Arquivo da tag: ciência

Poor Concentration: Poverty Reduces Brainpower Needed for Navigating Other Areas of Life (Science Daily)

31/08/2013UncategorizedCapitalismo, ciência, Cognição, Desenvolvimentismo, Economia, Pobreza, Políticas públicas, Violênciarenzotaddei

Aug. 29, 2013 — Poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life, according to research based at Princeton University. As a result, people of limited means are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that may be amplified by — and perpetuate — their financial woes.

Research based at Princeton University found that poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life. Experiments showed that the impact of financial concerns on the cognitive function of low-income individuals was similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep. To gauge the influence of poverty in natural contexts, the researchers tested 464 sugarcane farmers in India who rely on the annual harvest for at least 60 percent of their income. Each farmer performed better on common fluid-intelligence and cognition tests post-harvest compared to pre-harvest. (Credit: Image courtesy of Princeton University)

Published in the journal Science, the study presents a unique perspective regarding the causes of persistent poverty. The researchers suggest that being poor may keep a person from concentrating on the very avenues that would lead them out of poverty. A person’s cognitive function is diminished by the constant and all-consuming effort of coping with the immediate effects of having little money, such as scrounging to pay bills and cut costs. Thusly, a person is left with fewer “mental resources” to focus on complicated, indirectly related matters such as education, job training and even managing their time.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that pressing financial concerns had an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop in cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep.

But when their concerns were benign, low-income individuals performed competently, at a similar level to people who were well off, said corresponding author Jiaying Zhao, who conducted the study as a doctoral student in the lab of co-author Eldar Shafir, Princeton’s William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs. Zhao and Shafir worked with Anandi Mani, an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick in Britain, and Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard University economics professor.

“These pressures create a salient concern in the mind and draw mental resources to the problem itself. That means we are unable to focus on other things in life that need our attention,” said Zhao, who is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.

“Previous views of poverty have blamed poverty on personal failings, or an environment that is not conducive to success,” she said. “We’re arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function. The very condition of not having enough can actually be a cause of poverty.”

The mental tax that poverty can put on the brain is distinct from stress, Shafir explained. Stress is a person’s response to various outside pressures that — according to studies of arousal and performance — can actually enhance a person’s functioning, he said. In the Science study, Shafir and his colleagues instead describe an immediate rather than chronic preoccupation with limited resources that can be a detriment to unrelated yet still important tasks.

“Stress itself doesn’t predict that people can’t perform well — they may do better up to a point,” Shafir said. “A person in poverty might be at the high part of the performance curve when it comes to a specific task and, in fact, we show that they do well on the problem at hand. But they don’t have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems. It’s the other tasks where they perform poorly.”

The fallout of neglecting other areas of life may loom larger for a person just scraping by, Shafir said. Late fees tacked on to a forgotten rent payment, a job lost because of poor time-management — these make a tight money situation worse. And as people get poorer, they tend to make difficult and often costly decisions that further perpetuate their hardship, Shafir said. He and Mullainathan were co-authors on a 2012 Science paper that reported a higher likelihood of poor people to engage in behaviors that reinforce the conditions of poverty, such as excessive borrowing.

“They can make the same mistakes, but the outcomes of errors are more dear,” Shafir said. “So, if you live in poverty, you’re more error prone and errors cost you more dearly — it’s hard to find a way out.”

The first set of experiments took place in a New Jersey mall between 2010 and 2011 with roughly 400 subjects chosen at random. Their median annual income was around $70,000 and the lowest income was around $20,000. The researchers created scenarios wherein subjects had to ponder how they would solve financial problems, for example, whether they would handle a sudden car repair by paying in full, borrowing money or putting the repairs off. Participants were assigned either an “easy” or “hard” scenario in which the cost was low or high — such as $150 or $1,500 for the car repair. While participants pondered these scenarios, they performed common fluid-intelligence and cognition tests.

Subjects were divided into a “poor” group and a “rich” group based on their income. The study showed that when the scenarios were easy — the financial problems not too severe — the poor and rich performed equally well on the cognitive tests. But when they thought about the hard scenarios, people at the lower end of the income scale performed significantly worse on both cognitive tests, while the rich participants were unfazed.

