Perhaps my favorite entirely apolitical blog is The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by the Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, two physicians who specialize in brain research and its implications for educating children. With great regularity I find information there that either is of use to me professionally or has wider societal importance.
Science
Dirty Jobs
I’ve heard that smell is the sense that most easily evokes memory. Derek Lowe has an interesting post about smells in the lab. In my less charitable moments I am wont to say that Organikers become Organikers because they smelled too much Toluene in Sophomore Organic. But I, too was surrounded by smells in graduate school that I now miss once in a while. The smell of vacuum pump oil. The acrid smell of concentrated acids, especially the aqua regia we used for cleaning Ostwald Viscometers. The smell of burnt target paper as the laser fried it. The smell of burnt skin as the laser fried you. The smell of phosgene coming up the drains from the fume hoods on the roof . (Just kidding – when you smell cut grass in a chemlab, it’s time to grab your ankles and kiss your butt goodbye. But the drains did often carry unusual odors). One commenter reminded me of TEMED. I really do not miss coming home smelling like a fish market during the year I was using that stuff.
So, for all you non-techies out there, what are the smells of work and school that take you back?
[Update: not being an Organiker I managed to avoid thiols (mercaptans to you old fogies) after sophomore year. However, it was my misfortune to work in a lab two floors down from a lab that did use thiols. Derek’s commenter’s description that some of them smell like “burnt ass” is right on.]
X-posted at TPwithpagenumbers.
Ward — Out of Thin Air
Ward, Peter, Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, And Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere, John Henry Press, 2006. 282 pp.
Out of Thin Air takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through the earth sciences, melding cosmology, the geological and climatological history of Earth, and the story of the evolution of life on Earth. It’s a unique reading experience because it proposes a theoretical change-of-perspective so profound and so recent that the author is hustling (with a large number of scientific colleagues) to publish scientific articles which outline the implications of the new information and re-assess many assumptions about the ancient past. Out of Thin Air is a snapshot of science on the run. What it lacks in conclusiveness it restores with the excitement of iconoclasm and the possible revision of decades-old assumptions.
The book opens with the haunting image of mountain climbers dying of hypoxia near the top of Mount Everest as Tibetan bar-headed geese migrate overhead without apparent danger. How are birds able to survive flight at such high altitudes during such tremendous migratory exertions? Clearly, bird physiology is different in some profound way from that of mammals and reptiles. What are the ancient roots of this difference and does it have anything to do with the apparent dinosaurian origins of modern birds?
On Bias and Thinking
I’d like to juxtapose a couple of interesting posts that I have read this week that have bearing on how we select information that subsequently shapes our thoughts.
At Complexity and Social Networks Blog, Maria Binz-Scharf asks “How does the way we process information relate to how we search for it?“. A key excerpt:
“Some days ago I attended a talk on human information processing by Thomas Mussweiler from the University of Cologne who spoke at the Columbia Business School. Mussweiler and colleagues conducted an impressive number of experiments on the mechanisms and influences of individual information processing. A simple example would be to ask you to determine your best athletic performance. You have two basic options: 1) You think of every single athletic moment in your life, i.e. you engage in absolute information processing, or 2) you compare what you recollect as some of your best performances to a given standard, e.g. a famous athlete’s performance (or a famous couch potato’s performance). Not surprisingly it turns out that comparison allows to process information in a more efficient manner.
Mussweiler went on to talk about various factors that influence the comparisons we make, most importantly the standards we employ for comparing information. His experiments used a technique called “priming” to activate certain standards for example, subjects were asked to judge a trait in a person. The result shows that priming a trait concept (such as aggressiveness) will induce the subject to judge the target person according to that trait. In other words, once activated, standards are spontaneously compared to the target person.”
This is very interesting. “Priming” would be an efficiency mechanism for rapid mental screening of a large number of things. It is also a “bias mechanism” that would strongly predispose you to see some evidence of what pattern you are looking for, even if it does not exist. It would be very much like the ” Framing” of George Lakoff in its effect.
How to deal with that effect, our own unintentional biases or being targeted by zealous Lakoffian framers ? Metacognition might be a helpful technique, as suggested in the post “Strategic Learning: Metacognition and Metamemory” at The Eide Neurolearning Blog . The Drs. Eide write:
“High level strategic learning often requires constant self-regulation and error monitoring strategies, metacognition (thinking about the thought processes), sometimes specific memory techniques (metamemory or conscious thinking about memory).”
Such self-regulative monitoring provides a mental check against racing ahead with a dubious but attractive premise. It would also tend to derail the the likelihood of the amygdala becoming overly engaged in the heat of the argument and turning us into red-faced, sputtering, arm-waving, buffoons with a surge of emotionality.
Cross posted at Zenpundit
Pluripotent Cells – Pluripotent Debate
My husband has been getting after me since Christmas to read Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. He was right: Stark’s argument makes sense of much in early American lit. (I’m only half way through.)
He argues Christianity encouraged reason, glorified reason because its believers had a powerful vision of life as purposeful and science as a study, undertaken with humility, of the grand mysteries of nature. Because they assumed it was done with purpose, they comforted themselves that their approach, too, was purposeful: the best way to glorify God was to study not only his word but the harmony & beauty of his creation. Science then was honored because it sought a logical, rational, exploration of what is. Some indeed many, as Stark observes religious beliefs are antithetical to science, but Christianity is not.
The self-righteous assumption of “reason” versus “irrational faith” is often a little irritating, but Stark would say it is also quite wrong. Many sneered that Bush’s position on stem cells was irrational – “faith-based.” This always bothered me. I didn’t share his assumptions, so I didn’t get very worked up about it. But I could see where it was coming from. And, given his assumptions debatable but not stupid ones his was a quite logical position. So, while this isn’t my cause, I was pleasantly surprised by this link to a report by Michael Fumento (thanks to Instapundit):
Yet it’s been virtually a state secret that for over five years researchers, beginning with a team headed by physician Catherine Verfaillie of the University of Minnesota Stem Cell Institute, have been reporting numerous types of adult stem cells (she used those from marrow) that in the lab could form mature cells from three germ layers. Experiments around the world have clearly shown that adult stem cells from one germ layer can be converted into those of another in a living human, such as those that have turned adipose tissue stem cells from the mesoderm germ layer into neuronal cells from the ectoderm among others but these are all germ layer. (It also produced bone; cartilage; skeletal; cardiac muscle; and blood cells – mesodermal.)