The Thoughtful House agreed to the interviews because they figured they would get fair treatment from the likes of Matt. I’m interested to see what kind of a program NBC has put together on this very sensitive subject.

Depending on how this major media outlet writes the script, it could either be a major affirmation of what many within the science community already know, or it could increase the divide between anti-vax’ers and science.

Please, Matt… don’t go Jenny McCarthy on us. Don’t do the usual journalistic job of being “fair-and-balanced”. This is not a “he said, she said” issue. This is science. Do tell the world what the science supports.

In a recent study of cognition involving rooks, a type of corvid related to crows and ravens, scientists (one of whom I worked with once upon a time) succeeded in recreating one of Aesop’s fables. From the abstract:

In Aesop’s fable The Crow and the Pitcher, a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher and quench its thirst. A number of corvids have been found to use tools in the wild [1,2,3,4], and New Caledonian crows appear to understand the functional properties of tools and solve complex physical problems via causal and analogical reasoning [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. The rook, another member of the corvid family that does not appear to use tools in the wild, also appears able to solve non-tool-related problems via similar reasoning [12]. Here, we present evidence that captive rooks are also able to solve a complex problem by using tools. We presented four captive rooks with a problem analogous to Aesop’s fable: raising the level of water so that a floating worm moved into reach. All four subjects solved the problem with an appreciation of precisely how many stones were needed. Three subjects also rapidly learned to use large stones over small ones, and that sawdust cannot be manipulated in the same manner as water. This behavior demonstrates a flexible ability to use tools, a finding with implications for the evolution of tool use and cognition in animals.

So, the rooks used rocks to raise the level of water in a container in order to grab a yummy worm. They learned that rocks work better than wood dust, and they figured out that different sized rocks displace different amounts of water. That’s some fairly complicated tool use, which according to scientific concensus should take a fair amount of cognitive power.

How can these birds do these amazing things? Their brains are so small!

I have a reaction more like, “how did it take so long for someone to try this test?” If our brains are so big and wonderful, allowing us so much processing prowess, why is it so hard for us to devise ways to delve into the minds of other animals (nevermind our own). To me, this is a perfect example of scientists finally finding an appropriate test with which to peer into an animal’s abilities.

Many times when an experiment isn’t working, getting it to work is a matter of changing the way the question is posed, or being creative with the experimental design. This is especially true when working with animals. In my own experience, I have been outsmarted by many a magpie and scrub jay who just didn’t want to do the experiment the way I did. Not seeing eye to eye with the birds forced me to rethink the way I was doing the experiment.

For goodness sake, for years it was thought that birds had little to no sense of smell simply because the olfactory bulb would come unattached from the rest of the brain, and get lost in the processing!

Really, the point of this is that we can never jump to conclusions about the way things work in the world because we have probably failed in some way to come up with just the right test because we haven’t looked at the problem from all perspectives.

Watch a cool video of a bird performing the task in question here.

The flyer was for the ‘Vital Orbit™’ Personal Human Force Field.

Personal Human Force Field - note that all the contact tags have been removed

At first, I dismissed the picture, and wondered why my friends pick me to send things like this. But, then I started thinking about it a bit more, and I’ll admit my curiosity got the best of me. You can’t see it in this image, but there was a weblink on the flyer for the Jejune Institute and the Vital Orbit product. I checked it out.

Phrases like:

Channels users own Hydrodynamic activities to project a spherical charge armament against all material bodies and organic compounds. Unintended matter undergoes total magnetic reversal (a process called “negativism”).

and:

The Vital-Orbit reduces these basic tenets to a demonstrable formula by harboring hydro-dynamics multiplied by intention (aquatic/thought). It is proven, time tested, bonafide.

had me rolling on the floor.

But, there was more, I noticed. There was a whole website to explore. The products offered are all fabulously imagined devices to make life better, and the Founder… well, his “meet the founder” video is a piece of work.

Everything about this Jejune Institute was simply too good to be true (what is with the 1972 – 2036 copyright? And, seriously… Jejune? The word means dull or insipid, or lacking in knowledge.). I wanted to know more, so I went to Google and YouTube.

In Google, I found an interesting article describing the Jejune Institute as the doorway to an ARG, or alternate reality game, which use the real world as their platform. So, by following the clues laid out before you, you can head quite willingly down the rabbithole of surreal life.

It turns out the game was launched last October (2008), and from the looks of it has gone through a couple of iterations and gathered quite a cult following. There is one flickr photostream dated April 30, 2009 chronicling a fairly large gathering for some scavenger hunt aspect of the game. The institute even has a Yelp page.

