The Greater Blogosphere

You remember being 14, bragging to your peers about how totally wasted you are (“Yeah I can actually drink three strawberry Maddog 20/20s before I puke, it’s pretty awesome”), lecturing about how stupid adults are and how you read half of the Fountainhead and ‘Ayn Rand totally had it all figured out, and no, it’s pronounced “Aye-enn,” you socialist dipshit,’ etc. You remember that. You don’t admit it but you remember it.

Jimmy Zinn remembers it, because it is happening to him right now. The only difference between you and Jimmy Zinn is that Jimmy Zinn is 19 instead of 14 and you never wrote your moronic opinion in a letter and mailed it to the local paper so everyone would laugh at you.

[sic] (throughout)

Dear Rebecca;

In advance I’d like to apologize for my writing in this email being below my usual standard- I haven’t sleep for 48 hours and am completely smashed on 100% pure California nightrain express wine…but anyway:
My name is Jimmy Zinn and I’m a die hard MRA and hard rock fan. I’m 19 years old, and I’m not to happy with the current state of affairs. I’ve decided to dedicate my life to what I’m calling the three revolutions- the hard rock revolution, the Men’s rights revolution, and the life extension revolution(concerning promoting the developments of medical technologies to radical extend the human lifespan.)

Two of these are indirectly pointed at people like you- bigoted feminists who marginialize and trivailize* the male gender, promoting sexist and discrimination attitudes, and fighting vivaciously for the very thing you vehemently claim to be so against- gender inequality.

* yes yes, spelling mistakes. great. idfc. im wasteeeeeeeeeeeeeed motherfucka!

See, over the last 20 years, 2 terrible things have happened:
1. Music sucks.
2. Discrimination of males increases at an alarming rate.

Now I’m not particularly happy with either one. Things at home weren’t going particularly well- girls with lower GPAs and poor extra ciriculars were getting scholarships that boys with perfect 4.0s were not, and since I’, one of the poor privileged white males, I couldn’t afford college. Getting a job was tricky to- I was told on more than one occasion “we aren’t hiring white males right now.” Indeed, it did appear that 90% of those waiting in the unemployment office were male. After 23 interviews/applications, I was left still jobless. I also become of the privileged white males who developed heart problems at age 18, but of course, couldn’t afford a doctor. I was going to go to a free heart screening at a local college, but whoops…. “FEMALES ONLY”, courtesy of the “Women’s radical feminist men hating Heart association of a women-only America”, or whatever it was called.

Well, I decided “this sucks”, and decided to set out to star ta revolution and become the next great American (and global) icon. So, I jumped on a slow moving freight train as it passed*, which started a journey hitch-hiking to Los Angeles.

* I’m sure you’ll be quick to point out on your blog that this is a felony and I am a criminal…whats interest that if a woman did the same you’d laud her as a “bad-ass heroine” or “kick-ass chik” or some nonsense.

but anyway, here I am.
Rebecca, I am going to radical alter our society in the next year. I am going to start the greatest hard rock 1986 GNR-esqe band the world has ever seen. There is an army, millions strong, of angry people, and especially young males seething at the lack of justice and outlet for their rage. I fear a violent revolution is near, and I’m not in favor of that idea at all. Instead, why not give them a kick-ass 24/7 rock n roll party, tearing through the country with blistering blues-based rock, finally giving red-blooded masculinity a place in American culture again. I am going to fight the bigoted feminist you propagate, and start the largest social movement since the 60s…the Mens rights revolution.

I’m in hollywood right now, partying, crusin’ down sunset strip, spreading the MRA message, rockin out at the whiskey, troubador,

We’re coming, Rebecca. The walls of mass social delusional, ignorance and apathy will crumble down as justice and non-autotuned music will triumph in the streets. You will fight back, I’m sure, but you will lose, and you will lose badly. In 3 years time, you WILL live in an American of true gender equality, but I’m not sure it’s going to take the direction you expect!

Feel free to post this on your blog- in fact, I might even start a daily blog of my own to illiustrate what the legitmate MRA issues are. While I concede there is an unfortunately population in the MRA community who are misogynistic and who don’t hold true gender equality in high esteem, I am very sure that the vast majority of MRAs are far less bigoted than yourself.

For example, why is it wrong for men to seek correction in the heavily women-favored family and divorce court system? Why is it wrong for fathers to want equal access for their children? Why is it wrong for men to want equal enforcement in gender equality laws, eg title IX where schools with heavily disproportionately high female athletes are ignored by the NCAA, but schools with a 1% proportion disbalance favoring are forced to cut the male indoor track team for “budget issues”

Our scoiety is incredible anti-male…we are vilified, insulted, exploited.

I will have intriguing enticements such as “why the wage-gap is the myth”, “why violence against males goes encouraged”, “why women support abuses of male reproductive rights”, and hundreds of other subjects I’m sure you’ll love disecting with your other misandrist friends.

Why should my life have to be a punishment just for being born male? I see as 95% of the homeless here are male, and feminists dont give a shit, and it pisses me off. i hear stories of men who lost everything, houses ans pensions included, to an ex-wife who divorced out of spite. and it pissed me off. i read stats that the fed. gov. spends 15x more of women specific health issues on a PER DEATH RATIO (meaning for every death, maternity issues excluded.)

But don’t worry, we’ll be getting to all of that. In the mean time, you can brood over one question- as a woman, what is ONE constitutionally legal right you don’t have, that I do as a male? (There’s only one right non-stupid answer, lets see if you get it right!)

You’ll be seeing the name Jimmy Zinn quite a lot, feel free to follow my twitter….its the one called “jimmy zinn” thats been spamming you earlier this afternoon.

Sincerest regards!
-Jimmy Zinn
Hard Rock Revolution
Mens rights revolution
life extension revolution.

As many of you know, this year's SkeptiCal 2012 conference was a rousing photo by Heather Appleburysuccess! Hundreds of skeptic-minded guests converged upon the Berkeley Doubletree Hotel to hear talks on what toddlers and children can teach us about being better scientists, the neuroscience of Out-of-Body Experiences, doomsday predictions for 2012, the importance of vaccination, and many other topics.

Please CLICK HERE to read an excellent article about the conference by LaRae Meadows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. In addition to being exceptionally well written, Meadows' article contains brief descriptions of each speaker and break-out session, links to more information on the speakers themselves.

Keep your eyes peeled for details about next year's SkeptiCal Conference, and we hope to see you there!

This piece is adapted from my research and notes for the speech I gave this past Sunday, May 20th, at the Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference. The talk was entitled “Push and Pull: The Role of Religion in Social Justice.” The follow-up to this piece will address the present-day role of religion in social justice and whether there is a secular alternative.

There is no doubt that religion has hindered social justice movements and continues to do so. I am not saying that said movements were dependent on religion, that their achievements could not have been accomplished without religion, that religion didn’t have its place in hurting the efforts of the movements, or even that religion didn’t necessitate them in the first place. At the same time, to deny religion’s role in certain aspects of specific social justice movements is to ignore an incredibly important aspect of American history, especially for certain minority communities.

As the discussion of religion’s role in hindering social justice took us all the way back to American slavery, let us start there, with Abolitionism. Christianity was used heavily by white abolitionists to motivate and inspire others to join their cause. Rather sentimentalist Christian propaganda, such as the highly influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin, propelled the cause forward. The central idea in this line of thinking was that the slaves were brothers and sisters in Christ and were thus undeserving of the horrendous treatment they endured.

 

 

The enslaved people themselves used religion in their quest for their freedom. Though Christianity was imposed upon them as part of their slavery, they turned it around to work in their own favor. Slaves used spirituals to communicate messages towards freedom. As is evidenced by Harriet Tubman’s nickname, the Biblical Moses was a commonly-used source inspiration towards freedom. Though the notion of the Jewish slavery in Egypt is historically questionable, when did the truth ever get in the way of a good, inspiring story? The Christian indoctrination of the slaves had backfired spectacularly: through “we are all children of God” and “brothers and sisters in Christ” lens, white Americans were led to sympathize with Abolitionism and slaves were empowered as human beings deserving of freedom.

 

 

The legacy of slavery was what made the Civil Rights Movement necessary. Beyond the obvious fact that Martin Luther King Jr., as well as many other leaders, were religious figures, religion was crucial in the movement. Churches served as essentially the perfect organizational tool: people were forced to be at least decent to fellow churchgoers, there were enforced weekly meetings and sense of community, there was built-in respect for what the man behind the pulpit had to say, and there was social pressure to participate both personally and financially. The malleable nature of the messages of religion, so evident with slavery, became even more consciously manipulated: the “children of God” narrative implied the necessity of equality.

