Images of the future from history.
Evolutionary psychologists on the adaptiveness of homophobia: what could possibly go wrong?
Documentary film maker Errol Morris has a series of blog posts this week on his interactions with and thoughts about Thomas Kuhn.
Science journalists Jamie Hansen and Julia James experiment with “real -time science reporting“.
Science communication in Kenya: is there too little science to communicate?
In this interview, ninety two year old distinguished philosopher Mario Bunge from McGill University talks about his long career and his philosophy of science.
Part 1:
James Bond
A fascinating little piece on spies and naturalists from the New York Times.
On dictators and the Internet from the Wall Street Journal.
The upcoming issue of Scientific American is devoted to the mind, and features a number of articles that concern technology.
A snapshot of the current Egyptian collective consciousness, as seen on Twitter, on Computational History.
Will Thomas writes thoughts on expertise and the state on Ether Wave Propaganda.
Japan has abandoned its annual Antarctic whale hunt before the end of the season because of “repeated harassment” by US activists, Sky News reports.
Matthew C. Nisbet reports from the AAAS Annual meeting on Age of Engagement.
Paul Newall blogs on “Astrology and its problems: Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend“.
RealClimate describes how an idea originating in a blog post resulted in a scientific paper.
Notre Dame philosopher of science Professor Ernan McMullin has died at the age of 86. McMullin had made many contributions to the philosophy of science, including questions concerning the social dimensions of science.
Pharmaceutical company Pfizer has announced that it is to close its drug-development laboratory in Sandwich, Kent, and fire most of its 2,400 staff. On natureNews, columnist Colin Macilwain argues that the Pharmaceutical industry has not delivered its promise to create better drugs and more jobs. He calls regulators to resist the industry pressure and to loosen patent laws and ease up the free flow of research information.
A recent clip from the successful sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which follows the life of a group of physicists. Not only is it funny by itself, it also reveals that for practicing scientists, apparently, a conference panel on “Science and Society” is exactly the right place to randomly talk about stuff and things.
Alice Bell, blogging for The Guardian, argues that “Sexual discrimination in science may be institutional“.
Is there a liberal bias in social psychology?
NASA plans to investigate Europa for signs of life, in blatant disregard of HAL’s warning.
Does science get more credit than it deserves? Philosopher Susan Haack thinks that it does. In a talk entitled “Six Signs of Scientism” she has recently given at the Rotman School of Philosophy, the University of Western Ontario, she identifies six ways in which science is given too much credence and for the wrong reasons in areas such as law and policy. She explains why, in her view, the question of demarcation between science and non-science is the wrong question to pose, and what role science and scientists should play in public debates.
Podcasts of the talks from the conference held at Cardiff University on under-represented groups in philosophy are freely available to listen and download here.
Scientists burst out singing on YouTube. Symphony of Science is a new Internet project which takes bits from popular scientific lectures and makes them into video clips, in which the original presenters sing their lectures. The first clip is composed of bits from Carl Sagan‘s A Glorious Dawn. The final results of this project, are… well, judge for yourself.
A new study published by the British Medical Journal challenges the existing recommendation to exclusivity breastfeed babies for their first six months. A post on Feminist Philosophers comments on that: “Did we make you feel horribly guilty and tell you that you were ruining your child’s life if you didn’t exclusively breastfeed for six months? Oops. Sorry about that … Come on, folks, how about a bit of epistemic humility in discussing these issues? Nah, that would involve complexity and we all know mothers’ brains can’t cope with that”.
Minneapolis astronomy instructor Parke Kunkle made a splash this week after reminding the astrologically inclined that Earth’s “wobble” has shifted the zodiac signs over the last two thousand years. Turns out yesterday wasn’t the dawn of Aquarius after all.
Aaron Sidney Wright, a fellow historian and philosopher of science, provides a clear philosophical summary of Jonah Lehrer’s insightful article on the decline effect, noted in a previous Weekly Roundup. Certainty and the internal/external inevitabilities of bias present serious problems for those that “want to believe in the results of science”.
פיזיקאים, אסטרונומים ומדענים אחרים מוצאים את עצמם בתוך שירים על מדע, חלל והחיים
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| << מה ההבדל בין תימני לרוסי?
פרוייקט מוזיקלי אינטרנטי בשם Symphony of Science לוקח קטעים מתוכניות והרצאות מדעיות והופך אותם לשירים מקוריים עם וידאו מרהיב. הקליפ הראשון בפרוייקט, A Glorious Dawn, מורכב מקטעים מתוכנית המדע ש |
A report conducted by the LSE and private healthcare firm Bupa questioned more than 12,000 people from 12 countries and found that 81 percent of those with Internet access use it to search for medical advice, but only a quarter of them check where their online advice has come from. Another study done by researchers at the Department of Pediatrics at Nottingham University Hospitals in Britain looked into 500 websites and found only 39 percent provided the correct information to a question about common childhood ailments. While these studies raise concerns about the accuracy of medical information on the Internet and public reliance on it, it is also worthwhile, in our opinion, to ask who determines what the right answers are.
Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. Thirty-eight percent believe God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years from less advanced life forms, while 16%, up slightly from years past, believe humans developed over millions of years, without God’s involvement, Gallup survey reveals.
Historian of science Will Thomas writes a sketch of the history of agricultural research and education in the UK on Ether Wave Propaganda.
Christine Rosen reviews a forthcoming book entitled Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future. In the book, 150 authors, including scientists, philosophers and artists, write on the way the Internet affects human thought.
U.S. officials have decided to close down the Tevatron particle accelerator as originally planned, and not to extend extra funding of $35 million to prolong its operation for three more years, in which American physicists hoped it could beat the CERN Large Hadron Collider in the race for finding the Higgs boson, Nature News reports.
New philosophy podcasts on Philosophy Bites. Martha Nussbaum talks about the value and importance of the humanities, and Philip Pettit talks about group agency – how groups can act, believe, and held responsible by others.
Geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer, who is the director of the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University, and one of the authors of the latest IPCC report, gave a talk at the American Geographical Union meeting about the prospects and challenges that scientists who want to engage with public issues relating to their research face.
New Scientist discusses 2010′s “top ten” technological innovations, and Guide to Online Schools ranks top 50 philosophy podcasts.
Nature casts their predictions for scientific development in 2011. Here are last year’s predictions.
Debates over the current viability and effectiveness of the peer review process are not over, as The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a prominent social psychology journal, is set to publish a paper supporting the existence of ESP. Rebuttals that employ more nuanced Bayesian analyses have already been drafted and submitted to the same journal. Here is a link to a New York Times article covering this issue.
Pope Pope Benedict XVI announces that God was behind the big bang, and the universe was not created by chance. He said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.
