Category: Society

Neil deGrasse Tyson Agrees With Me About The Innumeracy of Intellectuals

A great clip from his World Science Festival appearance the other night, especially the bit toward the end: “One thing I think that as a nation we should be embarrassed by is that the scientists– you can do this experiment yourself, I’ve done the experiment– the scientists, by and large, know more liberal arts than… Continue reading Neil deGrasse Tyson Agrees With Me About The Innumeracy of Intellectuals

Correlation, Causation, and Belief in Creation

Thinking from Kansas, Josh Rosenau notices a correlation in data from a Daily Kos poll question on the origin of the universe: Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year old universe. Democrats are the most positive, with 71% accepting that, while only 44% of Republicans agree… Continue reading Correlation, Causation, and Belief in Creation

Non-Dorky Poll: Vote Reporting

As James Nicoll is fond of saying, context is for the weak. So here’s a context-free poll regarding the reporting of election results: Releasing a rank-ordered list of candidates with vote totals after a contested election is:online survey If you’d like to explain what context you might imagine this to have in the comments, that… Continue reading Non-Dorky Poll: Vote Reporting

Infuriating Polls

I’m currently enjoying the high, thin whistle of an impending deadline, so here are a couple of poll questions about infuriating behaviors to pass the time. The first is about people: Which of these is more infuriating to read/watch/hear?online surveys The second about presentations: Which of these talks is more infuriating to listen to?Market Research… Continue reading Infuriating Polls

There’s More to Science Than Evolution

The National Science Board made a deeply regrettable decision to omit questions on evolution and the Big Bang from the Science and Engineering Indicators report for 2010. As you might expect, this has stirred up some controversy. I wasn’t surprised to learn this, as I had already noticed the omission a couple of months ago,… Continue reading There’s More to Science Than Evolution

Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help

My talk at Maryland last Thursday went pretty well– the impending Snowpocalypse kept the audience down, as people tried to fit in enough work to compensate for the Friday shutdown, but the people who were there seemed to like it, and asked good questions. If you weren’t there, but want to know what I talked… Continue reading Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help

Public Knowledge of Science: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t

The NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators report came out not too long ago, and the bulk of it is, as usual, spent on quasi-quantitative measures of scientific productivity– numbers of degrees granted, numbers of patent applications for various countries, etc. I find all of those things pretty deeply flawed, so I tend to skip past… Continue reading Public Knowledge of Science: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t

The Latest from Awful Yuppie Town: Green Divorce

One of the less attractive features of the New York Times is its tendency to feature little profiles of horrible people. They’re not presented that way, of course, but that’s the effect– I read these articles, and just want to slap everybody involved. Today’s story on marital tensions caused by environmental issues is a fine… Continue reading The Latest from Awful Yuppie Town: Green Divorce

Dog Physics and Academic Blogging

I’ve made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs: When I started my blog in 2002, I had… Continue reading Dog Physics and Academic Blogging