There’s a video on YouTube about thinking skeptically, the Baloney Detection Kit. It’s sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Many of the comments are about whether science is an alternate religion, but there’s also a theme of denying climate change. What I find notable, though not surprising, is that deniers are using the Spam button [...]
Posts under ‘Science’
online discussion bites back researchers
William Cohen’s blog has a post about a long fascinating thread on a political blog that found out they were being analyzed by algorithms. The community investigates and some attempt to fight back by gathering and posting personal/private information on the researchers. I found comment #303 particularly interesting, Tae, let that be a lesson: Blogs [...]
A couple gripes articulated on News Mirror
I keep another blog called News Mirror where I write about what I read in the news. Today I got ticked off at bad science, maybe prompted by Saturday night entertainment at the iSLC conference this weekend. On bad scientific reporting and bad quantitative methods.
liberal brains “are more responsive to informational complexity.”
UPDATE: An excellent tear-down in Slate: Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid.. This is why I don’t blog much… because to say anything I can stick to takes more attention and mental energy than I have to spare for a blog. Sometimes that censor takes a break though. Human Nature is a great [...]
Education SIGs
I just volunteered to review papers in 2008 for several divisions and SIGs of AERA, the American Educational Research Association. It’s a very long list (12 divisions, 3 committees, and 160 SIGs). Below are the SIGs that grabbed my attention.
Women in Computing
These two blurbs appeared in the same issue of ACM Technews (March 21, 2007)… Girls Ask Alice for Programming Skills eWeek (03/19/07) Taft, Darryl K. A program called Alice, originally conceived by Carnegie Mellon’s Stage 3 Research lab, has proved effective in getting young women excited about computer programming. Alice allows those who do not [...]
Why Mobile Phones are Annoying
This study controlled for loudness and ringtones, but commuters still found mobile phones more annoying. I suspect it’s partly due to prejudice, but an interesting hypothesis is raised: Unfortunately, Monk and his colleagues don’t provide the final answer; more research is called for. But the problem seems to be that people pay more attention when [...]
Fishfart Telecomm
“Scientists” have “linked a mysterious, underwater farting sound to bubbles coming out of a herring’s anus.” They call it Fast Repetitive Tick (FRT) and hypothesize that it’s how shoals keep together after dark. You know you wanna hear it. Full article from New Scientist. So be careful when you fart in the ocean; you may [...]
Oldest human custom
Quick, what’s the oldest human custom? Picking your teeth. I said custom, not profession. New Scientist: Grass stalks fit bill for earliest toothpicks