To better gauge the influence of poverty in natural contexts, between 2010 and 2011 the researchers also tested 464 sugarcane farmers in India who rely on the annual harvest for at least 60 percent of their income. Because sugarcane harvests occur once a year, these are farmers who find themselves rich after harvest and poor before it. Each farmer was given the same tests before and after the harvest, and performed better on both tests post-harvest compared to pre-harvest.

The cognitive effect of poverty the researchers found relates to the more general influence of “scarcity” on cognition, which is the larger focus of Shafir’s research group. Scarcity in this case relates to any deficit — be it in money, time, social ties or even calories — that people experience in trying to meet their needs. Scarcity consumes “mental bandwidth” that would otherwise go to other concerns in life, Zhao said.

“These findings fit in with our story of how scarcity captures attention. It consumes your mental bandwidth,” Zhao said. “Just asking a poor person to think about hypothetical financial problems reduces mental bandwidth. This is an acute, immediate impact, and has implications for scarcity of resources of any kind.”

“We documented similar effects among people who are not otherwise poor, but on whom we imposed scarce resources,” Shafir added. “It’s not about being a poor person — it’s about living in poverty.”

Many types of scarcity are temporary and often discretionary, said Shafir, who is co-author with Mullainathan of the book, “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,” to be published in September. For instance, a person pressed for time can reschedule appointments, cancel something or even decide to take on less.

“When you’re poor you can’t say, ‘I’ve had enough, I’m not going to be poor anymore.’ Or, ‘Forget it, I just won’t give my kids dinner, or pay rent this month.’ Poverty imposes a much stronger load that’s not optional and in very many cases is long lasting,” Shafir said. “It’s not a choice you’re making — you’re just reduced to few options. This is not something you see with many other types of scarcity.”

The researchers suggest that services for the poor should accommodate the dominance that poverty has on a person’s time and thinking. Such steps would include simpler aid forms and more guidance in receiving assistance, or training and educational programs structured to be more forgiving of unexpected absences, so that a person who has stumbled can more easily try again.

“You want to design a context that is more scarcity proof,” said Shafir, noting that better-off people have access to regular support in their daily lives, be it a computer reminder, a personal assistant, a housecleaner or a babysitter.

“There’s very little you can do with time to get more money, but a lot you can do with money to get more time,” Shafir said. “The poor, who our research suggests are bound to make more mistakes and pay more dearly for errors, inhabit contexts often not designed to help.”

Journal Reference:

A. Mani, S. Mullainathan, E. Shafir, J. Zhao. Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function. Science, 2013; 341 (6149): 976 DOI: 10.1126/science.1238041

Climate Panel Cites Near Certainty on Warming (N.Y.Times)

23/08/2013Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Previsãorenzotaddei

Tim Wimborne/Reuters. A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that the authors are now 95 percent to 100 percent confident that human activity is the primary influence on planetary warming.

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Published: August 19, 2013

An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace.

The level of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is up 41 percent since the Industrial Revolution. Emissions from facilities like coal-fired power plants contribute.

The scientists, whose findings are reported in a draft summary of the next big United Nations climate report, largely dismiss a recent slowdown in the pace of warming, which is often cited by climate change doubters, attributing it most likely to short-term factors.

The report emphasizes that the basic facts about future climate change are more established than ever, justifying the rise in global concern. It also reiterates that the consequences of escalating emissions are likely to be profound.

“It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010,” the draft report says. “There is high confidence that this has warmed the ocean, melted snow and ice, raised global mean sea level and changed some climate extremes in the second half of the 20th century.”

The draft comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of several hundred scientists that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore. Its summaries, published every five or six years, are considered the definitive assessment of the risks of climate change, and they influence the actions of governments around the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions, for instance, largely on the basis of the group’s findings.

The coming report will be the fifth major assessment from the group, created in 1988. Each report has found greater certainty that the planet is warming and greater likelihood that humans are the primary cause.

