Science & Society

Literature scholars love to debate Shakespeare. Like 'the greatest baseball player of all time' everyone can have an opinion and they are all just as valid, if even a modicum of thought went into it.(1) He was real, he was not real, he was a fraud, he was the greatest writer of all time, he was a woman, you name it and someone in the humanities has argued for it.  He was Catholic? Catholics say so, at least after the fact, but that evidence is circumstantial, like everything else except his writing. It takes some suspension of disbelief and no small amount of cultural meandering to…

AirAsia 8501 - More Bodies Retrieved, More Data Released Detik News reports that there was some difficulty in relocating the fuselage.  Sidescan sonar was used and the fuselage was discovered "a few centimeters" from the last reported coordinates.  This highlights the difficulties faced by the divers: quite apart from the strong currents, visibility is very poor due to silt and sand stirred up by the weather and currents. Furthermore: parts of the plane tend to get buried by sand and silt. Detik News reports that the fuselage is upright but the bottom part appears to be gone,…

Let's be honest, review articles are popular because they are easier than studies. Studies can take months or years and require methodology, money and expertise. A review just means finding other papers and figuring out what the consensus is. Want to prove acupuncture works and that organic food is superior? Do a review. And if you really want to promote an ideology, do an unweighted random-effects meta-analysis and make sure to include some outlier results. Many reviews, outside cultural wars, are quite valuable. In medicine as in science, they can summarize research on a given topic and…

In an interview of wealthy Norwegian business elites, mothers talked freely about their everyday lives - and why being wealthy enough to not have to work is important to many of them.  Among the 13 families chronicled  by sociologist Helene Aarseth from the University of Oslo in Tidsskrift for kjønnsforskning (Journal of Gender Research), nine of the women were full-time mothers or had a small part-time job which did not interfere with their ability to be home with the children when they returned from school. Prior to leaving the workplace, almost all the wealthy mothers had a…

Look lively! Stokkete/Shutterstock By Clive Brown, University of Leeds After a very drawn out and fraught construction, the Philharmonie de Paris is finally open. The 2,400 seat concert hall was conceived with ambitious plans to democratize classical music, and is situated, in line with these aims, on the boundary between the city’s affluent center and its banlieues. Whether it will succeed in these ambitions remains to be seen. Classical music has always been the music of the educated classes, but today, despite the much more equal distribution of education in first world society, it is seen…

They're suspected al-Shabaab militants – but probably not ivory traders. UN, CC BY-NC-SA By Diogo Veríssimo, Georgia State University It is often said that if something is repeated often enough, it becomes accepted as true. This has certainly been the case for the link between terrorism and the poaching of elephants for the ivory trade. A wide range of public figures have repeated the claim that ivory plays a major role in bankrolling terrorist organizations in Africa. These include former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, UK foreign secretary William Hague and Kenya’s president Uhuru…

These semi-serious but mostly joking statements are based on my observations as a student and as a Adjunct Professor at community colleges.  Thinking about the initiative to give school through the associates degree for free brings this to mind.  First a word from the President of the United States of America.  For the technical almost outsourcing proof jobs he has in mind, STEM jobs that might not work out. The First Law:  Students who are not interested will remain uninterested and students who are interested will remain interested, and make progress, unless acted upon…

There is a gender gap in some fields of academia. Some are skewed heavily toward women and some are skewed heavily toward men, though some have too little variation to be meaningful. But why are there any gaps at all? Various explanations have been offered, from the bizarre - sexism among the liberals who dominate academia - to the more bizarre - the belief among those same academic leaders that women are less analytical than men. The most popular explanation is that women are the only gender that can give birth and after that they work less hours and that penalizes them in faculty and tenure…

Last week's terrorist attacks in Paris were religiously-based and they have brought to the fore an issue that France, and most of Europe, had chosen to ignore: determining how prevalent religious fundamentalism is. A new paper says that creating Muslim zones where outsiders were not allowed is not the problem, nor is Muslim hostility toward 'out groups', like non-Muslims, and the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office by the terrorists was not even attacking people who made fun of religion, or even western religion, it was instead an attack on the religious values of peace-loving Muslims,…

Can you dance like Robbie Williams? It would go down great in a lecture hall. Jonathan Brady/PA Archive By Justin O'Brien, Royal Holloway In his anthemic Let me entertain you, Robbie Williams urges his audience to “come and sing a different song”. University lecturers could take a lesson or two from Stoke-on-Trent’s favorite singer-songwriter. Edutainment, far from the pariah many in academia fear, could be one of the best ways of keeping the next generation of students engaged and interested. Attention deficit in the millennial generation is becoming increasingly significant, particularly…