Posted 21 Aug 2013 / 0
WNYC The Leonard Lopate Show “The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments” This great feature uncovers two major sources of scientific distortion: Milgram himself selectively reported his results in order to tell a more sensational story; and Media depictions, fueled by popular preconceptions, further filtered and distorted the meanings of Milgram’s scientific results. Both Read More
A Minor Post, Altruism, Behavior, Emotion, Empathy, Ethics, Human Nature, Methods, Psychology, Radio & Podcasts, Scientific Fraud, Social Norms
Posted 17 Aug 2013 / 0
Times Higher Education “What’s God got to do with evolution?” It is really interesting to see that Coakley, a theologian, is collaborating with Martin Nowak. This is not entirely surprising: after all, the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics that Nowak heads is funded in part by the Templeton Foundation, which likes to support work at the interface of religion Read More
A Minor Post, Ethics, Religion, Web
Posted 13 Aug 2013 / 0
At the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, I first learned about a really interesting initiative of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The project –now dubbed EnviroAtlas — is dedicated to creating a free, interactive online tool for exploring the geography of ecosystem services. I had the opportunity to check out a beta version Read More
A Major Post, Biodiversity Loss, Biomes, Bogs & Wetlands, Climate Change, Computer Science, Conservation Biology, Deserts, Ecology, Ecology Education, Ecosystem Services, Educational Software and Apps, Environmental Justice, Freshwater Ecosystems, Geography, Grasslands, Habitat Destruction, Information Design, Invasive Species, Pollution, Ponds & Lakes, Population Pressure, Public Policy, Resource Consumption, Rivers & Streams, Sociology, Sustainability, Teaching, Teaching Tools, Temperate Forest, Temperate Rainforest, Terrestrial, Tropical Forest, Water Supply, Web
Posted 27 Jul 2013 / 0
I do think that the old adage “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is apt: if people are willing to copy what you do, they obviously think that what you have done is valuable. So I suppose that I should be flattered by this: Look at bit familiar? Sound a bit familiar? Yeah, that Read More
A Minor Post, Creative Commons, Ethics, Higher Education, WordPress
Posted 28 Jun 2013 / 0
NPR Planet Money “Economists Have A One-Page Solution To Climate Change” I love this piece because it effectively captures the importance of an across-the-board carbon solution. The carbon tax would be relatively easy to enforce, could be used to wean ourselves from carbon-based fuels in a calculated and deliberate manner, and would hurt only those Read More
A Minor Post, Climate Change, Economics, Political Science, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Resource Consumption, Sustainability, Sustainable Energy
Posted 29 May 2013 / 1
WNYC Micropolis “Hasidic Supermarkets and the Virtues of Insularity” Although I think that this is an interesting little feature, it mistakenly attributes the benefits of this trust to a lack of diversity. What allows this trust is a relatively small, highly-integrated society. If the larger city lacks anything, it is the level of social integration Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Cultural Anthropology, Economics, Ethics, Radio & Podcasts, Reputation, Social Networks, Sociology
Posted 21 May 2013 / 0
A colleague of mine, Associate Professor Ágnes Mócsy, just released her first short film, smashing matters: Featuring a really broad array of eminent physics researchers, this film uses the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider as a case study for how funding basic science research leads to social progress. Although I am not predisposed to believing that all basic Read More
A Minor Post, Film, Television, & Video, Grants & Funding, Public Policy, Science in Art & Design
Posted 01 May 2013 / 0
Rhett Bradbury has been a crucial member of Envirolutions over the past two years. Our only graduate student member, Rhett started coming to club meetings during his first semester at Pratt. Rhett’s skills as a graphic designer have had a profound effect on how Envirolutions has communicated with the rest of the campus: his posters, logos, and other visual Read More
A Major Post, Mentoring, Political Science
Posted 16 Mar 2013 / 0
College of the Holy Cross “Harvard Scientist to Lecture at Holy Cross on God and Evolution” It is amazing to hear someone like Nowak say “God uses evolution to unfold the living world around us”. This is radical stuff for a theorist to say, as we generally try to understand properties and dynamics of systems Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Evolution, Religion
Posted 15 Feb 2013 / 0
Do everyday people have any sense of their place in the world? Human beings live in incredibly complex societies undergirded by convoluted economies and overwhelmingly diverse cultures. Do we have a sense of how these societies came to be, or how they function and persist? For evolutionists, these are pretty vexing scientific questions: most researchers Read More
A Major Post, Behavior, Cooperation, Economic sustainability, Ethics, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Political Science, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Social Diversity
