Social Sciences
illconsidered | April 10, 2013The Bottleneck Years
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 34
Table of Contents
Chapter 36
Chapter 35
Prometheus, March 8, 2056
To be honest, the Group 2 debacle was more of a public relations disaster than an ecological one. The damage was dramatic, but relatively restricted. Within 48 hours someone leaked the hazmat team video on the internet and all hell broke loose. The media were all over us.
Rhamaposa survived only with the intervention of the Secretary General and several heads of state, including the Asian Union and the USSA. I have no proof, but I'm sure they knew of the pressure exerted by Corella…
oracknows | April 9, 2013Last week, I noted a particularly loathsome trend (even for antivaccinationists) to invoke Holocaust analogies for what they view as the "vaccine-induced autism epidemic holocaust." Now, loathsome analogies are not uncommon among antivaccinationists, who routinely refer to their children as "damaged" or "toxic" and view them as somehow not their "real" children, but this time around, former reporter turned hack editor for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism fantasized about dragging his former colleagues through the "evidence" for a vaccine Holocaust the same way that Allied troops…
pharyngula | April 8, 2013Apoplexy is such an antique disease. I'd hate to die of it, just because is so unfashionable, but every time I read one of these stories about Answers In Genesis, I feel an attack coming on.
Yeah, they're working on building a replica of Noah's Ark. It's all part of their plan for defrauding the public. The author talked to people at the existing creation "museum", and hit one of those points that spike my blood pressure.
When I was at the Creation Museum I got talking to Greg Duck, an industrial courier who was visiting from Texas. He said his favourite part was a video where a creationist…
oracknows | April 8, 2013One of the more depressing things about getting much more interested in the debate over how we should screen for common cancers, particularly breast and prostate cancer, is my increasing realization of just how little physicians themselves understand about the complexities involved in weighing the value of such tests. It's become increasingly apparent to me that most physicians believe that early detection is always good and that it always saves lives, having little or no conception of lead time or length bias. A couple of weeks ago, I saw another example of just this phenomenon in the form…
gregladen | April 5, 2013Napoleon Chagnon spent years living among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and wrote, among other things, a classic ethnography still used widely in anthropology classes. It came to pass that Chagnon and his ethnography came under scrutiny, actually a few waves of scrutiny, from practitioners of cultural anthropology in part because his monograph depicted the Yanomamo as “fierce people” and this characterization of them was used, misused really, against them by outside forces including the government to justify their “pacification.” The Yanomamo were indeed being abused by these outside forces, and…
oracknows | April 5, 2013Over the years this blog's been in existence, I've fallen into a habit in which I tend to like to finish off the week taking on a bit of science (well, usually pseudoscience) that is either really out there, really funny, or in general not as heavy as, for example, writing about someone like Stanislaw Burzysnki. Indeed, for nearly two years, I even turned into a feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo. Eventually, I got a bit tired of being straitjacketed into having to find something kooky or wacky every Friday, and I let the feature lapse. That doesn't mean that I don't still deliver an occasional…
carlyo | April 3, 2013We are excited to announce that Dr. Mary Cleave will be serving as a Nifty Fifty Speaker for the Festival!
Long considered a role model in science and space exploration for her achievements, Mary is the recipient of various honors, including being the recipient of the American Astronautical Society Flight Achievement Award (1989); NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal (1994), and being profiled with Sally Ride, Anna Fisher and other U.S. women astronauts in the Women In Space DVD, and The Women's Adventures in Science book series.
Our Nifty Fifty Program has tripled in size and will return to…
tfk | April 1, 2013The University of Notre Dame's Center for the Study of Social Movements is hosting a dialogue on science and politics, and I'm rather pleased with my contribution: "Will Climate Change Denial Inherit the Wind?" Do check out the other essays in the dialogue, especially Jeffrey Guhin's discussion of some results from his observations of creationist Muslim and evangelical Christian schools in New York, and Kelly Moore's debunking of 5 myths about science and politics.
I've been noodling around with the ideas in my essay for a while, ever since reading Michael Lienesch's In the Beginning, which…
carlyo | March 27, 2013Celebrating Women's History Month with another STEM Role Model! In today’s blog we feature Nanomaterials Physicist Dr. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky.
We are excited to announce that Dr. Leslie-Pelecky will be serving as a Nifty Fifty Speaker for the Festival!
She has appeared on television for ESPN, H2 and VOOM channels, and in print for publications such as TIME and Sporting News magazines, and professional society publications such as C&EN and the Materials Research Society Bulletin. She appears periodically on the SiriusXM Speedway satellite radio program where she uses science to dispel…
pharyngula | March 24, 2013You've probably heard this explanation for the virtue of religion: that even if god doesn't exist, belief in god (or some other monitoring authority) makes people behave more morally. There have been many experiments that have actually shown that people are nicer or more generous when exposed to religious concepts, such as this one by Norenzayan and Shariff.