Following links, it all appears to be a well thought-out, intricate game. I guess the only way to determine the truth is to take the final step, and actually start playing.

Are you in?

Conferences are a brilliant way to bring people together in order to foster communication. Certainly, if you are attending a conference, you are most likely interested in the topics to be covered. But, there is always the session that you didn’t expect to be interesting that turns out to be thought-provoking. Not to mention the mixers where you most certainly bump into people of all types, and have conversations you could never expect. The environment (or, it might be the alcohol) pushes people out of their shells, making them more social than normal, more interested than normal, and allowing maximum information transfer to take place.

How can the conference vibe be transferred elsewhere? How can we get people out of their mental caves and interested in communication… or, even learning, dare I say it?

First, the environment needs to have ease of entry. People need to find what they are interested in easily. The minute search takes too long, people lose patience and move on to something else. The internet is a great place to foster mass communication and information transfer, and social and new media are getting to a point that the barrier to entry into any conversation topic is incredibly low.

Second, the content needs to be engaging. Just like college lectures, the less interesting a video, blog, or slide-show are, the less people connect to the material. People judge novel content just like they judge people… subconsciously. Whether they are aware of it or not, they have decided their level of interest within 2 seconds. If the approach to getting information across is not able to make a good first impression, the opportunity for engagement is already lost.

Third and finally, the environment needs to allow free exchange of ideas and responses. This is crucial to the basic idea of communication as communication can never be one-sided.

The social web is getting closer and closer to putting all of these pieces together, and I am constantly on the lookout for interesting projects that are on the verge of making science communication better. In my recent web jaunts I came across the Imagine Science Film Festival, which will take place in New York in October. I think this festival is starting in the right place.

The festival is organized by Imagine Science Films and sponsored by AAAS and Science Magazine. But, rather than just getting film-makers to submit films and holding a physical festival, the organizers have partnered with the well-known video sharing site, Vimeo. In doing so, they have enabled the submission process to become a social one. People can upload and comment on each others videos. And, the hope is that the films run the gamut from artistic to educational to fun. This brings together film-makers from all different backgrounds into one conversation about what science in film actually is or even what it can be.

Also, Vimeo is featuring a different video each week from the group of submissions, which has the effect of bringing people from outside the circle of science enthusiasts or interested film-makers into the conversation. The barrier to entry is low due to Vimeo’s involvement. Add to this the fact that the content is video, which can be quite engaging if done well. And, the forum allows for the exchange of ideas through the video format and comment system.

In all, this has all the pieces to enable the successful fostering of communication about science in a much broader forum than that offered by a conference setting.

Oh, and if you’d like to submit a video, the contest entry ends July 31. So, get on it.

That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E

When that belief is questioned by someone else it can be perceived as an attack not only on their intelligence, but also on the people from whom they first learned the information in question. Questioning beliefs picks away at the mentors and heroes from a person’s upbringing.It’s easier for most to leave well enough alone than to face the possibility that their heroes might have had faults.

I ran across this blind-belief in the kitchen last week, when I was told by someone that it’s bad for your health to allow something from the freezer to thaw and then be refrozen. “It will make you sick,” I was told.

“Where did you learn this?” I asked.

“Oh, I learned it growing up,” was the reply. “And, my son, he got sick after eating refrozen food.”

I told her that the refreezing isn’t necessarily good for the quality of the food as it damages whatever is being frozen, but it doesn’t affect your health.

She said that the bacteria would make me sick.

I told her the bacteria don’t multiply while they’re frozen. It’s how long the food is left out while not frozen that makes the difference. If you froze spoiled food, thawed, and ate it; or froze perfectly fine food, thawed it, left it out for too long, refroze and re-thawed it, then you might have a problem.

She sighed dramatically, rolled her eyes, told me I was wrong, and left the room. Conversation over.

She had personally experienced trouble with refreezing food, which reinforced her belief about not refreezing. She learned this rule from someone who she looked up to as a child, and who helped shape her world view.

Her rules, her belief system, keep her healthy and safe. She and her family never get sick from refrozen food.

She wasn’t about to give me anymore time to put a chink in her belief system.

From the Huffington Post:

I have also read that this flu outbreak is a massive government/pharmaceutical company conspiracy to sell more Tamiflu. Quite conveniently, Tamiflu is one of two antiviral therapies to which the virus is not resistant. Hence, Roche stands to make a fair bit of money from this flu scare.

