Science & Society

Is Law A Science ? In a recent article The Science Of Law I asserted that law, or more properly jurisprudence, is a science.  The basis for that assertion was that both science and law are founded in the Baconian method. In this comment, A Bear In The Woods, said in rebuttal: I have to disagree that jurisprudence is a science. In what way would the study of law being any different than the study of astrology? For it to be science there would have to be something objective in the law that everyone could universally agree on, irrespective of culture. if that isn't possible then its just…

A ten-nation analysis of media systems and national political knowledge funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the United Kingdom found that women living in the world’s most advanced democracies and under the most progressive gender equality regimes still know less about politics than men. An unmistakable gender gap in political knowledge seems to be a global phenomenon, says  researcher Professor James Curran, Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre at University of London, and women know less about politics than men regardless of how advanced a…

One of the sillier arguments regarding gender inequality (and most of them regarding the developed world are pretty silly in 2013) is that Wikipedia, with anonymous editors of suspect credibility, is somehow sexist because fewer people self-identified as female on an internal survey. Now, it is obvious that there are fewer women writing it and reading it, just like it is obvious that Wikipedia is primarily populated by weird, militant goofballs. If you read their Science 2.0 entry, for example, it claims that Science 2.0 came into existence in 2008, as part of the Open Science movement, and…

There's a new weapon to fight poachers who kill elephants, hippos, rhinos and other wildlife - nuclear bombs.  By measuring radioactive carbon-14 deposited in tusks and teeth by open-air nuclear bomb tests, researchers can pinpoint the year an animal died, which discloses if the ivory was taken illegally.  The method uses the "bomb curve," which is a graph – shaped roughly like an inverted "V" – showing changes in carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere – and thus absorbed by plants and animals in the food chain. The carbon-14 was formed in the atmosphere by U.S. and Soviet…

Phone Hacking Scandal - Appeal Dismissed Rebekah Brooks, News International’s former chief executive,  Andy Coulson, former No. 10 spin doctor (Downing Street communications chief), and others have lost an appeal which attempted to redefine what is meant by the ordinary words which define  the unlawful interception of communications. They, or rather their lawyers, tried to persuade the Appeal Court that the legal and technical definitions concerning the transmission of telecommunications did not cover voicemails. The gist of their argument seems to be that it is quite legal to…

When it comes to disparities in gender among various, there are no limits to the hypotheses laid out to explain differences, usually in sync with the cultural agenda of the proponent. Engineering, for example, pays women more equally than any field in America but has far fewer women than environmentalist groups, which pay women about $.70 compared to men - yet engineering is criticized for having fewer women. Medical doctors have equal representation while the social sciences have fewer men and the hard sciences have fewer women. University of Washington psychologist Sapna Cheryan and…

This is an article I wrote for wikipedia to cover the diversity of published views on Mars Sample Return. Sadly it was deleted from wikipedia. So I present it here as background material for: Need For Caution For An Early Mars Sample Return - Opinion Piece The idea of a Mars sample return mission (MSR) is to return samples of rock, soil, dust, etc from Mars for study on Earth. Just about everyone involved in the debate agrees that  a MSR is well worth doing at some point. However the very thing that makes Mars so interesting can also give you pause for thought when you…

The Science of Law   Scattered throughout the pages of the history of the common law are many references to it being a science.  Science may be called the pursuit of fact by means of well-defined procedures.  Anyone who has ever visited any two courts of common law jurisprudence will have seen at first hand that their procedures inevitably differ somewhat.  The greatest difference will be found between English and American criminal courts.  Whereas in America the trial proper begins when the prosecutor addresses the jury, followed by the defence, in English Crown…

What happens if you are a Yogi living in Seattle (or Portland, or San Francisco - wherever progressive pseudoscience crackpots feel welcome and included) who discovers that 'proof' is more complicated than mumbo-jumbo on your mystical website? Navenna Shine, the founder and subject of the Living on Light experiment, got to show us. Because she had not discovered science, reason or even the fundamentals of biology in her many decades in this plane of existence she decided she could live on water and sunshine and be just fine.  And she set out to prove it. She's not alone. “Inediates” with…

Terrorism-induced smoking is a new explanatory factor that will keep public health academics from accepting that free choice happens - some people will do things that are bad for them.  A Weill Cornell Medical College public health study is stuck in pre-9/11 determinism too; the author concludes that the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks caused 1,000,000 former smokers to take up the noxious weed again - and maintain it. The analysis in Contemporary Economic Policy is distinct in that it is the first to examine terrorism-induced smoking in the United States and come up with net…