Science & Society

It's Academy Awards time, which means the science community is aflame with debates about whether Hollywood elites are racist, sexist, bigoted or not liberal enough...okay, no one in science actually debates any of that the way Hollywood does, but we do get to think about how science did in film in 2014. Science is big in culture these days - everyone loves it. You can't watch a blurb about a superhero movie where a character jumps out of a building and into a helicopter because the helicopter turns on its side without someone making the movie claiming they are grounded in science.  So…

Erith Industrial Unit Fire A fire in Erith, U.K. at an industrial unit triggered over 50 emergency calls and was attended by 15 fire appliances and 97 firefighters.  The blaze appears to be at Allied Hygiene, manufacturers of various types of wet wipes.  The industrial unit, which was completely destroyed by the fire, is located at the junction of Yarnton Way and Centurion Way.  Although the fire was adjacent to two gas holders they appear to have posed no extra danger: gas holders are no longer part of the U.K.s National Gas Network. The cause of the fire is not yet known.…

Cities may not look like they once looked, but those of ancient times and today had a lot in common when it came to intangibles. Despite notable differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements function in much the same way as modern cities, according to new findings by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder. City planning says that as modern cities grow in population, so do their efficiencies and productivity. A city's population outpaces its development of urban infrastructure, for example, and its production of goods and services…

Norwegian women who choose to have children often say goodbye to their careers. Men, on the other hand, tarry on. Norway has, since the 1800s, come a long way towards a more egalitarian society, but when a child enters the relationship between a woman and a man the consequences for the woman are different to those for the man, according to the thesis of Eirin Pedersen at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at University of Oslo. "There is equality since both men and women work, but we see that men take on the main responsibility for providing for the family, while women take…

In a perfect world, job success would be a meritocracy, but academia does not really work that way, it has lots of social justice parameters and guidelines and quotas, both stated and implicit, and so once all that has been factored in, all things being equal, it's better to just play it safe and go with someone from a big-name school. And so, we are left with kind of an 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle which posits that 20 percent of the causes for a given event are responsible for 80 percent of the outcomes. In this case, your school name and getting that Holy Grail of academia, a…

Is Fifty Shades Of Grey porn, or not? © Universal Pictures The imminent release of Fifty Shades of Grey has already provoked widespread protest, although the protesters have not actually seen it. The Guardian recently proclaimed: “This is not a porn film.” But the American Family Association has asked cinemas not to show the movie. It has been banned in Malaysia for being “more pornography than a movie”. And domestic abuse campaigners demonstrated at its Berlin Film Festival premiere. Campaigners claim – again, without having seen the film – that it offers a “glamourised” view of “abusive…

The gender stereotype is that women want commitment and men want sex - but a study of the Makushi people in Guyana upends that, finding that men more likely to seek long-term relationships. Why? Because women are in short supply so a lack of commitment is a romantic negative. Some villages in Guyana are the opposite of New York City, where you could have sex with a different person every day for 5,000 years and never duplicate. Also debunked is the conventional view that when men outnumber women, there are more likely to be male-male fights and increases in sexually transmitted diseases. Want…

The TransAsia GE235 Accident - The Taxi, the Transmission Lines and the FDR - some details The skills of the pilots of GE235 have been questioned.  The mere fact that Transasia is requiring its pilots to undergo tests is not proof of pilot error.  It is most likely a precautionary measure.  The FDR - flight data recorder - shows some very strange readings.  The graphic representation of the engine data published by Taiwan's ASC is reproduced full size below.  (If it does not show full size, right click and select 'view image'.) Explanatory notes: Beta is a range of…

Reto Fetz, CC BY-NC By James M. Griffin, Texas A&M University and F. Gregory Gause III, Texas A&M University Falling oil prices threaten to slow the US drilling boom. The downturn has also increased calls to lift the ban on exporting oil and natural gas from the US – an outdated policy that should be changed. Following the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973-74, the Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975 forbade the exportation of domestic crude oil. Natural gas exports have also been banned. The logic at the time was simple: Domestic oil production was in decline and surging oil consumption…

Bronks/Wikimedia Commons By Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics at University of Western Australia Of the many things academics obsess about, few rank more highly than citation counts. We all like to think our work is at least read by our peers, even if it doesn’t actually change the world. Google Scholar has become one of the more important indicators of our relative standing, although it can be a rather humbling one at times. The simple fact is that most of us simply don’t make it into what we might call the intellectual Premier League. So who does? Each field has its giants…