Social Sciences
bcohen | October 2, 2008Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
- - -
Part 2 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Given the class issues you deal with, the book is also a contribution to the history of environmental justice. How would you characterize environmental justice and issues of health?
GM: I think it is difficult to separate out issues of environmental and social injustice. When you combine inadequate access to health care, for example, with increased exposure to air pollution caused by the siting of bus depots in…
zooillogix | October 1, 2008A report published yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows that black bears living in urban areas weigh more, get pregnant at a younger age, and are more likely to die violent deaths.
The study tracks 12 bears living in Lake Tahoe over a 10 year period and compares them to 10 bears living in surrounding "wildland" areas. The urban bears weighed an average of 30 percent more because their diet was delicious, fatty, garbage - basically the same stuff you eat. While the bears in the wildlands typically gave birth between 7-8 years of age, some of the skanky city bears first…
clock | October 1, 2008Urban Black Bears 'Live Fast, Die Young':
Black bears that live around urban areas weigh more, get pregnant at a younger age, and are more likely to die violent deaths, according to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
Tiny Organisms Feast On Oil Thousands Of Feet Below Bottom Of Sea:
Thousands of feet below the bottom of the sea, off the shores of Santa Barbara, single-celled organisms are busy feasting on oil.
Mass Extinctions And The Evolution Of Dinosaurs:
Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and 50 million years before taking over the world and dominating ecosystems,…
evolvingthoughts | October 1, 2008
In the light of the ongoing automation of impact factors, usually by somewhat opaque algorithms or procedures, a number of editors of various biomedical jounrals have asked to be taken off a new European reference index. I have taken the liberty of formatting the text below the fold in paragraphs. It was taken from the HOPOS-L@listserv.vt.edu forum for history and philosophy of science, and originally on the H-NET List on the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology [mailto:H-SCI-MED-TECH@H-NET.MSU.EDU].
From: Finn Arne Jørgensen
Date: Tue, September 30, 2008 2:31 pm
Journals…
stoat | September 29, 2008Do you ever have the experience of a book you've bought from abe or ebay turning up, and you can't remember why you bought it? I got "The long-term impacts of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide" by MacDonald today (The Long-term Impacts of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels, By Gordon James MacDonald, Published by Ballinger, 1982, ISBN 088410902X, 9780884109020, 252 pages) , and thought "hmm thats interesting, but why *this* book?". Now I'm at home, I can find the answer: its really the JASON report. Aha.
So how does it shape up? Well of course what I've done is a very quick…
gregladen | September 29, 2008Human societies tend to be at least a little polygynous. This finding, recently reported in PLoS genetics, does not surprise us but is nonetheless important. This important in two ways: 1) This study uncovers numerical details of human genetic variation that are necessary to understand change across populations and over time; and 2) the variation across populations are interesting and, in fact, seem to conform to expectations (in a "we don't' really care about statistical significance" sort of way, for now) regarding human social organization.
Before examining the paper, we should…
pharyngula | September 29, 2008I've barred the doors — I'm sure that any moment now, a squadron of goose-stepping nuns will come marching up the street to wag their fingers at me and rebuke me for what I've started. It seems the Youth of Today are going on YouTube and…flaunting their disrespect for crackers!
People can find a video of almost anything on YouTube: babies' first steps, Saturday Night Live skits, news clips, concerts and now - to the shock of Catholics everywhere - desecration of the Eucharist.
YouTube has long been a destination for Catholics seeking video clips of Masses, apologetics lectures or devotions…
cwilcox | September 26, 2008Green is the new black in American society, and one way to see how green you really are is to look at your carbon footprint. But do you ever wonder what the world's footprint looks like? I recently stumbled upon a really fascinating website by David Bleja and the designer of the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival that shows the world's carbon emissions, births, and deaths in real time (well, kind of).
Breathing Earth tries to illustrate the impacts that humanity has on the earth by simulating real-time births, deaths, and carbon emissions by country. Every time, statistically, a person is…
razib | September 26, 2008PLoS Genetis has a neat paper up which clarifies something which we kind of already knew, Sex-Biased Evolutionary Forces Shape Genomic Patterns of Human Diversity:
Like many primate species, the mating system of humans is considered to be moderately polygynous (i.e., males exhibit a higher variance in reproductive success than females). As a consequence, males are expected to have a lower effective population size (Ne) than females, and the proportion of neutral genetic variation on the X chromosome (relative to the autosomes) should be higher than expected under the assumption of strict…
tfk | September 25, 2008Sarah Palin was interviewed by Katie Couric:
Couric: Would you support a moratorium on foreclosures to help average Americans keep their homes?
Palin: That's something that John McCain and I have both been discussing - whether that (pause) is part of the solution or not. You know, it's going to be a multi-faceted solution that has to be found here.
Couric: So you haven't decided whether you'll support it or not?
Palin: I have not.
Couric: What are the pros and cons of it do you think?
