Social Sciences
oracknows | October 5, 2012Remember Alan Yurko?
To remind those of you not familiar with this particularly odious excuse for a human being, I'll briefly relate who he is and why he's so vile. Alan Yurko is a baby killer, pure and simple. He shook his 10-week-old son to death. Normally, such a pitiful excuse for a human being would not be "worthy" of comment, much less admiration, but not to the antivaccine movement. Yurko was sentenced to life in prison without parole for his crime but somehow managed to find himself the "hero" of a campaign
I first learned of this vile concept when I learned of the case of Alan Yurko…
sastyk | September 28, 2012A few years back Stuart Staniford, (who is one of the most brilliant people I know) and I had a lively debate about the future of small scale agriculture over at The Oil Drum. Stuart argued that agriculture would continue to get bigger and more industrialized, because its fossil fuel dependency really wasn't that great. I argued that in fact energy and environmental pressures would push us back to smaller scale agriculture. So it is nice of Staniford to note that at least at this particular moment, there's a small general trend in my direction ;-):
I've circled the 4% increase between 2002…
jdupuis | September 26, 2012Scholars who grew up with the internet are steadily replacing those that grew up without it. Scholars who expect to put everything they write online, who expect to find everything they need online, and who expect unlocked content that they may read, search, link, copy, cut/paste, crawl, print, and redistribute, are replacing those who never expected these boons and got used to them, if at all, looking over their shoulder for the copyright police. Scholars who expect to find the very best literature online, harmlessly cohabitating with crap are, inexorably replacing scholars who, despite…
sastyk | September 21, 2012Most of the comments people make about our slightly changeable and somewhat odd family are lovely. Like all parents my husband and I love hearing how beautiful our kids are, how well behaved (even when it isn't always true), how nice it is to see us all together, what fun it is to see a big family having a good time.
There are a few that trouble me a little, but I understand why people make those comments - our family is different and strange, and people are processing how to respond to it. I've made mistakes when in those kinds of situations too, so I don't mind it. I know some people get…
lborkowski | September 21, 2012by Kim Krisberg
It really is a chemical world, which is bad news for people with asthma.
According to a recent report released in August, at this very moment from where I write, I'm fairly surrounded by objects and materials that contain chemicals that are known or suspected asthmagens — substances that can act as asthma triggers if inhaled. There's formaldehyde (it's in office furniture, wood flooring, curtains and drapes); maleic anhydride (it's in interior paint and tile flooring); hexamethylene diisocyanate (it's in metal storage shelving and decorative metal); and diisodecyl phthalate (…
jdupuis | September 21, 2012One of my favourite events in the science calendar is always the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which was held last night in Cambridge, MA. For those that don't know, the Ig Nobels celebrate the odd and unusual in scientific research, both genuine and not-quite.
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology
And last night's awards (archived video!) were no different than previous years' in their ability to make us…
jrosenhouse | September 20, 2012I had originally intended to devote this post to discussing some of the minutiae in Massimo Pigliucci's essay. In light of some of the comments on the previous post, however, I've decided it would be more useful to speak generally about why I get so annoyed when charges of scientism are casually thrown around.
I actually agree with some of Pigliucci's specific criticism's of Krauss. For example, in his exchange with Julian Baggini, Krauss said this:
Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to…
sastyk | September 6, 2012There has been a fair amount of hoohah about a Stanford Study that suggests that organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods. This shouldn't be a shock, but many health claims have been waved about over the years that say otherwise. The Atlantic's Brian Fung rightly points out that only over the last few years has the discussion shifted to imply that nutritional content is why we grow organic - in fact, that's not how the organic movement started. The reality is that such claims are hard to evaluate - what varieties are you comparing? Is this industrial or small scale…
sa smith | September 4, 2012A new* virus was recently discovered in my parents backyard, so to speak. Pop-sci articles:
Heartland Virus: New Phlebovirus Found in Missouri
Mysterious New 'Heartland Virus' Discovered In Missouri
Actual journal article:
A New Phlebovirus Associated with Severe Febrile Illness in Missouri
... and its NOT MY FAULT. Proof? It is apparently a new phlebovirus, and I know absolutely nothing about these guys.