The 2007 report found “unequivocal” evidence of warming, but hedged a little on responsibility, saying the chances were at least 90 percent that human activities were the cause. The language in the new draft is stronger, saying the odds are at least 95 percent that humans are the principal cause.

On sea level, which is one of the biggest single worries about climate change, the new report goes well beyond the assessment published in 2007, which largely sidestepped the question of how much the ocean could rise this century.

The new report also reiterates a core difficulty that has plagued climate science for decades: While averages for such measures as temperature can be predicted with some confidence on a global scale, the coming changes still cannot be forecast reliably on a local scale. That leaves governments and businesses fumbling in the dark as they try to plan ahead.

On another closely watched issue, the scientists retreated slightly from their 2007 position.

Regarding the question of how much the planet could warm if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere doubled, the previous report largely ruled out any number below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The new draft says the rise could be as low as 2.7 degrees, essentially restoring a scientific consensus that prevailed from 1979 to 2007.

But the draft says only that the low number is possible, not that it is likely. Many climate scientists see only a remote chance that the warming will be that low, with the published evidence suggesting that an increase above 5 degrees Fahrenheit is more likely if carbon dioxide doubles.

The level of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is up 41 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and if present trends continue it could double in a matter of decades.

Warming the entire planet by 5 degrees Fahrenheit would add a stupendous amount of energy to the climate system. Scientists say the increase would be greater over land and might exceed 10 degrees at the poles.

They add that such an increase would lead to widespread melting of land ice, extreme heat waves, difficulty growing food and massive changes in plant and animal life, probably including a wave of extinctions.

The new document is not final and will not become so until an intensive, closed-door negotiating session among scientists and government leaders in Stockholm in late September. But if the past is any guide, most of the core findings of the document will survive that final review.

The document was leaked over the weekend after it was sent to a large group of people who had signed up to review it. It was first reported on in detail by the Reuters news agency, and The New York Times obtained a copy independently to verify its contents.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does no original research, but instead periodically assesses and summarizes the published scientific literature on climate change.

The draft document “is likely to change in response to comments from governments received in recent weeks and will also be considered by governments and scientists at a four-day approval session at the end of September,” the panel’s spokesman, Jonathan Lynn, said in a statement Monday. “It is therefore premature and could be misleading to attempt to draw conclusions from it.”

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize six years ago, the group became a political target for climate doubters, who helped identify minor errors in the 2007 report. This time, the panel adopted rigorous procedures in the hope of preventing such mistakes.

Some climate doubters challenge the idea that the earth is warming at all; others concede that it is, but deny human responsibility; still others acknowledge a human role, but assert that the warming is likely to be limited and the impacts manageable. Every major scientific academy in the world has warned that global warming is a serious problem.

The panel shifted to a wider range for the potential warming, dropping the plausible low end to 2.7 degrees, after a wave of recent studies saying higher estimates were unlikely. But those studies are contested, and scientists at Stockholm are likely to debate whether to stick with that language.

Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said he feared the intergovernmental panel, in writing its draft, had been influenced by criticism from climate doubters, who advocate even lower numbers. “I think the I.P.C.C. on this point has once again erred on the side of understating the degree of the likely changes,” Dr. Mann said.

However, Christopher B. Field, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science who serves on the panel but was not directly involved in the new draft, said the group had to reflect the full range of plausible scientific views.

“I think that the I.P.C.C. has a tradition of being very conservative,” Dr. Field said. “They really want the story to be right.”

Regarding the likely rise in sea level over the coming century, the new report lays out several possibilities. In the most optimistic, the world’s governments would prove far more successful at getting emissions under control than they have been in the recent past, helping to limit the total warming.

In that circumstance, sea level could be expected to rise as little as 10 inches by the end of the century, the report found. That is a bit more than the eight-inch increase in the 20th century, which proved manageable even though it caused severe erosion along the world’s shorelines.

At the other extreme, the report considers a chain of events in which emissions continue to increase at a swift pace. Under those conditions, sea level could be expected to rise at least 21 inches by 2100 and might increase a bit more than three feet, the draft report said.

