Science & Society

While criminals will get guns illegally, and people who use guns to commit suicide may not be deterred by anything, people who are already prone to violence would be deterred from homicide by gun law changes, according to a new article which argues that federal and state laws should include people who abuse their partners regardless of whether they are married to them or not. And findings of abuse should be grounds for not being allowed access to guns.  The authors analyzed data extracted from the North Carolina Violent Death Reporting System between 2004 to 2013. As the state-wide…

These channels specialize in uploading evidence of 'Nibiru', a modern myth, a planet that supposedly is about to hit Earth or fly past, always in the near future. This will seem absurd to you if you have a decent scientific background, but these people do not. They missed out on astronomy or science at school and some are very young. Some teenagers as young as 13, the minimum age for Facebook are in a perpetual panic over these videos, and we hear from their parents of even younger children who got terrified by these videos, sometimes as young as 8 years old. Steve Olsen just revealed to…

Academics direly need objective, meaningful metrics to judge the impact their publications have on their field of expertise. Nowadays any regular Joe will be able to show many authored papers in their CV, and it will be impossible to objectively assess the relative merits of each and every one of them, if you are trying to rank Joe in a list of candidates for tenure, or just a research job at a University. "So let's appeal to the number of citations that those papers get!" has been the general feeling on the matter. Of course! Scientific articles that pass by unnoticed should not count;…

Transgender activism must not prevent people from using their common everyday senses to tell who is who within reason.   We now live in a world where someone can insist that they are a transgender woman with their ID changed.  Yet insist that if any image of them is used it should be a very, rather, unflattering one for any woman.    Clearly self ID in the absence of concrete and substantial measures to live the life of the identified gender is meaningless.  At the same time a biological definition isn't fool proof either.  DNA, chromosomes, and even…

This is another of my posts to help victims of fake doomsdays. For the last three weeks we've had constant PM's and comments on Doomsday Debunked as a result of a viral hoax that pranked probably hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Many of them are young children still at school who came across it on social media, on twitter, Facebook, reddit or YouTube, or as a result of the sensationalist press. There was a story about it in the Daily Express taken up by others, including a story in Fox News, publicizing these tweets about an alien invasion on 18th April.  Perhaps you are one of…

This is going viral on Facebook and scaring thousands of people, many panic attacks, some suicidal. This is another of my Doomsday Debunked posts to help these vulnerable people, many of them young children, still at school, who read about this on their mobile devices. Ever since March 14th I've spent hours every day reassuring very scared and panicking people that the MH 370 flight recorder did not send a voice mail message to a random twitter user warning us of an alien invasion on 18th April. Honestly‽ This is a piling heap of stinking horse dung that attracts trolls like flies and beetles…

I start with Bio-Evo (~580 words) although the Phil/Evo aspects (~890 words) are more fundamental. The latter are likely too difficult for most – but I encourage you to try - the issue of “holocaust denial” makes it at least entertaining.   Among the great apes, slavery is natural in all the races of the human (H). We should not be surprised about our personal slave behavior, as it comes natural. This co-evolution, or denied “back-reaction” of environment on the sub-systems is a general mechanism, consistently producing the denial of it, for example similar with rape:   Especially…

If you read corporate media journalism articles about epidemiology in the United States, you are not wrong for distrusting science more than ever. Using nothing more than statistics, every week some new trace chemical is an "endocrine disruptor", strawberries are bad for you (unless they're organic) and cell phones are causing cancer. It's nonsense, of course, but that is what statistics can do. As Dr. Stan Young, nationally renowned statistics expert and member of the American Council on Science and Health Board of Scientific Advisors notes in his talks, if you flip a coin 61 times you…

Nobody who ran this story even bothered to glance at a sky chart. The false claim is that the sun, moon and Jupiter will all be in Virgo on April 23. So what you might say? Well the end of the world apparently?! But actually none of them will be in that constellation, not only that, no other planet will be passing "in" Virgo on that date either. It’s a good way of locating some of the news sources that have no systems in place to filter out fake doomsdays.  They just went copy / paste / publish They copied the details of the story over from the red top tabloids trash newspapers…

March For Science, an offshoot of Women's March, gave itself a positive name in 2017 but its motivations were not about science at all. It was about social authoritarianism and promoting a political agenda. And at the top of that agenda was being anti-Trump in much the same way the same groups eight and 12 and 16 years earlier were ant-Bush. But things may be different in 2018. A lot of the more culturally militant people have quit or been (ironically) marginalized because the science community sees the real opportunity for gain - if they can apply pressure while also being part of…