Christianity was not the only religion to have a crucial role in organizing during the Civil Rights Movement. The Nation of Islam rejected the notion that Christianity, i.e. what they saw as “the white man’s religion,” could be used to liberate African-Americans. They advocated a religion that they saw as more authentic to their people’s history and background. Although most people remember the Nation for its divisive doctrines as voiced by the highly influential initial career of Malcolm X, its impact within the African-American community was immense. The Nation’s focus on reducing drug abuse, increasing self-reliance, and promoting gainful employment in the highly hostile environment in which it existed changed many lives.

 

 

The various waves of feminism and movements for women’s rights were not supported, and were often opposed, by organized monotheistic religion, but the idea of a more female-centric spirituality via various New Age movements was influential to many feminists. Moving away from the patriarchy inherent in Judeo-Christian religion and into a female-centric, female-empowered model was a way to free themselves of the self-hatred with which many of them were instilled through those religions.

The most prominent contemporary movement for civil rights is the LGBT movement. Most of the big muscle in the religious community is flexed in opposition to it, but just as some religious groups are against LGBT rights, some are for them. The United Church of Christ and Unitarianism in general has stood with the LGBT community. Their buildings have served as meeting places for groups like No on Proposition 8. While other religious groups have claimed that the mere existence of same-sex marriage violates their freedom of religion, the UCC has argued that being prohibited from performing same-sex marriages, which is permitted in their doctrines, violates their freedom of religion. Non-Orthodox rabbis have also generally been in favor of LGBT rights.

Even among mainstream Christians, the support for LGBT rights is growing. There is a growing segment of Christians who have adopted a more love-based faith in that they prefer to promote the “love thy neighbor” part of Jesus’s teachings over Paul’s writings or the Old Testament’s prohibitions related to homosexuality. This line of thinking is not limited to Christians that might be considered, let’s say, somewhat wishy-washy.

Originally posted on Mad Art Lab. Written by Ryan.

Evolution in Action is a fantastic little RocketHub funding campaign to study how bacteria like e-coli evolve as they pass through the GI tract of a host. It’s an interesting project and it has the potential to expand our knowledge of bacterial infections so that we may better combat them in the future. Also, they paint your name in bio-luminescent bacteria if you donate $50 or more.

Isn’t that awesome? Don’t you want one for yourself? I think bacterial cultures are an under-utilized artistic medium.  Slime moulds, too, should be used more but that’s off topic.

Good luck with your project Siouxsie and thank you for a beautiful and possibly contagious logo.

More info on the project after the break.

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/7491-evolution-in-action

Ryan is an engineering graduate student at the University of Waterloo and is attempting to improve the science of Mountain Bikes. His hobbies are myriad: camping, video games, fencing, painting, juggling, acting, armor smithing, D&D (yeah that nerdy), drumming and anything else that wanders along. His skeptical bent is understanding how humans learn and how they come to believe.

Back in March a study came out, though it was only recently hyped up in the media, which explored an interesting intersection between psychology, vaccination, and the communication of risk. This study by Cornelia Betsch and Katharina Sachse (2012) covered two experiments in which the researchers looked at how the wording of vaccine risk messages affected participants’ perception of the safety of vaccines.

The idea of these experiments was to explore what the researchers call the negativity bias. This bias is a tendency for negative messages to influence our perceptions of risk more than positive ones. This creates a problem for the communication of negating messages—messages that downplay a risk or offer contradictory evidence against a risk. So, relating to information about vaccines, how strongly should we word our pro-vaccine arguments?

As the science behind vaccine safety is sound, there are a few ways to make an argument for it (and to argue against anti-vaccine pseudoscience). The study outlines two different tactics: strong risk negation and weak risk negation. The study offers up the following example of both:

The claim that newborns tolerate vaccinations less well than older infants may be negated by the statement “It is absolutely impossible that newborns tolerate vaccinations less well than older infants,” which may be perceived as a strong and confident negation. A weaker risk negation may be expressed by the following statement: “It is extremely rare that newborns tolerate vaccinations less well than older infants.”

Participants in the experiments were asked to imagine that they were parents unsure about vaccination and its side affects, and were then presented with a number of common anti-vaccine arguments and their corresponding strong or weak negations (rebuttals). After this, the participants were asked how likely they would be to vaccinate their imaginary child against a fictitious illness. We could imagine this to be exploring how people would respond to the science-based community’s debunking of anti-vaccine myths.

Herein lies the issue: based on the previous literature on risk communication and the negativity bias, the study hypothesized that a strong risk negation would actually create a higher perception of risk than a weaker negation. This is counter-intuitive, as a strong negation leaves no “residual risk” (i.e., no possibility of harm), which should seemingly assure people. This would be akin to saying “It is absolutely impossible that vaccines will harm your baby.” But because of the negativity bias, even a weak negation (which implies a small risk) affects risk perception more than a strong negation (which implies no risk). That is to say, paradoxically, the study in fact found that a stronger negation of risk increased the perceived probability that a vaccine-adverse event (VAE) would affect their (imagined) child.

The study is not clear on why exactly this is the case. Perhaps a complete negation of risk is simply not “real” enough: claiming that a medical intervention is 100% safe is undoubtedly suspicious. As the negativity bias has us giving more weight to negative information, the weak negation simultaneously offers a negative aspect (“some rare side effects may occur”) while explaining vaccination. It may be that these aspects, when taken together, offer a more “real” message that has an emotional response we can focus on. Delinking this in the strong negation case could be the downfall of effective communication. It could also be that the strong negation, which makes no mention of risk, allows a cautious mind to run wild, inserting hyped-up dangers where none exist.

Of course, like any study, this one has its limitations. The sample size was relatively small (n=166), the participants weren’t actually parents, and there may have been confounding variables like effects from the availability heuristic (simply seeing the risk written down may have increased the perceived probability that it happens). But the study certainly offers an interesting and counter-intuitive finding. There are many more parts to this study, such as exploring other moderating variables like personal involvement, prior attitudes about vaccination, credibility of the message source, and views of alternative vs. conventional medicine. However, the finding about the negativity bias in communication about risk is enough to inform some strategy for those of us who wish to, rightly, extol the safety and necessity of vaccination (and negate the damage done by anti-vaccine proponents).

Adopting a More Rational Stance

The finding of the study discussed above presents a problem: We know vaccines are safe and save lives, but we can’t discuss it in absolutes. As a pro-vaccine proponent myself, I know that I have been guilty of making statements that sound too similar to the “strong negation” case explained above and have seen many skeptics to the same. The unfounded and fear-based arguments of the anti-vaccine movement frequently get me so incensed that I forget the conditional and tentative nature of the science I am trying to promote. Vaccines are not 100% safe. We can only say that adverse reactions (which do happen) are amazingly rare. [Indeed, even if an order of magnitude more children were in some way harmed by vaccines, the cost-benefit analysis would still point to continued vaccination] Though the vast majority of VAE’s are minor, like soreness or redness at the injection site for example, they still occur.

It is odd then that in this case a cognitive bias sides with the stance of science on an issue. According to risk communication experiments like these, adopting a more conditional and scientifically accurate stance on VAE risk is better than flat-out denying any risk (though the percentages are so small that we might be warranted to do so). If a pro-vaccine message owns up to possible side effects, instead of dismissing any with a strong negation, and therefore decreases the perception of risk in comparison, that is the way to go. It may seem like an information campaign no-no to include possibly scary side effects in the message, but our cognition is quirky. In this case, an honest representation of risk happens to work well with those quirks.

This should logically extend to other anti-vaccine tropes like the imagined link between vaccines and autism. Another study would have to be done, but if the negativity bias holds true across cases, it would be better for pro-vaccine advocates to speak in the conditional voice of science. Saying “all of the evidence that we have so far shows no plausible link between vaccines and autism,” would then be better for people’s understanding of risk than saying “it is absolutely impossible that vaccines cause autism” (even though this is nearly the case).

