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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Economics is always called the dismal science, because it has science pretensions yet never makes accurate predictions.   The outlook, according to economists, is always rather bleak.

But given the current state of the economy, economists are downright ecstatic, because they can be relevant again.  And, in this case, it turns out they are a lot more optimistic than unemployed people are about the future.

You know when economists are cheery things must be pretty bad.   
If you're in the prejudice business the worst thing that can happen is to have a woman and an African-American fighting it out to be President.   A white guy has a tough time out there these days and that's a good thing for society because it means that America continues to be the least racist country in the world.

But if you're in the prejudice business the death of institutional racism and the demise of cultural racism means you'll need to look deeper;  namely to find people being prejudiced against themselves.    Then you can say it's the legacy of old prejudice and the cycle continues.
Okay, you're thinking a guy who started a site where scientists write feature articles directly to the audience must be insane to endorse big media science journalism, right?   

Not at all.  Science journalism is a different beast than what we do here but it still has more commonality than it lacks and that's why I was intrigued by a recent back and forth between Professor Larry Moran of the University of Toronto and Chris Mooney of Seed Media's Scienceblogs.com.

Moran is never one to pull punches - that's why I have him on my blogroll - but that doesn't mean I always agree with him, I just like his style.


Show Me The Science Month Day 19

Merriam-Webster's dictionary says the word 'evolution' originated in 1622 and derives from the Latin evolutio, "unrolling, from", as in a parchment, and this is actually the perfect way to think of both Darwin and Evolution in their context.
Want to know if your discipline is in over-hype freefall?   Look at all the empty seats in your session.   For "The Science of Kissing" session I talked about yesterday it was standing room only, even if most people there wondered how much of it was just made up, but at the "High Energy Physics: From The Tevatron To The Large Hadron Collider" session there were plenty of open seats.
The interesting thing about being in a meeting like this is seeing some outstanding science and then seeing something that makes you wonder if people really know what they are doing.   Day 2 was when some of the more outrageous stuff, and therefore more outrageous headlines in the mass media, really came out.  If you want to start with Day 1, go here.