Culture
sheril | January 5, 2009Unless you've been on a desert island for the past few months, you've likely heard about Isis The Scientist; one of ScienceBlogs best new additions. Dr. Isis a physiologist who blogs about balancing her research career with the demands of raising small children, succeeding as a woman in academia, and shoes. In fact, her arrival sent a shockwave of shoes across the blogosphere, inspiring even the most unusual suspects to ponder the pump. So here's my contribution to the mix... These arrived Friday:
I'll be featuring them prominently at this year's annual AAAS meeting in Chicago where I'm…
sheril | January 2, 2009From the New York Times:
From Australia, to Asia and Europe and the United States on Wednesday, the message in the latest economic reports was clear: manufacturing continued to slump amid the worst slowdown since the Great Depression.
And yet today, the fickle Dow topped 9,000, but I can't shake the memory of that email from September...
Are readers optimistic for 2009?
amillikan | January 1, 2009Science writer Rebecca Skloot—who contributes to Popular Science, the New York Times, and Discover, among other publications—is also a blogger, and starting this week she'll be moving her blog Culture Dish over to ScienceBlogs. Her blog covers a wide array of science issues, with a particular focus on biology and medicine—which are also featured in her soon-to-be-published book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
razib | December 31, 2008So implies The Audacious Epigone:
Mormons are the least likely of the 19 denominations to live alone, but I suspect among the married, they are among the most likely to have a single breadwinner household.
Atheists and agnostics, by contrast, come in at the bottom. The low rates of multiple person households is part of the explanation, but the high number of lone wolves among their ranks illustrates their social marginality in another way relative to the cognitive endowments they enjoy. This does little to dispel stereotype I hold of atheists as cynical, single white guys who live in…
amillikan | December 31, 2008Aspiring scientists who have been conducting experiments form home labs have been encountering opposition. One DIY chemist was arrested for having a lab under the premise that it could be used to make bombs or drugs. Some biotech watchdogs fear that doing science outside of a lab may lead to biological hazards. "Actually the more likely negative scenario is that these DIY labs will produce absolutely nothing," said ScienceBlogger Jake Young from Pure Pedantry.
amillikan | December 30, 2008It's not merely a theory that women are far outnumbered by men in the world of science—it's common knowledge. But opinions vastly differ on what should be done to change the status quo. Recently, ScienceBlogger Dr. Isis sparked a series of discussions eliciting descriptions of what some of the ScienceBloggers' feminist revolutions would look like and what kind of science-doing utopias would result.
razib | December 28, 2008A few days ago the Audacious Epigone pointed out that Episcopalians are in the same neighborhood as Jews in the United States on intelligence tests; i.e., on the order of a bit more than 2/3 of a standard deviation above the norm. The recent paper on religion & IQ confirmed these findings. One of the peculiarities of American Jews is how liberal they are; the old saying was that they "live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans." With the rise of the Religious Right Episcopalians are actually starting to vote more like Jews; the Pew Religious Survey suggests that 49% are now…
amillikan | December 26, 2008While attempts to explain the disproportionate number of women in math and science have resulted in the conclusion that women are innately inferior to men in these areas, the methodology has often—if not always—been flawed. By analyzing chess players to explain the lack of female grandmasters, one study found the lack is mostly attributable to nonparticipation, not skill. "Increase female representation in this game and you would probably see many more prodigies rising to the fore," wrote ScienceBlogger Ed Yong from Not Exactly Rocket Science.
amillikan | December 23, 2008The advent of the science blogger is changing the way people talk about science. But along with new modes of communication and new rhetoric come new questions and opinions about how this evolution is affecting the scientific process. ScienceBlogger Coturnix from A Blog Around the Clock posted his views about why both scientists and science journalists sometimes rant about science bloggers, and why this is a good thing.
razib | December 20, 2008In the social circles I move in there is a lot of concern with overpopulation. Now, it is somewhat ironic to me that those who are concerned do not tend to breed so as to be virtuous...while others who are not so concerned, such as Sarah Palin (and also these ladies and gentlemen) make up for the balance (and some!) and render the valiant efforts of the concerned rather moot. In any case, I had a thought today...I remember when I was a small child that world population was between 4 and 5 billion. Today is between 6 and 7 billion. That is rather staggering...that my lifetime has witnessed…
razib | December 20, 2008I remember that back in mid-2007 I was mooting the possibility of a recession. Part of the reason was that I'd been looking at the statistical trendlines in real estate MLS data at the time for a software project, and I'd been getting a bad feeling from the summer of 2006 on (the flip rates in many markets were not going in a "good" direction). Check out the comments. Days of innocence....
