Culture
sheril | July 11, 2008Earlier this year, some in Sebastopol, California were very concerned over potential health hazards of wireless internet and halted a local company from providing public wifi access. (For details, visit O'Reilly). While I'm less nervous over electrical sensitivity, I can't help but wonder what residents would think about reports of a new microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people's heads. From this month's New Scientist:
The device - dubbed MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) - exploits the microwave audio effect, in which short microwave pulses rapidly heat…
razib | July 10, 2008I've posted on general scientific literacy broken down by demographic groups in the GSS. I've also pointed to data which suggested that the lower scientific literacy of church goers vis-a-vis non-church goers is an due mostly to the influence of Young Earth Creationism. Finally, I put up a post which suggested that Americans aren't that scientifically inept in the international context. So I thought I would repost the raw responses to various questions. Charts below the fold, but to explain the title, here's the difference between the 18-24 demographic and the over 65 demographic in terms…
razib | July 10, 2008I've already posted on GSS results on science knowledge. But what about the international context? Th working paper Civic Scientific Literacy in Europe and the United States has some interesting data which has international comparisons. Here's an interesting fact regarding "scientific literacy":
This confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates that all 32 of these items reflect a common factor. The uniformly high factor loadings suggest that many of these items are interchangeable and that would be possible to use a subset of these items if one needed a measure of civic scientific literacy…
razib | July 10, 2008This is a follow to the previous post focusing on which demographics know scientific facts. One of the major differences was between those who were very religious and those who were not, with more scientific literacy among the latter. Inductivist looks into the question that many have asked:
...I eliminated the three questions that touched on the question of creation or the age of the earth (i.e., the Big Bang, continental drift, and human evolution) and re-calculated scores with the remaining eight questions. Here are the results:
...
The Protestant mean goes up a few points when...when…
razib | July 8, 2008The always fascinating Inductivist takes a look at science comprehension of Americans via the GSS. Here's his methodology:
In 2006 the General Social Survey asked 437 respondents eleven basic science questions. The first one, for example, was whether the earth's center is hot. I gave each person one point for answering a question correctly, and then summed the scores. My next step was to convert these totals so they resemble IQ scores. I set the white mean at 100, and the standard deviation at 15. Here are some averages:
Since we know the standard deviation I decided that it might be…
razib | July 7, 2008Most of you who read this weblog know that one of my primary preoccupations is how to invest my marginal time in terms of reading to optimize whatever it is I want to optimize (i.e., to "know stuff"). Life is short. So I recently began reflecting on the choices I make in terms of reading "classics," and how great thinkers of the past are remembered. Euclid's Elements for example is still relevant today. Arguably the most successful textbook in the history of the world its usage is obviated by the integration of many of its insights into mathematics as a whole. I know many people who go…
razib | July 3, 2008Jonah pointed me to this artice, The '60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire, which chronicles the shift toward political moderation among the professoriate. That moderation seems to be less about changes in views toward the center of the American political distribution than it is a greater focus on career as opposed to striking a pose as a social revolutionary. As it happens, you can find the working paper which has most of the data which the article is based on, THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS OF AMERICAN PROFESSORS. Below the fold I've placed the most interesting graphs, where…
sheril | July 1, 2008What is it about that person? You know the one... You can't explain it, but when they're in the room, no one else matters. You light up and feel more alive. Try to think of something clever to say... a joke, a story, anything that might invoke a smile. Attraction.
'They Always Do' is a track about this force of nature. A jazzy melody by singer/songwriter Heath Brandon on his new CD 'Stand Clear of the Closing Doors'. About sixteen years ago, Heath and I played percussion together in the Suffern Jr. High School orchestra. His voice was much squeakier back then and he didn't know it…
sheril | June 24, 2008Real tribe. Not really lost.
Turns out, the photos were a hoax to call attention to the dangers of the logging industry.
The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles, 61, one of the handful of sertanistas - experts on indigenous tribes - working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, which is dedicated to searching out remote tribes and protecting them.
In his first interviews since the disclosure of the tribe's existence, Meirelles described how he found the group, detailed how they lived and how he planned the publicity to protect…
sheril | June 22, 2008The animals are difficult to see and the density of the populations of grass eaters is very low right now... it is the dry season.
~ Nicolas Devos, Biologist and Wildlife Photographer
My favorite wildlife photographer, Nicolas Devos, is back in South Africa. This morning I was delighted to open four incredible new photographs from the field... images of lions, meerkats, and this one which I chose to feature here at The Intersection. It captures an ephemeral moment at the water's edge leaving me nostalgic to return to the magnificent country I visited this week last year.
