Science

Here is his report. If his testimony is accurate (and we expect it is), American taxpayers are funding the equivalent of a prison riot: No wonder Weinstein is suing. So where are the science organizations that should be supporting him? Communing with their shoes? Added: Note: Crash course for sci nerds: How political correctness morphed into a monster. Don’t look at me. Look at yourselves. You let this happen. Take note that the new approach to intellectual freedom does not permit anyone to just mind their own business. Even silence can be violence. Bari Weiss quotes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the Wall Street Journal: “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or Read More ›

Physicist Sokal perpetrated the first hoax paper over two decades ago, to prove a point. From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: Mitochondria: totally real cell organelles that convert sugars, fats and oxygen into usable energy for cells. Midi-chlorians: completely made-up and widely derided microscopic life-forms that give Jedi warriors their ability to use the Force in the “Star Wars” movies. See the difference? A handful of “peer reviewers” apparently didn’t, as a paper that subbed in “midi-chlorians” for “mitochondria” got accepted into four journals this week. The paper mashed up lightly altered text from Wikipedia on mitochondria with Star Wars-related rambling, including the infamous monologue on the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise from “Revenge of the Sith.” The paper was Read More ›

From Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data: There is no scare quite like a good food scare; no scam quite like a food scam. People are downright obsessional about what they put in their mouths. California now requires the labeling of more than six hundred chemicals that you might meet in your food. The creation of true miracle foods by genuine scientists has been met with leftist hysteria, scientific fraud, threats, and lawsuits. For example, as we’ll see, a new strain of rice that could save hundreds of thousands of children from blindness has never gone to market. We look at this disaster in chapter seven. More. The war on evidence that Ruse addresses is widespread, Read More ›

From Springer: To celebrate the 25th International Congress of the International Congress of History of Science and Technology (ICHST), from 23 – 29 July 2017, we have have commissioned a Virtual Special Issue, available for free until August 20. — Local and Global Properties of the World Jacques Demaret, Michael Heller, Dominique Lambert German Water Infrastructure in China: Colonial Qingdao 1898–1914 Agnes Kneitz From ecological records to big data: the invention of global biodiversity Vincent Devictor, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent Moon-Struck: Artists Rediscover Nature And Observe Jay M. Pasachoff, Roberta J. M. Olson Reconfiguring the centre: The structure of scientific exchanges between colonial India and Europe Dhruv Raina Frits Went’s Atomic Age Greenhouse: The Changing Labscape on the Lab-Field Border Sharon Kingsland The ecological transformation of Cuba Read More ›

LIGO = Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory From Roger Penrose at Arxiv: Correlated “noise” in LIGO gravitational wave signals: an implication of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology It has recently been reported by Cresswell et al. [1] that correlations in the noise surrounding the observed gravitational wave signals, GW150194, GW151226, and GW170194 were found by the two LIGO detectors in Hanford and Livingston with the same time delay as the signals themselves. This raised some issues about the statistical reliability of the signals themselves, which led to much discussion, the current view appearing to support the contention that there is something unexplained that may be of genuine astrophysical interest [2]. In this note, it is pointed out that a resolution of this puzzle Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: he National Science Foundation (NSF) gave out more than three million dollars to fight “implicit bias,” “microaggressions,” and “lack of diversity” in STEM fields this July. Founded by Congress in 1950, the NSF is a federal agency that seeks to “promote the progress of science” by funding research and collaborating with scientists, according to its website. This month alone, the NSF has funded at least three social-justice themed projects, which together cost taxpayers $3,173,684. And you thought it was being spent on cancer research and space exploration? It will be interesting to see, now that post-modernism is hitting the sciences, which bureaucracies will buckle and which will respond as if a science-based way of Read More ›

With comments by linguist Noel Rude. From Arika Okrent at Aeon, summarizing the story told in Tom Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech, of how linguist Daniel Everett challenged grey eminence Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar: The crucial hypothesis is that its core, essential feature is recursion, the capacity to embed phrases within phrases ad infinitum, and so express complex relations between ideas (such as ‘Tom says that Dan claims that Noam believes that…’). More. But Everett found that the Amazonian language Piraha did not have recursion, and felt the wrath of the Chomskyites. Chomsky and his supporters replied that … even if Pirahã has no recursion, it matters not one bit for the theory of universal grammar. The capacity is Read More ›

