Social Sciences
oracknows | January 9, 2012I've spent a lot of time over the years looking at cranks, examining crank science (i.e., pseudoscience), and trying to figure out how to inoculate people against crankery. Because I'm a physician, I tend to do it mostly in the realm of medicine by critically examining "alternative" medical claims and discussing the scientific basis of medicine, both with respect to those "alternative" claims and to more conventional medical claims. However, I don't limit my skepticism and critical thinking just to medicine, although lately I think that I've been "specializing" too much, almost totally…
sastyk | January 5, 2012
If you have followed energy issues from anywhere other than a cave on a mountain peak, you've probably heard technoutopians utter some variation on the following sentence two or three hundred times "We walked on the moon - of course we can do whatever it takes to shift from fossil fuels to some other source of energy." The moon shot is perceived as the ultimate example of "put in a quarter and get out the technological outcome you want" in our history. If we could set out to put a man on the moon and do it in less than decade, can't we do anything we want to, with just enough ingenuity?…
oracknows | January 3, 2012As hard as it to believe, it's 2012 now. (I know, I know, I say that pretty much every year.) I've also been on vacation for the last week, which makes getting back into the swing of things a bit difficult. For one thing, we seem to have suffered an infestation of particularly brain dead alt-med and antivaccine trolls that drove comment totals on some posts into the hundreds. I must admit, that was something I didn't expect between Christmas and New Years, when blogging and commenting are usually as slow as everything else outside of retail that time of year. I must admit, though, that it was…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2011In a HuffPo essay entitled “Why I Love Religion,” Rabbi Alan Lurie writes:
I love the holy texts, the rituals, the art, the histories, the practices, the mystical teachings and the sacred spaces. I love religion, while very aware of its obvious dangers and limitations, because for the last 15 years religion has provided insight, intellectual growth, friendships and inspiration that continue to transform my life for the better.
We're really not on the same page here. I agree with him about the art, and I'm not sure what he means by “the histories,” but I find nothing to admire in the…
jrosenhouse | December 17, 2011If you spend much time involved in science/religion discussions, you will inevitably hear the term “scientism” thrown around. Usually it is hurled as an epithet. In practical terms, to be accused of scientism is usually to be accused of being insufficiently respectful of religion.
But I've never entirely understood what scientism actually is. The usual definition is that scientism is the blinkered belief that science is the only reliable “way of knowing,” but this is vague until we have sharp definitions of “science” and “way of knowing.” Philosophers have devoted no small amount of…
hrynyshyn | December 14, 2011Maybe it's just me, desperately searching for optimistic signals in the noise that dominates the mainstream coverage of climate change, but could there be something happening out there, something attesting to a new, more mature interpretation of the challenge facing society at large?
Item 1: The Economist publishes an impassioned lament. This from a magazine that for so long seemed althogether disinterested in the subject:
A HUNDRED years from now, looking back, the only question that will appear important about the historical moment in which we now live is the question of whether or not we…
drorzel | December 9, 2011Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics
Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again--or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three…
hrynyshyn | December 9, 2011Compare and contrast:
The team's new examination of the paleo-climate record now shows that "a global warming of a couple degrees Celsius would basically create a different planet," Hansen warned. It's different than the one that humanity, that civilization knows about. If we look at the paleo record, the target of two degrees Celsius is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." [Source]
and
I think that we look at two degrees as an important and serious goal which ought to guide what we do ... it ought to inform our sense of what needs to be done. It might well cause us or anybody…
gregladen | December 8, 2011That's a large number of grants.
As of today, the National Geographic Society has issued 10,000 grants funding research and exploration since 1890--including ten National Geographic grant projects that, according to an internal panel, "have made the greatest difference in understanding the Earth."
Barbara Moffet interviews Krithi Karanth, a 32-year-old conservation biologist based in Bangalore, India, the recipient of National Geographic's 10,000th grant (since the first in 1890). Dr. Karanth, who grew up around the wild animals of India's national parks, will use the funds to examine the…
lborkowski | November 15, 2011A few thought-provoking pieces I've read this week demonstrate the extent to which the US is failing to invest in our next generation. John Schmid of the Journal Sentinel points out that 44 other countries have lower infant mortality rates than the US (by UNICEF ranking), and we're tied for 45th place with Montenegro and Slovakia. Our overall national rate - 6.06 per 1,000 live births, according to the CIA World Factbook - conceals a great deal of variability by state and city, though. (See the Annie E. Casey Foundation's map for details on state-to-state differences.) Schmid zooms in on…
sastyk | November 10, 2011Here is the single biggest question to consider about the economic, energy and environmental unwinding we are facing - what will the economy look as we go? I get more questions about this than about anything else - what should people do for work, what should they do with savings, how should they begin to prepare themselves for a lower energy world. What I find, however, is that among both the prepared and the unprepared, there's a whole lot of people kidding themselves. There are those who imagine that there is no economy outside the world of the stock market and formal jobs - that a crash…
cmonforton | November 8, 2011An overwhelming majority of seniors want to remain in their own homes as long as possible. Residing with a family member or friends may not be an option, and assisted living facilities may take too big a chunk out of a senior's fixed income. Older Americans, and I'd argue most of us, feel more independent when surrounded by their own belongings and in their own community. But, living alone or with another frail senior, like a spouse, can create its own problems. Millions of U.S. seniors suffer from hunger and food insecurity, some because of resource constraints, but others because of…
sastyk | October 20, 2011On the 31st of October we will officially reach 7 billion people on the earth. Over the next week or two we'll be talking a lot about population issues, and I wanted to start by doing a light revision of an article I wrote some years ago about a concept a lot of people don't grasp very well - the idea of demographic transition and what it means.
The term "Demographic Transition" describes the movement of human populations from higher initial birth rates to a stabilzed lower one, and seems to be a general feature of most societies over the last several hundred years.
Initially, birth rates…
gregladen | October 11, 2011Skeptics and atheists and freethinking folk are supposed to be smart, and they are supposed to be inquiring and, well, skeptical and freethinking and stuff. But they very very often are not. Between skeptics being politically conservative (mainly with respect to social issues) and often not as inquiring and smart as they are fond of telling the rest of us they are, I am sufficiently annoyed by the movement(s) as a whole to reserve calling myself, for instance, a skeptic. If anything, I'm a skeptical skeptic. A godless freethinking skeptical meta-skeptic. That's me.
The latest example of…
dr. dolittle | October 10, 2011
First stop on the trail of physiology this Fall is the University of Cincinnati where the Ohio Physiological Society held their annual meeting last week.
Here are highlights from the meeting:
The meeting opened with a seminar from Dr. Ernest M. Wright from the UCLA-David Geffen School of Medicine. His presentation was on the development of new treatments for diabetes using inhibitors of sodium glucose cotransporters (SGLT). In the kidney, these transporters are responsible for preventing glucose from being disposed of in the urine by returning it to the blood. So inhibiting these…
cmonforton | October 10, 2011Freshman congressman Larry Bucshon (R-IN) scolded OSHA chief David Michaels for using the term "cancer" as a buzz word. The congressman, who is also a thoracic surgeon, said:"I don't like it when people use buzz words that try to get people's attention, and cancer is one of those."
The exchanged occured last week at a House congressional oversight hearing called "Workplace Safety: Ensuring a Responsible Regulatory Environment," where Members were examining some of OSHA's enforcement and regulatory initiatives. Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, David Michaels mentioned lung cancer in…
oracknows | October 9, 2011I debated a while about whether I should take this particular post on. It's not because there isn't a lot of fodder there deserving of that special form of not-so-Respectful Insolence that only Orac, in his usual inimitable fashion, can provide. There most definitely is. The problem, as is sometimes the case when I get on a roll, is that it represents going back to a topic that I've already covered very recently. In fact, it's a topic I've already covered twice, namely Steve Jobs and the insulinoma that ultimately killed him. Last week, I reposted what I wrote about him back in 2009 after he…
oracknows | October 6, 2011It's been a mere two days since Steve Jobs died. Although it hasn't yet been revealed what his specific cause of death was, it's a good bet that Jobs' death was due to a recurrence of his pancreatic cancer, first diagnosed in 2003, for which he underwent surgery in 2004 and ultimately a liver transplant in 2009. It's a history that I outlined yesterday (at least up to the time the original posts were written) by reposting two posts I wrote about his liver transplant back in 2009. But a funny thing has happened since then, and that's that Jobs has become a flashpoint in an argument that has…
gregladen | October 6, 2011I'm very excited to have the opportunity to interview Don Prothero this coming Sunday on Atheist Talk Radio. If you are local to the Twin Cities, you can listen in on AM 950. If not, you can get there via the Minnesota Atheist web site (where you will have to pretend you live in a twin cities zip code, such as 55433). Also, AM 950 is available on at least one digital radio station server ... I seem to be able to get it on my Roku.
Prothero is a palaentologist who has been featured on the Discovery Institute web site (they don't like him) as well as several podcasts (see below). He is a…
lborkowski | October 3, 2011One thing that drove me nuts during the healthcare reform debate was the scare tactic of claiming that proposed legislation would result in rationing of healthcare. The problem with making such a claim is that healthcare is already rationed in the US. We ration healthcare based on insurance status and ability to pay. And, as a story from NPR's Richard Knox points out, we ration when there are supply shortages -- as there are now with several important drugs. Here's Knox's overview of the problem:
The shortages involve a wide range of medications: cancer chemotherapy agents, anesthetics,…