Science & Society
Increasingly, science is failing to influence public policy. Facts, statistics and data appear insufficient to change highly politicized minds... and science has started scrutinizing why.
Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, has a new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don't Believe in Science, in which he describes how firmly some of our neighbors - even moderately well-educated ones - (and not just Republicans) - now cling to aphorisms, assertions and just-so stories in order to clutch a politically motivated…
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONSHow will human nature steer our nations over the coming decades? What are we evolved to do? The fundamental purpose of a living thing is to gather resources and reproduce. Some animals develop societies where the fundamental survival instinct of the individual is subsumed into the goal of protecting the social group. Human development of cities and defensive warfare addresses group survival under external threat. Our offensive warfare fundamentally addresses accumulation of resources required for survival. If you peel away all the layers of social rationalizations, at the…
DISEASEIn an October 17, 2005 New York Times Op-Ed article titled Recipe for Destruction, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy collaborated on the following article:
AFTER a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have
reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide.
Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird
flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on
how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services
published the full genome of the 1918…
vongehr |
It may be of interest for those outside of science and academia to get a closer look at what diverse scientists’ work environments are like. Some may be surprised about the drab conditions. Only few places look like the mad scientists’ secret laboratory in movies, although my previous lab was just like that (see below).
Here is my present work place at the National Laboratory for Solid State Microstructures, University of Nanjing, China. Most of the day, I am in front of a computer in My Office, which I sometimes convert into a standing desk deal; see Dumpster Diving For…
Back in August, an iPhone game called simply "Squids" charmed me with its adorable, somewhat-anatomically-plausible rendition of my favorite animal. Luckily for my productivity, however, I don't have an iPhone--I have a Nexus One.
Now, six months later, they've ported Squids to Android. And it's free. And everyone's still chirping about how awesome it is. According to Gamasutra,
Set in a colorful underwater kingdom, SQUIDS is a creative RPG with a humorous storyline, gorgeous cartoon artwork, and turn-based battles that pit a team of scrappy…
Hank |
If you are anything like me, and you had a chance to sit around with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, you wouldn't ask fanboy questions like 'will we ever understand the soul?' or 'how much should I make fun of evolutionary psychology surveys about sex?' you would instead lean in conspiratorially and ask, 'what's the best way to get out of a speeding ticket?'
That's what makes Garth Sundem's new book, Brain Trust (shipping March 6th - if you buy it through that link we get a nickel or something), so much fun. Garth is just like us. He asks the questions you either would want to…
Today Greenpeace issued the 52-page report "Lessons from Fukushima". In it the Japanese nuclear catastrophe is analyzed in detail, and its causes and consequences exposed. The report correctly focuses on a few crucial issues: the lack of accountability for the disastrous consequences of nuclear incidents, the lack of a correct approach to the potential risks involved in the production of nuclear energy, and the failure of proper emergency planning.
The document is very instructive to read. I found appalling the description of the many cover-ups of which TEPCO, the company running the…
I recently read two pieces in RealScience entitled "Cyberwar is already upon us" by John Arquilla and "Think again, Cyberwar" by Thomas Rid. While there are obviously differing views about what each perspective entails, I couldn't help but be struck by a few comments made by Rid in his piece.
"Indeed, there is no known cyberattack that has caused the loss of human life. No cyberoffense has ever injured a person or damaged a building. And if an act is not at least potentially violent, it's not an act of war. Separating war from physical violence makes it a metaphorical notion; it would…
Hank |
If if you're in media and tired old swine flu sounds too hammy to generate page views and bird flu does not make your audience cry fowl any more, there is good disease news - scientists may have found flu in bats. If bats can get a virus, why can't humans, in an anthropogenic, anthropocentric world?
Well, it isn't necessarily the flu in bats but it is genetic fragments of a flu virus. The precautionary principle says we'd better start vaccinating right now - if it's a slow news week because no singers have died and no white kids have been kidnapped, that is.
This isn't the first…
Hank |
Being in science media for any length of time, you will discover what Martin Robbins, a self-proclaimed liberal, called The Big White Elephant In The Room - partisan framing of science issues through a cultural and political world view. He referred to it as liberal bias, and he is a liberal, but not a self-loathing kind. He doesn't recognize it is not liberal bias that is the problem, it is progressives. Liberals can write articles talking about The Big White Elephant In The Room and worry that the lack of diversity in science media and science academia is harmful to those…