In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants…
pgleick | March 21, 2013Nearly two years ago, Science magazine published the following Lead Letter, signed by 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences addressing attacks on the integrity of climate science. The science has continued to strengthen, the evidence in real world observations has become even stronger and more obvious.
In response, in the past few months, there has been a last-gasp effort (see, for example, here and here) on the part of the ever-shrinking group of hard-core climate deniers to confuse the public and especially our elected officials. Given this continuing profusion of false and…
lborkowski | March 18, 2013by Kim Krisberg
When it comes to public health law, it seems the least coercive path may also be the one of least resistance.
In a new study published this month in Health Affairs, researchers found that the public does, indeed, support legal interventions aimed at curbing noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity. However, they're more likely to support interventions that create the conditions that help people make the healthy choice on their own. They're less likely to back laws and regulations perceived as infringing on individual liberties. It's a delicate…
gregladen | March 13, 2013In response to a comment on my blog, I issued a snarky tweet (and repeated it on Facebook) to the effect that if your argument involves the phrase "World View" you might be wrong. This led to a number of light hearted but snarky, and often helpful, responses on Facebook and Twitter indicating that the term "World View" could mean a lot of different things, such as opinion, paradigm, or point of view. So I thought I'd expand on the concept a bit. In short, "World View" does not mean any of those things, and is in fact a term with a very weighty and rather specific meaning.
The term is an…
pgleick | March 11, 2013In a previous post here, I discussed the scourge of cholera – a waterborne disease largely vanquished in the wealthier nations by our water and wastewater treatment systems. Unfortunately, it remains widespread and lethal. Cholera is perhaps the most common and serious water-related disease, directly associated with the failure to provide safe drinking water and adequate sanitation to billions of people. Millions – mostly young children – die unnecessary deaths each year from these diseases.
This week is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the man who would help settle, once and for all,…
sastyk | March 7, 2013Former Scienceblogger Boris Zivkovic, now at Scientific American, has an excellent post arguing that we should eliminate daylight savings time. Given that DST was invented to save energy, it may seem strange that I agree with him, but I do - mostly because there's no evidence that it does, and the physiological effects don't merit the change:
Whether or not DST saves energy is the least of the reasons why it’s a bad idea. Much more important are the health effects of sudden, hour-long shifts on our bodies and minds. Chronobiologists who study circadian rhythms know that for several days…
drorzel | March 6, 2013There was a lot of re-sharing yesterday of an article about the "Finkbeiner Test" to be applied to profiles of women scientists. This is analogous to the "Bechdel Test" in pop culture, which asks "Do two women talk to each other about something other than a man?", only because we're scientists, it's more complicated, hitting seven points:
To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention
The fact that she’s a woman
Her husband’s job
Her child care arrangements
How she nurtures her underlings
How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
How she’s such a role model for other…
oracknows | March 1, 2013I really hate to write this post, but I feel compelled. The reason I hate to write it is because someone I admire screwed up. The reason I feel compelled is because of my longstanding interest in World War II and Holocaust history, not to mention my longtime interest in refuting the lies of Holocaust deniers. I had meant to write about it the first time I came across it, but for some reason did not. I don't remember the reason, although it might very well be because of how much I respect the person who wrote it. Again, I don't remember, and today it really doesn't matter why. Whatever the…
cmonforton | February 26, 2013Most of the tributes to former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who died yesterday at age 96, are quick to remind us that he became a household name. As the New York Times' story notes that "is a rare distinction for a public health administrator." Dr. Koop's notoriety could be attributed to his "long silver beard and white braided uniform," as TIME magazine noted, to his pronouncements in 1986 about the health effects of second-hand tobacco smoke, and for his eventual warnings about the risk factors associated with contracting HIV. The USA Today's obituary about the Reagan-era Surgeon…
pgleick | February 20, 2013One of the reasons that climate change is such a big issue is because the global climate is an integral part of the Earth’s entire ecosystem, tied to so many of the big and little things that society cares about. Figuring out how all these complicated pieces tie together is hard, as is linking these pieces together in the minds of the public so that we – and our policy makers – can grasp the true implications of a changing climate and plan for them. Because this is so important, I expect that many of my future posts here will address this issue, but let me start with one example: the…
pharyngula | February 18, 2013Every once in a while, I hear these stirrings from scientists that there can be an objective morality, and that by following reason and evidence we can achieve great advances in ethics and reduce human suffering. I agree, in part. I think reason and science are the only ways we can implement our goals effectively, and that we should be empirically assessing our progress and making changes as necessary in a rational way. But — and this is a huge exception — science is not sufficient. Scientists are flawed, and while you can use science to optimally reach a particular goal, setting that goal in…