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cortex | January 11, 2010The paperback of How We Decide is now shipping from your favorite online retailers and should be in local bookstores. To celebrate the occasion, I thought I'd repost an interview I conducted with myself when the hardcover was published last year. If you'd like more, there's also this interview on Fresh Air, and this interview on the Colbert Report.
Q: Why did you want to write a book about decision-making?
A: It all began with Cheerios. I'm an incredibly indecisive person. There I was, aimlessly wandering the cereal aisle of the supermarket, trying to choose between the apple-cinnamon and…
sb admin | January 11, 2010The ScienceOnline conference brings together scientists, bloggers, journalists, writers, educators, students, entrepreneurs, and others to discuss the ever-expanding role of the Internet in the practice and communication of science, and to share new tools and practices that facilitate these goals.
This year's conference will take place January 15-17 in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. With 250 registered participants including 25 of our own ScienceBloggers and a program ranging from a tour of the Duke Lemur center to sessions on citizen science, scientific visualization, and open…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog…
agelman | January 10, 2010Coblogger John Sides quotes a probability calculation by Eric Lawrence that, while reasonable on a mathematical level, illustrates a sort of road-to-error-is-paved-with-good-intentions sort of attitude that bothers me, and that I see a lot of in statistics and quantitative social science.
I'll repeat Lawrence's note and then explain what bothers me.
Here's Lawrence:
In today's Wall Street Journal, Nate Silver of 538.com makes the case that most people are "horrible assessors of risk." . . . This trickiness can even trip up skilled applied statisticians like Nate Silver. This passage from his…
edyong | January 10, 2010If you read this blog regularly, then chances are you care about science and about writing. If that's the case, you can help to get an incredible piece of science writing into the bestseller charts.
My colleague, the gifted Rebecca Skloot, has finished her debut book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is due to launch next month. It's an incredible story and the culmination of 10 years of hard investigative research. It has been graced with some of the finest reviews I've ever seen for a popular science book.
There's a description below, and you can visit Rebecca's site or follow…
gregladen | January 10, 2010What is the answer to this age old question?
Round 1:
cats:
dogs:
Round 2:
dogs:
cats:
gregladen | January 9, 2010Please make yourself aware of this situation described on Phil Plait's blog.
gregladen | January 9, 2010And here we are not really talking about the operating systems, but the philosophy that derives decision making and development. An OpenSource system, according to J.H., is "real people oriented." Read "There's a problem on your computer"
gregladen | January 9, 2010As previously noted, J. Philippe Rushton has made the argument that the brain size of "Blacks" is about 1267 cc's, and for whites it is about 1347 CC's. It has also been noted that Rushton claims that the average IQ of Blacks is 85 and he average IQ of whites is 100. But does Rushton say that there is a link between the two?
Yes, explicitly so. In his widely distributed editions of Race, Evolution, and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition), Rushton makes the claim that the African IQ is 70, and that the reason that "Black" American IQ is 80 is because of the…
gregladen | January 9, 2010The process of using critical thinking involves several steps. These steps work formally in experimental design and analysis, studying and mastering new concepts as we learn and in making decisions that people need to make in the various aspects of our lives. They also work informally and people process these steps often when we are not aware of them, nor even that we are following them.
Mike Haubrich on Critical Thinking, a propos Science Online 10
gregladen | January 9, 2010Is it true that
intellectual dishonesty would get anyone canned from a tenured university position.
Maybe. but being an unmitigated racist asshat is apparently not.
pharyngula | January 8, 2010Just in case there is more than one of you, I'll mention that a Pharyngula fan group has been formed to coordinate social activities in Baltimore. Surely this will not involve alcohol or blasphemy, will it? Nor will there be rudeness and vociferous argument? Perhaps there will be squid.
gregladen | January 8, 2010Denailists have a repertoire of gambits they use to spread their denialism and make their points. They need these gambits because they otherwise lack facts, cred, usable theory, or any of the other good stuff that makes science, history, etc. work.
James Hrynyshyn has written a post about a publisher trying to pretend to be the victim of kool-aid drinking scientists, which is a ploy to increase sales of a dumb-ass AGW denialiist book. It is a very interesting development: The climate change boycott gambit
gregladen | January 8, 2010Sci Curious takes a poke at the recent G-spot research (which we discussed here) in this post: Friday Weird Science: the "reality" of the G Spot and the mainstream media. Sci reviews the actual, original research paper.
ddobbs | January 8, 2010
The study made news--see, for example, this piece in the New York Times. But do the results really mean that antidepressants are ineffective? I don't think so. In order to understand the implications of the study, you have to understand how clinical trials are conducted, and how radically they differ from usual care.
via carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
agelman | January 7, 2010One thing I learned in econ class in 11th grade was that government policy should be counter-cyclical (spending more in recessions and cutting back in boom times), but that there's a lot of pressure to be pro-cyclical, which will tend to exacerbate business cycles. (Except I suppose they didn't say "exacerbate" in 11th grade.) At a personal level, too, it's natural to spend more when we have more and cut back when we aren't doing so well. Every now and then you hear about a "rainy day fund" but my general impression is that these are never big enough to counter the business cycle.
Political…
grrlscientist | January 7, 2010From the North, with the cold and the ice,
To the South, where the beaches are nice,
To the East, to the West,
If your country's the best
Then it's you whom I ask for advice!
-- Digital Cuttlefish
My friend and fellow blog writer, Digital Cuttlefish, is asking us to help his nature-loving son with suggestions for where in Europe to visit while he attends university in Denmark for one semester. I provided a few suggestions of my own, but I haven't lived in Europe for long, so I am hardly a good source of information for where to visit. Many of you, on the other hand, are the real experts…
tqa | January 7, 2010
Waikiki Beach and Honolulu, as seen from Diamond Head.
Unknown date, probably 2003 or 2004. HP Camera.
Technorati Tags: blogpix, Oahu
gregladen | January 7, 2010
Click Here for PollOnline Survey | Website Polls | Email Marketing | Crowdsourcing SoftwareView MicroPoll
gregladen | January 7, 2010When I post about race, the racists show up and use my blog to spew their hokey science all over the place. There are reasons that I tolerate that to a certain extent, but there are limits. When a student shows up in a classroom and starts asking "innocent" questions of the teacher about "radiocarbon dating" and "transitional fossils" and such the teacher is being played by the student, who was likely trained (as it were) by some crazy yahoo parent or preacher. When AGW denialists show up on a science blog and start quoting from the famous stolen emails ... same thing.
If such abuse of blog…