Michael Meadon's shared items in Google Reader

Religion in schools | Leadership Online

2009-11-10T13:09:46Z

Shared by Michael Meadon
Interesting piece. The first comment hits it on the head: learning about religion (ALL religions), yes. Religious indoctrination, no.

The debate is far from over. There seems to be a lull in the public debate that recently raged in South Africa about the role of religious education in our schools after the organisation, Sceptic South Africa, threatened to lay criminal charges against some schools unless they immediately halted policies in this regards, which they argue is in contravention of the Constitution and the National Policy on Religion in Education (NPRE). It is a debate that is by far not restricted to South Africa, but is globally topical and has implications much wider than merely the issue of religion in the classroom.

New Podcast: Microbes As Computers

2009-10-12T18:41:37Z

My second podcast is now live. I talk to Dennis Bray of the University of Cambridge about cells as microscopic computers. I first came across Bray’s work while working on my book, Microcosm. I was looking for new work on how E. coli manages to figure out where to go when it doesn’t have a brain or even a single neuron. Before long, I came across Bray’s remarkable work on the sophisticated information-processing that goes on inside the bug.

In this week’s podcast I sound like I’m broadcasting out of a tin can (I’m getting that hammered out), but don’t let my distractions get in the way of listening to Bray. And if you’re interested in more details, check out his new book, Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell.

Autonomous Roombas do Pac-Man right (video)

2009-11-09T13:13:00Z

We've seen mixtures of Roomba and Pac-Man before, but nothing like this. A team of developers have hacked five floor-cleaning bots to create a sort of OCD version of the game, with the Pac-Man bot sucking up little white rectangles whilst being chased by robot incarnations of Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. But, when the Pac-Man vacuum finds a power pellet those ghostly rovers turn blue and start fleeing. The tech is supposed to be a demonstration of the developers' Unmanned Aerial System suite, designed for guidance of airborne vehicles, but we're too busy geeking out to care about potential real-world applications of this tech. Video below.

Continue reading Autonomous Roombas do Pac-Man right (video)

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Autonomous Roombas do Pac-Man right (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Martian landscapes

2009-11-06T16:28:25Z

Since 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real. (35 photos total)

Intersecting swirling trails left by the earlier passage of dust devils across sand dunes, as they lifted lighter reddish-pink dust and exposed the darker material below. Also visible are darker slope streaks along dune edges, formed by a process which is still under investigation. More, or see location on Google Mars. (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

How Did I Get Here?

2009-11-06T18:04:00Z

We can all trace our lives back through arbitrary chance events where a seemingly unimportant simple choice may had lead to an entirely different life. If I hadn't have taken the day off work on Monday 10th December 1984, I wouldn't have met my wife, and subsequently I wouldn't have my children or any of the things most precious to me now.

I thought I'd ponder for a few moments on how I came to be writing a blog on Science, Reason and Critical Thinking and retrace the chance events that lead me here. As with the above example on how I met my wife, there were a number of chance occurrences that begat other chances. I traced things back to the first modern "science" book that I read as a result of the disillusionment experienced on the Alpha course.

This lead to various other science books and eventually a Michael Shermer book, which lead me to the Skeptic magazine. It was this magazine that introduced me to the "Skepticality" podcast which is at the root of much of my current reading, listening, meetings and nights out.

Here's a clumsy diagram outlining some of the key books, podcasts, websites, events and organisations that got me to where I am now. NB If there's any unfamiliar names or logos on the diagram then I highly recommend checking it out.
NB By drawing things out it seems to identify a number of podcasts, namely "Skepticality", "The Skeptic Guide To The Universe" and "Little Atoms", and the monthly Skeptics in the Pub meetings that really need to be held responsible for this blog.

Pedobear is older than I thought

2009-11-05T15:00:01Z

Captcha fail

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Income inequality drives church attendance

2009-11-08T02:20:00Z

The Dutch press is reporting a new study with an international perspective on what drives church attendance (the authors are Stijn Ruiter, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, and Frank van Tubergen, a professor of sociology in Utrecht). What they set out to do was to compare the major theories on what causes religion, using data from the World Values Survey and other sources. Broadly speaking, you can summarize these theories like this:...