What then does this mean for pro-vaccine discourse? I suppose that it means speaking more like medical professionals and less like pro-vaccine cheerleaders. I am convinced that getting your child vaccinated is one of the most medically important things that you can do for her, but that does not mean I can leap beyond scientific boundaries and into a place of inscrutable certainty. If we start making claims that go beyond what the science says, we become as those who claim thimerosal is a persistent and evil poison. Luckily, we already have the science on our side. Every bit of evidence that we have shows that vaccines are safe, effective, incur a modicum of side effects, do not cause autism, and save millions of lives. We just have to communicate this in a way that acknowledges the real data. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is because people value real data or know the science behind these issues, but rather it is because, in comparison to statements that leave no wiggle room, weak negations leave room for judgment and suffer less from possible backfire effects. As does the psychology of “debunking,” the study of risk communication extends to everything from vaccines and autism to cell phones and brain cancer to “alternative medicine.” Studies like the one discussed above are by no means definitive, but they do give us a window into how to proceed as properly science-based individuals. Apparently, when it comes to communicating effectively about vaccination, and debunking the harmful tropes of the anti-vaccine movement, we need to stick to the science, admit the risks when they are present, and stay away from absolutes. Though it is incredibly hard not to adamantly shout back at those who are basically welcoming preventable childhood diseases with open arms, nothing in science is absolute, and we should represent that in the way we promote vaccine safety. A quirky psychology may just be our ticket to scientific literacy on the issue.

Journal Source:

Betsch, Cornelia, and Katharina Sachse. “Debunking Vaccination Myths: Strong Risk Negations Can Increase Perceived Vaccination Risks.” Health Psychology, March 2012.

 

Kyle Hill is the JREF research fellow specializing in communication research and human information processing. He writes daily at the Science-Based Life blog and you can follow him on Twitter here.

• How do you write such strong female characters? – “…Those attempting to defend their mistreatment of women within the industry have revealed a staggering lack of understanding, empathy, and self-awareness, while seeming to rejoice in an arrogance that is near heart-stopping in its naked sexism and condescension. To say there are those who don’t get it is an understatement; it would be like describing the Japanese tsunami as ‘minor flooding.’” From Chris.
• Women writing pilots: Nice work if you can get it – TV pilots, that is.
• Princess Scientist is back! – And she’s making a baking soda volcano with Grant Baciocco from the Henson Alternative puppet show, Stuffed and Unstrung.
• Chicks rule? – Information Is Beautiful has a new infographic on women on the internet. From Tom.

Maintaining our cognitive ability into old age is a top priority for some neuroscience researchers. As our population ages, cognitive decline and dementia are becoming more prevalent, requiring tremendous health care resources and having a significant impact on quality of life. Also, anyone who has had a family member suffer from dementia knows the heavy toll that this slow loss of self takes on the individual and their family.

A recent study sheds some light on the brain changes that correlate with cognitive decline in the elderly. Researchers studied 420 adults in their 70′s, using four different imaging methods to look at their brain anatomy. They found that the robustness of connections within the brain (the white matter tracts) correlated well with general intelligence.

What this study implies is that overall intelligence may be largely a factor of processing speed within the brain and the ability of the various brain regions to communicate with each other. General intelligence is less a factor of the function of any one or small number of brain regions. The white matter are the tracts in the brain where the axons that make up these connections reside.

The subjects in the study are part of the Lothian Birth Cohort of 1936, a group of 1100 people who have been followed since age 11. This is helpful because a lot of information about their overall health and intelligence has been tracked throughout their lives.

It should be noted that the current study did not look at dementia or specifically Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD is a pathological condition that affects the brain neurons themselves, not the white matter. In AD the different parts of the brain, and the specific functions associated with them, are progressively damaged by degenerative changes. The current study was looking at the changes in brain function that happen as a consequence of aging, in some individuals, and not the effects of  a specific disease.

Also, the current study found a correlation between white matter robustness and general intelligence and reaction time. It’s possible that those subjects who performed better on these tests had more robust white matter connections to begin with, rather than losing fewer of those connections as they aged. Longitudinal follow up of the current study will be helpful to sort out the relative contribution of these two factors. In other words – is loss of white matter connections causing cognitive decline in the elderly? This study suggests that it is, but again would benefit from confirmation.

The next question, of course, is how to prevent the loss of white matter connections. Not everyone suffers such a decline as they age. Are the lucky ones who stay sharp into very old age just benefiting from having the right genes, or are there lifestyle changes that can improve our odds? This study did not address that issue, but does provide an excellent tool for studying that question.

There are a number of studies that do look at the risk of dementia and cognitive decline in the elderly. A recent review of this research concludes that the usual lifestyle risk factors you would guess to be associated are in fact risk factors for cognitive decline.  These risk factors include hypertension, obesity, smoking, a high saturated fat diet, and social isolation. Protective factors include physical activity, staying mentally active and socially engaged, moderate alcohol consumption, and vegetable and fish consumption.

In short – good overall physical health contributes to overall cognitive health. It is also important to keep mentally engaged, and research suggests that the best way to do this is to keep challenging yourself with new types of activity.

I am not sure I buy the moderate alcohol consumption factor. This research has gone back and forth over the years, depending upon how factors are accounted for. For example, if the non-drinker category is contaminated with ex-alcoholics this tends to worsen the overall outcome of that group. Moderate alcohol consumption may also just be a marker for some other factor, such as social engagement. It’s possible moderate amounts of alcohol, or perhaps certain kinds of alcohol, like red wine, have a vascular protective effect, but I don’t think the final word is in on this yet.

Conclusion

I agree that research into cognitive decline with aging, what causes it, what changes occur within the brain, and how to prevent or minimize it – is a very high priority. Since we essentially are our brains, preserving them in good health and function throughout life is very important. Loss of brain function represents a literal loss of self.

And yes, I am deliberately making a reference to the debate on consciousness that has been raging on this blog over the last week. This kind of neuroscience research, in my opinion, establishes a clear direction of cause and effects. Systemic disease and illness causes changes to the brain and concomitant loss of cognitive function. The brain is a biological organ. Biological factors affect its function. That function is our cognition – our consciousness. The conclusion is ineluctable.

Photo:Trounce/Wikimedia Commons

One disadvantage of living in a country stuck using non-metric measuring systems is that we’re also stuck using a few related measures. One of the most familiar of these is mpg, miles per gallon. Many other countries use a newer standard, l/100km, liters per 100 kilometers. The salient difference between the two is not merely that one is metric and the other is not; it’s that they are multiplicatively inverted from one another. One gives fuel per distance, while the other gives distance per fuel.

When we talk about a car’s fuel economy, what we want to know is how much fuel does it use, not how far does it go. mpg answers the latter question, while l/100km is what gives us the answer we want. When we talk about a car that gets great fuel economy, we tend to speak instead in terms of how far it will go. This is the inverse of what we are trying to communicate.

The problem with using mpg — distance over volume of fuel — is that the relationship is not a flat line. It’s deceptive. Values at the lowest end of the mpg scale — where most of us scoff at all such cars — correlate to consumption numbers that are much further apart than those at the high end of the scale.

For example, imagine two cars that get 14 mpg and 17 mpg. Most of us look at them and say they’re both unacceptable. However, consider two cars that register 33 mpg and 50 mpg. Who among us would not clamor for the 50 mpg car, believing it to be far more fuel efficient than the 33? The fact is that in both pairs of examples, the car with the higher figure saves 1 full gallon of fuel on a 100-mile trip. Going from a 14 mpg car to a 17 saves exactly as much fuel (and carbon) as going from a 33 to a 50.

The advantage in using a linear scale of fuel consumption is that it tells us exactly what we want to know, without disguising the reality behind an invisible curve.

An increasing number of Monroney stickers — those mandatory window stickers on new cars that include the mileage among other things — are beginning to show l/100km values, though it’s still in a small font below the larger combined EPA mpg number. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

This piece is adapted from my research and notes for the speech I gave this past Sunday, May 20th, at the Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference. The talk was entitled “Push and Pull: The Role of Religion in Social Justice.” Look for the follow-up to this piece tomorrow about the positive role religion has played in social justice.

Generally speaking, among the skeptically-minded, religion is seen almost universally as a hindering force to anything approaching progress in society. Moving backwards in history, it is easy to see why that is the case.

In terms of LGBT rights, religion is notoriously hostile towards progress. Same-sex marriage, the issue that has become something of a poster child for LGBT rights, has been opposed at every stage by some very powerful religious groups. In California, most of the funding and support for Proposition 8, the voter referendum that denied same-sex couples the right to marry, came from a church that I will not name.

Religious groups have also been on the forefront of opposing hate crime legislation, often in the name of religious “freedom” or “liberty.” While some disagree with hate crimes as a concept, the fact remains that terrorizing someone in a minority community for being a member of said community affects all of its members and has wider repercussions than the harm done to the victim of the crime. In the case of the LGBT community, it will likely have a silencing, shaming, closeting effect. The same goes for bullying, both in terms of its effect and religious support of what seems to obviously be the wrong side on the issue, cloaked in the notion of freedom of speech. You don’t hear about religious groups outraged at the lack of free speech for, say, Jessica Ahlquist, but when it comes to children who bully their LGBT peers, it’s another story.

