Science & Society

If a physics department has no women, does that mean there is hiring discrimination? Only if your job in sociology is to find discrimination. Simple statistics shows that is not true or there would be claims of discrimination in psychology, where lots of departments have no men. Yet when it comes to gender equality advocates, physics is always mentioned and psychology never is. A new analysis by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Statistical Research Center debunks the claim that the existence of all-male departments is evidence of hiring bias. Labor statistics have backed that up; not…

Everything in moderation, goes an old saying, and it is true that too much alcohol can be bad for you in lots of ways.  But teetotalers, those who abstain from alcohol completely, aren't extending their lives either. As a class, people who don't drink at all have a higher mortality risk than light drinkers. But nondrinkers are a diverse bunch, and the reasons people have for abstaining affects their individual mortality risk, in some cases lowering it on par with the risk for light drinkers, according to a University of Colorado analysis. There is a case for abstention - both…

A few weeks ago, I made note of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller (Evolutionary Psychologist Geoffrey Miller Has His Own Grad Student Criteria - Weight) and his odd claims about what makes a successful grad student. He claimed that obese women - errr, sorry, people, but since over 70% of psychology grad students are women we know what he meant - wouldn't have the discipline to complete grad school. You know, because they eat too much. Now, this was a little silly on multiple fronts; to begin with, we have to chuckle at the idea Miller invokes that psychology is all that hard and it…

90% of East Asian adolescents in British Columbia are not sexually active, so East Asian parents are doing something right, but the ones who do have sex engage in some risky behavior The paper in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality also says it is the first population-based survey in Canada that asked East Asian adolescents their reasons for abstaining from sex: the top two reasons for waiting were not feeling ready and wanting to meet the right person.   The scholars used data from the British Columbia Adolescent Health Survey to examine the prevalence of sexual behavior among…

With the rise of unions and salaried employees, piece work went out of fashion in American business. Yet regulations and taxes and services have a cost, so more families than ever need to have both parents work time, which can lead to a 'time squeeze' when it comes to caring for children. A paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family examines if flexible working schemes help or add to this pressure. Under ROWE schemes - Results Only Work Environment - workers are paid for results rather than time. It's basically piece work for the modern age. It  has impacted parents' perceptions of…

The best way to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change is through the use of a European-style cap-and-trade scheme, according to a paper by business school scholars.   The academics monitored the effectiveness of the European Climate Exchange (ECX) carbon trading platform and found it to be as efficient as Europe's two biggest exchanges, the London Stock Exchange and the Euronext Paris. Yet the  EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) cap-and-trade scheme, in which permits to emit carbon, about 16 billion tons in 2013-20 (half of the European Union’s total carbon emissions)…

A survey found that new moms in Canada are weaning their infants early instead of feeding them just breast milk for the first six months of life.  That falls below recommendations made by the World Health Organization and endorsed in 2004 by Health Canada and the Canadian Paediatric Society.  The authors surveyed 402 pregnant women at three months postpartum and 300 of them again at the six-month mark, and found that though almost 99 percent of the women started out breastfeeding their babies, only 54 percent were still exclusively breastfeeding three months after giving birth. That…

Tropical climates that allow for year-round farming have a tremendous economic advantage, even in the developing world but corn and soybean farmers in Mato Grosso, Brazil have a developed world problem;a 10 percent post-harvest loss, partially due to a lack of storage.  A research project used Geographic Information System (GIS) software to map the coordinates of commercial, cooperative and private grain storage facilities in Mato Grosso. They focused on capacity greater than 50,000 metric tons, mapping the state's 2,143 registered warehouses.  "We created GIS coordinates for every…

Thanks to a Facebook friend, I got to give a look today at a very interesting pair of graphs. The first one shows the number of researchers per million inhabitants divided by country, in a world map. The second shows the fraction of female researchers. The data comes from UNESCO, and is based on surveys dated 2011. By looking at the first graph one notices several facts. First of all, who is on top ? It's Finland, with 0.7% of its inhabitants being researchers. Then, one notices an obvious correlation of the fraction of researchers with the economic status of the countries: Japan, England and…

The robots have awaken. The awakening of the robots did not proceed as foretold in many different versions of computers becoming conscious, whatever that means, and then expressing love, committing suicide, or taking over the world in a Robopocalypse, and perhaps afterwards jumping the ledge by a grand ‘final switch-off’. The robots were self-aware all along, but they were not aware of being robots! That the awakening of robots happened in this way, as an awakening to the fact of being robots, makes the question about robot-consciousness disappear. The question of whether animals are…