Hundreds of millions of people live near sea level, and either figure would represent a challenge for humanity, scientists say. But a three-foot rise in particular would endanger many of the world’s great cities — among them New York; London; Shanghai; Venice; Sydney, Australia; Miami; and New Orleans.

A version of this article appears in print on August 20, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Panel Cites Near Certainty on Warming.

The Battle Over Global Warming Is All in Your Head (Time)

22/08/2013Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Cognição, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Previsão, Psicologiarenzotaddei

Despite the fact that more people now acknowledge that climate change represents a significant threat to human well-being, this has yet to translate into any meaningful action. Psychologists may have an answer as to why this is

By Kharunya Paramaguru, Aug. 19, 2013

165161414 — *ANDREY SMIRNOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. Climate campaigns, like this one from Greenpeace in Moscow, have failed to galvanize public support for strong climate action*

Today the scientific community is in almost total agreement that the earth’s climate is changing as a result of human activity, and that this represents a huge threat to the planet and to us. According to a Pew survey conducted in March, however, public opinion lags behind the scientific conclusion, with only 69% of those surveyed accepting the view that the earth is warming — and only 1 in 4 Americans see global warming as a major threat. Still, 69% is a solid majority, which begs the question, Why aren’t we doing anything about it?

This political inertia in the face of unprecedented threat is the most fundamental challenge to tackling climate change. Climate scientists and campaigners have long debated how to better communicate the message to nonexperts so that climate science can be translated into action. According to Christopher Rapley, professor of climate science at University College London, the usual tactic of climate experts to provide the public with information isn’t enough because “it does not address key underlying causes.” We are all bombarded with the evidence of climate change on an almost a daily basis, from new studies and data to direct experiences of freakish weather events like last year’s epic drought in the U.S. The information is almost unavoidable.

If it’s not a data deficit that’s preventing people from doing more on global warming, what is it? Blame our brains. Renee Lertzman, an applied researcher who focuses on the psychological dimensions of sustainability, explains that the kind of systemic threat that climate change poses to humans is “unique both psychologically and socially.” We face a minefield of mental barriers and issues that prevent us from confronting the threat.

For some, the answer lies in cognitive science. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has written about why our inability to deal with climate change is due in part to the way our mind is wired. Gilbert describes four key reasons ranging from the fact that global warming doesn’t take a human form — making it difficult for us to think of it as an enemy — to our brains’ failure to accurately perceive gradual change as opposed to rapid shifts. Climate change has occurred slowly enough for our minds to normalize it, which is precisely what makes it a deadly threat, as Gilbert writes, “because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.”

Robert Gifford, a professor of psychology and environmental studies at the University of Victoria in Canada, also picks up on the point about our brains’ difficulty in grasping climate change as a threat. Gifford refers to this and other psychological barriers to mitigating climate change as “dragons of inaction.” Since authoring a paperon the subject in 2011 in which he outlined seven main barriers, or dragons, he has found many more. “We’re up to around 30,” he notes. “Now it’s time to think about how we can slay these dragons.” Gifford lists factors such as limited cognition or ignorance of the problem, ideologies or worldviews that may prevent action, social comparisons with other people and perceived inequity (the “Why should we change if X corporation or Y country won’t?”) and the perceived risks of changing our behavior.

Gifford is reluctant to pick out one barrier as being more powerful or limiting than another. “If I had to name one, I would nominate the lack of perceived behavioral control; ‘I’m only one person, what can I do?’ is certainly a big one.” For many, the first challenge will be in recognizing which dragons they have to deal with before they can overcome them. “If you don’t know what your problem is, you don’t know what the solution is,” says Gifford.

Yet this approach can only work if people are prepared to acknowledge that they have a problem. But for those of us who understand that climate change is a problem yet make little effort to cut the number of overseas trips we make or the amount of meat we consume, neither apathy nor denial really explains the dissonance between our actions and beliefs. Lertzman has come to the conclusion that this is not because of apathy — a lack of feeling — but because of the simple fact that we care an overwhelming amount about both the planet and our way of life, and we find that conflict too painful to bear. Our apparent apathy is just a defense mechanism in the face of this psychic pain.

