We need more knowledge (and less spin).

It’s no surprise that the scientific and medical research in which the public tends to show the most interest is the research that is somehow connected to practical issues, like living longer and healthier lives. Scientists who depend on public monies to support their investigations have gotten pretty good at painting the “so what” for their findings.
The problem, of course, is that the “so what” painted for a non-scientific audience is frequently oversimplified, glossing over a lot of the complexities that the scientists deal with daily. It’s hard to cram complexities into a sound bite. As well, these sound bites telling us why a certain finding matters often play into the pre-existing biases and social expectations of the non-scientific audience at which they’re aimed. Unfortunately, this can persuade that audience that, with a particular finding, we know all that we need to — or, perhaps, that we at least know enough to justify particular ways of doing things (surprise!) toward which we were already inclined.
Consider, for example, a New York Times op-ed piece by Marianne Legato on gender and health. She writes:

What emerges when one studies male biology in a truly evenhanded way is the realization that from the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It’s not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood — and underappreciated — vulnerabilities inherent in men’s genetic and hormonal makeup. This Father’s Day, we need to rededicate ourselves to deepening our knowledge of male physiology.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But Echidne of the Snakes worries that it is not only vulnerable to being spun, but also engages in some oversimpliciation and spin itself:

I feel as angry about this reverse take on the relative health of the sexes, and the reason for my anger in both cases is the same one: Discussions like these may or may not be the springboard for better health research, but they certainly will be used to perpetuate the status quo of power imbalances between the sexes.

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“Ethics, schmethics! Can’t I just think about science?”

There’s a nice commentary in the most recent issue of Cell about scientists’ apparent aversion to thinking about ethics, and the reasons they give for thinking about other things instead. You may not be able to get to the full article via the link (unless, say, you’re hooked up to a library with an institutional subscription to Cell), but BrightSurf has a brief description of it.
And, of course, I’m going to say a bit about it here.

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What good science teachers don’t do.

No sooner do I post an answer for one “Ask a ScienceBlogger” question than another one gets posted. If you thought Summer at ScienceBlogs was going to involve lots of lounging by the pool and drinks with paper umbrellas, that’s not how it’s shaping up.
The question of the week: What makes a good science teacher?
Others are already weighing in about the things a good science teacher ought to do. I would like to remind current and future science teachers (and those who interact with them) what good science teachers ought not to do.

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Mission accomplished, dude! (Or, a peek into my spam folder.)

Sometimes I check the spam folder just in case actual (even important) email from a human being who is not trying to sell me (and the millions of others in that valuable set of email addresses) something I don’t need has been snagged by the filter. More rarely, I open the odd spam message from the spam folder. (By the way, could Gmail please stop suggesting Spam recipes while I’m there? It makes the experience even ickier.)
Tonight, I found spam advertising “real, genuine degrees that include Bachelors, Masters, MBA and Doctorate Degrees. They are fully verifiable and certified transcripts are also available.” In 4 to 6 weeks! With no study required! It’s almost like they have no freakin’ idea what I do for a living.
But what made it art was the cryptic sentence and a half way down at the bottom of the email message:

towards him with his wand. I need to Disillusion you.

And lo! I was disillusioned.

Nerds and the dating game.

Given that I’ve weighed in on “nerd culture” and some of the social pressures that influence women’s relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It’s pretty much the dreck you’d expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it’s not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We’re not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, “Quick, what’s the one true programming language?” set).
But, Amanda at Pandagon has fed the article to the Regender engine with delightful results. Some of my favorite regendered passages:

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How do bloggers keep their day jobs?

How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?

Hey, that’s sweet to assume we fulfill our primary objectives! Not that we don’t try, but to paraphrase Grad Student Barbie, “Research is hard!” (For the record, that’s what Grad Student G.I. Joe says, too.) Still, unless one wants to be a full-time blogger who is otherwise unemployed (which I do not), there is balancing required. Here are my strategies:

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Why didn’t I see that before? (World Cup edition)

I’ve always liked soccer balls — and not just because you can play soccer with them. The arrangement of pentagons and hexagons to form a surfaces that’s reasonable spherical always seemed outstandingly clever. Who was the genius who first realized you could do that?
Well, my world has been rocked. I still think the soccer ball is clever, but in and entirely different kind of way. Tonight I was flipping through the copy of American Scientist that arrived with today’s mail, looking at the pictures*, and I came across this article on the topology (and combinatorics) of soccer balls. (The full article online requires a subscription.) Figure 8 revealed that a soccer ball is nothing but an icosohedron (that is, a Platonic solid with 20 faces, each of which is an equilateral triangle), each of whose 12 vertices is truncated. Chopping off each vertex leave a pentagonal face (so chopping off 12 vertices yields 12 pentagonal faces). And, each of these truncations chops off the corners of the faces that met to make the vertices you chopped off — turning the 20 equilateral triangles into 20 regular hexagons.
Whoa!