Yet another area where religion serves a hindering role in progress is with employment protections. In 29 states, still legal to fire people based on the gender of the people with whom they are nonplatonically involved. In 38 of them, the same applies based on the gender with which they identify.

Courtesy of Mother Jones

When it comes to the many and varied movements for women’s rights, including the feminist movement, mainstream, organized religion has had a less than stellar role, to say the least. As shown by the War on Women, reproductive choice is always in a precarious position, and I’m not just talking about abortion. Birth control is something fairly uncontroversial nowadays, given that the vast majority of Americans use it, and yet access to it has been recently and severely challenged. In terms of abortion rights, which remains fairly controversial, religious groups have been at the forefront of attacking, shaming, and even murdering people whose actions are pro-choice.

Further back in history, the Klu Klux Klan (which might still exist but has been defanged to a large extent) relied fairly heavily on Christian wording and appeals to Christianity to rouse their supporters in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. For example:

Unlike the state of Utah,  I am fairly sure the cross is a symbol of at least somewhat related to Christianity.

The Civil Rights Movement was the necessitated due to the legacy of slavery. After people were enslaved and brought over the Atlantic to the Americas, their native cultures, religions, and languages were literally beaten out of them in order to ensure subservience. Religion played a crucial role in convincing slaves to obey, the idea being that the white slaveowner was the representative of the Christian god to the enslaved. It’s not all in the Old Testament, either — even Jesus told slaves to be obedient to their masters.

Given all of the evidence, both historical and contemporary, it can be difficult to imagine religion taking a neutral, let alone positive, role in social justice movements. However, it has, and it is historically disingenuous to completely deny its legacy.

This post was written by Courtney and is cross-posted from Queereka.
 
Today, the 23rd of May, marks exactly one month until the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth. Events have been going on, and will continue to go on, through the whole of this year to celebrate the milestone. You may have seen that next month’s Skepchick Book Club book will be David Leavitt’s biography of Turing, but you may not know much about the man himself – much less about why he warrants a whole year of recognition. As Queereka’s resident Turing geek (official title) I hope I’ll be able to demonstrate what an important figure Turing was, the enormous debt we owe him, and the injustices he faced as a gay man living in the wrong time. Of course, I won’t be able to cover every facet of him, which is why you should definitely join in with next month’s discussion!

Alan Mathison Turing was born on the 23rd of June 1912 to an upper-middle class British family. It didn’t take long for him to show signs of brilliance. As a teenager he attended Sherborne School, where his scientific talents weren’t appreciated by the more classics-focused teachers, leading him to work on them in his own time (including extrapolating Einstein’s doubts about Newton’s laws of motion, completely independently, at the age of sixteen). It was also here that he met and fell in love with a fellow student named Christopher Morcom. Sadly, Morcom died suddenly of tuberculosis near the end of their schooling – it was this event that turned Turing into an atheist and arguably helped shape the rest of his life.

Having won a scholarship to study maths at King’s College Cambridge, Turing was elected a Fellow of the college only a year after graduating with a first-class honours degree. A year after this he published perhaps his most important paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“. In it he introduced what became known as Turing machines – machines capable of performing any mathematical function if it were expressed as an algorithm (a set of instructions for the machine to follow). This theory is central to computer science – in essence, Turing created the theoretical framework for computers in this paper, decades before the first digital computers were built.

If those contributions weren’t enough, Turing went on to even more great things. During the Second World War, he worked at Bletchley Park, the centre of Britain’s codebreaking efforts, where the brightest minds in the country worked together to crack German ciphers. It is believed that these efforts shortened the war by at least two years, potentially saving millions of lives.

Though what was achieved at Bletchley Park was undoubtedly a massive team effort, built upon the previous work of others including Polish cryptanalysts, Turing’s contribution was clearly vital. He shares credit with Gordon Welchman and Harold Keen for the invention of the Bombe, a machine designed to break Enigma, one of the Germans’ major methods of encryption. He worked to make previous methods of decryption more general, robust and efficient. His ideas also fed into the design of Colossus, a machine that cracked the Lorenz cipher, though he wasn’t directly involved in it.

While at Bletchley he gained a reputation as an eccentric. To combat hayfever he’d wear a gas mask while cycling to work, he chained his mug to the radiator to prevent it being stolen, and when the chain came off his bike he didn’t get it fixed. Instead, he counted the number of times the pedals went round and got off in time to adjust it. Turing was awarded an OBE for his war work, but wasn’t allowed to reveal the nature of it due it being classified – the full extent of his contributions would not become clear until after his death.

 

The Alan Turing Memorial in Manchester

After the war Turing worked first at the National Physical Laboratory, then the University of Manchester, on early computing machines. He also began to consider the issue of artificial intelligence, formulating the famous Turing test. This states that a computer can be said to “think” if a conversation with it cannot be told apart from a conversation with a human being. In the last two years of his life he turned his mind to mathematical biology, specifically morphogenesis (the study of how organisms develop their shapes), where his work is considered seminal.

(Did I mention he was also a world-class marathon runner? Hey, you have to balance out founding computer science with a little physical exercise.)

As you may have worked out, in addition to all of this Turing happened to be gay. While these days most people in the UK have cottoned on to the fact that being gay is not a bad thing, back then homosexuality was illegal – it was only legalised in 1967. In 1952 Turing spent the night with a young man, Arnold Murray, who was also a petty thief. This would prove to be his undoing. After their encounter Murray and an accomplice broke into Turing’s house – Turing, honest to a fault, reported the crime to the police, but in the process was forced to acknowledge his sexual relationship with Murray. They were both charged with “gross indecency”. Turing lost his security clearance and was also forced to choose between a jail sentence and chemical castration by oestrogen injections. He opted for the latter.

The treatment, which aimed to reduce libido, was humiliating, and didn’t even work as it was “meant” to – Turing’s sexual desires were unaffected, but he became impotent and grew breasts. He couldn’t run any more after his body became bloated thanks to the effect of the hormones he was required to take. Two years after his arrest, on the 7th of June 1954, Turing died aged just forty-one. He had apparently taken his own life by biting into an apple laced with cyanide. Some have speculated whether this could have been an accident, due to him not washing his hands after performing experiments, or even something more sinister – the government viewing him as a liability following his conviction and orchestrating his death. What matters, though, is that the world lost one of its greatest minds prematurely, and wouldn’t have were it not for the horrendous treatment dished out to him simply because of who he was attracted to.

While in his lifetime Turing was wholly unappreciated, since his death and since the work he did during the war has been declassified that has changed. Blue plaques punctuate the route of his life. An entire year of events relating to him have been planned all over the world, from conferences to mass sunflower planting. In 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the way Turing had been treated, saying, “We’re sorry, you deserved so much better”. There have been campaigns to officially pardon Turing and all the other men convincted of gross indecency and to get him on the next £10 note.

Sadly, despite all these gestures, the injustice remains and continues around the world in infinite guises. Perhaps the greatest tribute of all would be to work to make the world a place where no one gets intimidated, prosecuted or killed because of who they are and who they love.

Feature image from the Alan Turing Year website.

I have been raising money to pay for registrations for women to attend the Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas this year. I have so far raised enough for six registrations! That’s SIX women who normally would not be able to attend the event but now they will be there! I’m SO freakin’ excited and proud! THIS IS SO GREAT!

This post is to help us remember that this is not just some idea, these are REAL people we are helping. And that by doing this we are literally changing the environment of our conferences. When there are more women on stage and in attendance it will create a more welcoming environment for women in general and will pave the way for more women to get involved.

We can, and are making a difference.

So are you ready to meet them?

 

Georgina Capetillo lived in Nicaragua for 14 years before attending high school in Belmont, MA. She is a Howard University Alum where she studied philosophy and political science. She just started graduate school for conflict resolution in Umass Boston, with a concentration on gender and race conflict. She strives to be a human rights activist, concentrating her efforts women’s rights and separation of church and state. She is most passionate about LGBTQ, women’s and human rights. She loves animals, science, nature, food and to travel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aimee Kuzenski likes to think of herself as a study in contrasts. She has a degree in acting at the UWSP and another in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota. She writes highly technical manuals for a living, but would prefer to write in the sci-fi realm. She can’t dance all that well, but has four years of training in Filipino stick fighting. She lives alone, has two house rabbits as pets, and can’t wait to meet all the fabulous people of TAM.

*Aimee gave me a choice of two photos to use in this post. One with a black eye and one without. How could I NOT pick this one?! The ladies of skepticism are also bad-ass stick fighters! You have been warned.

