Science & Society

Today, 12 April 2011, is “Equal-Pay Day” in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago. Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t just take any man and any woman and make that comparison. The figure that’s used for this is the median income: take all the men’s annual salaries, list them in order of lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. Do the same for women’s salaries.…

On March 14, I became aware of the CDC’s consideration of adding a wandering code to the ICD-9-CM in relation to autism and other developmental disabilities. ASAN, an organization created and headed by Ari Ne’eman, created a petition calling for people to speak out against the wandering code. I deconstructed the petition and began to investigate the likelihood of a wandering code doing what ASAN insisted it would: “hundreds of thousands of children" would get this diagnosis, nor that "school districts and residential facilities" would stick these labels on individuals in order to "…

How much does science cost-- and how much does it cost to turn science off?  I know science can be done cheaply.  After all, you're listening to a guy who is building a satellite in his basement, for fun.  Yet while the satellite is paid for, even I'm hitting costs for the science part-- the ability to do something useful with the hardware once it's up.  In fact (shameless plug time) I've launched a Kickstarter fund drive where you can get cool Project Calliope space memorabilia for the next month only-- visit it!  Pass this link around through facebook, twitter, your…

A solid month of almost daily “there is no problem but today we have big progress on it” is near, and a post on this record was planned to come in a few days time, but today my irony meter exploded, a lowly height has clearly been already reached. Greg Laden has covered it already, and his take is similar: Welcome to the "I'm starting to get cynical" edition. Yes, this is pretty much what I thought about the news today, too; how can you not get cynical. Anybody with a little wit about them knew since the first few days that the Fukushima disaster is going to be at least another Chernobyl…

Last weekend, Dynamic Patterns Research attended a virtual presentation in Second Life. It wasn't an imaginary talk, but actually a very real discussion that included George Djorgovski, a top astrophysics from Caltech and the popular science writer from MSNBC, Alan Boyle. It was virtual in the sense that all attendees only had to travel to the closest computer connected to the Internet, log on to their Second Life account, virtually sit in the user-generated, 3D world, and listen and ask questions just as one might do when attending an "old-school" open…

I've just come across a fabulous tune from Newfoundland that captures perfectly the chaos of jigging (fishing with special lures) for squid: Holy smoke! What a scuffle! All hands are excited. 'Tis a wonder to me that there's nobody drowned. There's confusion, a bustle, a wonderful hustle, They're all jiggin' squids on the squid-jiggin' ground. It's called "The Squid-Jiggin' Ground" and, just a few days ago, it was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, an event which brought it to my attention for the first time. (I think I'm a little behind the curve on this one, as the Wiggles…

LONDON, April 5, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- At The Times' Africa CEO Summit on Tuesday 22 March 2011, Brian Menell, Chairman of Kemet Global Ltd., presented to the Natural Resources Session his views on the challenges posed by the increase in "resource nationalism" which is building momentum across the African continent. Brian Menell identified two dominant trends that are transforming the African mining investment landscape. The first is the trend away from the history of African mining investment being polarised between big global companies building mega projects on the one hand, and short term…

LUCERNE, Switzerland, March 30, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- -- EF Education First's English Proficiency Index reveals wide gaps in English skills across the world -- EF Education First, the world leader in international education, today unveiled the first comprehensive index ranking the proficiency of English among a broad population in 44 countries and territories around the world where English is not the native language. The EF English Proficiency Index (EF EPI) is the first index that compares the English ability of adults in different countries. The index uses a unique set of test data (see…

RMS Titanic - Lessons From History Titanic 100 Festival Belfast's most famous creation, Titanic, will be commemorated in an extended annual festival from 31 March - 31 May 2011, which will include key dates of the ship's build.http://www.belfastcity.gov.uk/titanic/ It is unlikely that anybody involved in the design, construction and operation of RMS Titanic ever claimed that she was unsinkable.  But the rumor persists that the claim was made. The Titanic was never designed to be unsinkable: she was designed to stay afloat long enough to transfer her passengers and crew to another ship…

I am sure there is nobody who would disagree when I say that the Japanese earthquake and tsunami were devastating disasters which have caused untold misery for hundreds of thousands of people and will have profound effects on the lives of millions more, but for a small group of 14 year olds who were sat nearly 6,000 miles away in a science lab it was the most exciting thing in the world. It is very rare that a major natural disaster occurs at exactly the same time that you begin teaching a class about that particular phenomenon, but when it does, as it did with my year 10 GCSE science…