The other even more entertaining theory is that a pharma company or research lab is behind the creation of the virus. For some reason, it is more difficult for the conspiracy theorists to believe that the virus could have emerged naturally than that… “it came from the lab” (should be read aloud with a spooky edge to the voice).

Learn some basic biology people.Viruses mutate and evolve very quickly. They can recombine with material from other similar viruses. In the case of Influenza A, there is not much separating the avian and the mammalian strains genetically. They mix and match their bits and pieces all the time.

Most of the time, it is of no consequence. The virus is in the wrong environment to be transmitted to a suitable host, the mutations aren’t quite virulent enough to cause a problem in human populations, they aren’t spread easily enough… any number of things can keep the virus from spreading.

However, every once in a while, the virus gets it all right. That’s what we worry about. That’s why the world’s health organizations respond seriously to even a mild threat.

The conspiracy theorists can postulate all they want about governmental influence, secret organizations, and even space aliens. But, it all comes down to parsimony. The simplest explanation is often right.

Is it good that they use different approaches? Does it benefit the reach of science? I guess I’m wondering who they really end up reaching and how that benefits science literacy and understanding, especially among the uninitiated?

So, let’s compare…

World Science Festival Logo

The World Science Festival (WSF) website (and all aspects of the production of their events) is slick. It reminds me of the website for the TED Conference, a conference of ideas for the elite intelligencia. WSF promotes participant scientists as celebrities. The events are focused on “BIG” ideas in science; those that are palatable to the press and the thinking adult. Most of the talks are presented at an adult level, but there are some specifically targeted at children. The WSF is held for one week, and consists of many ticketed events held at various locations throughout Manhattan. The week ends with an outdoor street fair for children.

San Diego Science Festival Logo

The San Diego Science Festival (SDSF) website is cartoonish and reminiscent of Nickelodeon. The program is idea based, and it seems to have a very integrated approach to its audience: there is something for everyone. They include a program to bring scientists to schools, as well as panels and presentations that appeal to interested adults and the professional scientist. The focus appears to be involving the attendee in the scientific thought process – their theme being ‘The Science of You’. A majority of the events are free of charge to attendees, and take place over a month over the general San Diego region. This festival also culminates in an outdoor street fair.

I see the main differences between the festivals as a focus on lifestyle. The WSF is the festival for the hip, urban, thinking person, while the SDSF is for the family. To attract the average swanky, city-dweller, you need to convince them that whatever you’re peddling is culturally cool. The average family isn’t looking for cool. They’re looking for educational, fun, and cheap!

By no means do I think one approach wrong and the other right. They are just different, and in reaching different audiences will have different effects on overall scientific literacy and understanding. Children inspired by the SDSF might go on to great careers somehow related to the sciences. Adults will pass that same inspiration on to their children. And, that is a huge point: the less fearful adults are of science, the more children will find it intriguing. Fear is definitely a learned behavior when it comes to subjects in school.

I do think that the two festivals compliment one another. It is just too bad that they are on opposite sides of the country from one another. This brings up another question: how would the festivals fare if we were to put them in the middle of the country?

Both are extremely successful festivals, attended by tens of thousands of people. But, are they reaching beyond those who already have an interest in science? The WSF attempts to break past the expected audience of science fan-boys by including scientifically inspired  arts events. SDSF does include a few art events, but that kind of interdisciplinary effort is not their focus. Would the slick, city-arts events of the WSF interest or deter small-town America? Does SDSF do a better job of creating an environment that can get the average person excited about science?

I think if we take both festivals out of their repective locales, SDSF does a far better job of creating a repeatable model for science festivals that in the end attracts a broader segment of the population.

However, I do love New York, and the urbanite in me is a sucker for the stylish packaging of the WSF…

I know that I normally keep myself to posts about science, reason, or media. However, there are things taking place in this world that are worth talking about aside from how I feel science is being presented to the public or what silly thing Jenny McCarthy said this week.

Worldwide, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. But as a percentage of world population, there are fewer now than ever before. Within a generation, we can wipe the crime from the face of the earth.

I honestly believe that if we can’t learn how to treat humans as humans, and get rid of this kind of mistreatment around the globe, nothing we do academically will matter. I know that money makes the world go round, but it also leads to all sorts of horrendous acts in the name of profit.

How much of our world depends on the labors of uncompensated individuals? How much of this kind of activity bleeds over into American life? How much of it happens on American soil?

We should care that it happens anywhere, not just here. So, abolitionists like Ben are working to understand the problem, spread the word, and give to free the slaves.

You can support two organizations, Free the Slaves and Anti-Slavery International, by purchasing Ben’s book. Or, you can just give to the groups by following the links.