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  • Classic Edition: Master of None [Uncertain Principles]

    作者:scienceblogs 日期：2007-07-14 所属分类：科技 | 推荐：367 | 阅读：4280
    A discussion in the back-channel forums reminded me about all the many things I've learned how to do badly in the course of my scientific training. My junior high shop teacher probably sprained something laughing the first time he heard that I was doing machine shop work as part of a research project, but it's part of experimental science, so I know a little bit about how to work a milling machine these days. It's a crazy busy week for me, and today will be largely taken up by hosting Jennifer Ouellette, who's visiting campus to tell us about the physics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, I've dug this post out of the archives, from way back in December of 2002, about the jack-of-all-trades ethos in physics, and the consequences for the job market. ------------ I'm a lousy plumber. I'm also a mediocre electrician, a machinist and carpenter of indifferent ability, a fairly bad computer programmer, and a decidedly poor electrical engineer. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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  • Religious Right Upset at Strickland [Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

    作者:scienceblogs 日期：2007-07-14 所属分类：科技 | 推荐：260 | 阅读：2841
    I reported the other day about Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland issuing an order protecting gays from discrimination in state employment there. Predictably, the religious right in Ohio has their frilly panties in a bunch over it. Also predictably, the reasoning is absurd: The order addresses discrimination based on "gender identity" and "actual or perceived" homosexuality. Phil Burress of Citizens for Community Values (CCV) says there are at least two problems with those definitions -- first, there is no definitive test for homosexuality; and secondly, the word "perceived" addresses what people think. The latter causes Burress to ask: "So we're going to be suing people because of what someone was thinking?" Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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  • Kaminer on the ACLU [Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

    作者:scienceblogs 日期：2007-07-14 所属分类：科技 | 推荐：183 | 阅读：2008
    The Wall Street Journal article that I asked to have sent to me was a column about the ACLU written by Wendy Kaminer. Before I get in to the substance, a little background on Kaminer. She is a lawyer and writer who was on the national board of the ACLU until June 2006. She is still on the board of the Massachusetts state ACLU. She's also on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. She's also active with a range of secular and humanist organizations. In short, she's one of the good guys and she speaks not as an enemy of the ACLU out to demonize the organization but as a passionate supporter and longtime civil liberties activist out to save the ACLU from itself. She is also, along with former ACLU president Ira Glasser, David Goldberger and many other present and former board members, part of the SaveTheACLU coalition. I think her criticisms deserve to be taken seriously. She writes: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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  • Anakin Skywalker has borderline personality disorder [Omni Brain]

    作者:scienceblogs 日期：2007-07-14 所属分类：科技 | 推荐：145 | 阅读：1605
    star_wars_kid.jpgAhh silly research - gotta love it! SAN DIEGO -- Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, suffers from a controversial mental condition and could use some couch time in a shrink's office, a team of researchers declared this week. "He's suffering. And he's suffering from a disorder," said Dr. Eric Bui, a psychiatrist in Toulouse, France, who co-wrote a study that diagnosed one of the most villainous and heroic characters in the Star Wars canon as having borderline personality disorder. According to the authors, who reported their findings at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting in San Diego, Skywalker meets the criteria for the condition: He has difficulty controlling anger, stress-related breaks with reality (after women in his life die or leave), impulsivity (dangerous pod racing), obsession with abandonment (those women again) and a "pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of ideation and devaluation" (hello, Obi-Wan). In another sign that he's borderline, the authors argue that Skywalker suffers from an "identity disturbance." After all, he did become Darth Vader after being "very unsure of who he was and what he wanted." Read more from Wired. Read the comments on this post...
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  • The Winner's Curse and the Yankees [The Frontal Cortex]

    作者:scienceblogs 日期：2007-07-14 所属分类：科技 | 推荐：79 | 阅读：792
    So the Yankees aren't quite as bad as we've been led to believe. (At least, until Petite also pulls his hamstring.) They've taken two of the last three from the Red Sox. That said, it's still obvious that the Yankees are one of the most least productive baseball teams when looked at through the prism of salary vs. performance. Ben Fry has a fantastic chart illustrating this. Why do the Yankees get such a measly rate of return from their players? The answer, I believe, involves the winner's curse, which is the old dictum that, in auctions with incomplete information, the winner tends to overpay. Free-agents in baseball are perfect examples of the curse in action. Nobody really knows how the player will perform in the future, and the auctions are usually blind, which encourages people to speculate. The end result is a frenzy of irrational bidding. In the case of the Yankees and the Red Sox, the rivalry inflames this tendency. They make bad speculative bids simply to keep the player away from the other team. Now the enmity has been moved to a higher level of battle, to team front offices, where the dollars and sense seem to move in opposite directions. Enemies? You bet. In the modern era of escalating salaries, the Red Sox and the Yankees have become their own worst enemies. Last night at Yankee Stadium provided the setting for a good example in how a wonderful rivalry has made reckless bedfellows. On the first-base side of the diamond, the Yankees waited another day to ann
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  • Culture, Conflict, and Climate [The Intersection]

    作者:scienceblogs 日期：2007-07-14 所属分类：科技 | 推荐：40 | 阅读：412
    Dr. Montgomery McFate, a noted anthropologist and Pentagon consultant currently based at the U.S. Institute for Peace, has pointed out an historical military role of her academic field in understanding the local populace during the Colonial period. Despite this intermingled history of anthropology and the military, however, modern-day defense policymakers and academic researchers rarely play well together in the proverbial sandbox. In general, a Cold War-era preoccupation with technological superiority, combined with the negative aftereffects of poor cultural understanding of opposing forces in the Vietnam War, left the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) unprepared to integrate cultural knowledge into a comprehensive intellectual infrastructure. In the current "Global War on Terror" or "Long War" era, it needs such tradecraft now more than ever. A recent news article from within the scientific community discussed a new DOD initiative called Human Social Culture Behavior (HSCB) Modeling, which has been outlined in testimony to Congress by the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, John J. Young, Jr. The HSCB Modeling program is designed for advanced anthropological analyses of cultures that the U.S. military might encounter during overseas operations. This relatively inexpensive defense transformation - largely a shift in thinking - could have benefits beyond active counterinsurgency warfare and counterterrorism. This is increasingly important given the recent DOD emphas
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