Science & Society

In today's world where far too many people already defer spaying/neutering of pets, we have an article that provides another rationalization for those people.  Apparently, we should be concerned about our pets experiencing increased anxiety levels and even depression as a result. I suppose we can ignore the fact that animals that are not spayed/neutered will experience higher risks for ovarian and testicular cancers. Equally, we can ignore the problems that are often accompanied by having sexually intact members of such species and the higher attendant behavioral risks that this often…

“The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations”, published in 2004, is a book by James Surowiecki. It discusses, often using anecdotes, that under certain conditions, crowds of people make better decisions than experts. In how far can we (mis)construe this as further proving the democratic doctrine? “The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's…

The observations of faster than light neutrinos have stirred up much debate, but the most important is not pointed out. Seen in a wider context, the affair sheds yet again light on the rapid decay of the academic science machinery, a social construct where the quest for truth has given way to career gaming as well as plain political and monetary interests.   In 2007, MINOS observed that neutrinos arrived faster than light over non-astronomical distances. That experiment carried a significance level of 1.8 standard deviations, which means in plain language: If this were a study on the…

Is your cell phone a known carcinogen? Do cell phones give you cancer?  Well, the precautionary principle contends unless you can prove cell phones can't give you cancer, then they are a concern.  Fortunately, the precautionary principle isn't overused by everyone (though when it is, the politically like-minded dismiss it as policy disagreement and not being anti-science) but any time you have an anti-science hotbed, it will get trotted out. Welcome to San Francisco, which makes Seattle look positively lucid in its quest to mollify every anti-science hippie contingent - except naked…

“The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstruction in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind” —David Hume In a few short weeks, it will once again be time for the Open Science Summit (yay!!), a yearly event which brings together researchers, life science professionals, students, and science enthusiasts to discuss the future of open scientific discovery, publication, and collaboration.   As many of you already know, I am a huge supporter of…

Bribery and corruption rise and fall with the level of collective feeling in a society, according to research by Pankaj Aggarwal, University of Toronto Scarborough professor of marketing in the Department of Management, and Nina Mazar, University of Toronto professor of marketing. Aggarwal and Mazar say that people in more collectivist cultures, where individuals have more communal belief and see themselves as interdependent with larger society, are more likely to offer bribes than people from more individualistic cultures where independence and freedom are more valued. Their work suggests…

Hard Times For Unscientific Blogging Pseudo-skeptic claims of Arctic ice recovery have been followed by further losses in the real world.  Evidence of global warming is accumulating to such an extent that the web's unscientific bloggers have to work really hard to find anything to write about.  Times are so hard that Anthony Watts was recently reduced to writing a very lengthy anacoluthon-style dust-speck-spotting article about how Al Gore didn't make a video in one take.  Horror of horrors!  And what are we to conclude from Watts' analysis?  The experiment portrayed…

Scientists want more children.  Seriously, that's not my headline, that's the conclusion reached by Ecklund and Lincoln back in August in the online PLos ONE journal.  Put simply, science as a career is not very kid-friendly, so older scientists feel regret over not having as many kids, and younger scientists make plans to leave science in favor of better work-life balance. I worked at one lab where (I was advised) you should only talk of children and home life behind closed doors, with other known parents.  I find it ridiculous that family is still seen as a liability.  I…

Question: Quick, what is the fastest way to make the term "false equivalence" appear? Answer: Contend that whatever side of the political spectrum the person you are talking to is on is more anti-science than the other side.  Or even equal. The Left is More Anti-Science than the Right  Ken Green, writing in The Enterprise Blog, recently endured this go-around when he claimed the left had its anti-science kooks too.   What was the response?   Well, the usual, like that PETA is not anti-science, they simply have 'moral' positions that disagree with science.  Huh???…

With scientific research becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, many researchers find themselves dealing with issues they are not prepared for. A good example of this is how biologists in several fields come to rely on computer programs, and are occasionally ‘forced’ to write their own programs. Vice versa, many computer scientists, interested in bioinformatics, need background information about the biological processes underlying their topic of interest. Luckily, the internet comes to the rescue. Web forums, mailing lists and online communities of scientists (for some examples of…