ScienceSeeker John Grant's 'Corrupted Science' | Skulls in the Stars While I was in a bookstore over the holidays, I stumbled across a relatively new publication by author John Grant, Corrupted Science: Fraud, ideology and politics in science. I snapped it off the bookshelf without a second thought (well, one second thought, which I'll mention below), because I'm fascinated by frauds, crackpots and crazies in the sciences. I just finished the book last night, and my highly unscientific verdict... amazing! If you care to hear a few more details than that, look below the fold... Corrupted Science is a follow-up to Grant's earlier work, Discarded Science: Ideas that sounded good at the time, which I haven't read. Other books have touched on this subject. In a book of amazing breadth, Grant covers all these topics, and more. Fraudulent ScientistsSeeing What They Wanted to SeeMilitary MadnessThe One True BookIdeology Trumps ScienceThe Political Corruption of Science The last chapter is what made me snatch the book off the shelf.
Science Library Neurotic Physiology Blame Bashir for this one. In a previous post, I talked about how I wasn't yet free of academia. How it's still got hooks in me, in the form of papers that need to be published, and that won't get published until I get them out. Bashir noted that it was like Borg. Borg, for those not familiar, are characters in the Star Trek universe. In particular, consider the character Seven of Nine, from Star Trek: Voyager. (Seven of Nine. De-assimilating from the Borg does, in a way, remind me of academia. Obviously academia does not give you cybernetic implants in grad school (though if they are, they'd BETTER come with the health plan and a decent increase in stipend). There are so many things about academia that I have assimilated, and that, via slow and sometimes painful surgeries, I have to get rid of. 1. I also don't seem to know how to communicate casually, yet professionally. 2. 3. I remember once, my aunt asked me what peer review was. 4. 5. This isn't the case outside.
Genomes Unzipped BEHOLDE! Giant’s Shoulders Edition 26: Fools, Frauds, and FAILURES. Greetinges, all ye who enter here. Beholde, before you doth appear A moste unusual carnivale! And this one hath a grand moral. This speakes of fools, failures and fraudes. Those findings no longer we applaude. So some One, come ALL! (Also, it gives me a chance to speake like thise. So welcome one and all to the Giant's Shoulders Special Edition: Fools, Frauds, and FAILURES. Let's start with the FOOLS. Now obviously, most of these people weren't FOOLS, but they did postulate some foolish things. For example, many people believed in the 1500's and 1600's that astrology had a lot of influence on medicine. If astrology is one major thing you think of when you think of old-timey foolish beliefs, then alchemy surely is another. And here's a foolish belief of which Sci had never heard. A post in which Sci was particularly interested in one from the History Compass Exchange, which looked at the Victorian View of dinosaurs. (It's an iguanadon, isn't it? The FRAUDS And finally, the FAILURES.
Science Daily What is Dyscalculia? How Does it Develop? Nearly everyone has heard of developmental dyslexia - a learning disorder characterized by poor reading skills despite otherwise sufficient schooling - but have you heard of developmental dyscalculia? Many people have not. Here is part 2 in a week-long series on this lesser-known learning disorder. If we're going to seriously discuss a developmental learning disorder, the first thing that might be done is to define it. Prevalence studies have been carried out in various parts of the world, all with (surprise!) The manifestation of developmental dyscalculia generally changes with age and grade. The best kind of study of a developmental learning disorder is one in which the same groups of individuals are studied over the course of months or years, in what is called a longitudinal study. 51% of the group could not solve 7x8 (versus 17% of controls);71% could not solve 37x24 (versus 27%);49% could not solve 45x3 (versus 15%); and63% could not solve 5/9 + 2/9 (versus 17%). Image source.
Mass Genomics What Are The Origins of Number Representation? : The Thoughtful Animal This post considering the evolutionary origins of numerical cognition, specifically in terms of the approximation of large numbers, is meant as a companion to this week’s series on the developmental origins of numerical cognition and developmental dyscalculia, at Child’s Play. What are the origins of number representation in the mind? Are there any innate building blocks that contribute to our understanding of mathematics and number, or must everything be learned? Number is an important domain of human knowledge. Many decisions in life are based on quantitative evidence, sometimes with life or death consequences. Figure 1: Fight or flight? By now you probably have come to expect that I’ll be arguing that there are several innate “building blocks” of cognition that give rise to more complex mathematics. Surely, humans have something unique that allows us to do things like multivariate regression and construct geometric proofs, however, but let’s start at the beginning. Figure 2: Results.