I guess we should have a punitive tax on churches for the trouble they cause the same way there is a punitive tax on cigarettes!
The 2 minute MSNBC report pretty much says it all… apart from the anchor-blonde’s tone giving a hint at how the US public will view (or more correctly, not view) the evidence. (HT: Pharyngula)
Unfortunately, Pharyngula’s PZ Myers’ post didn’t point to the source papers… so you can go into the gory details of the sampling and data yourself via:
If those papists in Canberra declare a national holiday because Mary McKillop is given some Roman gong… THEN I’M TURNING UP FOR WORK ANYWAY.
I’m beginning to smell a KRudd/Abbott lovefest, religious patriotic jingoism replacing everyday patriotic jingoism as the first refuge of scoundrels.
Mind you, from the policies coming out of Canberra these days, I think KRudd’s more partial to Bob Santamaria than Mary McKillop.
(p.s: I would celebrate if Father Bob was made Pope.) Read more »
Those wanting action on adolescent obesity have got a good tabloid headline in their kit-bag, thanks to a new paper (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009296 in PLoS that links adolescent (but not) sugar overconsumption with a liking for cocaine in later life, not through correlative statistics, but by messing with the dopamine-related reward pathways in the brain.
It’s more than likely gambling and other addictive behaviours could have sugar as a gateway drug as well.
"Sugar Overconsumption during Adolescence Selectively Alters Motivation and Reward Function in Adult Rats" (2010-02-19) includes the following in the conclusions/significance section:
Sugar overconsumption induces a developmental stage-specific chronic depression in reward processing that may contribute to an increase in the vulnerability to reward-related psychiatric disorders. Read more »
A very thought provoking paper on why people do not want to, and therefore reject, overwhelming scientific concensus, has just been released on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN): "Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus" (2010-02-07) with the lead author from Yale Law School.
It posits and tests the idea that your worldview will make you, near-instinctively, reject evidence based on whether the actions guided that evidence would conflict with your worldview.
Putting it a bit simplistically, libertarians hate the science of climate change because it demands action involving regulation, and supranational concerted action, while lefties, viewing big business as intrinsically untrustworthy, will not credit any evidence that nuclear waste can be managed. Read more »
The evil cackling you hear in the background is me thinking about how many harmless people could be locked away for up to three years if Nick Xenophon’s proposed legislation, with laudable aims, gets through. Ain’t I a nice guy giving losers the chance to raise their concerns to government, and maybe keep their loser activities from becoming criminal?
The Senate Inquiry into the Criminal Code Amendment (Misrepresentation of Age to a Minor) Bill 2010 got me wondering how many Australian women approaching or over "a certain age" (whatever that is) will have to delete their facebook and or myspace profiles, and start again with a new profile created from scratch, unless female behaviour has changed radically in the last 15 years or so.
Oh well, it’s an easy way to get rid of all the silly groups and pages they have joined!
I thought I’d crunch some numbers from the 2008/09 Donations to Party Group declared to the Australian Electoral Commission, looking specifically at what I’ll term a "T2 Index", with T2 being shorthand for "Tweedledum Tweedledee", a possible measure of perceived political similarity.
I look only at those donors who donated to both the majors (treating the Libs and Nats as one Liberal-National Party), and calculated the T2 according to the following formula:
T2 = 100 * (1 – abs(ALP-LNP)/(ALP+LNP)) Read more »
I wonder what would happen if the assumptions of MySchool on the worth of schools, their ability to teach students, were applied to entrance scores for university courses?
If one school is deemed half as good as another, then surely a student from the inferior school, with test results three standard deviations above the mean for that school, shows greater ability and dedication to learning, and is more worthy of entry into an elite course like medicine or law, than a person who may have got the same absolute year 12 score, but was only one standard deviation above the mean for the better-scoring school.
Indeed, any raw score for a student of one school scoring half that of another, should be doubled when considering eligibility for a tertiary course.
Imagine the howls of protest from the ivy-walled private schools, as parents dragged the brighter kids away to place them in more disadvantaged state schools.
