Social Sciences
sheril | August 24, 2007A frightened society is easily kept in check by the powers that be so I suppose someone is benefiting from the news media circus, eh? But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself...let me begin again by taking things back to our formative years:
One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when -- KERPLUNK -- an acorn fell on her head. "Oh my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king."
Hence, 'Chicken Little' has become synonymous with hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent. I liken the mentality to that exhibited by the prime time news…
evolvingthoughts | August 23, 2007
The "angry atheist" debate has broken out again, like a fire that smolders on until it finds new fuel. I am moved to make a few points, which are worth all you paid for them.
1. There is an assumption that reasonable people can only come to one conclusion. To theists this is theism of some kind. To atheists this is atheism. It presumes that people who are reasonable in one domain (say, science) are reasonable in all. But I know atheists who are libertarians, and a more irrational faith in rights I haven't found, and I know theists who are absolutely in line with all the social, scientific…
sb admin | August 23, 2007By Liz BorkowskiÂ
Revereâs been keeping us up to date on the latest news about the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences â specifically, the stepping aside of Director Dr. David Schwartz for an NIH investigation, and the letter sent to NIEHS employees with the apparent goal of discouraging whistle-blowing. It seems like a good time to review some NIEHS happenings that had already attracted congressional scrutiny.
Conflicted Contractors
As regular readers may recall, NIEHS lacks appropriate policies to identify and address potential conflicts of interest in contractors it hires…
revere | August 23, 2007"Protecting the border" is a battle cry for the most reactionary US politicians but when it comes to flu, they are as unlikely to be successful as they are for people. However it might be the Canadians, who have a functioning public health system, who are most at risk from a surge of US citizens fleeing their own poverty-stricken, understaffed and dysfunctional health care society that will be most interested in keeping those American illegal aliens out of their hospitals. This week the heads of state of Mexico, Canada and the US discussed what to do in a pandemic and they all agreed on the…
revere | August 22, 2007One of my colleagues (a clinical psychologist) was once asked the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. "You have to understand," he said, "that a psychiatrist doesn't have a PhD." It turns out there is at least one more difference. The professional association of psychiatrists have rejected the idea it is ethical for a medical doctor to be complicit in interrogation abuse or abusive conditions under which interrogations are conducted. The professional association of psychologists have twice declined to take that step. I think that's a more telling difference than the nature…
thusspakezuska | August 22, 2007Since I don't work I have a lot of time in the morning to listen to talk radio. One of my favorite shows is Radio Times With Marty Moss-Coane. Marty, you rock, girl! She can wrangle arguing guests or a too-chatty caller like nobody's business.
Today's show was all about the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal. In the second hour she had historian Edmund Russell on the show to talk about the history of dog-fighting, and a sad tale it was. At one point he spoke about having encountered a man somewhere in the south who was involved in the related "sport" of cock-fighting; he asked him if he…
pharyngula | August 21, 2007Yesterday's discussion of future biological advances that will piss off the religious right had me thinking about other innovations that I expect will happen within a few decades that might just cause wingnuts to freak out. First thing to come to mind is that it will be something to do with reproduction, of course, and it will scramble gender roles and expectations…so, how about modifying men to bear children? It sounds feasible to me. Zygotes are aggressive little parasites that will implant just about anywhere in the coelom — it's why ectopic pregnancies are a serious problem — so all we…
hrynyshyn | August 21, 2007Actually, burning it would probably be better than this. A barge overturned and dumped a loaded diesel truck in waters just metres from Robson Bight, one of those areas where the term "ecologically sensitive" just doesn't do seem to do justice.
Robson Bight, up near the northern end of Vancouver Island on Canada's west coast, is a wilderness area off-limits to just about everyone and everything, except orcas (killer whales to the unwashed), which visit its gravel beaches for a good rubdown. From today's Globe and Mail:
"There couldn't have a been a worse time and a worse place for this to…
angrytoxicologist | August 21, 2007So I if walked over to your house and dumped something over your fence, that's probably trespassing, unless that something happened to be a box of Krispy Kreme, then it's just tasty. If it's grass clippings, you'd be pissed off; if it's an industrial chemical, you might sue. If I came over with said chemical and spoon-fed it to your newborn, I'm pretty sure I'd be looking at a 12/12 bid in the joint.
Which leads me to a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives that is a follow up to a paper published on-line in the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology by…
j7uy5 | August 18, 2007No money down, but the payments go on forever. The
only
people who win are the bankers and the contractors. We make
it easy to get in. But like herpes and condominiums, it is
hard to get rid of.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite
books was Starship
Troopers, (1959). It was written by a guy
(Robert
A. Heinlein)who was medically unable to be in a combat role
in World
War II.
