2012

Resources for online media awareness A Abusive online behaviour Controlling trolls helps keep social media free But there’s a risk in making trolls more important than we need to. See also: Etiquette; Privacy; Safety; Security; Trolls Ad blockers The death of the online ad agency? Thanks to increasingly sophisticated adblockers? Addiction, social media Addiction treatment centre Most of what we see on the internet has a better chance of being false than what we see on our street. Math profs devastate social media “popularity” Various studies have shown that teenagers consistently overestimate the amount of alcohol and drugs their friends consume. Portrait of a social media addict … Social media addiction is like any other kind; you spend all your Read More ›

An entire PhD dissertation about the Discovery Institute is being put together by Christine Shellska. Her claim is: I argue that the Discovery Institute has “rebranded” creationism as ID, and that its strategies include attempts to disrupt the translation of evolution into education and the broader public. Discovering the Discovery Institute Some problems with her thesis: 1. “creation science” was the term used in the book Pandas and People and later changed to “intelligent design”. Even presuming purely for the sake of argument the change to from “creation science” to “intelligent design” was for nefarious purposes, that name change cannot be attributed to the Discovery Institute since they weren’t the publisher this work or any other such work (at least Read More ›

It just doesn’t make sense that the entire biological world spontaneously arose all by itself. But the challenges to evolution go far beyond the intuition. When Charles Darwin proposed his unlikely idea in 1859 it defied much of what was known about biology in that day. Today, the situation has only become worse. If there was ever a modern-day myth this is it and science is increasingly revealing this with its empirical findings dealing with both biological patterns and processes.  Read more