January 25, 2007
I Guess You'd Call Them "Poofs"?
It seems a researcher named Charles Roselli at Oregon Health & Science University has been conducting experiments to understand what makes sheep gay. This already sounds like a good idea. Apparently, it's drawn a lot of fire from certain circles, notably
Posted by tony at 10:13 AM | Comments (3)
July 10, 2006
Two Great Tastes ...
Good news: [t]wo studies [...] demonstrated that coffee drinking might protect against liver cirrhosis.
It's always nice when two health-wrongs make one health-not-as-wrong.
(Via The Register and Keats' Telescope.)
[Meanwhile, I apologize for the speed with which this has turned into a booze-blog. I'll work on finding more non-alcoholic material in the near future.]
Posted by todd at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)
May 31, 2006
You Mean there is Science that's not Art?
Ed Felten helpfully links to the second annual Art of Science exhibit at Princeton. My favorite is this electron microscope image of a Drosophila egg, followed by this painting, this poem, and this lichen. These thingies are pretty as well.
Posted by todd at 11:49 AM | Comments (3)
May 12, 2006
Comments are Back
I had the website named "tonguebutnodoor.net" in some config file. But the server was redirecting requests sent there to "www.tonguebutnodoor.net", and this difference blew some CGI script's mind. Awesome.
In order that this post not be a complete waste, I bring you this story. A Missouri school district let some Answers in Genesis creationist visit a bunch of schools and talk to students during their science classes. This generated an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which ended with this:
Last year, the percentage of Potosi seventh- and 10th-grade students who scored "proficient" or "advanced" in standardized science tests was below the state average. Perhaps instead of hearing about creationism, those students would be better off spending their science classes learning about science.That's ridiculous. The problem is obviously that there aren't enough questions about Genesis on the state's standardized tests.
Hat tip: Afarensis.
Posted by todd at 10:29 AM | Comments (2)
May 9, 2006
I Think We're Still Planning Kuhniana
In the meantime, John Hawks has a post on "surprise" as a factor in journal publication.
The study of nature does indeed seem to surprise us. The odds of finding in abstracts of scientific research papers a result or conclusion described as 'surprising', 'unexpected', or 'unusual' are an order of magnitude greater than in standard language and several times greater than in non-science academic abstracts. The word 'surprising' appears 12 times more frequently in the natural sciences than in standard English and 1.3 times more frequently than in social sciences, arts and humanities. The word 'unexpected' appears 39 times and 2.2 times more frequently in the natural sciences than, respectively, in standard English and in non-science academic writing.
Posted by todd at 9:06 AM | Comments (1)
May 4, 2006
Animal Testing, Human Trials, Evolution.
It's a few days old now, but I thought this piece at Carl Zimmer's site was really good.
In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug--a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia--appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man's limbs turned blue, while another's head swelled like balloons. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong disruptions to their immune systems.
How could such a devastating disaster come from a trial that followed all the rules, including tests on both mice and monkeys? According to a paper published today, the drug developers might have thought twice if they had known more about our evolutionary history.
Carl Zimmer, by the way, is awesome. I recently finished, and really enjoyed, this book of his.
Posted by todd at 8:45 AM | Comments (0)
April 5, 2006
Kuhniana! Coming Soon!
Due to a convergence of TBND contributors' reading lists, I've proposed we hold a seminar of sorts. In about three weeks, we will try to coordinate a series of posts on T.S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. With any luck, myself, Todd, Ruth, and Adrianne will all get involved, and anyone else with something to say (or a bone to pick) should feel free to contact us about writing a guest post on the topic. We'll aim for the 26th as a publication date, so by picking up the book now, anyone should be able to finish in time to take part in what promises to be a lively debate. While everything that might usefully be said about Kuhn's work has probably already appeared in print in the 44 years since it was first published, maybe we can add some new insights. And besides, when is it not fashionable to be seen reading Kuhn?
Posted by tony at 6:34 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2006
Baby Killin'
I'm probably the last person in the world to see this question posed. I'm always behind the curve. Anyway, in case I'm not, here it is:
On the pro side they had Alta Charo, professor of bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, and on the con side they trotted out Some Dude whose name I can't remember, [...] whose contention is that life begins at the moment of conception when sperm meets egg and having been thus blessed by the Divine Hand of the Creator it is henceforth entitled to the same protections as an adult human. [...] The ultimate conclusion is that Embryonic Stem Cell Research Is Wrong.The rest of the article (via Atrios) is about the disconnect between the stances of Right to Lifers on abortion and in vitro fertilizaiton, which apparently produces a number of unused embryos:
So Alta brings up the conundrum that's always guaranteed to set wingnut heads a-spinning and green pea soup spewing from their mouths, which is basically a riff on "if a fire breaks out in a fertility clinic, who do you save -- a Petri dish with five blastula or the two year-old child?"
