Truth doesn’t change from building to building on a college campus

Georgia Southern University has a history professor teaching creationism. This is absurd; no serious academic in any discipline should be misinforming students about the state of knowledge today. That Emerson McMullen is in a history, rather than biology, department, is no excuse at all — I should think that we ought to defer to a significant degree to our colleagues’ expertise, so McMullen ought to be paying attention to what more knowledgeable people are saying, and striving to give his students better representation of what we actually know.

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The Ebola ‘conspiracy’

We’re thick in the election nonsense here in Minnesota (so are you other Americans, you betcha), and this is an ad that was running in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, against Democrat Mark Dayton.

anti-daytonad

He says he’s ready for Ebola.

HE ISN’T.

33 million travelers per year at our airport, yet no travel ban from infected areas.

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Your daily dose of irony

Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini claim to be making a full length feature film, a documentary about the wickedness of Anita Sarkeesian called The Sarkeesian Effect. Dave Futrelle asks whether this isn’t all just an elaborate practical joke, because the two are hilariously incompetent at making simple videos. Their latest is a poorly lit, static video of the two of them justifying donations to their Patreon account, in which they used a directional microphone that only picked up Owen’s voice, so every time Aurini speaks, there is no sound, just his face flapping.

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If they don’t know journalism, and they don’t understand ethics, what is it about?

Tauriq does a marvelous job raking #gamergate over the coals on the issue of ethics — which they know nothing about. We already know it’s not about journalism, or they’d be targeting journalists and ‘zine publishers that have a cozy relationship with game publishers, and we can also see that the foaming-at-the-mouth GG advocates haven’t got even a passing acquaintance with the content of a first year philosophy of ethics course, so what can we conclude?

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I do enjoy a good haunted house

It’s really a shame I just now found out about the Haunted Basement in Minneapolis. And I had to find out about it in the New Yorker!

Housed directly beneath the Soap Factory galleries, in the building’s grimy, raw underground space, the Haunted Basement consists of a series of rooms, or scenes, each created by an emerging artist. Despite (or perhaps because of) its highbrow origins, it’s generally agreed to be the freakiest haunted house in town—only adults are allowed in, dressed in closed-toe shoes and a protective face mask, and armed with a safe word (“uncle”), just in case. Visitors enter in groups but often get separated as they move through the twelve-thousand-square-foot space; they can expect to crawl, climb, and run, to get covered in gore, and, in 2013, to be stuffed into a coffin by a toothless man in an orange jumpsuit. The entire experience lasts a brief but intense twenty minutes, though nearly a hundred people bailed out early this year by crying uncle.

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Plastic brains

This is quite a nice talk by Daphna Joel on male brains and female brains — she’s making the point that there are no such things. There are differential responses by developing brains to the environment that lead to different structures…but because it is a property of interactions between sexual factors and the environment, it’s inappropriate to call the differences simply “male” or “female”.

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Yay! Sexism in science is over!

The New York Times has declared that Academic Science Isn’t Sexist. What a relief! The authors are reporting the results of a broad study of many different parameters of the career pipeline, and are happy to report that there are no problems in academia. None at all, no sir.

Our analysis reveals that the experiences of young and midcareer women in math-intensive fields are, for the most part, similar to those of their male counterparts: They are more likely to receive hiring offers, are paid roughly the same (in 14 of 16 comparisons across the eight fields), are generally tenured and promoted at the same rate (except in economics), remain in their fields at roughly the same rate, have their grants funded and articles accepted as often and are about as satisfied with their jobs. Articles published by women are cited as often as those by men. In sum, with a few exceptions, the world of academic science in math-based fields today reflects gender fairness, rather than gender bias.

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Did you know that surveys are actually really hard to design well?

My wife the psychologist struggled a lot with her survey, which was part of her thesis on parenting attitudes. It took months to get it together, and it was reviewed multiple times by multiple people who were evaluating her experimental design, and it was also reviewed for ethics by the human studies review board. I acquired a healthy respect for the skills required!

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