Stijn Ruiter, & Frank van Tubergen. (2009) Religious Attendance in Cross-National Perspective: A Multilevel Analysis of 60 Countries. American Journal of Sociology. info:/

Cooperation between non-kin in animal societies

2009-11-07T13:18:47Z

Cooperation between non-kin in animal societies

Nature 462, 51 (2009). doi:10.1038/nature08366

Authors: Tim Clutton-Brock

Explanations of cooperation between non-kin in animal societies often suggest that individuals exchange resources or services and that cooperation is maintained by reciprocity. But do cooperative interactions between unrelated individuals in non-human animals really resemble exchanges or are they a consequence of simpler mechanisms? Firm evidence of reciprocity in animal societies is rare and many examples of cooperation between non-kin probably represent cases of intra-specific mutualism or manipulation.

[News Focus] Origins: On the Origin of Religion

2009-11-07T13:15:57Z

How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science's series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities.

Author: Elizabeth Culotta

The illusion of time: Perceiving the effect before the cause

2009-11-06T17:50:39Z

A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness.

Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly rotating background causes prominent and motionless visual stimuli to disappear and reappear, as demonstrated in the video below. Fixate on the flashing green spot in the centre, and you'll notice that the surrounding yellow spots begin to disappear and reappear after about ten seconds. Then replay the clip and focus on any of the yellow spots; you'll see that it is a visual disappearance illusion. Exactly how it works is unclear; according to one hypothesis it is due to the properties of neurons in area V1 of the visual cortex.

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David Nutt: Governments should get real on drugs

2009-11-04T10:40:00Z

David Nutt was sacked from his role as chairman of the UK's official advisory body on drugs for his outspoken views. He explains why governments should not ignore scientific evidence

Malcolm Gladwell's miscellany of myths

2009-11-07T11:00:00Z

Superstar writer Malcolm Gladwell teases out complexities behind the obvious and fun in the mundane in his collection of essays, What the Dog Saw

Who's That Sexy Swine?

2009-11-07T13:02:43Z

Pigs know how to use mirrors [Read more]

Carnival of the Africans #12

2009-11-07T10:40:30Z

Michael Meadon recently hosted the 12th Carnival of the Africans at Ionian Enchantment, and there are a number of pieces worth a look, and blogs worth supporting. Three posts that I’d recommend are Mike’s on the disturbingly common habit humans have of engaging in post-hoc reasoning with regard to medicine and the immune system, Tim at Reason Check reminding us of how “psychics” and their ilk exploit the vulnerable for personal gain, and Dr. Spurt at Effortless Incitement on robophobia in music. But you may want to look at the Carnival post itself, as there’s a lot more there that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. And if you’d like to host or contribute to a future Carnival, the guidelines are here.

No related posts.

Carnival of the Africans #12

2009-11-06T08:20:00Z

In case you didn't know (and I realize I'm a little late on this) the latest 'Carnival of the Africans' is up at ionian-enchantment

Some notable entries - for me, at least - are Simon Halliday's post (one in a series that looks like it's going to be great) on Gender and Risk aversion , Doctor Spurt's discussion of whether music produced by computers has any value, and Michael Meadon's smackdown of Gene Callahan's opinion of Evolutionary psychology.

Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby's cry

2009-11-05T17:00:15Z

Telling the difference between a German and French speaker isn't difficult. But you may be more surprised to know that you could have a good stab at distinguishing between German and French babies based on their cries. The bawls of French newborns tend to have a rising melody, with higher frequencies becoming more prominent as the cry progresses. German newborns tend to cry with a falling melody.

These differences are apparent just three days out of the womb. This suggests that they pick up elements of their parents' language before they're even born, and certainly before they start to babble themselves.

Birgit Mampe from the University of Wurzburg analysed the cries of 30 French newborns and 30 German ones, all born to monolingual families. She found that the average German cry reaches its maximum pitch and intensity at around 0.45 seconds, while French cries do so later, at around 0.6 seconds.

These differences match the melodic qualities of each respective language. Many French words and phrases have a rising pitch towards the end, capped only by a falling pitch at the very end. German more often shows the opposite trend - a falling pitch towards the end of a word or phrase.

These differences in "melody contours" become apparent as soon as infants start making sounds of their own. While Mampe can't rule out the possibility that the infants learned about the sounds of their native tongue the few days following their birth, she thinks it's more likely that they start tuning into the own language in the womb.

In some ways, this isn't surprising. Features like melody, rhythm and intensity (collectively known as prosody) travel well across the wall of the stomach and they reach the womb with minimum disruption. We know that infants are very sensitive to prosodic features well before they start speaking themselves, which helps them learn their own mother tongue.

But this learning process starts as early as the third trimester. We know this because newborns prefer the sound of their mother's voice compared to those of strangers. And when their mums speak to them in the saccharine "motherese", they can suss out the emotional content of those words through analysing their melody.

