Physical Sciences
tfk | June 4, 2007Why are basic scientific facts controversial in the public realm? What can scientists and their friends do to engage the public and move them past those misunderstandings?
Those are the questions motivating fellow ScienceBloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet as they tour the country giving a talk called "Speaking Science." They kicked the tour off here in Kansas City, and they'll be in New York tonight and on to places unknown after that. The talk is rooted in their controversial paper in Science and a subsequent op-ed in the Washington Post, both on the topic of framing science –…
hrynyshyn | June 1, 2007The reaction from the scientific community to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's lack of concern over climate change is blunt. Here are some examples. First, from Jim Hansen, who works for Griffin: "I almost fell off my chair. It's remarkably uninformed."
Next we have Berrien Moore, director, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire: "I don't understand it. I'm really stunned that he could say something like that. I mean, I really find it shocking."
And then there's Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences at Princeton University: "It's…
denialism | June 1, 2007Readers of the Nation are probably by now familiar with the lunatic ravings of Alexander Cockburn on global warming.
What is bizarre, is that, before he traveled down this road, he seemed able to identify other crank ideas - like 9/11 conspiracy theories, and criticized them. Further, it's unusual to see a left-winger become a crank on global warming. The history of this mess is interesting. It started with this first post from Cockburn, in which he declares global warming a scam.
What evolves is a fascinating picture into the formation of a crank, and the change in global warming…
drorzel | May 31, 2007Everybody's abuzz about the article by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg (the link goes to a reprint at Edge.org; you can find an illicit PDF of the Science article if you poke around a little) about research into why people don't automatically believe scientific explanations. From the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science. The last several decades of developmental psychology has made it abundantly clear that humans do not start off as "blank slates." Rather, even one year-olds possess a rich…
mixingmemory | May 28, 2007A little over a year ago, I wrote a post describing some research showing that there are cognitive barriers to understanding evolution. There I listed three specific factors:
Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of uncertainty; intuitions that can be reinforced culturally to an extent that it may be almost impossible to overcome them by the time we reach adulthood.
Intuitive essentialism, which causes us to believe that biological kinds have hidden internal essences which determine what they are, how they will…
nisbetmc | May 25, 2007Facebook and similar social networking sites hold vast potential for reaching non-traditional audiences for science. As the NY Times reports today, Facebook has 25 million users and growing as the company plans bold new features and opens up its user base to almost anyone with an email account. Social networking sites are important new platforms for science communication since they facilitate two of the key strategies I have pushed in the past in reaching broader American audiences about science.
First, they have the potential to facilitate incidental exposure, in other words they can…
oracknows | May 25, 2007One of the banes of a physician's existence is not so much keeping up with changes in how medicine is practiced, studying new treatments, and following the medical literature. After all, that comes with the territory; it's part of the job. Failure to keep up is to become increasingly ineffective and even to risk malpractice lawsuits. No, what's a major bane is to document that you've kept up. In other words, it's to get enough continuing medical education (CME) credits to be able to renew your medical license. In my state, I have to get 100 CME credits in two years in order to renew my…
oracknows | May 24, 2007Our creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, isn't going to like this one bit. No doubt he'll try to call it "artificial selection" or a "tautology" when he finds out about it, if he doesn't just ignore it because he it doesn't fit in with his view that studying evolution is "of no value" in medicine. Too bad, because, via Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline, I've found a really cool application of evolutionary biology to the development of antibiotic resistance in response to vancomycin that sheds light on the molecular mechanisms behind the development of antibiotic resistance in…
thusspakezuska | May 18, 2007So, I just finished reading Lost Clown's tale of her entry into mathematics - from feminist theory. (Thanks to Sciencewoman's compilation for the 6th round of Scientiae for leading me to that post!) It's really inspiring, and exciting to hear how Lost Clown's physics teacher helped her find her true love of math and physics and encouraged her to pursue it. Her physics teacher also talked with her about mixing feminism with science:
We had many discussions about me going into a scientific field; I was still concerned about leaving a possible career in women's studies for one in science, she…
purepedantry | May 16, 2007No, this is not like voodoo prediction where they will know what will happen 12 years hence.
All of us, however, are capable in degrees of predicting what is going to happen over short time scales. This predicition falls into two general categories. First, we can predict the behavior of inaminate objects such as knowing how a ball will flight when we hit it just-so with a bat. That implies that we understand how physics work on some inituitive level.
