News

The way thing are going, they might even succeed. From Rod Dreher at American Conservative: Having all but ruined humanities education, the Social Justice Warriors now turn to the STEM fields. Purdue University has hired Donna Riley as its new head of its School of Engineering Education. Here’s an excerpt from Prof. Riley’s biography page at Smith College, where she taught for 13 years: My scholarship currently focuses on applying liberative pedagogies in engineering education, leveraging best practices from women’s studies and ethnic studies to engage students in creating a democratic classroom that encourages all voices. In 2005 I received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to support this work, which includes developing, implementing, and assessing curricular and Read More ›

Here’s Richard Webb interviewing Peter (“Higgs boson”) Higgs on the occasion of his receiving the “1851 Royal Commission medal for outstanding influence on science” at New Scientist: What would your advice be to someone who has your sort of esoteric interests? Go undercover. I wasn’t productive in an obvious way; I didn’t churn out papers. I think these days the University of Edinburgh would have sacked me long ago, there’s just too much competition. So now I would say, do it in your spare time, and get yourself a solid publication record in the sort of thing that gets you recognition more readily. More. Higgs has noted this before: Higgs boson discoverer wouldn’t get a job today? “He doubts a similar breakthrough Read More ›

… talking about ID. From Zondervan Academic: We are now just several weeks away from the release of the Dictionary of Christianity and Science. We have been encouraged by the response so far—it has occupied the #1 New Release spot on Amazon in the category of Christian Bible Dictionaries & Encyclopedias for much of the past few months. More. Look for entries from Bill Dembski, Steve Meyer, Ann Gauger, Bruce Gordon, Michael Flannery, Mike Keas, Paul Nelson, Wayne Rossiter, Angus Menuge, Guillermo Gonzalez, Michael Egnor, Cornelius Hunter, Rob Sheldon, Jonathan McLatchie, etc. Just think: Apparently, it is actually a reference work. It can tell you what is happening in these areas in newsmakers’ own words. At US$59.99, it is a Read More ›

In Pittsburgh, including 12:00 PM Nik Melchior. “Machine Emulation of Human Thought” Artificial intelligence promises the development of computers with the same capabilities of cognition, perception, and problem-solving as their human inventors. Recent applications include self-driving cars, robots that work in factories, and computers able to best humans in games like Jeopardy, Chess, and Go. This talk will present an accessible introduction to common techniques and paradigms in the study of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The significance of newsworthy AI systems will be examined, as well as the perceived threat of superhuman intelligence that does not share our morality. Bio: Nik Melchior received his masters in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis and his Ph.D. in robotics Read More ›

From Mike Macrae at ScienceAlert: New Simulations Suggest Dark Energy Might Not Exist 68 percent of the Universe might not exist. Physicists from Loránd University in Hungary and the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii are now questioning if approximations in Einstein’s equations introduced “serious side effects” that gave the illusion of a vast, unknown force pushing space apart. … The thing is, right now it’s little more than an empty box without any other properties to describe the nature of its existence. More. Empty box? That’s what the hamburger poll in the lunchroom here said too. Apart from that, we can’t keep up. Is it possible that the sheer ability to make up theories without consequence is Read More ›

From Sally Adee at New Scientist: For people like Cerf and many American companies, who view online speech through the lens of the US First Amendment, Germany’s approach may look like a heavy-handed suppression of the right of free expression. However, it may be a necessary first step in re-establishing a shared moral reality. In the age of bots, misinformation, and anonymity, free speech itself may be used to enact a kind of censorship. … There are many good reasons to be wary of outsourcing the policing of moral beliefs to private corporations, even if they are only tasked with implementing a country’s national laws, as would be the case with the draft German proposal. But we should focus on Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at Aeon: A billion years ago, two dancing black holes make a final spin, merge, and – in a matter of seconds – release a cataclysmic amount of energy. Much as a falling pebble spreads waves on the surface of a still lake, the merger initiates gravitational waves in the space-time continuum. Fast-forward to planet Earth and the year 2015. After an immense journey, the gravitational waves from the black-hole merger pass through our solar system. On the morning of 14 September, they oh-so-slightly wiggle the arms of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington state. A pattern of light-waves shifts in a distinctive, long-sought way. A computer sounds the alarm. Niayesh Read More ›

