I was just reading an interesting study on the politics of intellectuals and postgraduates, and one figure leapt out at me:

The number of graduate and professional degree students grew at a rate of about four percent per year over the past decade (Bell 2010), and data from the General Social Survey (GSS) show the percentage of American adults with advanced degrees has more than doubled since the 1970s, reaching just over 9 percent in 2008.

On Point of Inquiry in February, I somewhat jokingly asked Dan Kahan–who has documented how everybody thinks the experts supports their point of view–whether the problem isn’t simply that there are so damn many experts out there now that you can find one willing to say anything. These data would seem to support the contention, at least with regard to the growing number of experts.

Don’t get me wrong–I know it is very good for our society, in a myriad of ways, to have highly trained, smart people running around. However, I wonder whether one by-product is that it is easier to politicize science, because it is easier to find someone very smart who is willing to argue some strange contrarian position in a very convincing way–and indeed, may even pay the bills by doing so.

This is a pretty neat picture taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: two craters, side by side:

[Click to impactenate.]

What’s cool about it is the obvious age discrepancy between the two craters. The Moon lacks water and air, but it has erosion nonetheless: micrometeorite impacts, solar wind, and even thermal stress cause by the month-long day night cycle slowly wears away at the surface. Old craters have a rounded look to them, while fresher craters are sharp-edged, and show the debris from impact.

The full-res image has a scale of just a meter per pixel, so a lot of the smaller boulders you see around the younger crater on the right are the size of cars. Both craters are roughly 300 or so meters across; you could walk briskly across them in a couple of minutes.

I noticed the young crater has an odd shape, non-circular, almost diamond-shaped. Then I looked at other, nearby craters, and saw the same thing, so it must mostly be due to lighting. However, there is a funny hillock just to the right of the crater, and the boulder field around it is not symmetric; there ...

I like the habit because it makes me
look like the Linux penguin.

From elite hackers, to white-hat hackers, to hacktivists, hackers don’t generally have sterling reputations as upstanding citizens—at least as far as the general public is concerned. That’s why it may come as a surprise that the Vatican has published an essay that redeems computer hackers and even compares hacker philosophy with Catholic theology.

In his article published in the Vatican-vetted Civilta Cattolica, technology expert, literary critic, and Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro draws similarities between hackers and Catholics (via TechWorld):

Hacker mentality implies a joyful application of intelligence to problem solving, rejecting the concept of work as repetitive, burdensome and stupid, Spadaro wrote. Hacker ethics rejected a capitalistic, profit-oriented approach to work, eschewing idleness but favoring a flexible, creative approach that was respectful of the human dimension and natural rhythms, he said.

In addition, hacker philosophy fosters creativity and sharing, and is both committed yet playful. “Under fire are control, competition, property. It’s a vision that is … of a clear theological origin,” writes Spadaro. He argues (rather vaguely) that many of these characteristics are also, as odd as it ...

Answer: When he has Ann Coulter on the air, and somebody has to act responsible:

For a thorough debunking of Coulter, see here.

What’s the News: A gene that makes bacteria resistant to up to 14 antibiotics has been discovered in bacteria in drinking water and street puddles in the Indian capital of New Delhi by a research team from the University of Cardiff in Wales. Scientists were already aware that microbes bearing this gene, which produces an enzyme called NDM-1, were infecting people in India, but it had been thought that such bacteria were mainly picked up in hospitals. This study shows that the gene, which is capable of jumping from species to species, is loose in the environment.

What’s the Context:

NDM-1 is in a class of enzymes that are known culprits in the spread of drug-resistance: the beta-lactamases. The first beta-lactamase, penicillinase, was discovered in 1940 ($, pdf). These enzymes give resistance to antibiotics like cephamycins, carbapenems, and penicillin, which have similar chemical structures. The study is fueling fears that the NDM-1 gene could easily jump into bacteria around the world. Recently, a separate team of scientists showed that Swedish tourists returning from India had bacteria with beta-lactamases in their guts that they hadn’t had before the trip. And as the current study found that the gene for NDM-1 skipped ...

“What are the best books for my daughter?” “What kinds of extra curricular programs should my son be enrolled in?”