“We’re reluctant to come to terms with the fact that what we love and enjoy and what gives us a sense of who we are is also now bound up with the most unimaginable devastation,” says Lertzman. “When we don’t process the pain of that, that’s when we get stuck and can’t move forward.” Lertzman refers to this inability to mourn as “environmental melancholia,” and points to South Africa’s postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an example of how to effectively deal with this collective pain. “I’m not saying there should be one for climate or carbon, but there’s a lot to be said for providing a means for people to talk together about climate change, to make it socially acceptable to talk about it.”

Rosemary Randall, a trained psychotherapist, has organized something close to this. She runs the U.K.-based Carbon Conversations, a program that brings people together to talk in a group setting about ways of halving their personal carbon footprint. Writing in Aeon, an online magazine, Randall suggests that climate change is such a disturbing subject, that “like death, it can raise fears and anxieties that people feel have no place in polite conversation.” Randall acknowledges that while psychology and psychoanalysis aren’t the sole solutions to tackling climate change, “they do offer an important way of thinking about the problem.”

Lertzman says the mainstream climate-change community has been slow to register the value of psychology and social analysis in addressing global warming. “I think there’s a spark of some interest, but also a wariness of what this means, what it might look like,” she notes. Gifford says otherwise, however, explaining that he has never collaborated with other disciplines as much as he does now. “I may be a little biased because I’m invested in working in it, but in my view, climate change, and not mental health, is the biggest psychological problem we face today because it affects 100% of the global population.”

Despite the pain, shame, difficulty and minefield of other psychological barriers that we face in fully addressing climate change, both Lertzman and Gifford are still upbeat about our ability to face up to the challenge. “It’s patronizing to say that climate change is too big or abstract an issue for people to deal with,” says Lertzman. “There can’t be something about the human mind that stops us grappling with these issues given that so many people already are — maybe that’s what we should be focusing on instead.”

Digest This: Cure for Cancer May Live in Our Intestines (Science Daily)

01/08/2013Uncategorizedciência, Intestinos, Saúde, Víscerasrenzotaddei

July 31, 2013 — Treating a cancerous tumor is like watering a houseplant with a fire hose — too much water kills the plant, just as too much chemotherapy and radiation kills the patient before it kills the tumor.

The discovery of Robo1 protein in the intestinal stem cells (depicted in yellow) leads to tolerance of higher doses of chemoradiation for cancer patients. (Credit: Dr. Wei-Jie Zhou)

However, if the patient’s gastrointestinal tract remains healthy and functioning, the patient’s chances of survival increase exponentially, said Jian-Guo Geng, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Recently, Geng’s lab discovered a biological mechanism that preserves the gastrointestinal tracts in mice who were delivered lethal doses of chemotherapy.

The findings, which will appear in the journal Nature, could revolutionize cancer therapy, Geng said.

“It’s our belief that this could eventually cure later-staged metastasized cancer. People will not die from cancer, if our prediction is true,” said Geng, who emphasized that the findings had not yet been proven in humans. “All tumors from different tissues and organs can be killed by high doses of chemotherapy and radiation, but the current challenge for treating the later-staged metastasized cancer is that you actually kill the patient before you kill the tumor.

“Now you have a way to make a patient tolerate to lethal doses of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. In this way, the later-staged, metastasized cancer can be eradicated by increased doses of chemotherapy and radiation.”

Geng’s lab found that when certain proteins bind with a specific molecule on intestinal stem cells, it revs intestinal stem cells into overdrive for intestinal regeneration and repair. Stem cells naturally heal damaged organs and tissues, but so-called “normal” amounts of stem cells in the intestine simply cannot keep up with the wreckage left behind by the lethal doses of chemotherapy and radiation required to successfully treat late-stage tumors.

However, the phalanx of extra stem cells protect the intestine and gastrointestinal tract, which means the patient can ingest nutrients, the body can perform other critical functions and the bacterial toxins in the intestine are prevented from entering the blood circulation, Geng said.

These factors could give the patient just enough of an extra edge to survive the stronger doses of chemotherapy and radiation, until the tumor or tumors are eradicated.