Head over to…
razib | June 20, 2008In short, liberal, yes, but godless, far less so. Religious Beliefs and Behavior of College Faculty:
Faculty are, however, not monolithic. There are divisions among faculty ranks. Science and math faculty are the least religious in belief and behavior. Business faculty are the most conservative and most religious. Humanities faculty, though the most politically liberal, are not less religious than other faculty and on some measures are more religious. Faculty, while less religious than the general population, are complex in their religiosity.
Am I the only one who has had the experience of a…
vhughes | June 16, 2008Last week, a bunch of sciblings wrote about a study from Purdue psychologists suggesting that high consumption of artificial sweeteners is linked to obesity. In the study—published in Behavioral Neuroscience in February—rats fed a sugar substitute gained significantly more weight than those fed regular glucose.
Not gonna lie: As someone who consumes those sweet yellow packets in high numbers, I was somewhat alarmed by these results. (Not that I've decreased my intake since, of course.)
Are y'all as addicted as I am?
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razib | June 15, 2008Every few years I post this map. Anyone have good explanations for some of the patterns? (e.g., what's going on around St. Louis and Milwaukee?)
razib | June 11, 2008Josh has a good overview of the wending through the legislature of a Creationist bill in Louisiana. The governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, who just turned 37, has made Creationist noises before. This is interesting because Jindal is a Roman Catholic, so he has no necessary religious rationale for his Creationism. Additionally, he has a degree in biology from Brown University. Fellow ScienceBlogger Mike happens to have gone through the same biology program as Jindal at the same time at Brown, and he makes it clear that Jindal's opinions do not emerge from a vacuum of information, Brown'…
vhughes | June 9, 2008Last week, the ScienceBloggers wrote about a new study in Nature in which scientists tracked the cellphone habits of 100,000 Europeans and found that people rarely strayed from familiar locations—their homes and workplaces.
It made me wonder....Are our readers homebodies, too?
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Want to know the results? We'll publish them exclusively in next week's ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap—the fun e-newsletter that brings you the top posts, quotes, photos and videos from the previous week on ScienceBlogs. (Click here to subscribe…
razib | June 8, 2008A long response by me at my other weblog to Alan Jacob's piece, Too Much Faith in Faith. A sample:
As they say, read the whole thing. Alan, as a Christian, place particular focus on the New Atheists who wish to leave at religion's feet all evil done it in its name but explain away as incidental all the good whose motivation was putatively supernatural. But he does note there are those such as Rodney Stark, an extremely pro-Christian sociologist, who would ascribe to religion all the good in the world while staying relatively silent on the evil enacted in the name of God (or, the usual…
razib | June 5, 2008Inductivist looked into the General Social Survey and found that the mean IQs of white college graduates has been dropping:
1960s 113.72
1970s 110.59
1980s 108.04
1990s 104.42
2000s 105.12
Remember that the popualtion mean is around 100, with a standard deviation of 15. That means that since the 1960s the college graduate has gone from being, on average, in the 17.5th percentile to the 37th percentile of the population! What's going on here? I think it has to be the fact to a great extent a college degree is now substitute for a high school diploma, the pool is getting larger and so of…
cmooney | June 5, 2008Maybe it's the bug I caught when I moved to LA. But increasingly, I've been thinking about how well science connects--or perhaps rather, fails to connect--to the entertainment industry.
It seems to me that there's evidence on both sides of this issue. Positives:
1. Hollywood made a science movie, An Inconvenient Truth, into a smash success that changed the global warming debate forever.
2. Many popular films and television shows--Grey's Anatomy, Lost, and CSI come to mind--have plotlines that are driven by science and technology.
3. There is certainly nothing virulently anti-science about…
cmooney | June 4, 2008I did my latest Science Progress column about last weekend's World Science Festival in New York, which I unfortunately could not attend, but which sounds like it was awesome. In my column, I simply had to rate the festival a success based upon how much of a splash it made, including in non-science media--places like the Colbert Report and ABC's Good Morning America.
Still, I think this coverage itself shows the dilemma of science today. For instance, although Good Morning America was very positive on the World Science Festival, something really struck me about how they summarized its purpose…
sheril | June 2, 2008It seems the previous post has inspired the call for a special dedication to our distinguished boy band-loving scibling over at Gene Expression. So it's time to sport your fanny pack and get those fluorescent Reebok pumps out of the closet! Yes Razib, just for you... the premiere of New Kids On The Block in 2008: