Social Issues
j7uy5 | August 29, 2007
Sexual assault is a common and serious problem. It is
hypothesized that misconceptions (rape myths) may play a role in this.
About 50% of sexual assaults involving adolescent or young adult female
victims occur in the context of alcohol consumption. The
authors of a recent study from the University of Michigan Institute for
Research on Women and Gender and the Substance Abuse Research Center
investigated this in a recent study. The full text is $ for
access, but the abstract is openly accessible and a press release is
available
href="http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=…
j7uy5 | August 24, 2007Health care is shaping up to be one of the big issues in the
upcoming elections. No big surprise there, it was a highly
-ranked issue in the last election, too. It's just that last
time, voters failed to see how health care is more likely than
terrorism to affect their health.
Perhaps this time around, people will have a more rational perspective.
In an effort to keep our perceptions in such a rational perspective,
the American Medical Association is starting a massive advertising
campaign. The gist of the message is that they want health
insurance for all.
At first glance, that seems…
j7uy5 | August 19, 2007Hard to know what to make of
href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3499544">this.
The American Psychological Association considered a proposal
to ban participation in military interrogations.
Specifically, APA members would have been prohibited from
assisting in interrogations "in which detainees are deprived of
adequate protection of their human rights."
The APA national meeting is being held in San Fransisco this year.
In a session 19 August 2007, they chose not to ban
all participation. Instead, they adopted a substitute motion.
href="http://www.apa.org/governance/…
j7uy5 | August 13, 2007An
article in Forbes documents exorbitant commuter costs in some
communities. In and around Houston, for example, the average
commuter spends 20% of their household income on commuting.
That, together with housing costs, adds to more than 50% of
household income. The author ends up making a case for a
pro-environmental cause: mass transit.
The make the point that mass transit systems are cost-effective, in
light of these high commuting costs.
href="http://www.forbes.com/home/realestate/2007/08/07/commute-housing-expensive-forbeslife-cx_mw_0807realestate.html">America's
Most Expensive…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2007
There is an article in the Christian Science Monitor about the history
of tainted consumer goods. The author, Jane Whitaker, points
out that the USA has a history of problems ever bit as bad as what we
are seeing now from China, and makes the point that we should not be so
quick to judge. That is a fair point, but there is another
equally fair point to be made.
href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0803/p09s01-coop.html">America's
history of tainted consumer goods
Critics of Chinese products shouldn't be so quick to judge.
By Jan Whitaker
from the August 3, 2007 edition
Northampton,…
j7uy5 | August 3, 2007Foreign
Policy magazine has released the results of their
second survey of 100 foreign policy experts, on the topic of national
security. The results are compiled into what they call the
href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3700"
rel="tag">Terrorism Index. Their sample
is bipartisan, with about 40% of the
participants identify themselves as conservative. 80% have
worked in Government, 26% in the military, 18% in intelligence.
The results this year are
equally dismal.
Eighty-eight
percent of the experts believe that the war in Iraq is having a
negative impact…
j7uy5 | August 1, 2007A
couple of months ago, I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/06/psychologists_and_torture.php">wrote
about the revelation that the a committee of the American
Psychological Association had been manipulated into tacitly supporting
the involvement of psychologists in developing harsh interrogation
techniques.
A couple of weeks ago, journalist Katherine Eban published an article
with more detail on the subject. Her article,
href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/07/torture200707">Rorschach
and Awe, appeared in Vanity Fair
on 17 July 2007.
Democracy Now…
j7uy5 | July 20, 2007
The New York Times contained two statements, in different contexts,
that say opposite things. The first appears in their "most
blogged" box. It is from July 15:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html?ex=1342152000&en=b93e1c0193b4182c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">The
Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: July 15, 2007
...These days, Mr. Weill and many of the nation’s very
wealthy chief executives, entrepreneurs and financiers echo an earlier
era — the Gilded Age before World War I — when
powerful…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2007So, there's some amount of Harry Potter mania out there in the world this weekend, what with a new movie and the last book in the series being released. (To show you how disconnected I am from the mania, I could not tell you without recourse to the internet whether The Order of the Phoenix is the new movie or the new book.) I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books (yet), but my eldest child recently finished the first Harry Potter book and quite liked it. However, as we were discussing it this morning, we encountered one of my pet peeves:
We drive past the road where our elementary…
j7uy5 | July 13, 2007I'm
not the best one to comment on this, not being a starving grad
student, but I find it a bit disturbing. In Science
today: an article on the unintended consequences of increased NIH
funding.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="opa.faseb.org/pdf/NIHFundingTrends.pps">
NIH funding was doubled from 1998 to 2003, but then the rate of
increase dropped to zero, and in fact has not kept pace with inflation.