Imagine how the per-capita funding of schools, even on just a federal level, could be more equitable.
HT: "Boy do I recommend this – Hayek vs Keynes: the video clip" Peter Martin (2010-01-29). Read more »
A recent paper in PLoS "Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption" has a few things to say about costly altruism – adoption of orphans, the socio-economic conditions required for altruism, and raises the questions of why human males aren’t primary caregivers half the time, as half the chimp adopters of unrelated infants were male.
Single dad Porthos and adopted daughter Gia - food preparation Read more »
…. when it’s a toy that goes hum in the night.
Consumer Affairs Minister Craig Emerson (one of the more useful members of the KRudd government in my opinion) has announced a long-overdue "Ban on pthalates in toys" (2010-01-25) is good news – but does it go far enough – cover enough toys?
Phthalates are rather nasty compounds widely used in plastics to make them softer, and, unsurprisingly big industry has set up "information centres" such as phthalate.com that behave similarly to those set up by the tobacco lobby.
Sure, there is legislation around the world to limit the amounts of phthalates in things going into childrens’ mouths, whether in toys or teats, but there is a loophole in such regulations: Read more »
Climate-action denialists try to pull down the edifice of climatology because of a few bitchy emails between competitive scientists, and a single error (but hardly a fundamental one that invalidates all other data) in a huge report.
It is a pity that the even more damning, more evil, universally recognized, and self-admitted phenomenon of pederast priests, which belies the claims that Xtianity leads to improved behaviour of individuals, doesn’t cause those climate-action denialists to demand that those organizations who have protected pederasts, or at least, despite supposedly intensive training been unable to make them decent people, be pulled down, be given no special protected status within civilized societies.
Why is that?
Perhaps because... both denying the need for climate action and denying the parasitical (at best) nature of pederast-harboring churches within society both require looking for, and correctly evaluating evidence, and taking logical steps to protect society in the long term. Read more »
Is it just the Libs who are happy that Garrett is getting so much bad press, or are some in the ALP even happier?
Certainly Conroy would be happy for any distraction from his questionable behaviour with media owners, which comes on top of his bloody-minded, technically illiterate and very unpopular policy stances in his own portfolio, such as his Orwellian internet agenda, and stances outside his portfolio that stem from his regressive social policy agenda, which tightly mesh with, and derive from the same imaginary friend sources as, the policies of Lib leader Tony Abbott.
He’ll follow the line of Rome and the Mad Monk for things like preventing access to RU486, but when his own direct interests are at stake… well… what’s Rome’s line on egg donors and surrogate mothers?
What hope to we have for a progressive society when the leaders of both major parties and at least one of the major backroom headkickers who happens to be in control of information flow (or stemming it), are all in thrall to a regressive version of direction from imaginary sky friends? Read more »
The DVD (and obviously Blu-Ray) formats have some useful features – easy choice of soundtracks and subtitles… so why can’t we get ones with bleeps in the soundtrack and ****ing stars in the subtitles?
It can’t be hard. if you can get two different cuts (theatrical and extended) on the same DVD, because you only need the extrra space for the extended bits, why can’t you have similar techniques for the extra bleeps and stars?
Mind you, I wish bleeps were a little more subtle… a neutral "errrrr" sound about the same volume as the voice.
The problem with blatant bleeps is that it can turn something quite innocent into something filthy…. try listening to the Sesame Street Count sing with bleeps and NOT hear the obscenities.
If KRudd (or state governments) wanted to improve educational use of computers in schools (and kindergartens), and wanted to DECREASE the government spend on IT in schools, all he’d have to do is point schools to the pages where Google offers a near-enterprise-level service free of charge: Google Applications for Education and Google Apps for Kindergartens through Secondary.
Then, there’d be no need to fund laptops – just low-end "diskless" (actually a flash disk) netbooks and a means-tested basic internet connection (enough to be ok for google apps, wiki pages, etc, but a bit painful for music/video).
