaking, 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.
This Friday!
Details here.
mspringer | January 20, 2010First day of the semester yesterday. Wide-eyed undergrads were flocking to their physics classes in our brand new and completely beautiful building. I'm not so sure they were thrilled about it; doing physics is not something that naturally appeals to most denizens of the university. I admit I'm feeling a few pangs myself for entirely different reasons - though in a lot of ways teaching (and grading!) is a massive time sink, as a research assistant I do miss being in front of a blackboard and helping teach the next generation their physics. Maybe I'll volunteer to do some tutoring now and…
cortex | January 20, 2010There's an interesting new paper on how the brain makes sense of music by constructing detailed models in real time. The act of listening, it turns out, is really an act of neural prediction. Here are the scientists, from the University of London:
The ability to anticipate forthcoming events has clear evolutionary advantages, and predictive successes or failures often entail significant psychological and physiological consequences. In music perception, the confirmation and violation of expectations are critical to the communication of emotion and aesthetic effects of a composition.
The paper…