In Starship Troopers, the planet Earth is ambushed
by an enemy, but ultimately wins the war decisively. This is
done with just the right combination of patriotism, leadership,
righteousness, brainpower, and…
clock | August 17, 2007
Male Elephants Get 'Photo IDs' From Scientists:
Asian elephants don't carry photo identification, so scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and India's Nature Conservation Foundation are providing the service free of charge by creating a photographic archive of individual elephants, which can help save them as well.
Cat Disease Linked To Flame Retardants In Furniture And To Pet Food:
A mysterious epidemic of thyroid disease among pet cats in the United States may be linked to exposure to dust shed from flame retardants in household carpeting, furniture, fabrics and pet food,…
revere | August 17, 2007I'm not sure which is worse. Pandemic flu preparation which puts most of its eggs (pathogen-free, of course) in the vaccine basket or the one that plans to distribute the non-existent vaccine in a way that it misses the most needy and vulnerable. I guess it's obvious that if the first is bad, the second is very bad so it's worse, but it also a warning that other kinds of preparation may also be seriously flawed from the equity point of view. I know many of you don't care about these folks -- undocumented immigrants, substance users, the homeless, homebound elderly, and minorities. Many…
denialism | August 16, 2007Oddly enough, I agree with (most) of one of them.
The attack on Newsweek's article "The Truth About Deniers continues with a piece from Robert Samuelson in the WaPo. Samuelson, true to form, sees a hard problem and resorts to saying, "It's hard, we can't do anything about it!" His boring fatalism on any difficult problem seems to always end with assertions that if something requires regulation, or proactive government, it's impossible. He's also critical of Newsweek's correct assertion that the attacks on the science aren't for legitimate "dissent" but rather represent an organized…
purepedantry | August 16, 2007The New Yorker has an exquisite article by Adam Gopnik on science fiction writer, Phillip K. Dick. Gopnik doesn't pull punches; Dick was in many ways bat-shit crazy. He also had a genius for understanding that the future would likely be just as wrong -- in the way that people in 60s tended to define wrong -- as the present. This sense of stability in human nature made his books ironic and deeply satirical.
Money quote:
Dick's admirers identify his subjects as..."reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation." Later, as he became crazier, he did see questions in vast cosmological…
oracknows | August 16, 2007[Note: Part I is here.]
I tell ya, I stay up all night putting the finishing touches on a grant, and what happens? Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism.com finds a real hum-dinger of stupidity published in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately (or fortunately, given the rampant stupidity that appears to be going on in this article), I do not have a subscription to the WSJ; however, a little Googling found the whole text here. I've written about this conflict before, and it's a recurring theme in the multiple posts that I've done regarding dichloroacetate (DCA), the small…
voltagegate | August 16, 2007The next ESA/SER meeting is right up my alley:
Drawing from a wide range of case studies that illustrate the potential effects of climate on disease dynamics, a series of presentations to be held at the joint meeting of the Ecological Society of America and the Society for Ecological Restoration will showcase what scientists are discovering about the links between climate and disease...
John Bruno (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) will review the trends for such coral diseases as White Syndrome and Caribbean Yellow Band Syndrome. Temperature anomalies, which are predicted to…
denialism | August 16, 2007Sociologists are. Or so says Inside Higher Ed.
Sociologists -- especially those who study sexuality -- have for years done research that was considered controversial or troublesome by politicians or deans. Many scholars are proud of following their research ideas where they lead -- whatever others may think. But at a session Monday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, sociologists considered the possibility that some of their colleagues may feel enough heat right now that they are avoiding certain topics or are being forced to compromise on either the language or…
drorzel | August 15, 2007Michael Nielsen, who's so smart it's like he's posting from tomorrow, offers a couple of provocative questions about the perception of a crisis in funding for basic science:
First, how much funding is enough for fundamental research? What criterion should be used to decide how much money is the right amount to spend on fundamental research?
Second, the human race spent a lot lot more on fundamental research in the second half of the twentieth century than it did in the first. It's hard to get a good handle on exactly how much, in part because it depends on what you mean by fundamental…
bcohen | August 15, 2007Part 1 | 2 | 3
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Part III with David Hess, author of Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry, follows below.
All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series are here.
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TWF: You think all these farmers markets will really do anything? Or do they just make for a more fun middle class weekend?
DH: There are actually two or three complicated questions here. Even though one can demonstrate significant growth trends in many localist institutions (such as farmers' markets), does the localist movement really have any long-term economic significance? I'm doing a lot of thinking about…
retrospectacle | August 12, 2007 [This is part of a series I'm doing here on Retrospectacle called 'Science Vault.' Pretty much I'm just going to dig back into the forgotten and moldering annuls of scientific publications to find weird and interesting studies that very likely would never be published or done today (and perhaps never should have.) I'll probably try to do it once a week (and if you have suggestions, please do email me with them.)]
Its been nothing but roses lately for us coffee drinkers needing a scientific reason to validate our habit. The past couple weeks have yielded no less than four separate studies on…