Social Sciences
oracknows | August 8, 2006Our Seed overlords beckon:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
This one's a bit of a toughy. First off, I waited too long to answer it, which means that other ScienceBloggers have copped answers that I had thought of, movies such as Real Genius and Apollo 13. Those were definitely among the first movies that came to mind. Even though the science itself in Real Genius is downright silly, its celebration of the joys of being a science geek is infectious…
purepedantry | August 7, 2006Yikes. You just can't win with embryos:
Pasko Rakic of Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut and his team were similarly scanning experimental mice, to help inject dye into embryos. When later studying the brain development of these mice, the team noticed that certain neurons in the growing cortex were not behaving normally.
Rakic discussed his preliminary results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2004...But he says he wanted more results to be convinced -- now, 335 mice later, he is.
Rakic says that he has no evidence that ultrasound scanning disrupts the brains of human…
pharyngula | August 7, 2006
This is the week of the Stevens County Fair, right here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota. It starts on Wednesday, 9 August and runs through Sunday the 13th, so you all still have time to start heading out this way. It's your classic rural fair: there will be accordions, deep-fried anything on a stick, pig-judging, carnies, a demolition derby, country-western music, lawn mower races, 4H kids, and tractors, snowmobiles, and ice houses for sale. You have not lived until you have experience a midwestern county fair.
(Oh, and don't eat the food if you want to continue living. It's like jabbing your…
razib | August 5, 2006Most of you have likely heard of the paper out in The Proceeding of the Royal Society, Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?. Here is the relevant section from the abstract:
Toxoplasma gondii, explains a statistically significant portion of the variance in aggregate neuroticism among populations, as well as in the 'neurotic' cultural dimensions of sex roles and uncertainty avoidance. Spurious or non-causal correlations between aggregate personality and aspects of climate and culture that influence T. gondii transmission could also drive these patterns. A…
clock | August 3, 2006
Being out of the lab, out of science, and out of funding for a while also means that I have not been at a scientific conference for a few years now, not even my favourite meeting of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. I have missed the last two meetings (and I really miss them - they are a blast!).
But it is funny how, many years later, one still remembers some posters from poster sessions. What makes a poster so memorable?
I guess it has something to do with one's interests - there is just not enough time during a session to check out every single one out of hundreds (or…
razib | August 2, 2006I have talked about the problems that may occur because of long term societal inbreeding in the past. In short, in a society that is predominantly outbred isolated cases of cousin marriage are not particularly deleterious, but in many cultures systemic inbreeding results in tunneling and narrowing of lineages into discrete effective population pools where stochastic effects start to loom large. In plain English, the number of unique ancestors in inbred clans starts drop in relation to what one would predict in a panmictic context. Deleterious recessives masked in the ancestors are then…
bcohen | August 2, 2006This link about really, really long experiments is from the Athanasius Kircher Society, and I have no idea what that is, and I'm looking to you to tell me. But, for what it's worth, an interesting link to an interesting thread, about an interesting phenomenon. Did you want the answer? The oldest? It's this.
And then we can start another "what's up with Wikipedia?" thread a bit later (since I, like the rest of the human race, just linked to it). Really been pulled into the current these last few weeks (as at The New Yorker, The Onion, and now The Colbert Report (then click the Wikiality…
hrynyshyn | July 31, 2006While online polls are generally worthless when it comes to generating representative statistics - see this post and ensuing dicussion (sorry for being cranky, girlscientist) -- they can at time produce quite curious results. This self-described unscientific poll from the Australian science magazine COSMOS really has me wondering about the publication's readership.
"Are humans still subject to natural selection?" asks COSMOS. Fair question. And more than three quarters of the respondents selected one of two quite similar variations on a theme of "yes." But then there were the other responses…
terrasig | July 30, 2006If posting frequency is any indication, regular readers might be able to tell that the last two or three weeks have not been the highlight of my life. And, thankfully for you, I've kept much of it off-blog because of the unique personal identifying characteristics than prevent me from being too honest here. But, let it suffice to say that several friends of mine and old lab colleagues have had deaths of family members due to cancer, two of which were at painfully young ages...not that there's any 'good' time to die of cancer.
Is this odd? Do my recent experiences represent a statistical…
jrosenhouse | July 26, 2006During those rare moments when I am not doing mathematics or blogging, I am usually reading. I read a lot of nonfiction, mostly books related in some way to science or mathematics. I also read a lot of fiction, and here I generally stick to a steady diet of mysteries, horror, science fiction and political thrillers.
But every once in a while I get the urge to read something good. A Les Miserables or a Moby Dick. That sort of thing. Recently I got it into my head that I really ought to read some Dickens. I've never read any of his novels. Theoretically I read Great Expectations in high…
scientificactivist | July 26, 2006From the archives:
(17 February 2006) I'll be honest with you: I really don't know what to think about drug companies. I'll give them some credit, since unlike many of their peers they produce a product that is useful to society and has important humanitarian implications. I want to like them--I really do--but when I read about things like this, it becomes pretty difficult.