 

 

Sarah Hamilton has a BA in Visual Arts and French. She is a born-again science enthusiast, kerning skeptic messages one letter at a time while MacGyvering clever ways to promote science through art and graphic design. Self-appointed ice cream connoisseur and snarksmith. She is an artist who hopes to take a more active role in communicating art and science to the masses and looks forward to attending her very first TAM.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Kate Baker is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at UC San Diego, specializing in optics. She will never stop being fascinated by what can be accomplished through the manipulation of light and will happily talk your ear off about popular misconceptions of lasers. Kate has been interested in science and skepticism for a long time, but this will be her first TAM. She is particularly interested in promoting critical thinking and skepticism in engineering as well as science outreach for kids, especially girls.

 

 

 

 

 

Vanessa Lin is a Southern California native returning to school to study Microbiology. She is working toward entering the MS program in Epidemiology at UC Irvine in order to participate in their chronic diseases research on cancer/ HIV. She enjoys hiking, traveling, photography, gaming and is a complete nerd for the latest gadgets and electronics. She is fairly new to the skeptics community but believes it is a great community that fosters critical thinking for young aspiring researchers such as herself! She is excited for this wonderful opportutnity that the Surly Womens Grants has given her.

 

 

Amanda Baraldi received her B.S. in mathematics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and her M.A. in clinical psychology from Columbia University. She is currently a PhD student at Arizona State University studying quantitative psychology. Broadly, quantitative psychology is concerned with the design and analysis of research pertaining to psychological data and other social sciences. Amanda believes that quantitative psychology is vital to keeping the “science” in “social science”. Specifically, Amanda’s research pertains to missing data analyses, mediation analyses (e.g. X causes M causes Y as opposed to just an X to Y relationship), longitudinal growth modeling, and prevention research. Besides her academic work, Amanda enjoys crafting, board games, musical theater, and, of course, science and skepticism.

 

 

Random fact: NONE of these women have EVER attended a TAM meeting. THIS is how we help bring new faces into organized skepticism. You are watching it happen in real time.

 

Here is the part where I remind you that there are SO MANY more applications that have been turned in. And all of the applications are wonderful. I really wish I could send EVERYONE who wants to go.

If you can donate anything please consider it. You can go here to place a tax deductible donation or you can go to my shop and buy a YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE necklace.

There is still time to apply as well. I promise I will send at least one more person. I am determined.

 

See you at TAM.

PS: If you know any millionaire-skeptics please ask them if they wouldn’t mind sending all the rest of the applicants. Thanks.

Love,
Surly Amy

 

 

 

Right now, we are in the middle of a severe pertussis (whooping cough) epidemic. In Washington state alone, cases over tentupled (which is a word that I made up for up more than times) since last year. In 2011, there were 146 confirmed pertusis cases through the first 20 weeks of the year. This year? 1738. That’s really bad, people. Really bad. And Washington, frankly, I’m a little disappointed in you.

Pertussis is a disease that, if contracted, often kills infants. And once they contract the disease, the only treatment they receive is to stop them form spreading it. There is no shortening of the illness. There is no medicine to help the body fight it. There’s just medication to stop you from spreading it.

And that “whoop” that gives whooping cough it’s name? That’s the sound of the sufferer struggling for air, being suffocated from inside their own body.

But worst of all, where they usually catch it is from an adult who hasn’t been vaccinated against pertussis.

So over here, in my little corner of the internet, with my tiny organization, we’re trying to fix this in every way we can… which is the only way we can, and that’s by vaccinating people against pertussis. If you can’t get infected with it, you can’t spread it.

The Women Thinking Free and the Hug Me! I’m Vaccinated campaign have partnered with the JREF and will be bringing yet another Tdap clinic to TAM2012.

Tdap is a combined vaccine that immunizes against tentanus, diphtheria and pertussis. It is a booster that all adults need to get. If you have not had a tetanus shot since 2007, you need a Tdap. If you don’t know if you’ve had a tetanus booster since 2007, you need a Tdap. But not all tetanus vaccines contain the pertussis component — some are just Td— so if you are unsure if your most recent booster was a Tdap or the Td, and you are having trouble verifying that information, you need to get a Tdap.

We are also working on several other clinics at other conferences and conventions around the country… and while the medical staffing and the vaccines themselves are donated, the clinics are not completely free to put together. We have to promote them and get our volunteer staff to the events, trips they often fund out of their own pockets.

So we’re asking again if you could chip in to help us save the world.

But this time, we’re also asking if you could chip in to help a friend. A fellow Skepchick Network blogger, who has asked that we keep her identity private, grew up in a semi anti-vaccine household. This blogger is working to get their vaccines up to date, while going to school full time. And she’s paying for these vaccines out of pocket. Her goal was to have the money to have them all up to date by the end of the summer, while sacrificing all else to attend SSACon.

So, as part of our fundraising for these clinics we are also raising funds to help our friend, a dedicated young leader in the skeptic and secular movements, finish receiving her basic recommended vaccines, which include chicken pox and meningitis, so she can focus on doing bigger and better things. If vaccinating everyone against pertussis isn’t your thing, then maybe you can help a Skepchick out.

To donate, you can visit our Chipin page, or use the widget below:

Featured image of a very vaccinated Phil Plait by Jamie Bernstein.

• Dealing with badly behaving speakers in the secular movement.
• Harold Camping’s doomsday followers a year later. (From Eric.)
• It’s not feminism that hurts men.
• Why I write strong female characters, from Greg Rucka.

The Mongolian tyrannosaur specimen that was to be auctioned off on May 20.

The buzz was going back and forth among my paleontologist colleagues for weeks: an important tyrannosaur skeleton (Tarbosaurus bataar) that had been poached from Mongolia was scheduled to auctioned off on May 20 in New York City. We paleontologists were all outraged, and spent days signing online petitions, blogging, and sending letters and emails to the appropriate parties, but the tiny scientific community of vertebrate paleontologists in the U.S. (no more than 2000 people) don’t hold any real positions of power beyond a handful of museum curator positions and top professorships. But our activity got the attention of the Mongolian government, and they sent formal letters of protest to the auction house and the American government. All the emails and blog posts were full of anger and despair that such blatant theft could be rewarded with a million-dollar sale. Then, just hours before the auction was to start, a Texas judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order, and it appeared that the the fate of the Mongolian tyrannosaur was put on hold. But the auction house went ahead with the sale anyway, getting a final bid over over $1 million, and arguing that the Texas judge has no jurisdiction over a New York auction house. This occurred, even as the attorney for the Mongolian government was in the auction room with the Texas judge on his cell phone, trying to make himself heard and to get anyone to listen to the judge. The sale went on pending resolution of legal issues, so now it is in limbo for a while until this could be sorted out.

This story highlights a much bigger problem that most people never hear about: the huge international market in stolen fossils and antiquities. Bit by bit, some governments are becoming better at protecting their national treasures, but the poachers and smugglers are always much better funded and quicker than even Interpol. Not only is there a big black-market trade in stolen artwork and artifacts, but the market in natural objects is equally brazen and profitable. The stories I’ve heard just want to make you cry! Now that all five species of rhinoceros are nearly extinct in the wild, mounted rhino heads in older natural history museums all over Europe have been stolen or defaced just for their valuable rhinoceros horn (worth more than cocaine or gold by the ounce, all because “traditional Chinese medicine” believe rhino horn reduces fever). Famous fossil localities in protected national parks all over the world are brazenly poached by thieves, destroying not only most of the fossils but ruining the locality for its scientific value as well. Museum research collections and even specimens on public display with security guards and video cameras protecting them are stolen or damaged by thieves. One-of-a-kind fossils that are certainly new species and genera and have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of life’s history are seen briefly and then end up on some rich person’s living room. (Lately, one of the biggest problems is the fad among rich Hollywood celebrities like Nicholas Cage and Leonardo di Caprio to have their own dinosaur in their living room).  Even above-board organizations like some major auction houses and the more reputable fossil dealers have to be careful of poached specimens with fraudulent locality data hiding the illegality of their collection. I’ve heard the horror stories from my colleagues who had the proper permits and found an important bone bed on Federal land, only to come back a few days later and someone had plundered the best material and left the rest in broken piles, hacked out of the ground with no attempt to protect the fossil in a jacket—or record the location and stratigraphic horizon of the specimen, which is a big part of its scientific value. It’s common practice now to bury your excavation and hide it once you leave so this doesn’t happen, and I’ve had museums ask me to not publish my GPS coordinates of paleomagnetic sites that also might give away locations of fossil localities. My paleontologist friends in the fossil-rich National Parks are constantly having to spend more and more time planning on how to prevent poaching, and less time doing the science they are better qualified to do. The situation on private land is even messier: although it is usually legal to collect on most privately-held ranches with the consent of the landowner, the story of the tyrannosaur named “Sue” showed that handshake agreements, and disputes over where the specimen was found, and unclear property rights can make those specimens a legal nightmare.