Dear Parents,

You send so many emails asking, “How do I encourage my child to pursue science?” It’s a noble endeavor, and of course, there’s no end to possible responses. Much depends on what each individual is interested in from marine science to space. While I welcome these inquiries, here’s the best suggestion I can offer: Rather than science specifically, focus on critical thinking!

No matter how advanced a student’s math skills or laboratory technique, it will be her ability to work through problems and develop creative solutions that sets her apart from peers. In other words, parents should do more than going through the motions for standardized test preparation, and begin early. Foster her natural curiosity about the world. Perhaps most importantly, she needs to believe in herself and recognize what she is capable of.

Sure, it sounds a bit cliche, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. More than ever before, our culture poses formidable social obstacles to success. Joe’s is right that “It’s okay to be Smart,” but “smart” doesn’t always seem adequate. Kids are bombarded with billboards, music videos, television shows, advertisements, and films telling them that they also have to look and act a certain way to be accepted. A cultural firestorm of unrealistic expectations damages self-esteem and, in turn, academic performance. Of course there’s no simple way to counter these harmful false messages, but building confidence is the place to begin.

So that’s what I hope moms and dads will continue to emphasize. And if you’re still seeking a good book to start with, my vote for elementary schoolers goes to Free To Be You And Me. (DVD and audio are even better!). For young adults, books like Tracy Kidder’s outstanding Mountains Beyond Mountains about Dr. Paul Farmer will help them recognize how one individual can have a tremendous positive impact on the world.

Good luck!

Sheril

That’s the number. At least according to Public Policy Polling. That seems rather high. So I decided to go back and look at the RACMAR variable in the General Social Survey. Here’s the question:

Do you think there should be laws against marriages between African-Americans and whites?

They kept asking the question for 30 years, but dropped it in 2002. Here’s the reason:

By 2002 it was a consistent finding that less than 10% of Americans would accede to the proposition that interracial marriage should be legally banned. So the finding that that 46% of Mississippi Republicans agree with that position, and that only 40% reject it outright, is somewhat curious. Here’s the question in PPP:

Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal?

The outcomes were:

- 40% said legal

- 46% said illegal

- 14% were not sure

Remember that the sample was limited to Mississippi Republicans. Let’s go back and look at some of the demographic correlates for the responses to RACMAR between 1998 and 2002, when the proportion responding yes and no was relatively constant. I’ll focus on region and politics.

Ban interracial marriage Liberal
7 Moderate
10 Conservative
12 Democrat
10 Independent
10 Republican
11 New England
7 Middle Atlantic
8 East North Central
9 West North Central
9 South Atlantic
11 East ...

A bill clearly intended to promote and protect antiscience passed in the Tennessee State House yesterday, by a vote of 70 – 23.

Let that sink in. 70 to 23.

The bill is another in a long series of creationist (and broadened into other antiscience topics) wedge bills designed to weaken the teaching of real science in public schools. The summary makes that clear:

This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.

On the surface this sounds like legit science; after all, science thrives on understanding the weaknesses in ideas so they can be improved. But if you read that last part, conservative antiscience rears its head: the two specific cases mentioned are evolution and global warming.

That doesn’t sound like real science is the motivation behind this bill — and

Effect of solar eclipse on microbes.

“OBJECTIVE: A solar eclipse was observed in India on 15(th) January, 2010. It was a total eclipse in some parts of the country, while it was a partial eclipse in other parts. Microorganisms play an important role in various phenomena on the earth. This study was undertaken to know the influence of solar eclipse on nature indirectly, by analyzing certain genotypic and phenotypic variations in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Since yeast have similar gene expression as that of humans, investigations were pursued on Candida albicans. Hence the study of the effect of solar eclipse on cultures of Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella species, Escherichia coli,and C. albicans was performed in the laboratory. The effect of the total or partial eclipse on the microorganism isolated from clinical isolates was investigated during the time period from 11.15 am to 3.15 pm.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Cultures of S. aureus, Klebsiella species, and E. coli colonies on nutrient agar slants and broth and C. albicans on Sabouraud’s dextrose agar plates and broth. Slants were exposed to sunlight during eclipse and exposure to normal sunlight at Mangalore, Dakshina Kannada district, Karnataka state, India.