The rapid increase caused problems, and the failure to
continue the increase has caused problems.
href="http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/…
j7uy5 | July 13, 2007Here
are ScienceBlogs, we have been
href="http://www.scienceblogs.com/sample/fastsearch?order=date&IncludeBlogs=49%2C83%2C3%2C11%2C8%2C55%2C64%2C10%2C87%2C60%2C22%2C80%2C15%2C95%2C78%2C52%2C4%2C48%2C45%2C63%2C14%2C25%2C53%2C50%2C42%2C89%2C5%2C47%2C90%2C71%2C96%2C9%2C62%2C16%2C38%2C67%2C43%2C73%2C81%2C99%2C44%2C79%2C23%2C7%2C41%2C46%2C17%2C61%2C82%2C54%2C74%2C92%2C85%2C93%2C21%2C12%2C65%2C86%2C75%2C72%2C6%2C91%2C51%2C&search=holsinger&x=0&y=0">resoundingly
critical of the
nominee for
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgeon_General_of_the_United_States"
rel="tag">…
jstemwedel | June 23, 2007
Last May, on my way back from a mini-conference in Stockholm, I had a long layover in Munich. Since major airports are now essentially shopping malls with parking for commercial jets, I used a little bit of that time to wander through a pretty impressive airport book store, where I picked up a copy of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I had heard a bit about it (maybe in reviews on the radio, if memory serves), and knew that it had some connection to ethical issues around biomedical technologies that seem not to be too far off from where we are now.
Because I was taking a stab at using my…
j7uy5 | June 9, 2007Why
is it that recovering persons with alcoholism should not drink
near-beer (beer with little or no alcohol)?
...Hank
had been dry for several weeks thanks to a radical withdrawal program,
but a simple walk past Pete's Tavern on any given night almost erased
his will to abstain. During the daytime he did not feel a craving for
alcohol, but when he passed the bar in the evening--when he saw the
warm light through the windows and heard the glasses clinking--he would
be sorely tempted to run inside for a beer. Addiction researchers call
this phenomenon "conditioned desire." If a person had…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2007I'm recycling another post from the ancestor of this blog, but I'm adding value by adding some newish links to good stuff on other blogs.
* * * * *
How much does it matter that certain groups (like women) are under-represented in the tribe of science?
I'm not, at the moment, taking up the causes (nor am I looking for any piss-poor "Barry Winters"-style theories as to the causes). At present, the bee in my bonnet is the effects.
And this is not a hypothetical situation. This post at Thanks for Not Being a Zombie links to an article from the New York Times with some sobering statistics:
Even…
jstemwedel | May 30, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science, there's a nice review by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg [1] of the literature from developmental psychology that bears on the question of why adults in the U.S. are stubbornly resistant to certain scientific ideas.
Regular readers will guess that part of my interest in this research is connected to my habit of trying to engage my kids in conversations about science. Understanding what will make those conversations productive, in both the short-term and the long-term, would be really useful. Also, I should disclose that I'm pals with Deena (and with…
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007
From CNN Money:
href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/">Microsoft
takes on the free worldMicrosoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a
big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants
royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe.
Fortune's Roger Parloff reports.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Roger Parloff, Fortune senior editor
May 13 2007: 1:06 PM EDTFree
software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often
high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and
then copied at…
jstemwedel | May 8, 2007Since many of you were kind enough to suggest questions to ask of Margaret Spellings at SJSU's Founders Day "The Future of Higher Education" panel last Friday, I thought I should report back on that session.
First, the bad (but utterly predictable) news: while Margaret Spellings gave the keynote address, she didn't stick around for the panel discussion afterwards -- so she wasn't there for the question and answer period. However, the panel of experts certainly had something to say about the Spellings Commission report on higher education.
It was striking, as CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed…
j7uy5 | May 6, 2007(Note: if the accent marks look weird, set your browser to view character encoding as Unicode (UTF-8))One
of the problems with the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders">Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is that there is
no clear rationale for the division of problems into Axis I vs. Axis II
disorders. It is assumed, sometimes, that Axis I disorders
are "biological" and Axis II disorders are "psychological."
Legend has it that the division arose directly from the conflict
between psychodynamically-oriented…
jstemwedel | May 5, 2007Depending on your blog reading habits, you may already have heard the news that feels almost like cosmic justice that a law firm has rescinded an offer of employment from a third year law student whose online activities the firm found troubling. The linked posts will give you some flavor for those activities (as will this post), so I'm not going to go into the gory details here. However, I wanted to say a few words about this comment Amanda Marcotte made on Sheezlebub's post on the matter:
While it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, I simply have to voice my unease with the politics of…
j7uy5 | May 3, 2007According
to
href="http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070503/NEWS07/70503070">a
study done at the University of Michigan's
href="http://www.isr.umich.edu/home/">Institute for Social
Research, fewer people are identifying themselves as
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiracial" rel="tag">multiracial.
Reynolds
Farley Ph.D. reported:
The
annual ACS, which samples about 3 million households, shows a clear
trend, Farley says. In the 2000 survey, 2.1 percent checked more than
one race. In 2005, it slipped to 1.9 percent. ”It’s
a slight decrease but statistically…