to give space for expression after a fight comes to a dead end and no one can prove that they’re right, to say ‘i told you so’ or ‘i was wrong’, and most importantly, to learn new things and dispel old myths. it’s going to be conflict resolution at its best.
i forgot to upload this into the slideshow.
The Guardian has a column called Bad Science! And the author, Ben Goldacre, has a Bad Science blog! Not only is poorly executed and analyzed science criticized, poor science reporting is taken to task. I totally want Goldacre’s job if I don’t get into grad school.
Does this mean the Guardian will no longer publish stories like “Emails ‘pose threat to IQ’“? The story was previously reported in this blog as “communication technologies no longer bigger threat to IQ than marijuana.” (I just fixed a link there so you can actually read the story, btw.)
The revealing photodocumentary of a mad scientist’s lab. Play the slide show fast at first so that you can see a “video” of the squid attacking! (Go to the speed on the upper right hand corner and drag it all the way to the left.)
So said John Steinbeck (via Gilly via Susan, wording confirmed using Google Print).
By now, everyone knows that researchers in Japan were able to record images of a GIANT squid (Architeuthis).
In response, I traveled to Monterey, CA to interview the acclaimed squid researcher William Gilly. He studies Humboldt (JUMBO) squid, which look like this:
And I was scooped by Science Magazine:
“We are only left with a glimpse of the monster, and more questions than before,” such as which aspects of the apparatus actually attracted the squid, says William Gilly, a marine biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Still, he says, the video provides “far more than what was known previously, which was zero.”
Turns out that the Science freelancer used this new fangled email process instead of getting stuck in traffic because of an unexplained fire on Highway 101 near Gilroy.
Over dogs and wine, in celebration of the approval of my degrees, the details of the story were revealed:
(1) Really cool, previously all we knew was based on dead GIANT squid washing to shore.
(2) Extra cool because the researchers were able to see something with a relatively cheap, low tech rig, where others have failed with fancy-schmancy equipment.
(3) The ‘video’ is actually just a series of images.
(4) Appears the rig was successful once in the last year.
(5) At 8m, the GIANT squid is about the same size as a large JUMBO squid (which are, population-wise, smaller).
A case study in scientific journalism. Complete story at the Language Log.
(by way of Slashdot.)
New Scientist just posted a brief summary of research published in Science that suggests that two gene variants implicated in brain development evolved over the past several thousand years. Reading the article, I thought to myself, this is pretty cool because the conventional wisdom is that over the past couple thousand years, there have been few new gene variants in humans. Then I read:
What is more, not everyone possesses the new gene variants, potentially inflaming an already controversial debate about whether brains of different groups of people function differently.
“Whatever advantage these genes give, some groups have it and some don’t. This has to be the worst nightmare for people who believe strongly there are no differences in brain function between groups,” says anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, US.
No differences in brain function between groups? Are there folks who really believe that?
Flashback to January when Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard and known liberal-baiter, spoke on the underrepresentation of women in engineering and the sciences and suggested that there may be reasons for that underrepresentation - social and biological differences, specifically. Controversy galore.
As Summers’ tone was intended to provoke, the way he brought up the biological differences between men and women was heard by some of the listeners as suggesting that women do not have the same natural ability for science.
Research will (and in many cases does already) show that the majority if not all higher brain functions are dependent on both “nuture” and “nature” and we each start with a mixed bag of genes. The result is that we are all individuals and process information in different ways. The fierce emotion coming from those who “believe strongly there are no differences in brain function between groups” is energy that would be better spent creating a society in which:
(1) Diversity is accepted.
(2) Education teaches to the different in the ways students process information/learn/express themselves.
(3) Science education is improved.
(4) Popular science writing is improved.
In other politics of science news - Leon Kass has stepped down as chair of the President’s Committee on Bioethics.