Second, we can understand how animate objects such as people behave. For example, if I see someone removing objects from a container…
jstemwedel | May 13, 2007In part II of the interview, my mother discussed her transition from mentor-ific undergraduate physics to a graduate physics program with no mentoring to speak of, not to mention astronomy courses that were described in the course catalogue but not actually taught. Here, in the final segment of our interview, she describes how she developed an exit strategy that took her closer to who she wanted to grow up to be, and reflects upon the lessons learned.
Part III: Making your graduate program work for you:
Was writing a masters thesis even a standard option in the physics program at City…
jstemwedel | May 12, 2007In honor of Mother's Day, I want to celebrate the ways that mothers have blazed trails, knocked down barriers, and challenged expectations of what their daughters' lives can be.
When we're young, we don't always appreciate how important our parents (or other adults in our circle) can be as role models. Part of this, I think, is that a kid's world is smaller in some important ways. What you know of the world you know through school, through friends, through cartoons, and through your family. Lots of aspects of the wider world don't really pop up in your consciousness until you have to…
oracknows | May 10, 2007A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of knowing, invoke postmodernist nonsense claiming that science is just one way of knowing that is not any better than any other ways, or both. The most outrageously absurd example of postmodernist silliness in this regard that I've ever seen was the…
razib | May 4, 2007The post below about the decline of biological anthropology as a concentration at Harvard elicited many responses. To some extent the columnist was framing the argument in a Two Cultures fashion. This is an expansive and thoroughgoing argument. I am personally unaware of the direct benefits of studying mathematics and English Literature simultaneously, though I do know that my old secondary school experimented with mixing subjects such as physics and history after my graduation. But though I am unclear as to the direct benefits, I think that the indirect long term fruit can be substantial…
oracknows | May 4, 2007Everybody (well, mostly everybody) learns in science and physics class the Three Laws of Thermodynamics:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, meaning that the increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.
The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.
As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.
These three laws pretty much describe the…
drorzel | May 4, 2007We were talking about student recruitment the other day, as faculty are wont to do, and our chair suggested that we really ought to have a "Why You Should Major In Physics" page as part of the department web page. As I'm currently the web page coordinator, it will fall to me to write whatever goes on that page.
Now, there's a fair bit of material out there about potential careers and stuff like that from the American Institutes of Physics and other sources, but that tends to be pretty dry. So I thought I'd throw this out to the physics blogosphere:
Why should students major in physics?…
drorzel | May 1, 2007I wrote yesterday's post about the undergraduate research study very quickly, basically just to note the existence of the survey. It's sparked some good discussion, though, and I'd like to take another post or two to expand on what I think it means.
Of course, the beneficial effect of undergraduate research seems almost obvious if you stop to think about it a bit. Undergraduate research works to attract students from all different backgrounds into science for a very simple reason: doing research is nothing at all like the typical science class.
OK, I can really only speak for physics, here,…
sb admin | April 30, 2007Following Chad and Jake, I want to jump off from an article in Science about undergraduate research. It's always nice when some sort of survey confirms one's preexisting biases....
In short, the survey found that performing research increased undergraduates' interest in science and technology fields (so-annoyingly-called "STEM" disciplines, for Science Technology Engineering Mathematics). Such undergraduates were also more likely to go on to advanced degrees, although here the causality isn't necessarily clear. The survey did find that students with higher grades tended to be more likely…
omnibrain | April 30, 2007If you believe that a name can have an impact on how people treat you, your future career and if you also like math you should name your daughter (or change your name) to something further down this list:
Isabella 1.21
Anna 1.04
Elizabeth 1.02
Emma 0.97
Jessica 0.93
Samantha 0.83
Sarah 0.78
Olivia 0.74
Hannah 0.70
Emily 0.68
Lauren 0.66
Ashley 0.63
Grace 0.50
Abigail 0.48
Alex 0.28
If you want your daughter to be a beautician, home maker or a monarch the names on the top of the list are fine. Something bothers me about studies like this but I'm not sure if it's just that I don't want things…
thusspakezuska | April 27, 2007You'll recall I posted about fellow Scibling Shelley Batts's run-in with Wiley over fair use of a figure and graph from a journal article. This incident created quite a firestorm in the blogosphere. You'll find a good summary and a nice link roundup provided by Bora over at A Blog Around The Clock. It's a big deal because it gets to the heart of science blogging and science reporting.
It generated enough attention that both Nature and Scientific American posted about it.
Now Nature's blogger reported on the issue as follows:
A few days ago Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle reviewed a…