Over at Bora’s House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this: U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though… Continue reading Deism’s Just Alright With Me
Category: Politics
The Education Gap
The Times last weekend had a big article on the “achievement gap” in education, where poor and minority students are found to lag behind upper- and middle-class white students in many subjects. The author looks at a number of innovative shools that are producing good results with students from the at-risk groups, and considers a… Continue reading The Education Gap
Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth
Fred Clark at Slacktivist is probably the best writer in blogdom, when it comes to matters of religion and the intersection between religion and politics. This might sound like damning with faint praise, given how screechingly awful most blogospheric writing about religion is, but it’s not intended that way. He’s a terrific writer by any… Continue reading Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth
Election Round-Up
Well, it’s not really much of a round-up, as that has a connotation of completeness, and this is pretty scattered. But, really, if I’m your only source for political links on the Web, you need to get out more. This is just a collection of links to a few things that I thought were particularly… Continue reading Election Round-Up
Get Out the Vote
Two links to speed you on your way to the polls: 1) Jim Macdonald writing to Democrats. 2) John Scalzi writing to Republicans. Now step away from the keyboard, and go vote. The Internet will be here when you get back. (This assumes you’re a US citizen, or coincidentally holding an election in your home… Continue reading Get Out the Vote
Election Rule
I’m officially about three “Ask a ScienceBlogger” questions behind, but I didn’t want to pass this one up completely: What’s the most important local political race to you this year (as a citizen, as a scientist)? It’s tough to say, because the answer is either “all of them” or “none of them.” I thought about… Continue reading Election Rule
Polling for Dummies
Because I’m a Bad Person, I no longer remember who pointed me to Halfway There’s primer on polling, but it’s really an excellent of the effects of sample size, and why it’s legitimate to project results based on small numbers of interviews. Some important notes from the conclusion: Second, even a poll that is supposed… Continue reading Polling for Dummies
Local Realism, Loopholes, and the God Delusion
The recent discussion of reviews of The God Delusion has been interesting and remarkably civil, and I am grateful to the participants for both of those facts. In thinking a bit more about this, I thought of a good and relatively non-controversial analogy to explain the point I’ve been trying to make about the reviews… Continue reading Local Realism, Loopholes, and the God Delusion
Conference Blogging
It’s not the sort of thing I usually follow, but Ethan Zuckerman is blogging about the talks at the Pop!Tech conference (Pop!Tech 2006 site). There’s an impressive variety of topics, and Ethan gives good summaries of the talks (well, at least, the summaries themselves are pretty readable– I can’t speak for the accuracy, as I… Continue reading Conference Blogging
Whose Fault Is That Again?
Inside Higher Ed today features an opinion piece calling for more basic research funding: For the first time since we won the Cold War, other nations are mounting an aggressive challenge to the United States’ position as a world leader in science. China and India combined produce more than twice as many engineers each year… Continue reading Whose Fault Is That Again?