In the world as we understand it, based on Einstein, nothing can go faster than light. This prediction based on the general theory of relativity has proven itself countless times in empirical research. And now, lo and behold, a group …
Just an update to dust of my website from serious blogging-neglect. Check out this new science blogging aggregator: ScienceSeeker.org. From their website: There are thousands of science blogs around the world, written by active scientists, journalists, professors, students, and interested …
With the Triumph of Numbers, I read and wrote about the power of using numbers, and how the observation of empirical regularities led to the basic knowledge on how to use such numbers. Already in the triumph of numbers, it …
Can bad science lead us to draw wrong conclusions about the world we live in? “Of course it can“, we are inclined to think. And if so, can this have real-life consequences? Investigating these meta-questions is not as easy as it might seem, for it would require an exact manner to distinguish the good from the bad science, and it would require a subject that has been thoroughly investigated in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ ways to compare the outcomes.
One such subject would be the vast amount of research done on the psychological consequences of undergoing an induced abortion. This heavily researched (and heavily debated!) subject focusses primarily on the questions whether or not a women has a higher chance of suffering from anxiety, feeling of guilt, depression, or (other) mental disorders caused by undergoing an induced abortion. The conclusions drawn in the vast literature on this basic question vary form an abortion having no consequences, to an abortion having a negative impact on the psychological well-being of a woman.
With a new year, and a new month, it is time for the second edition of the Curving Normality Blog Carnival on quantitative social sciences. Just started a month ago, I look forward to continue this carnival into the next …
Today, I am happy to present to you the first edition of the Curving Normality blog carnival. It is all about the quantitative social sciences, and aims at bringing together high quality blog posts about our lovely profession. With just a few weeks of preparation, I am very pleased with the number of submissions, and especially glad with their quality. Apparently, the quantitative social scientists are quite well represented in the blogosphere!
Not only blogs can inspire scientists, but podcasts can do too. I regularly listen to some science podcasts, and will start a short series on Curving Normality to introduce these to you. Probably the most fun science podcast I listen to is ‘The Naked Scientists‘, the science show that ‘boldly goes where no science show has gone before‘.
The show is hosted by Cambridge University’s Dr. Chris Smith. Clearly having fun, he interviews top scientists and ‘catches up with the latest top science news stories’, focused to a large exten on medicine, technology, and biology. The interviews are accessible for people not familiar with the specific discipline, and the findings are always placed into a wider context.
Science changes, as does the way scientists report on their work. Reading a 1971 article in Science, on attitudes towards induced abortion, I was truly amazed by the sheer amount of apparent activism that might have influenced the interpretation of the findings. Let’s have a look.
Today, Researchblogging.org has been thoroughly updated; a good moment to reflect some on the initiative of researchblogging.org itself, my participation in it, and on the phenomenon of blogging on peer reviewed research itself.
Researchblogging.org is a non-profit initiative, and provides in a web-based gathering of posts from weblogs on science. Not all posts are gathered (‘aggregated’) though, only the ones that explicitly address research that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In that, it distinguishes clearly from similar (collections of) scientists’ blogs, for everything else but the research itself is left out. This is achieved by having bloggers to administer their posts on the researchblogging.org website manually, after which some PHP-code is provided. This code is added to the blog-post, resulting in a bibliographic reference to the article that is discussed, as well as the aggregation of the article to the researchblogging database.
For me, this results in a very interesting collection of blog-posts, that are nicely categorised and stored in a searchable database accessible though the web. And this is where the new version of researchblogging.org becomes really interesting, because next to a visual update, new features have been added. Bloggers now can categorise their posts manually, making them easier to find by prospective readers.
Now that the Beijing Olympics have come to an end, people in the Netherlands are pretty satisfied with the amount of medals won by Dutch sportsmen and -women. Interestingly though, these medals have been predominantly won by Dutch women. This has been widely analyzed in newspapers and on television, but unfortunately I think some of these analyses were completely wrong.
It was often argued that it is inherent to women in general to have a stronger will and desire than men to reach the goals they set for themselves. This might very well be, but that cannot explain the relative success of Dutch women over Dutch men, unless this stronger feminine willpower is a phenomenon exclusive to the Dutch. Otherwise, the strong will-powered Dutch women just compete against other strong will-powered women from other countries, and the weakly will-powered Dutch male athletes compete with other rather weak opponents. Clearly, this did not seem to be the case …