The phlebovirus genome is made up of three strands of negative sense RNA--- that is its genome is broken up into three parts, and backwards. It has to use a virally encoded RNA-RNA…
tsmith | August 28, 2012Mahabouba*, age 14, was sold into a marriage as a second wife to a man 50 almost years her senior. Raped and beaten repeatedly, she ended up pregnant, finally succeeding in running away 7 months into her pregnancy. Fleeing to the nearby town, she found that the people there threatened to return her to her husband, so she ran back to her native village in Ethiopia. However, her immediate family no longer lived there. An uncle eventually took pity on her and provided her with housing. When Mahabouba went into labor, lacking resources, she tried to deliver her baby herself. Her pelvis was still…
jrosenhouse | August 23, 2012Jerry Coyne directs our attention to a harrowing, but important, article from The New York Times Magazine. It is a profile of Jerry DeWitt, a former Pentecostal preacher who discovered, after more than twenty-five years in the biz, that he no longer believed any of the things he was preaching. Here's the opening:
Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2012I read a recent report from the Swedish Institute of Futures Studies titled Humanisterna och framtidssamhället, "Humanities Scholars and Society in the Future" (freely available as a PDF). I found some but not too much of the usual unrealistic sloganeering about how useful the humanities are to society, and a lot of pretty sobering statistics. In the following note that the typical basic degree in Sweden is the MA. I translate:
"… among those with a basic degree as highest qualification, humanities graduates clearly have the lowest annual incomes in 2008 ... Humanities graduates with basic…
jrosenhouse | August 14, 2012Remember that scene in Die Hard, where Bruce Willis drops a huge pile of explosives down an elevator shaft, blowing up the lobby of the building and killing a few terrorists, but also shattering the building's huge glass windows? You might recall that right after he does that the officious deputy police chief says to him, angrily, “I got a hundred people down here and they're all covered in glass!” And Bruce Willis replies, “Glass? Who gives a sh*t about glass?”
I was reminded of that scene upon reading this article, by Tom Bartlett, in the current issue of The Chronicle Review. Here's…
gregladen | August 14, 2012Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be officially released on August 28th, though you can of course get it now if you click on this secret link (or this secret link for the Kindle edition).
I just received a press release for the book, and thought I'd pass it on to you.
Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be released August 28th
“A chorus not of arguments and positions but of shared human lives . . . At turns smart, funny, and deeply touching.” – Dale McGowan, author of Parenting Beyond Belief
ST. PAUL, Minn. (8/14/2012) —…
sastyk | August 14, 2012On my lap, I’ve got a set of school books that date from the 1850s to the 1890s. They belonged to various of my father’s family – my great-uncle, George Hume, who died long before I was born and studied Eaton’s Common School Arithmetic in Amesbury, MA in the late 19th century, 20 miles from where I would go to school 100 years later. The majority belonged to my great-grandfather, Edgar White, who studied latin and algebra in Jonesboro, Maine, and later went on to teach school in Cheshire, Connecticut, using the same books. My grandfather’s books were mostly published in the 1860s, right…
choofnagle | July 31, 2012When one spouts disinformation about disinformation, does it make it information? No, it's L. Gordon Crovitz's "Information Age," the weekly poorly informed and poorly reasoned blather about information policy in the Wall Street Journal.
Recall that Crovitz recently wrote about the invention of the Internet and online privacy. I wrote about these last two columns, and this week in the Journal Crovitz tries to backpedal, with the standard trope that his "Who Really Invented the Internet?" article was controversial—"It [became] for a time the most read, emailed and commented upon article on…
tfk | July 27, 2012There's a tale told about grandparents who refused to take the grandkids to see a classical orchestra perform. Asked why, they explained that it was a bad influence. Too much sax and violins.
I was reminded of that joke by fantasy author George R. R. Martin's reply to those concerned about the graphic sex in his books (and the TV show based on them) (via BoingBoing):
“I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people…
jtoney | July 27, 2012This post was co-authored by Natasha Bahrami, a foreign policy researcher, and Ali Arab, Ph.D., an assistant professor of statistics at Georgetown University.
Last month, a young American woman was blocked from purchasing an Apple product at a local store in Alpharetta, Georgia. After overhearing her speaking Farsi, the second generation Iranian-American was informed that selling the product to her went against the company's policy. Apple's export compliance policy states that direct or indirect sales of Apple goods to any embargoed…
esiegel | July 23, 2012"Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known." -Ronald Reagan
Earlier today, Sally Ride, the first American woman ever to fly in outer space, passed away at the age of 61 from pancreatic cancer. To many different people, her life, her achievements, and her death means a great diversity of things. To anyone with a love of outer space, human exploration, and achieving your dreams, her story will likely resonate with you, too. I'd like to share with you what are,…
sa smith | July 22, 2012The polite way to describe my opinion of the Humane Society of the United states is 'Im not a fan'.
For those of you who are unaware, HSUS has absolutely nothing to do with 'the Humane Society' that rescues animals in your community. HSUS has nothing to do with rescuing animals at all-- they give less than 1% of their income to shelters. Technically, against rescuing animals-- they wanted Michael Vicks dogs killed (while they became BFFs with Vick), but thankfully, some people know better than to listen to HSUS and the dogs are okay.
HSUS is functionally a political group with a habit of…