Science & Society

Academia is notoriously resistant to change, which to some extent is a good thing. It was therefore no surprise that when Wikipedia became a phenomenon most academics scoffed at it as a passing fad, fatally flawed by its very core idea: anybody, and I mean anybody, can become a Wiki author and post new entries or edit existing ones. Surely, this will inevitably lead to chaos and complete unreliability, the critics said. But a few years ago a study of a sample of entries compared the accuracy of Wikipedia with that of the unquestionably prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica, and Wikipedia…

With sexual activity among adolescents in the United States resulting in over 750,000 teenage pregnancies each year and reports of up to 25 percent of all female adolescents in the US having sexually transmitted infections, researchers and public health officials are looking for those factors that might increase sexual activity in teens. In an article published in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers say that teenagers who preferred popular songs with degrading sexual references were more likely to engage in intercourse or in pre-coital activities.…

It is every geek’s dream to join a think tank and thereby rule the world with nifty numbers and influential ideas—for no think tank is completely without agenda. John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis (not to be confused with the Emmy-winning actor of the same name, most known for his role as the beer-swilling husband on the TV series Roseanne) even-handedly describes the difference in approach of first-rate liberal versus conservative think tanks, saying, for example, “The Brookings Institution is more likely to investigate unmet needs and ask what governmental programs…

Do sexy images sell products?  Like anything in marketing, it depends on if it works, says a new study in Journal of Consumer Research, but the common belief is that it doesn't work all that great for women.   The researchers say there may be ways to do it that can attract customers of both sexes. In today's cluttered advertising space, marketers use increasingly radical images that include nudity and sexual language. Authors Darren W. Dahl (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), Jaideep Sengupta (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), and Kathleen D. Vohs (University…

A new study says that kids who are allowed to watch R-rated movies are much more likely to believe it's easy to get a cigarette than those who aren't allowed to watch such films.  The researchers found that parental permission to watch R-rated movies was one of the strongest predictors of the perception that cigarettes are available, about as strong as having friends that smoked. If allowed to watch R-rated films, nonsmokers were almost twice as likely, and smokers were almost three times as likely to say it would be easy for them to get cigarettes.  The researchers looked at data…

Last night, I watched on BBC Television Natural World, 2008-2009 - 14. A Farm for the Future in which Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key. With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel,…

Can you connect the dots? Playboy playmates, Barbie, and Wired Magazine. Give up? Wired featured a charticle in the February issue on the BMI of Playmates, starting back in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe to the recent January 2009 cover girl, versus those of the average woman. No surprise, the bunnies are trending toward Barbie (who turns 50 this year), while the average woman is slowly crawling up the BMI scale. BMI, or body mass index, is a a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Playmate BMI data taken from Wired; average women BMIs verified from 2004 CDC article, using data from…

Time to put New York Times’ columnist Stanley Fish in his place, again. Fish is a rather interesting kind of animal: an academic through and through (he is, after all a professor of law at Florida International University and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and before that has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University), who nevertheless relishes harsh criticism of academia. I have taken him to task before for his comments on the “new atheism” and for his unbounded enthusiasm for…

Last night at two in the morning I woke to find someone had grafted a zombie arm to my left shoulder. I commanded it to move—no response. I jabbed it with my right hand—no response. I threw it against the wall—no response. Would this limb remain forever zombific? Medical literature is conflicted. The current guidelines for tourniquet use suggest a one-hour maximum for restricted blood flow to upper extremities and a two-hour maximum for lower extremities, but also admit that the onset and degree of tissue death (necrosis) varies according to patient age and physical condition. Past these…

Want to know if your discipline is in over-hype freefall?   Look at all the empty seats in your session.   For "The Science of Kissing" session I talked about yesterday it was standing room only, even if most people there wondered how much of it was just made up, but at the "High Energy Physics: From The Tevatron To The Large Hadron Collider" session there were plenty of open seats. Why?  Well, in June 2007 Lyn Evans said about the already perpetually late LHC: “The low-energy run at the end of this year was extremely tight due to a number of small delays, but the inner triplet…