From Jag Bhalla at BigThink: 1. Life’s games are not all “red in tooth and claw” fights. And you need no brain to see that a “war of all against all” might not be the best way. Even single-celled bacteria “know” that. Stop, wait. Single-celled bacteria do not “know” anything and never will. The reason that they do not behave according to the survival of the fittest is that because the Darwinian theory of evolution is wrong. Better theory can explain how they behave co-operatively without attributing minds to them. To “know”what is going on in Bhalla’s sense is to have a mind like a human being. 2. In “Survival of the Friendliest” Kelly Clancy describes the evolutionary logic of relationships Read More ›

Is the field full of “undead” theories? From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Science is embattled in a raging replication crisis, in which researchers are unable to reproduce a number of key findings. On the front lines of this conflict is psychology. In a 2015 review of 98 original psychology papers, just 36 percent of attempted replications returned significant results, whereas 97 percent of the original studies did. “Don’t trust everything you read in the psychology literature,” reporter Monya Baker warned. “In fact, two thirds of it should probably be distrusted.” How did psychology reach such a sorry state of affairs? Back in 2012, when the replication crisis was just beginning to gain prominence in the popular media, psychology professors Moritz Read More ›

From Jonathan McLatchie: Here is the recording of part 1 of Paul Nelson’s webinar series on “Evolution is a Theory of Transformation, Not Similarity.” More. He intends to schedule more webinars with Dr. Nelson. Nelson’s scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Biology & Philosophy, Zygon, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and Touchstone, and book chapters in the anthologies Mere Creation (Intervarsity Press), Signs of Intelligence (Brazos), Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics (MIT Press), and Darwin, Design, and Public Education (Michigan State University Press). Paul is one of the authors of the biology textbook Explore Evolution, and has appeared in several films on intelligent design for Illustra Media. He is a member of the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) Read More ›

From Nick Hines at VinePair, on why we like to drink alcohol: The theory was originally put forth by Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 2000 article called “Evolutionary origins of human alcoholism in primate frugivory.” The hypothesis proposes that apes and early humans evolved to seek out ethyl alcohol because it led them to food. These early primates are known as frugivores, referring to their preference for fruit over any other food. But in order to locate that desirable fruit and those crucial calories, frugivores couldn’t just hit the local Whole Foods. They had to rely on their sense of smell. And one thing that routinely led them to fruit Read More ›

One doesn’t use the word “miracle,” of course, but a friend pointed recently in passing to an older paper by Israeli philosopher of science Iris Fry, arguing that “near miracle” is a form of creationism: This paper calls attention to a philosophical presupposition, coined here “the continuity thesis” which underlies and unites the different, often conflicting, hypotheses in the origin of life field. This presupposition, a necessary condition for any scientific investigation of the origin of life problem, has two components. First, it contends that there is no unbridgeable gap between inorganic matter and life. Second, it regards the emergence of life as a highly probable process. Examining several current origin-of-life theories. I indicate the implicit or explicit role played Read More ›

They got smarter every time we noticed them again. From Sam Wong at New Scientist: A bone from a raven’s wing with seven regularly spaced notches carved into it is the strongest evidence yet that Neanderthals had an eye for aesthetics. Evidence that Neanderthals used pigments, buried objects alongside their dead, and collected bird feathers and claws had been taken as signs of behaviours that were once considered unique to our species of Homo sapiens. But interpreting the motives of ancient humans based on their relics is fraught with difficulty. Incisions in bones and stone objects could be the result of butchery or other practical activities, rather than artistic engravings. More. Yes but, at a certain point, even meat carving Read More ›

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The results on searches for supersymmetry reported this week have all been negative, further pushing up the limits on possible masses of conjectured superparticles. Typical limits on gluino masses are now about 2.0 TeV (see here for the latest), up from about 1.8 TeV last summer (see here). ATLAS results are being posted here, and I believe CMS results will appear here. This is now enough data near the design energy that some of the bets SUSY enthusiasts made years ago will now have to be paid off, in particular Lubos Motl’s bet with Adam Falkowski, and David Gross’s with Ken Lane (see here). A major question now facing those who have spent Read More ›

From BeauHD at Slashdot: Computer hardware is getting a softer side. A research team has come up with a way of genetically engineering the DNA of mammalian cells to carry out complex computations, in effect turning the cells into biocomputers. The group hasn’t put those modified cells to work in useful ways yet, but down the road researchers hope the new programming techniques will help improve everything from cancer therapy to on-demand tissues that can replace worn-out body parts. More. No, they were not “turned into” complex biocomputers. They always were that. The researchers found a way to potentially make them work for us instead of just themselves, somewhat like milking cows. See also: Cells communicate to navigate a crowded Read More ›