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Showing posts from 2010

The 48 Percent Part 3 - Slipping Into the Future

Right now, the United States economy, and that of the world in general, is in turmoil–arguably the worst economic disaster since 1929. In my day job, working on the public side the workforce development arena (i.e. Job Service), I see many people that feel strangely out-of-place seeking new employment in the 21 st century world, many of whom were with their former employer for decades. Even my co-workers are not immune to this sense of bewilderment. The particular branch of my state government for whom I work is in the midst of transitioning, after nearly a decade using Windows XP ® and MS Office XP/2003, to Windows 7/Office 2010. In speaking with my managers and co-workers, I have likened the experience of my co-workers starting up their computers one morning, only to be faced with a completely unfamiliar operating system, to what a blind person would likely experience if they awoke one morning to find their furniture has been rearranged while they slept. One of my younge

The 48 Percent Part 2

A t Beyond Belief 2006, when speaking about his work on phantom/paralyzed limbs and the denials that can accompany such phenomena, V.S. Ramachandran related a humorous anecdote about a study that asked people if they were above or below average in intelligence. Ramachandran pointed out the fact that like height, the distribution of IQ scores in a population take on the shape of the iconic “bell” curve (called by mathematicians a “normal” or “Gaussian” distribution). The salient property of Gaussian distributions of variations in a population is that 50% of the population will be below the average value (or arithmetic mean) for the trait in question and the other 50% of individuals in the population in question will be above the average value. [1] The punch line comes when Ramachandran reveals that 98% of the survey respondents indicated that they considered themselves to be of above average intelligence, a statistically impossible result which indicates that 48% of humanity are “in d

The 48 Percent Part 1

I am not a professional, credentialed, scientist – I am just a guy with a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Science (IS) with an emphasis on science communication and the public understanding of science. I do consider myself a serious amateur and in that context, I do what I can to be, in Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase, “a candle in the dark,” a voice for reason in our “demon-haunted world.” I deliberately switched majors to IS from Electrical Engineering because I was so deeply concerned about the lack of appreciation and understanding of what science and critical thinking are, even among very bright students in engineering programs. My undergraduate thesis involved a planned NSF-funded “Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.” [1] The State of South Dakota, and especially the Governor’s office, made a big deal about how much the planned laboratory could do for science education and attracting high-tech jobs – those involving Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM

A principled postition on an "atheist/agnostic" for the Supreme Court

Note that the following has become moot for the most recent SCotUS vacancy... On one of my frequent visits to Richard Dawkins ' site I came across a discussion in the News section of an LA Times Op/Ed piece by Marc Cooper whose thesis was that Obama should consider nominating a religious non-believer (actually, Cooper used the word “atheist”) to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCotUS). While it would be nice to have a person of no faith as a member of the SCotUS, actively advocating for an atheist/agnostic as a nominee would constitute a transgression of Article VI, § III of the United States Constitution, which clearly says: “ The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office

PZ Myers, Phil Plait, and the Pope

Two blog(er)s that I greatly admire, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy and PZ Myers of Pharyngula disagree over just what atheists/skeptics/non-believers/rationalists/free-thinkers (I will be using these somewhat interchangeably throughout the remainder of this piece) ought to be advocating with regards to the revelation (pun intended) that Pope Benedict XVI, while still the (presumably fallible...you can be sure that Bill Donohue will point that out before long) Cardinal Ratzinger, knew of, and was complicit in, the shuffling around of Catholic priests against whom substantive accusations of child sexual abuse had been leveled, in what plainly was, and is, an ongoing attempt to shield those priests (and those above them in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church) from investigations by temporal and civil authorities. There is even documentary evidence that indicates that the Church has been aware of the existence of pedophilic priests for decades. More documentary evidence has surfac