On 15 February, The New York Times published a detailed account in its business section on the exorbitant prices some pharmaceutical companies are willing to charge for their therapies. The report focused on Avastin,…
pharyngula | July 25, 2006This is an excellent short article by Janet Browne (the Janet Browne who wrote the best biography of Darwin I've read, Voyaging(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Power of Place(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), both well worth reading) that discusses the reception of the theory of evolution by his contemporaries, and acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Huxley, Hooker, Gray, and Lyell. One important point is that opposition to his ideas was not driven by the crude Biblical literalism that we encounter so much today, but a more general conflict with a more enlightened religion that found no place for…
ksharpe | July 25, 2006Today on ScienceBlogs:
The Chronicle of Higher Education is running a symposium on the benefits of academic blogging
When vocalizing, rhesus macaques use regions of the brain that correspond to language centers in the human brain
A medical anthropologist in Minnesota undertakes a study "to examine the ways in which ideas about everyday life in American society are shaped by and shape ideas about sleep"
Why Indonesia's bird flu policy should make you nervous
Is science just 'common sense' writ large?
The math of zero
What's the difference between carbon dioxide and the common housefly? (Hint:…
cevans | July 21, 2006
Every day, under our noses, obsolete scientific ideas run rampant. I'm not talking about the maddening sabotage of science constantly perpetuated by ideological conservatives -- that, although a daily frustration, is not unnoticed. This is a transgression that we all unknowingly commit.
Although everyone with a first-grade education knows that the Earth is a sphere -- the general belief in a flat Earth died out, of course, in the Middle Ages -- we still use the term "worldwide" to describe things on a global scale. The Earth's dimensions can be measured in volume, for one, and area; the word…
purepedantry | July 20, 2006In an earlier post about Bush's stem cell veto, I mentioned that I am a libertarian. One of the comments got me thinking, and I want to answer it in detail. Posted by Quitter:
Libertarian? And you're a scientist? Where do you think your funding comes from?
Usually big "L" Libertarian is defined as believing government's only job is defense and law enforcement. When you find one of these guys under a rock they usually bitch about the department of education, say the FDA has killed more people than Hitler and then proceed to tell you how a oregano suspension cured their strep throat.
Maybe…
stcynic | July 20, 2006Ralph Barker is back with the conclusion of his 2-part series on UFOs. And he's about to reveal to us what UFOs really are:
Even the greatest skeptic would have to admit that there are still unexplained UFO sightings. So, what are they? Are they alien spaceships? Are they visitors from the future? Or, are they something else.
Personally, I think they are something else. In my youth I held to the idea that they were truly alien visitors. Today, I still think they are alien visitors but not visitors from another planet. I am convinced they are visitors from another dimension, a spiritual…
razib | July 19, 2006Over at Darwin Catholic there has been some discussion of the human influenced evolution of dogs. Seed actually has it right, it is human influenced evolution. Some of the interpretation of the paper which showed an increase in the frequency of 'deleterious' alleles spin the results as suggesting that dogs are beyond the constraints of evolution. But, as I pointed out over at DC's weblog dogs are evolved toward their own special adaptations, and the lack of these adaptations in their wild cousins is not evidence that wolves carry "deleterious" traits. For me, the most fascinating case of…
retrospectacle | July 19, 2006"These boys and girls are not spare parts," he said of the children in the audience. "They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research. They remind us that we all begin our lives as a small collection of cells."
Yeah, so what? So does a tumor.
Bush said, "If this bill were to become law, American taxpayers would, for the first time in our history, be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos, and I'm not going to allow it."
We're already compelled to fund a war that has killed over 3,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. These are…
scientificactivist | July 19, 2006Since January, I've been covering Oxford's animal rights movement, and the response of local scientists, primarily through the organization Pro-Test. This post from the archives describes a particularly informative Pro-Test event.
(26 May 2006) On Monday, May 22nd, an audience of about 100 people joined the pro-research organization Pro-Test at a public meeting in the Oxford Town Hall, and in standard fashion The Scientific Activist was there to report all about it. The purpose of the meeting was to make the case for animal research from a variety of perspectives, get feedback from the…
cortex | July 18, 2006Judge Richard Posner has stepped into the tedious debate over innate cognitive differences between men and women. While I'm usually a fan of Posner's contrarian streak, he indulges here in some terrible evolutionary psychology. He manages to justify a blatant inequality - women have lower average earnings than men - by constructing a silly, trite and untestable hypothesis about our "ancestral human environment":
the mean performance of women in college and university is superior to that of the men, but the variance of male performance is greater and as a result there are more male geniuses.…