In fact, the famous story of “Sue” is one of the reasons the problem has become so egregious. Thanks to the $8 million bid the specimen fetched so that it would end up on display in Chicago’s Field Museum, every commercial collector is now more motivated than ever to bend the rules for a big payout. (Never mind the fact that no fossil since has gotten even close to that price—the tyrannosaur that was auctioned last Sunday fetched just over $1 million, much less than the auction house had hoped). And the Sue story also put museums in a “Catch 22″ situation: they do not have the money to try to bid on these scientifically important specimens unless they get huge funding from rich sponsors (as did Sue, when McDonalds, Disney Corporation and the California State Universities chipped in); they don’t want to bid on specimens with questionable provenience since the specimen is probably poached and illegal, encouraging the lawbreakers; yet they want to make their best effort to keep scientifically important specimens in the public domain, where they can be studied and researched and yield their secrets, and eventually put on display for the public to see. I have many good friends in the commercial collector community. Some, like my old buddy Henry Galiano, are also a publishing scientists; Henry is very conscientious about his merchandise, and is often brought in as an expert to appraise the value of specimens, or to adjudicate whether their claims of legal collection are valid or not. Others, like Peter Larson (discoverer of “Sue”) and his buddies at Black Hills Institute in South Dakota, are notorious for selling incredible specimens of dinosaurs and marine reptiles with great scientific value to rich individuals. Larson has gone to jail for some of his many offenses of illegal poaching and falsifying records. Then there are the specimens that are ethically in a gray area. The big fuss over the spectacular complete specimen of the adapid primate Darwinius last year (which turned out to be a bust; it’s closer to lemurs than it is to us or other anthropoids) was clouded by the fact that the specimen was hiding for 20 years in a private collection with big questions of how it had been obtained. It would have never seen the light of day if normal black-market activities had prevailed.

Paleontologists tear out their hair as every month another high-brow auction house catering to rich people and corporations sells off many scientifically important fossils, but the story of the Mongolian tyrannosaur brings all these issues into sharp focus. The issue appeared on the public radar only a few weeks ago, and set off alarms all over the paleontological community. It is an 80% complete skeleton of the tyrannosaur relative Tarbosaurus bataar, which is extremely rare and scientifically important, and known only from a few localities in the Nemegt Formation in a small area of Mongolia. The auction house kept calling it “Tyrannosaurus” to enhance interest and its value, but it is not in the same genus or species as Tyrannosaurus rex, known only from Montana. (The name of the vendor, Heritage Auctions, is another cruel irony, since they profit by selling off the public heritage of other countries to the highest bidder). When it caught the attention of paleontologists, they started email and petition campaigns to bring attention to the illegality of the sale. Although the U.S. has no laws restricting the import of such specimens from foreign countries, both Mongolia and China have laws forbidding the export of any fossils from their countries, so any Chinese or Mongolian specimens you see on the public market are illegally obtained. The auction house claims the specimen is from a reputable source and legally obtained from “Central Asia”. That is an impossibility, since even they admit it came from the Gobi Desert, which lies entirely within Mongolia. As Dr. Mark Norell, Chairman of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (and an expert on Mongolian dinosaurs) said it:

It is with great concern that I see Mongolian dinosaur materials listed in the upcoming (May 20) Heritage Auctions Natural History catalogue. For the last 22 years I have excavated specimens Mongolia in conjunction with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. I have been an author on over 75 scientific papers describing these important specimens. Unfortunately, in my years in the desert I have witnessed ever increasing illegal looting of dinosaur sites, including some of my own excavations. These extremely important fossils are now appearing on the international market. In the current catalogue Lot 49317 (a skull of Saichania) and Lot 49315 (a mounted Tarbosaurus skeleton) clearly were excavated in Mongolia as this is the only locality in the world where these dinosaurs are known. The copy listed in the catalogue, while not mentioning Mongolia specifically (the locality is listed as Central Asia) repeatedly makes reference to the Gobi Desert and to the fact that other specimens of dinosaurs were collected in Mongolia. As someone who is intimately familiar with these faunas, these specimens were undoubtedly looted from Mongolia. There is no legal mechanism (nor has there been for over 50 years) to remove vertebrate fossil material from Mongolia. These specimens are the patrimony of the Mongolian people and should be in a museum in Mongolia. As a professional paleontologist, am appalled that these illegally collected specimens (with no associated documents regarding provenance) are being sold at auction.

Then paleontologists in Mongolia also sent letters of protest, including this missive by Dr. Bolortsetseg Minjin of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences on behalf of the President of Mongolia:

I am writing you at the request of Elbegdorj Tsakhia, the President of Mongolia. He has asked me to inquire on the country of origin for the specimen of Tyannosaurus (aslo known asTarbosaurus) bataar (lot 49315) which is scheduled to be auctioned by your company this Sunday, May 20, 2012. I am the director of the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs and also serve as the New York representative of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Based on our experience in the studying the collecting of Mongolian dinosaurs, and on the information provided by your company with other specimens to be auctioned this Sunday, we strongly suspect that the Tyrannosaurus specimen, as well as several others you intend to auction, came from Mongolia.

Mongolian law prohibits the export of fossil specimens, and if this specimen did in fact come from Mongolia, we we strongly urge you not to auction this specimen because it would then have been acquired and exported illegally. In fact, information on your website indicates that two of the tyrannosaur teeth (lots 49318, 49320) came from the Nemegt Formation, which is only exposed in Mongolia. Thus these specimens were acquired and exported illegally. We also strongly suspect that the ankylosaurus skull (lot 49317) came from Mongolia, and the troodontid may have come from Mongolia as well (lot 49318).

The auctioning of such specimens fuels the illegal fossil trade and must be stopped. If you could provide detailed information on the provenance(s) of these specimens, I will then pass on this information to the President of Mongolia. I strongly urge you not to auction the two, illegally exported tyrannosaur teeth from Mongolia. I strongly urge you not to auction the other specimens we have indicated until their legality is fully resolved. Even if the owner indicates that they did not come from Mongolia, we suggest that you investigate this matter closely as sometimes collectors falsify information or documents to make illegal specimens appear “legal”. In the meantime, the best approach would be an open dialogue with the government of Mongolia and other interested parties in order to find an acceptable resolution to this problem. If it is eventually determined that these specimens did not come from Mongolia, it would be prudent for Heritage Auctions to consult the laws of the country of origin because many countries now prohibit the export or sale of such specimens (China is one example). Thank you for your prompt attention in this matter.

Yet the auction house was determined to go ahead with their ethically-challenged specimens and make their profit. In response to the international pressure, Greg Rohan, President of Heritage Auctions wrote:

The opening statement in this petition is false and reckless. There is no evidence that we have seen regarding where the fossils were collected, or that they were collected illegally. We appreciate your concerns relating to the Tarbosaurus but it is our conclusion that no impropriety exists with regards to its sale at auction. You should all be aware that this auction has been publicicized broadly for 4 weeks and the Mongolian Governments request issued today, less than 48 hours before the auction is unreasonable and inappropriate. We have no reason to believe that any laws enforced by the United States have been violated and we are unaware that Mongolian law would have prevented export from Mongolia. Mongolia won its independence in 1921 and this specimen is obviously quite a bit older than that. Further, we are not aware of any treaty between the United States and Mongolia which would prevent the import into the United States and are equally unaware of any prohibition of export, particularly since Mongolia has not produced any factual or legal document supporting a possible claim. We have asked Mongolia if they had failed to tell us of a known prohibition preventing auction, and so far they have not. Our consignor is an individial with a good reputation and he has warrantied in writing to us that he holds clear title to the specimen.