Recently, we’ve been running a featurette, Tales of the Tone Deaf, featuring dim profs writing in dozy journal about why people doubt Science and how to fix them. They do not appear able to process the fact that the public is well aware of any number of dubious findings about nutrition, for example, marketed for decades as Science. And is beginning to learn about the corruptocrat crime labs. Yes, Science again. And then there are all the scandals around peer review to stumble over. Skeptics are replacing worshippers for a reason. The growing reputation of universities for suppressing honest discussion in favour of group thumbsucking does not help. No matter, a new book by Austin Ruse, Fake Science: Exposing the Read More ›

From Carie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’” at Journal Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography: Abstract: An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation Read More ›

From Michelle Malkin at Townhall: As I’ve been chronicling in my newspaper columns and CRTV.com investigative reports, many state crime labs and police departments are particularly ill-equipped and inadequately trained to interpret DNA evidence, especially “touch” or “trace” DNA — minute amounts of DNA of unknown origin often transferred through incidental contact — which has resulted in monstrous miscarriages of justice against innocent people. The aura of infallibility conferred on crime lab analysts by “CSI”-style TV shows exacerbates the problem when juries place undue weight on indeterminate DNA evidence of little to no probative value. Just last week, North Carolina’s Mark Carver, who was convicted of murdering a college student based on dubious touch DNA that was likely the result Read More ›

From Jonny Anomaly and Brian Boutwell at Quillette: “Actually Studies Show…” Chances are you’ve found yourself in a heated conversation among a group of friends, family, or colleagues when someone throws down the gauntlet: “Actually, studies show…” Some nod in silent agreement, others check their text messages, and finally someone changes the subject. It’s hard to know what to say when people cite scientific studies to prove their point. Sometimes we know the study and its relative merits. But most of the time we just don’t know enough to confirm or refute the statement that the study is supposed to support. We are floating in a sea of information, and all we can do is flounder around for the nearest Read More ›

This is becoming an anthology. From Joshua C. Tom at Sociological Perspectives: Social Origins of Scientific Deviance: Examining Creationism and Global Warming Skepticism Abstract: Scientific communities maintain respected authority on matters related to the natural world; however, there are instances where significant portions of the population hold beliefs contrary to the scientific consensus. These beliefs have generally been studied as the product of scientific illiteracy. This project reframes the issue as one of social deviance from the consensus of scientific communities. Using young-earth creationism and global warming skepticism as case studies, I suggest that consensus perception in light of public scientific deviance is a valuable dialectical framework, and demonstrate its utility using logistic regression analyses of the 2006 Pew Religion Read More ›

Abstract at ScienceDirect: Science denialism poses a serious threat to human health and the long-term sustainability of human civilization. Although it has recently been rather extensively discussed, this discussion has rarely been connected to the extensive literature on pseudoscience and the science-pseudoscience demarcation. This contribution argues that science denialism should be seen as one of the two major forms of pseudoscience, alongside of pseudotheory promotion. A detailed comparison is made between three prominent forms of science denialism, namely relativity theory denialism, evolution denialism, and climate science denialism. Several characteristics are identified that distinguish science denialism from other forms of pseudoscience, in particular its persistent fabrication of fake controversies, the extraordinary male dominance among its activists, and its strong connection with Read More ›

At at Watt’s Up with That: Traditional science required a skeptical view of one’s own findings until they could be replicated, especially by others. Unfortunately, skepticism has been deleted from the latest edition of “On Being a Scientist,” a widely-read booklet published by the National Academies of Science. When I asked the NAS about this unfortunate deletion, they explained there was insufficient space to include this fundamental aspect of doing science. Yet I counted nearly 10 pages of white space in the new edition. Despite the NAS change, I’ll continue to view science, including mine, through a veil of skepticism. That’s why I am concerned about what has become of the global warming/climate change movement, which is rapidly assuming the Read More ›

Asked by Mindy Weisberger: While scientists have yet to find any evidence that multiverses exist, there are a number of hypotheses that use the laws of physics to explore the possibility of multiple universes, sometimes challenging our understanding of reality itself in the process, Erin Macdonald, astrophysicist and self-proclaimed “massive sci-fi nerd,” explained during a panel on Saturday (June 17) at Future Con, a festival that highlighted the intersection between science, technology and science fiction in Washington, D.C. More. Not only have we yet to find any evidence that multiverses exist, it is unclear that we could find any such evidence in principle. The article provides useful information on various multiverse theories, about which we learn, “”None of these can be Read More ›