Social Sciences
tetrapodzoology | January 26, 2008
2007 - Tet Zoo's second year of operation - has come and gone. The previous article was a brief personal review of the year, and here's more of the same (sort of) if you can handle it...
As if Tet Zoo wasn't enough to deal with, in September my partners-in-crime Mike P. Taylor and Matt Wedel [shown here; Mike is the less big one] decided, with me, to start up a new zoological blog, but this time devoted to something a little more specific: namely, sauropod vertebrae (and nothing else, pretty much). So on October 1st, Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, or SV-POW!, was born. Despite…
tqa | January 24, 2008
Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins has a post that criticizes a recently-published journal article. Normally, I agree with John - in fact, if it's true that the best measure of someone's intelligence is how often their views match yours, then John Wilkins is an absolute genius. But even Einstein had off-days, and (again, based on the agreement standard) I think this might have been one of John's.
The article in question, by paleontologists Sarda Sahney and Michael Benton, examines how long it took for ecosystems to recover after the end-Permian extinction. The dinosaurs weren't…
mementomori | January 24, 2008Dr. Scott Berry, a medical oncologist at the University of Toronto, has written an interesting essay in this month's Journal of Clinical Oncology entitled "Just Say Die." His point is that doctors are hesitant to use the words "die" or "death" when counselling patients who are in the process of doing exactly that - dying:
Die is a short, simple word. The problem is that I rarely use it when I speak to my dying patients, and I don't think I'm alone.
According to Dr. Berry, one of the reasons why we eschew the "D" word when talking to patients about their prognosis is to avoid upsetting them…
evolvingthoughts | January 24, 2008
In 1972, David Raup published an influential paper on taxonomic diversity during the Phanerozoic. In that paper, he estimated extinction rates based on the number of fossil families and genera for the period and before and after. The idea was to estimate the "kill rate" of major disruptions in earth's history.
A new paper by Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton attempts to do this for the Permian extinction, arguably the biggest of all time. They attempt to reconstruct the "guilds", or ecological roles communities, of the Permian, and assess the biological diversity in terms of taxonomic…
petnoyer | January 24, 2008The New York Times has a nice investigative piece on mercury levels in your local urban sushi parlors that briefly restored my faith in mainstream science journalism. The Times performed what you might call a guerilla science action, hiring a pair of local professors to help to analyze bluefin tuna samples from 20 sushi places around Manhattan. Every city should do this. It's a great way to support local science labs, buying them lunch and funding research at the same time.
Researchers from Rutgers and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School found 5 of the 20 metropolitan restaurants serve tuna…
oracknows | January 22, 2008Three months ago, I wrote about vacuous legal threats issued by the Society of Homeopaths against one of the better skeptical bloggers, Le Canard Noir, who runs the excellent Quackometer Blog and created the infamous Quackometer, in order to intimidate him into silence. The attempt backfired spectacularly, as scores of bloggers reposted the article by Le Canard Noir that prompted the legal threats, in the face of which his ISP had caved.
Now it looks like it might be time to do it all again, this time with a different twit who has issued abusive threats against Le Canard Noir. This time…
hrynyshyn | January 21, 2008We bloggers tend to assume, or at least hope, that blogging is intrisincally a Good Thing. But at this past weekend's North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, some even dared ask if we can save science. If that's not a tall order, I don't know what is.
The conference drew a couple of hundred veteran bloggers, students and scientists from across the continent and abroad -- including a healthy representation from our own ScienceBlogs.com gang -- to the Sigma Xi headquarters in Research Triangle Park for a day of debate over what blogging can and cannot do, its relationship to journalism,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 21, 2008One of the things that is often neglected on Martin Luther King day is his dedication to economic justice. What is forgotten--often willfully--is that he was an advocate for racial and economic justice. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine):
My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their families, and to all of my brothers and sisters, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be in Memphis…
bcohen | January 21, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6
Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
Here's a supposition, as I continue this series of posts on seeing and knowing: those Morris essays about Fenton's Crimean War photographs at a road outside Sebastopol are a precis for studies of science and technology in society (STS). Inside his essays is a sort of mini-history of the field of that name. A particular and limited story, to be sure, but nonetheless it goes somewhere by following the ever deeper demands of developing context. I'll start in…
gregladen | January 20, 2008The Bell Museum, in Minneapolis, will sponsor a Valentine's Day Cafe Scientifique that will be especially close to my heart ...
... mainly because it is me doing it.
Evolution, Cuisine and Romance
Tuesday, February 19, 7 p.m.
