Social Sciences
sa smith | August 24, 2008Tonight at 10 pm EST, Animal Planet is running a special on the Michael Vick case, from the drug arrest that led to the discovery of the fighting ring, to what happened to the ~50 rescued dogs. I know there are lots of dog lovers who read ERV, so I wanted to give you all the heads up. I also suggest individuals with an irrational fear of pit bulls, or dogs in general watch, with the hope that viewing this program will save their respective souls. If you cant tune in, there are lots of great pics/videos/resources at the Animal Planet website.
A couple groups have gotten to review the show…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment:
Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to sell you, but because I can learn from the past and make inferences, and so can you.
Jim Goetz, who I find to be a balanced and sensible sort of Christian, asked in the comments for some backing to this apparently outrageous claim. It's a fair cop, so here is my argument...
As someone who does not believe in moral absolutes, and yet wants to ground moral claims in the real…
clock | August 21, 2008This is big! A new agreement was signed between Max Planck Society and Public Library of Science in which the MPS will pay publication fees for its researchers. Mark Patterson explains:
The MPS is one of the world's leading research organizations whose researchers have an international reputation for scientific excellence. We are delighted to be collaborating with the MPS in this way so that more MPS researchers will be encouraged to publish their work in PLoS journals, and to promote open access to research literature more broadly. For papers accepted in PLoS journals after July 1st, 2008…
sb admin | August 21, 2008Itâs World Water Week, and officials from around the world are meeting in Stockholm to discuss how to get adequate water and sanitation to the worldâs population â even as drought and other environmental problems threaten the global water supply.
The conference organizers explain the problem and what WWW intends to do about it:
For a staggering 2.6 billion people, lack of access to adequate sanitation is a major and daily threat to their health and well-being. This bears tremendous social and environmental costs, of which premature deaths, degradation of living quarters and the environment,…
pzminion | August 20, 2008Guest Blogger Danio, sneaking a few more posts in:
Remember that execrable HHS policy document that proposes an extension of the current protections for health care workers who refuse to provide or assist in treatments that they personally find morally objectionable? I did a little back-tracking on this issue, and followed the trail of HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, who requested this regulation after a "disappointing" interaction with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. He has since been unwavering in his support of the proposal--which he claims is not about abortion OR…
evolvingthoughts | August 19, 2008
The local evangelical students society had me along last night to talk about "Is belief in the Christian God rational?" I was on the negative, although I did ask them which side they wanted me to argue for. It was done in traditional debating format, and I found it incredibly restrictive - speakers were allowed to get away with introducing stuff they hadn't mentioned in their main point piece, and a number of things were left up in the air.
Kudos to the undergraduate organisers Tim and Stewart for having a philosophy lecturer and a graduate student in physics and moral philosophy (…
drorzel | August 15, 2008
Five Secrets to Publishing Success :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
Not so much for the scientists, but a good look at the process for the humanities.
(tags: publishing journals humanities social-science academia)
If One Professor Gropes, Does Everyone Need Training? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
Yes.
(tags: academia gender politics stupid)
FemaleScienceProfessor: FSP's Guide to Academic Etiquette
"24. DonâÂÂt make faculty meetings last longer than necessary unless you have something really important…
razib | August 15, 2008MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives:
Previous studies in animals and humans show that genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) influence individual odours and that females often prefer odour of MHC-dissimilar males, perhaps to increase offspring heterozygosity or reduce inbreeding. Women using oral hormonal contraceptives have been reported to have the opposite preference, raising the possibility that oral contraceptives alter female preference towards MHC similarity, with possible fertility costs. Here we test directly whether…
neurophilosophy | August 15, 2008You may have read elsewhere that publishing giant Reed Elsevier has been caught copying Mike Dunford's content without permission (and copyrighting it as their own!), which is extremely hypocritical from a company that opposes the open access movement and makes huge profits from restricting access to scientific data.
I''m not going to discuss the matter any further - others have already said plenty about it - but I thought that now would be an appropriate time to post this opinion piece I wrote back in March 2002. It was originally published in Al-Ahram Weekly, the English-language edition of…
laelaps | August 15, 2008Olivia Judson has a short column in the opinion section of the New York Times about the importance of teaching evolution in public schools. Like Judson, I am frustrated that evolution is often taught as a distinct biological phenomena at the end of the year, hardly presented as the concept that makes sense of the rest of biology (as Theodosius Dobzhansky once said). Rather than being a powerful idea that connects what is being taught it is often treated as little more than a footnote, if it is mentioned at all. Just because a school isn't mired in a creationist controversy doesn't mean that…
evolvingthoughts | August 14, 2008
It's always a Bad Idea to critique a paper on the basis of summaries, but I just can't seem to make Proceedings of the Royal Society let me download this article. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have proposed another explanation for religion, based on the correlation between tropics and diseases, and the variety of religions in the tropics.
