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Every wonder how many clues you needed to uniquely solve a Sudoku puzzle? Watch and find out :)
As usual Sociological Images is chock-full of interesting articles. I was intrigued by the title of this post and decided to reproduce it in part here for the benefit of my readership. While you are there, check out the article on how cheerleading outfits are shrinking over time.
“You might be surprised to learn that at its inception in the mid-1800s cheerleading was an all-male sport. Characterized by gymnastics, stunts, and crowd leadership, cheerleading was considered equivalent in prestige to an American flagship of masculinity, football. As the editors of Nation saw it in 1911:
…the reputation of having been a valiant “cheer-leader” is one of the most valuable things a boy can take away from college. As a title to promotion in professional or public life, it ranks hardly second to that of having been a quarterback.*
Indeed, cheerleading helped launch the political careers of three U.S. Presidents. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan were cheerleaders. Actor Jimmy Stewart was head cheerleader at Princeton. Republican leader Tom DeLay was a noted cheerleader at the University of Mississippi.”
Head over to SI and read the whole thing.
I’m writing this a week ago, but I’ll watch this again today as it is just that interesting.
Yea us!
*sigh*
Facts and science be damned! We have Jebus on our side... (and there was rejoicing).
Well, at least the anti-woman crowd still has icky-graphical signs to wave around because they have lost yet another scientific leg to stand on. Thanks to the Guttmacher institute for advancing the rights of women, but also the rigorous application of the scientific method. What follows is the deconstruction of a poorly constructed study, a small win but the flawed studies destructive effects reach far beyond just bad science. Anti-female forces latch onto any study that will help strip women of their basic bodily autonomy and they ran with this one. Mandatory counselling with dubious medical facts is just one of the downsides, as the article mentions, of this poor science.
“A study purporting to show a causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems has fundamental analytical errors that render its conclusions invalid, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Guttmacher Institute. This conclusion has been confirmed by the editor of the journal in which the study appeared. Most egregiously, the study, by Priscilla Coleman and colleagues, did not distinguish between mental health outcomes that occurred before abortions and those that occurred afterward, but still claimed to show a causal link between abortion and mental disorders.
The study by Coleman and colleagues was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2009. A letter to the editor by UCSF’s Julia Steinberg and Guttmacher’s Lawrence Finer in the March 2012 issue of the same journal details the study’s serious methodological errors. Significantly, the journal’s editor and the director of the data set used in the study conclude in an accompanying commentary that “the Steinberg-Finer critique has considerable merit,” that the Coleman paper utilized a “flawed” methodology and that “the Coleman et al. (2009) analysis does not support [the authors’] assertions.”
Steinberg and Finer initially published an analysis in 2010 in the peer-reviewed journal Social Science and Medicine showing that the findings of the 2009 Coleman study were not replicable. The JPR editor’s commentary now supports that conclusion. (The full sequence of events is detailed below.)
“This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data,” says Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The shifting explanations and misleading statements that they offered over the past two years served to mask their serious methodological errors.”
The errors are especially problematic because Coleman later cited her own study in a meta-analysis of studies looking at abortion and mental health. The meta-analysis, which was populated primarily by Coleman’s own work, has been sharply criticized by the scientific community for not evaluating the quality of the included studies and for violating well-established guidelines for conducting such analyses.
“Studies claiming to find a causal association between abortion and subsequent mental health problems often suffer from serious methodological limitations that invalidate their conclusions,” says Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “In thorough reviews, the highest-quality studies have found no causal link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems.”
Even when identified, spurious research can have far-reaching consequences. Mandatory counseling laws in a number of states require women seeking an abortion to receive information, purportedly medically accurate, that has no basis in fact. Among other things, mandatory counseling can require that a woman be told that having an abortion increases her risk of breast cancer, infertility and mental illness. In reality, none of these claims are medically accurate. These laws not only represent a gross intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship, they serve to propagate misinformation, intentionally misinforming the patient on important medical matters.”
The title of the video is actually called “Thunderf00t Unmasked” as it deals with some of the nasty things zealots have and continue to do. It is a little slice of youtube drama, but at the same time the argument Thunderf00t makes against religion is remarkably cogent and clear and deserves to be amplified :) Thus it ends up here…
Hey, you in the lab coat. Stop your filthy science right now, I have policy to fabricate!
If Steven Harper was a puppy, he would be getting a firm “NO” and a being ignored right now when it comes to his views on science and the dissemination of scientific knowledge through government agencies. We get it Stevie, you hates the empirical reality that science provides because it makes your socially conservative ideology(census anyone, or Prisons perhaps?) look like horseshit.
Our systematic dismembering of Canadian Science has not gone unnoticed. Nature has released a short editorial decrying the ineptitude of the our Conservative government on the handling of science.
“Over the same period, Canada has moved in the opposite direction [from the fundagelically fracked up United States, no less]. Since Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party won power in 2006, there has been a gradual tightening of media protocols for federal scientists and other government workers. Researchers who once would have felt comfortable responding freely and promptly to journalists are now required to direct inquiries to a media-relations office, which demands written questions in advance, and might not permit scientists to speak. Canadian journalists have documented several instances in which prominent researchers have been prevented from discussing published, peer-reviewed literature. Policy directives and e-mails obtained from the government through freedom of information reveal a confused and Byzantine approach to the press, prioritizing message control and showing little understanding of the importance of the free flow of scientific knowledge.”
You know there is a problem when we are being compared negatively to the US with regards to the dissemination of scientific information.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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