As a reply, it’s one of the lamest imaginable. They refuse to be specific about where the specimen was found, and claim that their source is reputable, but the scientific evidence is overwhelming that the specimen could only could have come from Mongolia. Their quip about Mongolia’s independence in 1921 and the specimen being geologically much older is irrelevant; what matters is that the Mongolian laws have been place for decades, are very strictly enforced among those who do legitimate collecting and research in Mongolia (all specimens found and borrowed outside Mongolia must eventually be returned), and they themselves admit the specimen was found in 2005. That fact alone makes it an admission of guilt! Yet they have the temerity to suggest that the burden of proof is on their critics! I’m not sure of the laws in this instance, but there’s enough evidence here to suggest that they are knowingly lying about the specimen’s source. I would assume that laws about sale of antiquities are written so that vendors must go the extra mile, do their research and meet the burden of proof, and be cautious about selling materials whose legality is in question, if for no other reason than to protect themselves for liability in selling contraband. And the comment about the auction being announced four weeks ago is also irrelevant. It was only announced to a narrow spectrum of their clientele, and only by accident did sharp-eyed paleontologists who have made it their mission to scour auction listings was it publicized outside the auction house’s regular buyers.

Mongolian citizens even protested outside the New York premises of Heritage Auctions in New York, where the stolen specimens were being sold inside.

So when the T.R.O. was announced and Sunday’s auction began, most of us in the paleontological community thought that justice had prevailed. The auction house was even picketed by Mongolians wishing to draw attention to their sleazy practices! Then we were all surprised when we followed the auction and found out that they sold it off anyway, even with the attorney for the Mongolian government in the room protesting, his cell phone connected to the judge in Texas, as the greedy auctioneers trying to slip the sale by before the law could act. According the press release from the law firm representing Mongolia:

When this particular lot came up for auction today, the Heritage Auctions, Inc. auctioneer read a statement, “The sale of this next lot will be contingent on a satisfactory resolution of a court proceeding dealing with this matter.” At that point, attorney Robert Painter got Judge Carlos Cortez, of the 44th District Court of Dallas County, Texas, who signed the TRO, on his cell phone. Painter stood up at the auction, and stated that the judge was on the telephone and that going forward with the auction, even contingent on the court proceeding, would violate the TRO. Heritage Auctions, Inc. President Greg Rohan rushed toward Painter, refused to speak with Judge Cortez, asked Painter to leave the room and directed that the auction proceed. Painter said, “I am very surprised that Heritage Auctions, Inc. knowingly defied a valid court order, particularly with the judge on the phone, listening and ready to explain his order. It makes me wonder if that Heritage Auctions, Inc. has a similar disregard for the property laws that protect antiquities, like the Tyrannosaurus fossil, that they attempt to auction. I applaud President Elbegdorj for taking swift action to oppose the sale of this important Mongolian national treasure, and to make sure that it is not transferred to anyone until its ownership is verified in court,” said Texas-based Ed Story, Honorary Consul General of Mongolia. “His leadership in protecting the cultural heritage of the Mongolian people was on display again today in New York, thousands of miles away from Mongolia. This is a victory not only for the people of Mongolia who are one step closer to proving the true ownership of this important dinosaur, but also for the important friendship between the people of United States and Mongolia.”

For now, the judge’s T.R.O. puts the final resolution of the auction on hold, and we hope that there will be an opportunity for the Mongolian government and scientists to testify that the specimen is illegal, and get it returned to Mongolia. If the appropriate witnesses are allowed to speak, there will be no problem establishing that the specimen came from Mongolia, and thus it is illegally poached. Heritage Auctions’ President Greg Rohan has already given three mutually contradictory statements in a single day about the fossil’s provenience: 1) It is from Mongolia; 2) It is not from Mongolia; and 3) He doesn’t know where it came from! Even more interesting, in a open court the auctioneer will be forced to reveal the name of the poachers (apparently British, based in Dorset, and clearly not legitimate paleontologists), which should lead to some sort of prosecution or at least bad publicity for these grave robbers (and whomever collaborated with them in Mongolia).

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Scanning through the rest of the items featured in the auction, there are a lot of others that are of questionable legality, and even for those that are legal, it is a tragedy that they are going to end up as some expensive “art piece” in a rich person’s mansion, rather than in the public domain where their scientific information can be properly studied and published, and where the specimen can enrich the lives of the rest of us who are not rich.

The Pseudo Scientists — Test of Faith Panel Belinda and Jack present the audio from the April 16th “Test of Faith” panel discussion from the Reason for Faith Festival. Jack discusses the intersection of science and religion (specifically Christianity) with two fellow atheists, Jonathan Meddings and Professor Graham Oppy, and three Christian scientists, Professor John [...]

This past weekend was CFI’s Women in Secularism conference, a first-of-its-kind conference. I was bummed to not be able to attend, and even more so while watching the #wiscfi hashtag over the weekend.

One thing that made me even sadder was to hear that the event was largely unattended by men. I can only assume that’s because the title was “Women in Secularism”, which I kind of get… as a woman who runs a women’s organization, we often get men emailing asking if they’re even welcome at events titled “women”. (They are.)

But there still seems to be an idea that white and male is a default, neutral thing that appeals to everyone, and straying from that is somehow focusing on special demographics. For example, Disney’s Tangled is an adaptation of the Rapunzel story. But Disney had to work very hard to make sure that boys weren’t turned off by watching a movie about a girl. For one, they didn’t call the movie “Rapunzel”. The story is narrated by the male lead, despite the movie being about Rapunzel’s journey. Or if you pay attention to Pixar’s marketing of Brave, coming out this summer, you’ll notice, for example, that they advertised during the NFL draft… but that preview shows the female lead for maybe 2 of the almost 60 seconds, and gives the very distinct impression that the movie is about tough men… especially bothersome since this is the very first Pixar movie about a girl.

They’ve covered men and boys, robots, cars, monsters, toys… and now they’re finally making a movie about a bad ass girl, and they can’t even show her in the previews because a move about a girl is not something that men and boys can even begin to relate to. Meanhile girls cheered on Lightening McQueen, Mater, Woody and Buzz and loved them dearly… because those were movies for everyone. Those were characters everyone can relate to.

That’s a problem for me. But then, I also often have issues with the way that female characters are portrayed when they are featured. They’re in search of a prince. They want to live happily ever after. And when they’re good at non-girl things, everyone around them is shocked. (OMG she can KICK a real soccer ball! How is the media not all over this?) Reinforcing the idea that if you’re a girl, and not naturally spectacular, no one is going to take you seriously.

What’s a girl to do?

How do we get men to realize that women are actually interesting? Hell, how do we get women to realize that women are actually interesting? How do we people to start realizing that women’s issues are men’s issues, too? Is this something that really matters? 

Featured image via Sodahead

• Nikola Tesla wasn’t god and Thomas Edison wasn’t the devil – In response to The Oatmeal comic on why Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived.
• US Women’s Professional Soccer permanently suspends league – “The cause was the loss of several teams in the league, which according to US Soccer rules, meant they would no longer have Division 1 status.”
• The hidden truth behind hip-hop conspiracy theories – “The hip-hop blogosphere has been throwing fits over an anonymous letter entitled “The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation” and only Jay Smooth can see the secret order behind this shadowy intrigue.”
• Placebo: Now available in maximum strength – From Otoki.

This week in Doubtful News:

There were three big mysteries making news this week. First, a package makes a postal worker ill. But what really happened is a story that is messy in many aspects.

A pilot has a close encounter over Denver that has UFO theorists intrigued.

Rocks collected on the beach gave us a genuine case of spontaneous combustion, resulting in a woman with burns and a question about where the reactive material came from.

Some consumer issues also made the news this week. U.S. trade officials declared a $40 million settlement over deceptive claims about toning shoes.

Consumer Reports questioned whether you really need all those vitamins and supplements.

And, in the U.K., an article over the potential safety hazards of alternative treatment sparked much name calling.

A group of kids head off to the Congo with big dreams of finding dinosaurs and giant spiders.

You will not believe this story on a Vietnamese Firestarter. Really, you won't.

Don't you miss Paul the psychic octopus? Instead, we have a llama and pig.

To continue with the odd beliefs, one business owner sees an angel as a sign at his pizza shop. And a member of Iceland's parliament reveals that country's continued belief in elves.

Parents are acquitted in the death of their son when they opted for faith healing instead of medical treatment. In an additional complication, the boy was 17 and also opted to forego treatment.

A psychic and crime investigator are called in to revitalize a missing child case in Texas. Guess who got top billing in the news?

And, speaking of top billing, one if not THE most popular psychic in the U.K., Derek Acorah really stepped in it this week, making lots of people angry with his thoughts on missing Madeleine McCann (whether or not he even said them). We've appropriately put him on the bottom.

Visit Doubtful News for more stories like these every day.

Follow us @Doubtfulnews on Twitter

A recent study looking at the correlation between video game violence and real world actions found a significant correlation, and that’s what the authors were hoping to find. The study was not looking at the propensity for violent video games to increase real world aggression or violence, but rather as a training tool.