[Fifteen percent] of all mothers in this country get a little help on the fertility front from science, and since that probably includes no small number of Iowa fundies looking to increase the flock of the faithful, she stops short of casting Joe and Sally Christian who just want to breed, breed breed into the fiery ovens of eternal damnation if they happen to brew up a few extra embryos they never intend to use along the way.That sure is some sentence, isn't it? Someone should donate a full stop to this person. Nonetheless, it's a good read.
Update: Also, South Dakota blows. Not that anyone needed more reasons not to move to Nowhere, but there it is.
Posted by todd at 9:49 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2006
Artificial Artificial Intelligence
I just learned about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which they call "artificial artificial intelligence." Programmers use an MTurk API, which pays people pennies to do "simple tasks that people do better than computers."
HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: "Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?" Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.Am I the only person whose first thought was, "This is just dying to be exploited by a sweatshop owner in a third world country"?
Just so you know, the best deal right now appears to be that you can be paid two cents to draw a sheep.
Posted by todd at 2:42 PM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2006
Everything Old is New Again
Last year, when Tongue, but No Door was lost for a while, most of our old posts had not yet made it into the Internet Archive. However, they seem to be creeping in, which is nice, because I have some updates for you.
First, you may remember my post about the unique sexual relationships of Bitch PhD. Nothing new to add to that discussion, but in case you missed it, I wanted to point out that Adrianne and Nick interviewed Dr. B for the third episode of Love & Radio.
Secondly, you almost certainly remember Monica's post about institutional sexism. Now (via Neurodudes) I bring you an interesting paper by Peter Lawrence on gender and academia.
The paper is the kind of thing that Lawrence Summers might have meant to say, if he weren't in all likelihood a douche. Discussion and extensive quoting from the paper follow, below the fold.
Tasty morsels include:
For example, among current student members of the British Psychological Society, there are 5,806 women to 945 men; and among graduate psychologists, 23,324 women to 8,592 men. Of those who practice as chartered psychologists, the ratio has fallen further (7,369 women to 4,402 men). Yet among Fellows of the Society, honoured largely for their research, there are 428 men to only 106 women!
The point being, there are jobs that women seem to choose more than men. However, they still don't have the positions of power within those fields. Lawrence argues that this not because of discrimination, but because the selection process for those positions favors the wrong traits.
There is good psychological evidence that aggression and lack of empathy are on average male characteristics, and we may agree with Baron-Cohen that for both sexes, “nastiness…. gets you higher socially, and gets you more control or power” [2,10,11]. Science should not be a military or a business operation, but nowadays it increasingly resembles one—for most, it is a vicious struggle to survive. In this struggle, men climb higher because they are on average more ruthless, and many women, as well as a gentle minority of men, shy away from competing with them [12]. And I think that our selection methods exacerbate this tendency.
He continues:
At present, in the competition for academic posts, we expect our candidates to go through a gruelling process of interview that demands self-confidence. We are impressed by bombast and self-advertising, especially if we don't know the field, and we may not notice annexation of credit from others, all of which on average are the preferred province of men. But we should also seek out able scientists who would care well for their groups, those who would mentor a distressed student and help her or him back into productive research. And if we did, we would choose more feminine women as well as more feminine men.
And, his conclusion:
I have argued that reducing the premium we give to aggression would, in several different ways, lead to more women in science and also to better science. Even so, in this Utopia, I think that far less than 50% of top physicists would be women (and far less than 50% of top professors of literature would be men). But I don't think that would matter—we would be making better use of the diverse qualities of people. Both women and men might accept that although there is much overlap in the two populations, we are constitutionally different—a diversity we should be able to celebrate and discuss openly. Both women and men should be leading such discussions with pride.
One thing that bothered me was the terse dismissal of discrimination as a factor in the discrepancy: "Regarding overt discrimination, in a lifetime in science, I have seen only little, and it has been both for and against women. Surely, gender discrimination cannot explain more than a tiny part of this trend." Well, gee, Pete, I wonder why you've seen so little discrimination? While we're at it, let's ask a bunch of middle class white people whether or not racism is a problem in America.
Nonetheless, this strikes me as a relatively constructive contribution to the discussion. Thoughts?
Posted by todd at 1:42 PM | Comments (0)