Palin: Oh, well, some decisions that have been made poorly should not be rewarded, of course.…
stoat | September 25, 2008I decided to skip over the synthesis - how can I judge that, before reading the chapters its supposed to synthesise? I'll come back to it.
Previous: Part I.
Chapter 2 "Future carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels" is by Nordhaus and Yohe; and by Ausubel and Nordhaus. Eli has laid into this, but he largely based his post on Oreskes et al. (henceforth, OCS), and I no longer think thats such a good thing to do. They say: Chapter 1, written by Nordhaus, Ausubel, and Gary Yohe,... but this is, a teensy bit wrong. The chapter in question is chapter 2 (chapter 1 is the synthesis) and OCS have…
edyong | September 25, 2008The art of auctioning is an ancient one. The concept of competitively bidding for goods has lasted from Roman times, when spoils of war were divvied up around a planted spear, to the 21st century, when the spoils of the loft are sold through eBay. But despite society's familiarity with the concept, people who take part in auctions still behave in a strange way - they tend to overbid, offering more money than what they actually think an object is worth.
Some economists have suggested that people overbid because they are averse to risk. They would rather make spend more money to be sure of a…
sb admin | September 23, 2008By Olga Naidenko
Maybe our government should listen to what the people have to say? I mean, not all the time, not every day â surely, that would be too much to ask for â but at least every once in a while? Occasionally? And even consider those public opinions with a modicum of respect? Ah, what a dream that would be!
On Tuesday September 16 Erica Engelhaupt reported in Environmental Science and Technology on the findings of the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) Panel on Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making. The opening phrase of the NRC report is incisive…
mikethemadbiologist | September 23, 2008...John Bircher? By way of ScienceBlogling Ed Brayton, I came across this Salon article describing Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's claim that she is a young earth creationist (or, at the very least, believes that human and dinosaurs lived at the same time, which is fucking stupid enough). But it gets even more insane. From Dave Neiwert, we learn that she very well might be a John Bircher:
What's striking, as Michael points out, is the article in front of her: It's a piece about the "Con Con Call" -- one of those hysterical non-issues that conspiracy theorists of the far right in 1995…
pharyngula | September 23, 2008Sixty years ago, the UN composed a document setting out a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It lists a set of basic principles, such as that everyone should be treated equally, torture and slavery are forbidden, and everyone has the right to life, liberty and security. It's a lovely set of ideals, but it also has a set of enemies. To name just one: fundamentalists hate it. And, unfortunately, fundamentalists, especially Islamic fundamentalists, are quietly working behind the scenes to undermine it.
A commission from Islamic nations composed a new Universal Islamic Declaration of Human…
drorzel | September 22, 2008I meant to follow up on some of the comments to my post calling for more science majors last week, but we had some Issues Thursday night, and I didn't get to it on Friday. There were a number of people making negative comments about things that weren't quite what I was saying, though, and I do still want to respond.
Happily, Johan Larson gets it:
[I]t seems to me that for a large portion of undergrads what they study doesn't seem very important, for several reasons: they don't know what they want to do with their lives, their preferred employers require a college degree but don't much care…
clock | September 22, 2008An oldie but goodie for the connoisseurs of my long political rants (May 11, 2005):
--------------------------------------------
I am not an economist. Actually, I have no background in economics at all, if one ignores "Capitalism for Beginners" and "Marx for Beginners".
Like all Yugoslavs of my generation, I suffered through a couple of years of "Marxism" classes back in high school and college - classes that both teachers and students hated and did the absolute minimum. My high-school teacher gave us not-so-subtle hints about what she thought about it. When it was time for Marxism class,…
revere | September 21, 2008Hats off to fellow blogger Stephen Soldz and his colleagues, leaders of a coalition within the American Psychological Association that campaigned to put the APA on record declaring participation in torture interrogations at US prisons at Guantanamo Bay and similar prison camps an unethical breach of professional standards. The referendum victory (59%) comes after previous failures to ban professional complicity by APA members in interrogations where there is good reason to believe international law is being violated.
The ban means those who are American Psychological Association members can't…
clock | September 19, 2008It is great when you write a blog post about somebody, then that somebody shows up in the comments and clarifies his position thus starting an interesting conversation (both in the comments and via e-mail), then you realize that his book-signing tour is bringing that somebody to your town, so you go there and meet that somebody in person and have a great conversation, which inspires you to write yet another blog post - the one under the fold....
It's too late and I am too tired to write a long post on this, but I know I won't have time tomorrow. All dirty, scrungly and unshaven after a day…
clock | September 19, 2008 You probably know that I am quite interested in the history, current state, evolution and future of the institution of marriage, mainly because it is an important indicator of societal attitudes towards sex and towards gender-relations, which is the key to understanding political ideology. Between May 29, 2005 and February 23, 2006 I frequently mentioned Stephanie Coontz and particularly her latest book - Marriage, A History, e.g., in New History Of Marriage, Stephanie Coontz On Marriage, Op-Ed on the 'End of Marriage', Don't Know Much About History.... and What 'traditional' marriage?.…