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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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Sociologists love when people get shot; it gives them a chance to make correlation/causation arrows go in all kinds of crazy directions.

So when people jumped on the gun rage by Jared Loughner as a product of the Tea Party or a climate of hate or whatever they wanted to call it, they easily found someone in sociology to back them up on it.   

It must be extremism or something else that he got from listening to Rush Limbaugh or watching Fox News, right?   Unless it is just some crazy guy shooting people.    Mapping events to a cultural topology or a social agenda is not science - not even social science - it is plain old superstition.
Is there still gender discrimination in science?    We hear about it even today but is it a real problem or is it primarily a problem in that 'if there is even one instance it is too many' way that zealots insist on zero tolerance, even when applied to individuals who sometimes make decisions based on silly reasons.
Environmental groups are concerned they have lost the trust of the public regarding global warming so they have taken to new marketing approaches.    They started the last decade with runaway public interest and goodwill and ended it with scandals and black marks on the credibility of the climate field.
The Economist argues, as they would be expected to argue, given their free market leaning, that due to the glut of Ph.D.s and therefore the poor job market (in academia), it is a waste of time.   A Ph.D. who enters the job corporate world for anything except basic research has the wrong set of skills, according to corporate hiring managers, so it is actually better to hire a bachelor's or Masters degree and spend the time in the corporate world.  Numbers bear it out.  While a Ph.D. earns more than a bachelor's degree today the difference between a Ph.D. and a Masters is barely noticeable.
Wrestlers are taught to ignore an opponent's eyes and instead watch his waist - nothing much is happening that his waist won't be involved in whereas eyes can be misleading.    That means wrestlers are conservatives, according to new research coming out in Attention, Perception&Psychophysics.

Progressives follow eye movements more than conservatives, the authors contend.   That means that progressives (also, liberals, if you don't know what the word liberal means) and conservatives quite literally do not see the world in the same way.   The researchers measured reaction to 'gaze cues' - the tendency to shift attention based on another person's eye movements.  Essentially, they wanted to find out who looked more at what distracted someone else.
In the category of lesser-known holidays that could be celebrated on December 25th, the coronation of William of Normandy in 1066 A.D. as first King of what we know as modern England would have to be considered.    It was the last time a foreign nation would conquer the island nation and years later the Brits gave us all Shakespeare, Christmas Island and America.