razib | December 20, 2008The paperback edition of "Dow, 30,000 by 2008" Why It's Different This Time came out on the 1st of this month on Amazon. I guess publishing schedules are fixed so that at a date is a date? Here's the most amusing of the "reviews" on Amazon (4 out of 4 stars by the way):
A Prescient Mind - Spot On!
What a brilliant, insightful tome on investing cycles. The author makes an iron clad case as to why the Dow will skyrocket to the stratosphere by 2008. I can find NO FAULT in his logic. Leverage is the key to success in this world of ours. Everybody should borrow against ANY asset that they have,…
razib | December 19, 2008The New York Times just published the definitive Bernie Madoff piece so far, Madoff Scheme Kept Rippling Outward, Across Borders. Reading about Madoff, I can't help but think about this conversation attributed to J. P. Morgan:
Untermyer: "Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?"
Morgan: "No sir. The first thing is character."
Untermyer: "Before money or property?"
Morgan: "Before money or property or anything else. Money cannot buy it...because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom."
That sir, was the problem of course. And…
razib | December 19, 2008Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations:
Science and religion have come into conflict repeatedly throughout history, and one simple reason for this is the two offer competing explanations for many of the same phenomena. We present evidence that the conflict between these two concepts can occur automatically, such that increasing the perceived value of one decreases the automatic evaluation of the other. In Experiment 1, scientific theories described as poor explanations decreased automatic evaluations of science, but simultaneously increased automatic…
razib | December 18, 2008On today's Talk of the Nation there was a show with the title, Obama And The Politics Of Being Biracial. Here's the intro:
President-elect Barack Obama defines himself as African-American. His mother is a white American, and his father is a black African. This hits a nerve with some people, who wonder why Obama doesn't use the term biracial to describe his race.
The obvious answer is that the United States Barack Obama looks black. Some of the guests noted this. That being said, I was a bit peeved with the fact that there wasn't even a nominal nod to the fact that there are many biracial…
razib | December 18, 2008Jake Young has a skeptical take on the contention that science can save the economy. He ends:
In short, I think the suggestion, while well-meaning, is misguided. If all that would happen in this project was that more brains would be applied to the problem, I would support it. It would probably be harmless even if it was ineffective. However, I think it may be worse than that. Given the dismissiveness bordering on contempt with which most scientists hold economic problems, I think their participation would be actively unhelpful. What would result is a lot of acrimony and very little progress.…
razib | December 17, 2008Matt Yglesias has a post up, Illusions of Rationalism, where he seems to dismiss some of the anger in the Left-blogosphere at the coronation of Princess Caroline. Like Matt, I don't really care that much who gets anointed to the throne of the junior Senator from New York, though that has much to do with my relative minimal investment in the particularities of the Democrats within the legislative branch. Yglesias is correct to note:
But of course that's not how things work at all. The whole business of electioneering is full of irrationality and tradition all the way from top to bottom. The…
razib | December 16, 2008United States Death Map Revealed:
A map of natural hazard mortality in the United States has been produced. The map gives a county-level representation of the likelihood of dying as the result of natural events such as floods, earthquakes or extreme weather.
...
Hazard mortality is most prominent in the South, where most people were killed by various severe weather hazards and tornadoes. Other areas of elevated risk are the northern Great Plains Region where heat and drought were the biggest killers and in the mountain west with winter weather and flooding deaths. The south central US is…
razib | December 16, 2008A Sale of Two Doorstops:
Well, that much is correct. I am thinking that this is what somewhat derivative fantasies patterned on George Martin rather than Tolkien are likely to look like (Acacia: Game of Thrones :: Sword of Shannara : Lord of the Rings). More political intrigue, a darker moral world with many shades of grey, a grimmer arc of character development.
Acacia is not terrible, as far as these things go. But it sure could be a lot better than it is, and most of the problem comes down to the basics of the prose. And that in turn maybe comes down to a bad combination of missing…