A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift

January 29, 2015

“The story began in January 1951, when Mrs. Lacks was found to have cervical cancer. She was treated with radium at Johns Hopkins, the standard of care in that day, but there was no stopping the cancer. Her doctor had never seen anything like it. Within months, her body was full of tumors, and she died in excruciating pain that October. She was 31 and left five children, the youngest just a year old. She had been a devoted mother, and the children suffered terribly without her.”

Eugenics movement reaches its height 1923

January 29, 2015

“The trappings of science, anyway. Even in its day, many people saw that eugenics was a dubious discipline, riddled with inconsistencies. But it was championed by a very prominent and respected biologist, Charles Davenport, and its conclusions told many people what they wanted to hear: that certain “racial stock” was superior to others in such traits as intelligence, hard work, cleanliness, and so on. In this view of human behavior, the work of Sigmund Freud was disregarded, while the ideas of behaviorism were just gaining ground.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh23eu.html

South Park Episode: “The F Word”

January 29, 2015

An interesting episode that delves into the meaning of words and what gives them power. Who gets to decide what a word means? What determines whether a word is insulting?

A thought provoking episode but there is a lot of foul language. The episode makes its point in the way that South Park usually does. If you can tolerate obscenity and offensive language, you might find this interesting.

https://www.cc.com/video/prdntl/south-park-south-park-1312-the-f-word-act-1

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s13e12-the-f-word

TED Talk: Brian Cox: CERN’s Supercollider

January 29, 2015

“Rock-star physicist” Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive project.”

This is just an amazing lecture with some great visuals to help explain some complex ideas. Absolutely worth watching. Some interesting questions that get raised: Why bother engaging in research that is so far removed from any seeming relevance to our every day lives? Should we spend billions of dollars to fund research that may never provide any practical outcomes or make our lives materially any better? Is the quest for knowledge and understanding a valuable enough goal to justify these costs?

This lecture was filmed before the supercollider went online in 2008. It has since gone online and done some important work already and the particle he talks about, the Higgs Boson, has since been detected by the super collider as documented in the amazing documentary Particle Fever

Should Statistical Sampling Be Used in the United States Census?

January 29, 2015

“Statistics—the mathematical science of analyzing numerical information—is vital to the practice of all the empirical sciences. No modern science tries to account for the complexity of nature without using statistical methods, which typically provide investigators with a numerical outcome along with an analysis of the margin of accuracy of that outcome. With the help of computers, statistical techniques for collecting and analyzing large, complicated data sets have become very sophisticated and have proved to be reliable and effective for scientific researchers, inventors, and engineers working on problems in such diverse fields as economics, physics, and pharmaceuticals.”

http://www.scienceclarified.com/dispute/Vol-2/Should-statistical-sampling-be-used-in-the-United-States-Census.html