Tag: Society and Science

Since corporal punishment in class is off limits, we need the NCSE

Social (not scientific…) controversy over science issues sometimes gives students a chance to act up.

Eugenie Scott has a guest post up at Real Climate on why the NCSE has taken up the issue of climate change in the classroom:

Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class.

Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up.

“Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!”

Or you come to school one morning and the principal wants to see you because a parent of one of your students has accused you of political bias because you taught what scientists agree about: that the Earth is getting warmer, and human actions have had an important role in this warming.

Pulitzer-prize winning novelist visits genetics lab, scientists have no recollection of visit

If a famous novelist visited your lab, would you remember it?

Jeffrey Eugenides’ latest novel The Marriage Plot features a bipolar yeast geneticist. While writing the book, Eugenides, who lives down the road from several world-famous yeast genetics labs at Princeton, decided to do a little research. He visited David Botstein, one of the elder eminences of yeast genetics, got a tour of the lab, and nobody there seems to remember the visit. From the New York Times: Continue reading “Pulitzer-prize winning novelist visits genetics lab, scientists have no recollection of visit”

Low levels of literacy in creationist legislation

Maybe I’m suffering from observational bias because the only legislative bills that I tend to read are creationist ones, but the authors of such bills seem to have an uncommonly poor ability to write and think coherently.

From the NCSE, this creationist bill was dismissed in New Hampshire:

House Bill 1457, introduced by Gary Hopper (R-District 7) and John Burt (R-District 7), which would have charged the state board of education to “[r]equire science teachers to instruct pupils that proper scientific inquire [sic] results from not committing to any one theory or hypothesis, no matter how firmly it appears to be established, and that scientific and technological innovations based on new evidence can challenge accepted scientific theories or modes.”

And here in Missouri we’ve got a great one this legislative session, which tosses around a flood of technical-sounding words without much regard to consistency or precise definition: Continue reading “Low levels of literacy in creationist legislation”

Behind the climate change skepticism curtain

Document leakage in the battle over public opinion on climate change isn’t limited to hacked email accounts of climate scientists. The Heartland Institute, a deep-pocketed promoter of climate change skepticism inadvertently sent confidential fundraising materials to someone just posing as a deep-pocketed climate change skeptic, and Desmog Blog has done the document dump.

Apparently some of the documents are fake, but most have been confirmed as genuine. Ezra Klein gives a run-down of what’s there. His main conclusions: Continue reading “Behind the climate change skepticism curtain”

Cormac McCarthy mixin’ it up with Sante Fe science

While I have my doubts about how much progress the permanent inhabitants of the Santa Fe Institute actually make, this is my kind of hang-out, progress be damned:

From Newsweek via The Daily Beast

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group of scientists frustrated with the narrow disciplinary confines of academia. They wanted to tackle big questions that spanned different fields, and they felt the only way these questions could be posed and solved was through the intermingling of scientists of all kinds: physicists, biologists, economists, anthropologists, and many others. Continue reading “Cormac McCarthy mixin’ it up with Sante Fe science”