Science & Society

UK Ban On Explosives Detector Exports The ADE 651 is a lump of plastic with a wobbly telescopic antenna attached.  It is claimed by its manufacturers to be able to detect many things and substances at long ranges.  The US Government says that during tests on a similar device it failed to detect a truck carrying a tonne of TNT when it drove up behind the operator. Source: TimesOnLine The American magician James Randi has condemned the device as a “blatant fraud” and offered $1 million if the manufacturer, ATSC,  can prove that it works.  ATSC has declined.  Now, it…

Science : It's More Than Just Words Science, like law and many another discipline is widely noted for its jargon.  I love jargon because I love language.  I love language because I was blessed with parents who loved language.  I came to love science through being taught its experimental and investigative methods at school, overlaid on a strong foundation of inquisitiveness built at home.  Through studying the science of linguistics I came to understand that language is a common thread in all human endeavors.  To understand any branch of human endeavor, one must…

Based on a survey of UK science journalists and 52 in-depth interviews with specialist reporters and senior editors in the national news media, researchers from the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies say that specialist science news reporting in the UK is in relatively good health, but also warn that a wider crisis in journalism poses a serious threat to the quality and independence of science reporting. According to the research, between 1989 and 2005 there was an unprecedented rise in the numbers of science journalists in the UK national news media and there is a…

Malnutrition higher in children born to child brides - Infants born to child brides in India (married before the age of 18) have a higher risk of malnutrition than children born to older mothers, according to research published on bmj.com today.  However, low birth weight and childhood mortality are not significantly linked with the age of the mother, concludes the research, and the child's malnutrition was not related to the mother's body mass index. This article is another example of attempting to establish causal relationships when there are virtually none.  The link between "…

As expected, this last round of information that corrected an error regarding the demise of the Himalayan Glaciers is now being touted as the latest evidence of the lies surrounding global warming.  Of course, the global warming "deniers" want to use this as evidence of deception, instead of acknowledging it as an error. Instead of considering that it is the publication of such corrections which demonstrates how science works to resolve its mistakes and to validate its data, the global warming "deniers" just want to continue on their way with no more evidence than their beliefs. In this…

At the start of every work day, I browse a short list of online resources to get a fresh sample of the happenings and themes active around my universe (meaning my particular, teeny-tiny subset of the Universe). I like to begin with a new "gist" of everything, from my peculiar perspective. For fun, I am publishing the short list of web favorites I check daily to take a quick reading of the state of everything, with apologies to anyone who finds this collection old news. I have noticed that one persons "obvious" can be the next person's "oblivious." Today's suggestions appear under this web-…

I'm up in Ann Arbor, doing a little mathematical modeling of gene regulation here at the U. of Michigan. On my way to find some Chinese food, I stumbled upon an amazing book store called Dawn Treader. Always in quest of finding old paperbacks on my list of post-apocalyptic sci-fi (I've been intending to write more about a little science and post-apocalyptic fiction project I've been working on; unfortunately my days are limited to 24 hours), I went in and found a treasure trove of sci-fi, especially from the 30's-70's. Here's my haul, at $2-3 a piece: When Worlds Collide - Philip Wylie…

Recently, I came across an article in “The Times”, “Why non-scientists are a pain in the arts” by Ben Miller, presumably the physicist turned comedian, going back to his science roots, which explains a lot. The title of the piece derives from an art graduate who thinks the moon landings were a fake. After berating the media for being arts dominated Miller goes on to write:  “This is how we end up in the ludicrous situation we find ourselves in with the Large Hadron Collider. Ten thousand of the world’s top scientists spend 20 years building the…

Jeffrey Shallit takes down creationist nonsense about information theory in Stephen Meyer's latest creationist offering, Signature in the Cell: In Signature in the Cell, Meyer talks about three different kinds of information: Shannon information, Kolmogorov information, and a third kind that has been invented by ID creationists and has no coherent definition. I'll call the third kind "creationist information"... Creationist information, as discussed by Meyer, is an incoherent mess. One version of it has been introduced by William Dembski, and criticized in detail by Mark Perakh, Richard Wein…

And why they make a lot of money, according to The Economist: Although you might expect people who seek out obscure products to derive more pleasure from their discoveries than those who simply trudge off to see the occasional blockbuster, the opposite is true. Tom Tan and Serguei Netessine of Wharton Business School have analysed reviews on Netflix, a popular American outfit that dispatches DVDs by post and asks subscribers to rate the films they have rented. They find that blockbusters get better ratings from the people who have watched them than more obscure ones do. Even the critically…