Researchers compared several groups – playing a video game involving shooting at a human, shooting at a target, and non-shooting game, and also the shooting games either used a realistic gun-controller or a standard controller (like a joystick). They then had each group shoot a real gun at a human mannequin. They found that the group who played the video game involving shooting at humans with a gun-like controller had the highest accuracy overall including the most head shots. In the nonviolent shooting (using a target) there was not much of a difference between the gun vs non-gun controllers. The non-shooting video game did slightly worse overall on accuracy but significantly lower on head shots.

The results are not that surprising. Essentially they show that using a video game simulation of an activity does improve the real world skill, and the more similar the video game (in this case using a gun-like controller) the better the training. I was a bit surprised that the gun vs non-gun was not significantly different in the target shooting game.

The authors of the study discuss two factors at work here. The first is mechanistic transfer – the transfer of skills from one task to another, in this case from video game performance to real world performance. They also note Thorndike’s 1932 theory of identical elements: the more identical elements there are between two tasks, the greater the mechanistic transfer of skills. In this case, the more closely the video game controller and experience mimicked the real world task of shooting a gun at a humanoid mannequin, the greater the benefit of the training.

This all sounds like common sense, and it is, but not everything that makes sense turns out to be true, so it’s good to have experimental verification. Further, there is a growing industry of products making essentially the opposite claim, that games can transfer skills in a more general way, not limited to the specificity of identical elements. This is the “train your brain” marketing phenomenon, the notion that doing a certain cognitive task will make you more intelligent in general.

To state this another way – how far do skills learned through training (whether video game or other types of tasks) transfer to other tasks? They certainly improve the task itself, but they don’t seem to increase overall intelligence – but where do we draw the line in between? This is still an open question and the subject of research, but at present it seems that the skills do not transfer very far. A large study I wrote about two years ago showed that video game training skills did not transfer to the general category of cognitive ability – such as memory, language skill, problem solving, or visual skill. Subjects performed better in the specific task they practiced, but this did not transfer to different tasks involving the same kind of cognitive skill. In my opinion this was a stake in the heart of the “brain training” industry.

Given that it has been recognized since the 1930s ala Thorndike that identical elements matter when task training, it seems like the current flirtation with generalized brain training is a temporary aberration, in my opinion largely brought about by the marketing of brain training products. The current study is in line with the classic view that if you want to improve your skill in a specific task you will want your training to be as close as possible to the real thing.

The second effect the researchers claim is at work in their study is operant conditioning. Subjects who were rewarded for hitting the target, especially with a head shot (which resulted in an instant kill) were more likely to aim for the head in the real-life situation – they performed the behavior for which they were recently rewarded. Their increased accuracy may have also made them more likely to shoot for the smaller target – the head vs the torso. The authors did not bring this up, but I also wondered while reading this study if exposure to the violent video game also reduced any inhibitions against doing violence against a humanoid (even if mannequin) target. We know from prior research, for example, that physicians lose their inhibitions of causing pain while performing a necessary procedure, like blood drawing.

The evidence that video game violence causes real world violence is an issue for another blog post, but the quick bottom line is that the evidence is mixed and controversial. There are some correlations, but not enough to establish cause and effect.

What this study is really about is training and transfer of skills from video games. It supports what common sense and prior research all indicate – transfer of skills is optimal when the training most closely resembles the task being trained.

This review of Ignorance: How it Drives Science by Stuart Firestein (Oxford University Press, May 2012, ISBN 13: 97801-998-28074) was originally published in Nature, 484, 446–447 (26 April 2012) as “Philosophy: What we don’t know.”

At a press conference on February 12, 2002, the United State Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld employed epistemology to the explain U.S. foreign entanglements and their unintended consequences: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

It is this latter category especially that is the focus of Stuart Firestein’s sparkling and innovative look at ignorance, and how it propels the scientific process forward. Firestein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he teaches a wildly popular course on ignorance, inviting scientists in as guest speakers to tell students not what they know but what they don’t know, and even what they don’t know that they don’t know. (Would you rather earn an A or an F in a class called “Ignorance”?, he muses.) This is a slim volume about a fat topic, but Firestein captures the essence of the problem by contrasting the public’s understanding of science as a step-wise systematic algorithm of grinding through experiments that churn out data sets to be analyzed statistically and published in peer-reviewed journals after a process of observation, hypothesis, manipulation, further observation, and new hypothesis testing, with the Princeton University mathematician Andrew Wiles’ description of science as “groping and probing and poking, and some bumbling and bungling, and then a switch is discovered, often by accident, and the light is lit, and everyone says, ‘Oh, wow, so that’s how it looks,’ and then it’s off into the next dark room, looking for the next mysterious black feline” (p. 2), in reference to the old proverb: “It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. Especially when there is no cat.”

If ever there was a time to think seriously about ignorance it is in our age of digital knowledge. Consider an Exabyte of data, or one billion gigabytes (typical thumb drives that most of us carry around consist of a couple of gigabytes storage capacity). It has been estimated that from the beginning of civilization around 5,000 years ago to the year 2003, all of humanity created a grand total of five exabytes of digital information. From 2003 through 2010 we created five exabytes of digital information every two days. By 2013 we will be producing five exabytes every ten minutes. The 2010 total of 912 exabytes is the equivalent of 18 times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. It isn’t knowledge that we need more of; it is how to think about what we know and what we don’t know that is becoming ever more critical in science, through a process Feinstein calls “controlled neglect.” Scientists “don’t stop at the facts,” he explains, “they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out” (p. 12). It must be this way, he argues, because “the vast archives of knowledge seem impregnable, a mountain of facts that I could never hope to learn, let alone remember” (p. 14). Doctors and lawyers and engineers need many facts at their ready, as do scientists, but for the latter “the facts serve mainly to access the ignorance” because this is where the action is. “Want to be on the cutting edge? Well, it’s all, or mostly, ignorance out there. Forget the answers, work on the questions” (pp. 15–16).

To Rumsfeld’s epistemological categories Firestein would one add more: unknowable unknowns, “things that we cannot know due to some inherent and implacable limitation.” He puts history in this category, but I would not, for if we take the broader construct of history as anything that happened before the present then most of astronomy, cosmology, geology, archaeology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology are historical sciences, subject to testing hypotheses no less rigorously than their experimental scientists in the lab. And I worry slightly that an overemphasis on our ignorance about this or that claim opens the door to creationists, Holocaust deniers, climate deniers, and post-modern deconstructions who wish to challenge mainstream scientists because of religious or political agendas. Acknowledging our ignorance is good, but let’s acknowledge and celebrate what science has confidently given us in the way of well-supported theories.

The Believing Brain
by Michael Shermer

In this book, I present my theory on how beliefs are born, formed, nourished, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. Sam Harris calls The Believing Brain “a wonderfully lucid, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the boundary between justified and unjustified belief.” Leonard Mlodinow calls it “a tour de force integrating neuroscience and the social sciences.”

• Order the autographed hardcover
• Order the unabridged audio CD
• Order the Kindle edition
• Order the iBook edition
• Listen to the Prologue for free

That caveat aside, Ignorance includes an important discussion about scientific errors and their propagation in textbooks. I’m embarrassed to admit that I perpetrated one of these myself in my latest book, The Believing Brain, in which I repeated as gospel the “fact” that the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. Firestein reports that his neuroscience colleague Suzana Herculano-Houzel told him it is actually around 80 billion (after undertaking an actual neural count!), and that there are an order of magnitude fewer glial cells than the textbooks report. As well, Firestein continues, the “neural spike” every neuroscientist measures and every student learns as the fundamental unit of neural activity when the cell fires, is itself a product of the electrical apparatus employed in the lab and ignores other forms of neural activity. And if that isn’t bad enough, even the famous “tongue map” in which sweet is sensed on the tip, bitter on the back, and salt and sour on the sides that is published in countless popular and medical textbooks is wrong and the result of a mistranslation of a German physiology textbook by Professor D. P. Hanig, and that the localization differences are much more complex and subtle.

These and other errors are the result of our lack of skepticism of the knowledge we have and our lack of respect for ignorance. “Ignorance works as the engine of science because it is virtually unbounded, and that makes science much more expansive” (p. 54). Indeed it is, and as the expanding sphere of scientific knowledge comes into contact with an ever increasing surface area of the unknown (thus, the more you know the more you know how much you don’t know), we would do well to remember the mathematical principle of surface area to volume ratio: as a sphere increases the ratio of its volume to surface area increases. Thus, in this metaphor, as the sphere of scientific knowledge increases, the ratio of the volume of the known to the surface area of the unknown increases, and it is here where we can legitimately make a claim of true and objective progress.