RESULTS: There ...

What’s the News: On a quest to discover at what size the kooky quantum physics that governs atoms (teleporting!) gives way to the ho-hum classical physics that governs humans (no teleporting), scientists have shown that if conditions are right, a molecule of a record 430 atoms can be in two states at once, like Schrödinger’s infamous cat. For the last three decades, researchers have been watching progressively larger objects under special conditions to see how big of an item they can catch showing quantum behavior. This molecule, which was created by a team at University of Vienna and their collaborators for the experiment and is larger than insulin, is the largest on record.

How the Heck: The researchers shot a beam of molecules through a series of three sets of slits—an updated and modified version of the classic double-slit experiment—and measured exactly where the molecules arrived at the end of the beam. Graphs of where the molecules arrived show a fluctuating pattern indicating interference between the parts of the beam going through different slits. Since the molecules interfered with each other (not something well-behaved classical molecules do) ...

The whole Libyan affair seems kind of like a joke, albeit with some serious consequences for the people involved. Gaddafi’s bizarre behavior. Hapless rebels which seem out of central casting for a dark military comedy like Tropic Thunder. An American political class unable to form a coherent message as to the rationale for the intervention. All set against the background of an even more pressing humanitarian crisis in the Ivory Coast.

As Americans are not familiar with Libya at this point the news media has been plying us with many maps which show the locations of the battles. All of them seem distributed along the nation’s coast on the Mediterranean. This makes sense because of the climate of the country, as well as the concentration of oil refineries in this region. But the maps which always seem to show one set of roads hugging the coastline also make me think of South Park. Here’s the clip below which makes my logic clear:

It’s Christmas in Canada
Tags:

Saw this on Twitter, but I’ve talked to others who have brought up this issue:

It seems the logistic issues are the big problem. How do you validate phenotype? Tight-knit communities could probably work just based on trust, but then how do you scale up the sample size to detect loci of small effect? I think it will come, but I’m not sure when. Though obviously when it comes to disease phenotypes there’s going to be more motivation by interested parties. In the near future we’ll have pretty cheap full sequences, so one could probe differences within families to pick out possible mutations which might account for the variance you see across siblings. But would people really want to know why they’re smarter/stupider or better looking/uglier than their brother/sister? Isn’t the reality enough?

I hadn’t run into this story today (thank God!). John Hawks’ begins a critical post:

I am just about to go crazy today. I just can’t seem to escape the “gay caveman” story.

No, I don’t mean the Geico caveman who likes mango duck breast and who has Talia Shire as his therapist. His sexual orientation I don’t know.

In the sitcom, Cavemen, they were all straight. The main issue in regards to sexuality was that one of the cavemen tended to date sapiens sapiens females, and his girlfriend had a tendency to hook up with cavemen. Another of the cavemen frowned up these “mixed” relationships.

Sex. Dark chocolate. Nintendo’s Wii. It seems like most anything can be correlated with health and longevity nowadays. Now, some researchers want to add shopping to that list, after they saw a possible link between daily shopping and death age. Not everyone agrees, though, with this “shop so you don’t drop” mentality (surprise!).

In the study, published by the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, the researchers followed nearly 2,000, independently living, Taiwanese citizens who were at least 65 years old. The researchers gathered their shopping habits by looking at a 1999-2000 survey that evaluated how often these Taiwanese geriatrics shopped, and then they used national death registries to keep track of the study groups’ deaths until 2008. After correcting for age, gender, health, ethnicity, financial status, and other factors, the researchers discovered that daily shoppers were 27% less likely to kick the bucket than their less shop-happy peers (aka those who shopped only once a week or less). Oddly enough, the best shopping-related survival record goes to the men, who reduced their chances of dying by 28% by shopping; women who shopped daily ...