Bryant-Lake Bowl, Uptown
Were the opposable thumb, an upright stance and a large brain the most important evolutionary events in human history? According to Anthropologist Greg Laden, these and other traits are only the byproducts of the truly important evolutionary transitions for our species: the rise of romance and the evolution of cuisine. Join Laden for a…
oracknows | January 20, 2008Via a fascinating blog that was pointed out to me (Morbid Anatomy), I came across a story from last winter about how a Colorado nonprofit organization is reviving a Victorian custom about which I had been largely ignorant, namely the custom of taking photographs of recently deceased loved ones as mementos. Indeed, the photographs were known as "memento mori." The group, called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, takes carefully posed photographs that are truly astonishing. Although the concept may sound morbid, the results are not (although I really, really wish the website would get rid of the sappy…
oracknows | January 17, 2008Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…
sciencetolife | January 16, 2008
Men develop liver cancer at twice the rate of women in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society. Considering that the liver is a non-reproductive organ, this is quite a difference.
A research team led by Dr. Arlin Rogers, an experimental pathologist at MIT, looked at the gender differences in hepatocellular carcinoma, a male-predominant liver cancer that is associated with chronic hepatitis.
It turns out that:
Male and female livers are inherently different, with most of the differences arising during puberty when male livers are exposed to periodic bursts of growth…
drorzel | January 15, 2008
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Civility
The Dean Dad's one-sentence campus civility code.
(tags: academia culture society humanities social-science)
I Can Has Rezearch Papar? by Cyle Gage
The semiotics of LOLCats. Or Maybe it's the hemeneutics of LOLCats. I get those mixed up.
(tags: culture humanities internet academia)
MESSENGER: MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging
The first image of the previously unseen hemisphere of Mercury.
(tags: astronomy planets news science)
cortex | January 14, 2008After posting on some new research that suggests we are more sexually fluid than we typically assume - in other words, our strict sexual categories are largely cultural - I got a fascinating email from a reader:
I thought you may find my own experience, having lived in both eastern and western societies, interesting. I was born and lived the first 18 years of my life in Iran, and have been in the States for the last 21 years. Although Iran is an extremely conservative and mostly religious society; social and sexual norms are not what one may expect them to be in a muslim society (or at…
jlynch | January 13, 2008
In the comments to a previous post, "rebel scientist" Louis Savain made the following statements:
I have made a falsifiable prediction about the human cerebellum based on my interpretation of certain Biblical metaphors. If you can falsify it, do so. Otherwise, your lame attempt at ridiculing my person is just that, lame. You wanted falsifiability, you’re gonna get it. Lots of it.
I commented:
Excellent. I expect to enjoy reading your research papers in neurobiological journals.
and he retorted with:
Forget it. I believe in going directly to the customer, i.e., the public whom you despise,…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2008I've been presenting Al Gore's climate-change slide show for a year now, spreading the "message" to anyone prepared to receive it on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My version has evolved, along with the science, and the social and political landscape. But one part of Gore's presentation that I never embraced was his conviction that global warming is a moral issue. Now I finally can point to someone who can explain why it's a mistake to confuse moral imperatives with environmental advocacy: Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, whose essay in this coming Sunday's New York Times…
razib | January 11, 2008Martin had a comment below:
You equate language groups with ethnic, even political, groups. That's quite a stretch. Western archaeologists abandoned that idea in the 1970s.
I think I should expand a bit on my comment where I address Martin's assertion. I think I made it pretty clear that when it comes to burial styles or pottery motifs I render unto archaeologists their expertise, on the other hand, there's the old joke that archaeologists reduce the entirety of the past to material artifacts. Obviously such remains loom large because we unfortunately have no access to time travel machines…
Research with vulnerable populations: considering the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (part 2).
jstemwedel | January 11, 2008In an earlier post, I looked at a research study by Nelson et al. [1] on how the cognitive development of young abandoned children in Romania was affected by being raised in institutional versus foster care conditions. Specifically, I examined the explanation the researchers gave to argue that their work was not only scientifically sound but also ethical.
In this post, I examine the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, "The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children" [2]. Millum and Emanuel are in the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the…
bushwells | January 11, 2008Finally, the much anticipated return of Friday Flower Porn! For you debauched botanical voyeurs, I have two offerings for you today: a purple posy and turgid Darwinian prose.
Here's a violet blooming in Princeton's Marchand Park where a fair number of specimen trees and shrubs hang out. Just look at those ticklers. Any red-blooded hymenopteran would make a bee-line toward those babies.
And here's the prose in which our violet is mentioned in passing - Canto I as sung by the Goddess of Botany:
Descend, ye hovering Sylphs! aerial Quires,
And sweep with little hands your silver lyres;
With…