Mampe's data show that not only can infants sense the qualities of their native tongue, they can also imitate them in their first days of life. Previously, studies have found that babies can imitate the vowel sounds of adults only after 12 weeks of life, but clearly other features like pitch can be imitated much earlier. They're helped by the fact that crying only requires them to coordinate their breathing and vocal cord movements, while making speech sounds requires far more complex feats of muscular gymnastics that are only possible after a few months.

Reference: Current Biology doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064

More on child development:

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Transparency, choice and control — now complete with a Dashboard!

2009-11-05T10:15:00Z

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Google Dashboard. Have you ever wondered what data is stored with your Google Account? The Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your account — easily and concisely in one location.

Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data. In the past, we've taken numerous steps in this area, investing in educating our users with our Privacy Center, making it easier to move data in and out of Google with our Data Liberation Front, and allowing you to control the ads you see with interest-based advertising. Transparency, choice and control have become a key part of Google's philosophy, and today, we're happy to announce that we're doing even more.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over your own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we're delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Software Engineer, Yariv Adan, Product Manager, and Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience

S Korean woman passes driving test exam - at 950th attempt

2009-11-06T15:34:25Z

A South Korean woman is celebrating after passing the written exam for a driving licence - on her 950th attempt.

George of the Fumble?

2009-11-03T12:12:32Z

Well, the South African sceptical/agnostic/atheist/anti-religion blogosphere is abuzz with speculation. Question marks and suspicions are flying about, randomly colliding with particles of rumour and fragments of guesswork, leaving smeary trails in a murky cloud chamber of conjecture.

The Big Question is: Whatever happened in the curious case of George Claassen’s dual blogicides?

For the past few years, George maintained a blog called “Prometheus Unbound”. This sceptical blog dealt with various issues like psychics, pseudoscience and charlatanry, but it focussed particularly on the folly that is religion. The blog disappeared unannounced a few weeks ago with the hosting site reporting that the blog had been deleted by the authors. The final blog entry was a contentious one that examined how certain public schools were violating their purely secular mandate by promoting religious practices among pupils. The possibility of legal action against those schools was raised.

At first, the possibility was mooted that the blog had been deleted by a vengeful religious fanatic who had managed somehow to obtain administrative login credentials. This now seems very unlikely, as will be clear from subsequent developments. George soon after established a new blog called “Prometheus Liberated” and posted three entries in rapid succession. He gave no public explanation on the new blog as to what had occurred with the old one, but shortly before the latter’s deletion, he withdrew from the campaign against the schools, citing as motivations personal reasons as well as attacks on his person. At first, he had mentioned “technical problems” that allegedly were being attended to. The blog is still deleted.

The new blog suffered the same fate a few days ago, again without any prior announcement or explanation. While it will probably do little good to hypothesize about what prompted a virtual repeat, one is left to wonder. Is George fed up with contributions of some or all of the regular commenters? Is he being threatened somehow to leave off writing against religion? Blackmailed, maybe? Or is it something like indecision about whether to continue this work or to wipe the slate clean in some privately cathartic eruption of on-and-off misanthropy?

None of the above possibilities seems to fit properly.

We think George has something of a moral obligation to clarify these odd happenings, even if only to that small group of regular commenters that has travelled alongside him over the past few years. Depending on the circumstances, some kind of assistance with, or resolution of, the problem could be reached.

George, scepticism and atheism do not necessarily mean that you have to fight every battle alone.

Infographic of the Day: It's a Small World, Afterall

2009-10-23T22:30:37Z

This map shows exactly where are the most remote places in the world.

If you're wondering how "close" two places are, a geographic map doesn't help much anymore. If the airports are good--or if there's a bullet train nearby--hundreds of miles might as well be down the street. Point being, "distance" is now really a function less of geography, than of the transport networks we've invented.

Which is why researchers at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank, created this gorgeous map. They first created a model, which calculated how long it would take to travel from a given point, to the nearest city of 50,000 people or more; the model includes rail, road, and river networks.

Then they plotted these results on a color coded map: The brighter an area, the closer it is to a big city; the darker it is, the further out it is. (The blue lines above represent oceanic shipping lanes.)

As the New Scientist reports:

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10% of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilization as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20% of the land is more than two days from a city--around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.

The most remote place: Tibet, parts of which are as much as three weeks away from a city--with the journey comprising 20 days on foot.

Check out the New Scientist's entire gallery of 11 different maps.