Their argument, it appears, is to note that controlling for other factors you get higher numbers of religions in more tropical regions. Promoting within-group solidarity therefore is a way to prevent the spread of diseases, to prevent contagion. As…
laelaps | August 14, 2008I never quite know what to say when people call me a scientist. I take it as a compliment, certainly, but I'm usually unsure as to whether I can apply the word to myself or not. Is a scientist defined by their journey through the academic meat grinder? By expert knowledge? By skeptical thought? The popular imagery of scientists is often of a socially-inept nerd or of a mad scientist, both archetypes representing scientists as being so detached from the public that they almost literally don't speak the same language. As I've said before I find this characterization unfortunate, but in order to…
pzminion | August 14, 2008Guestblogger Sastra checking in:
A few years back the little Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in my area asked me to give a brief talk (!) on the topic of my choice. Seems they were looking for speakers, any speaker, and had noticed that I tend to talk a lot. So I considered the sorts of things that appeal to me, and the sorts of things that might appeal to them, and decided to try to see if I could put together an interesting speech on "Science and Human Rights," based on the idea "that concepts such as human rights, democracy, and science are historically linked together through similar…
mspringer | August 13, 2008MarkCC on Good Math, Bad Math has been posting lately on encryption and privacy. As usual, technology has increased the number of ways the government can read your mail, but it has also increased the ways you can hide your communications as well. Modern open-source encryption is very secure and all other things being equal it's much harder for the government to read encrypted email than it is for the government to open an envelope old-style. To read encrypted email, realistically the government is going to have to surreptitiously bug your computer and get your password, which (for the…
thescian | August 11, 2008Anand Giridharadas (his blog) writes at IHT:
many of the people who are making the new India new - from the stockbrokers to the bedecked socialites - are responsible for preserving a certain gloomy element of the Indian past: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to taunt and humiliate and condescend to them, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served.
"Indians are perhaps the world's most undemocratic people, living in the world's largest and most plural democracy," as Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, put…
clock | August 11, 2008Elephant Memories May Hold Key To Survival:
A recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) suggests that old female elephants--and perhaps their memories of distant, life-sustaining sources of food and water--may be the key to survival during the worst of times.
Fry Me Kangaroo Brown, Sport:
Skippy could be on more menus following a report that expanding the kangaroo industry would significantly cut greenhouse gases.
'Lost Tribe' Of Clinician-scientists: Medical Doctors Who Do Research Could Be A Dying Breed:
The road from disease research to…
mikethemadbiologist | August 11, 2008Commenting on John Edwards, Joe Klein makes two excellent points:
--Just about anyone under the age of 60 who has lived in this permissive society during the past 40 years, has done something that might be unfit for a Hallmark Greeting Card. In fact, I have profound qualms about any would-be politician who hasn't allowed him- or herself a moment of untrammeled human or chemical exploration. I fear that the media have driven an awful lot of interesting people away from public service for reasons that would have seemed extreme to the second generation of New England Puritans.
--These sort of…
worldsfair | August 11, 2008(Since I'll be away for the next week or so, I figured this is as good a time as any to reprint a few "speaks to a geneticist" pieces. Hope you enjoy them).
LIESL: Why is it that we can all sing very well?
GENETICIST: Liesl, that is an excellent question! And essentially one that boils down to the classic debate of nature versus nurture. Are your genes responsible for this particular talent, or has it more to do with your upbringing? Looking at this scenario objectively, I would have to say that it is both. There have been reports that the ability to have perfect pitch--that is the ability…
gregladen | August 9, 2008Technically, Nisbet did not say that. He simply showed a picture of PZ Myers ... a rather funny picture of PZ that is not what I would call a glamor shot ... and made the statement paraphrased as the title of this post in reference to all atheists who have strong views and who are, well, not appeasers of religion.
I've been getting private emails from friends and colleagues asking me if I can talk to Nisbet .. and convey a message to him (I won't repeat the messages here). What I want you to understand is that just because I am a Sbling, etc., does not mean that I'm in touch with the guy.…
pzminion | August 9, 2008[[Oops. Forgot this on the first post. MAJeff here.]]
It appears we've got more than a few Ottawans here (Ottawegians? Ottawites?) It also seems they'd like to meet each other. I've also seen a few Massholes (what do we call ourselves?) saying they'd like to get together again. I'm not surprised. We are, after all, a social species.
It's kind of funny to see Nisbet complaining about the loners over here when we are actually engaging in very social activity by sitting here chatting. Some of us may be sitting alone in physical space, but the intensive communicative action in which we…