One of the great things about ADMIXTURE is that the population elements shake out of the data through the logic of the program. The worst thing is that it is then left up to you to make sense of the elements. A useful way to use ADMIXTURE and avoid excessive interpretive fogginess is to figure out individual proportions of contribution from X ancestral groups when you have a pretty good idea that an admixture event did occur between very distinct and distantly related population groups. To some extent the whole New World is a good laboratory for this process. Consider, for example, someone from the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico. There is a good chance that their ancestry will fractionate into three elements:

- An African one

- An Amerindian one

- A European one

These three elements are sampled from very different locations geographically. The ancestral populations have been separated for tens of thousands of years, with little to no gene flow across them. This means that the allele frequencies of the “source” populations should be relatively different (maximizing Fst). A mapping of inferred allele frequencies between abstract ancestral populations generated by ADMIXTURE to concrete allele frequencies of known source populations ...

I know I just wrote about vaccine-preventable diseases on the rise once again, but even in the past couple of days there’s more news:

1) Houston is seeing the first case of measles in six years. The victim? An 11-month-old baby. Let’s hope she has a full and swift recovery, and no one else falls ill.

2) In that post linked above I talked about a school in Virginia that had to close down due to a big pertussis outbreak. Well, in Canada, they’re telling kids who are unvaccinated they can’t come to school; at least, not until they can show their inoculations are up-to-date. I have mixed feelings about forcing kids to get vaccinated, but in the end we simply cannot have schools be breeding grounds for diseases which are trivially easy to prevent. I read about this story on Fark, and the comments there are interesting, to say the least.

3) Seth Mnookin, who wrote "The Panic Virus" an exposé of the antivax movement, has posted his thoughts on these recent news stories. As usual, I find his comments to be well-reasoned and thoughtful.

What’s the News: Chimpanzees, like people, can “catch” yawns from others. But not all yawns are created equal, it seems; chimps are more likely to catch yawns from a chimp they know than from a stranger, a new study found. (You can see a video of it here.) This supports the idea that it’s empathy—rather than just everybody needing a nap—that makes yawns contagious.

How the Heck:

Two groups of chimps at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center near Atlanta, each with about a dozen adult members, were part of the study. The two groups lived in different large enclosures, and hadn’t seen—much less gotten to know—each other. Chimpanzees are extremely territorial, and a whole lot friendlier to individuals in their own group than to strangers.
The researchers took videos of spontaneous yawns from chimps in each group, as well as videos of the chimps just hanging out in the enclosure. They then played each chimp ...

In February 2010, cleaners working at Dutch railway stations went on strike for several weeks. Their stations quickly fell to dirtiness and disarray, but most people didn’t mind; public support for the strike was high. But two scientists – Diederik Stapel and Siegwart Lindenberg from Tilburg University – were particularly delighted. In the growing chaos of the stations, they saw an opportunity to test an intriguing concept – that disorderly environments promote stereotypes and discrimination.

Their big idea is that stereotypes, being a set of simplified categories and judgements, can help people to cope with chaos. They are “a mental cleaning device in the face of disorder”. When our surroundings are full of chaos – be it dirt or uncertainty – we react by seeking order, structure and predictability. Stereotypes, for all their problems, satisfy that need.

To test that, the duo went to Utrecht station after it hadn’t been cleaned for a few days and asked 40 travellers to fill in a questionnaire. Their task was to say how much Dutch, Muslim and homosexual people conform to different personality traits. When the cleaners returned to work, and the station ...

I’ve set up an account at Tumblr. No LOLcats, but assorted images and video that I feel moved to post with little commentary. Renaissance images of the brain, squid eyes, new images of Mercury. That sort of thing.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner‘s dead-tree forebear) opens with Deckard arguing with his wife about whether or not to alter her crummy attitude with the “mood organ.” She could, if she so desired, dial her mood so that she was happy and content. Philip K. Dick worried that the ability to alter our mood would remove the authenticity and immediacy of our emotions. Annalee Newitz at io9 seems to be worried mood manipulations will enable a form of social control.

The worry comes from recent developments in neuro-pharmaceuticals. Drugs are already on the market that allow for mood manipulation. The Guardian‘s Amelia Hill notes that drugs like Prozac and chemicals like oxytocin have the ability to make some people calmer, more empathetic, and more altruistic. Calm, empathetic, and altruistic people are far more likely to act morally than anxious, callous, and selfish people. But does that mean mood manipulation going to let us force people to be moral? And if it does, is that a good thing? Is it moral to force people to be moral?

The question is a strange one. Force people to be moral – what ...