By near-enterprise-level, providing the school joins before July 2010, I mean things like fine-grained filtering of email, along with not just email, but the other goodies like word processing, website creation, team assignments (via groups), lesson plan creation, integration with other schools… Read more »
The cloak of Confucian authority has been used previously by Lee’s Singapore, and increasingly China, as justification for authoritarianism, promoting misconceptions in Western cultures, and possibly a subtext in the forthcoming movie about Confucius.
Many parts of "The Analects of Confucius" are quietly subversive, as I’ll show by quotes that confound the common charges against Confucius of being an authoritarian superstitious pedant. Legalism is the true fist in the thin Confucian glove worn by Chinese leaders. Both schools stress strong government for order in society, but have opposite approaches. Read more »
Electioneering honesty could be ensured if politicians wore funny hats, of a very special kind.
"Can a Brain Scan Predict a Broken Promise?" (Sci Am Online 2010-02-02) looks at results that seem to detect an intention to cheat when the deal is being made.
Hmmm… maybe there is application of these funny hats for use when signing contracts!
I bet this research won’t be getting much "innovation assistance" funding from politicians. Read more »
Some bats seem to love their booze, and fly faster through obstacle courses when they are drunk.
"Drinking and Flying: Does Alcohol Consumption Affect the Flight and Echolocation Performance of Phyllostomid Bats?" (PLoS One, 2010-02-01 officially) has experimenters thinking about whether the fermented fruit bats eat (which can get up to 4.5% alcohol in some parts of the world) would affect the way they deal with an obstacle flying course made of linked plastic chains about a wingspan apart.
Well, some species appeared to get quite drunk as far as blood levels went, with a significant number getting themselves above 0.3%BAC, and some species avoided stronger alcohol unless they were hungry, yet apart from speed (some species slowing down when drunk, others speeding up), behaviour was unaffected.
It looks like the ability to handle your drink is important for bat evolution.
Further to "Adoptive chimp single dads and the evolution of altruism" (2010-01-28), another pointer, to a chimp, Anjana, an "assistant" at a zoo, that has fostered tigers, leopards and orangs, titled "A Mom is A Mom no matter what the species".
Also, look down the bottom for the discussion of chimps and non-reciprocal (don’t expect anything in return) altruism in "Of rats and men: generalized reciprocal altruism" (2007-07-10), as well as "Human Rights: a regressive concept" (2008-05-04) and its links.
Unlike many photos of cute animals, where the punchline comes from a caption, here, the eyes have it. Read more »
By the look of a recent paper in Nature Neuropsychopharmacology, the problems of psychosis caused (in the small number of people that are susceptible) by smoking too much cannabis could possibly be cured by…. smoking cannabis! It’s the strain that makes the difference, suggesting that a "government approved labelling standard" and a different legal status for each strain might be worthwhile – or even that the government should give away seeds from good strains!
There are two major cannabinoids in Cannabis sativa, Δ-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and Cannabidiol (CBD), both of which are psychoactive (especially for medicinal purposes like painkilling), but with THC being the most intoxicating.
It seems that for those few that can be pushing towards psychosis, it’s the THC that causes the problems, while CBD not only doesn’t cause the problem, but protects against the dangers of THC. Read more »
Lynne Kosky’s resignation from the Victorian Parliament and as Minister for Transport, for family reasons, was greeted with loud hurrahs by many long-suffering public transport patrons, and a string of "it wasn’t her fault" by many who recognized that taking over public transport, with many botched contracts already underway, was a poisoned chalice.
However, Lynne Kosky, along with all other Victorian Ministers, is extremely guilty of disservice to the public, for not gathering together with any honest party members, grabbing Joh Brumby, spreading him face-down on the Cabinet table, and shoving well-hidden and conveniently lost documents relating to mismanaged and ill-conceived contracts up his arse until his eyes popped out.
Such a method of assassination would take approximately 0.000000001% of documents meeting such criteria – even if they were on microfilm not paper.
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