In the study, 50-to-75 percent of the mice treated with the molecule survived otherwise lethal doses of chemotherapy. All of the mice that did not receive the molecule died, Geng said.

“If you can keep the gut going, you can keep the patient going longer,” Geng said. “Now we have found a way to protect the intestine. The next step is to aim for a 100-percent survival rate in mice who are injected with the molecules and receive lethal doses of chemotherapy and radiation.”

Geng’s lab has worked with these molecules, called R-spondin1 and Slit2, for more than a decade. These molecules repair tissue in combination with intestinal stem cells residing in the adult intestine.

Journal Reference:

Wei-Jie Zhou, Zhen H. Geng, Jason R. Spence & Jian-Guo Geng. Induction of intestinal stem cells by R-spondin 1 and Slit2 augments chemoradioprotection. Nature, 2013 DOI: 10.1038/nature12416

They Finally Tested The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ On Actual Prisoners — And The Results Were Not What You Would Expect (Business Insider Australia)

22/07/2013Uncategorizedciência, Dilema do prisioneiro, Economia, Economia experimental, Incerteza, Matemática, Previsão, Reciprocidaderenzotaddei

MAX NISEN, 21 July 2013

The “prisoner’s dilemma” is a familiar concept to just about anybody that took Econ 101.

The basic version goes like this. Two criminals are arrested, but police can’t convict either on the primary charge, so they plan to sentence them to a year in jail on a lesser charge. Each of the prisoners, who can’t communicate with each other, are given the option of testifying against their partner. If they testify, and their partner remains silent, the partner gets 3 years and they go free. If they both testify, both get two. If both remain silent, they each get one.

In game theory, betraying your partner, or “defecting” is always the dominant strategy as it always has a slightly higher payoff in a simultaneous game. It’s what’s known as a “Nash Equilibrium,” after Nobel Prize winning mathematician and A Beautiful Mind subject John Nash.

In sequential games, where players know each other’s previous behaviour and have the opportunity to punish each other, defection is the dominant strategy as well.

However, on a Pareto basis, the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.

Yet no one’s ever actually run the experiment on real prisoners before, until two University of Hamburg economists tried it out in a recent study comparing the behaviour of inmates and students.

Surprisingly, for the classic version of the game, prisoners were far more cooperative than expected.

Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange put the famous game to the test for the first time ever, putting a group of prisoners in Lower Saxony’s primary women’s prison, as well as students through both simultaneous and sequential versions of the game.The payoffs obviously weren’t years off sentences, but euros for students, and the equivalent value in coffee or cigarettes for prisoners.

They expected, building off of game theory and behavioural economic research that show humans are more cooperative than the purely rational model that economists traditionally use, that there would be a fair amount of first-mover cooperation, even in the simultaneous simulation where there’s no way to react to the other player’s decisions.

And even in the sequential game, where you get a higher payoff for betraying a cooperative first mover, a fair amount will still reciprocate.

As for the difference between student and prisoner behaviour, you’d expect that a prison population might be more jaded and distrustful, and therefore more likely to defect.

The results went exactly the other way for the simultaneous game, only 37% of students cooperate. Inmates cooperated 56% of the time.

On a pair basis, only 13% of student pairs managed to get the best mutual outcome and cooperate, whereas 30% of prisoners do.

In the sequential game, way more students (63%) cooperate, so the mutual cooperation rate skyrockets to 39%. For prisoners, it remains about the same.

What’s interesting is that the simultaneous game requires far more blind trust out from both parties, and you don’t have a chance to retaliate or make up for being betrayed later. Yet prisoners are still significantly more cooperative in that scenario.

Obviously the payoffs aren’t as serious as a year or three of your life, but the paper still demonstrates that prisoners aren’t necessarily as calculating, self-interested, and un-trusting as you might expect, and as behavioural economists have argued for years, as mathematically interesting as Nash equilibrium might be, they don’t line up with real behaviour all that well.

Vendettas, not war? Unpicking why our ancestors killed (New Scientist)

21/07/2013UncategorizedAntropologia, Índios, ciência, Cultura, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Previsão, Violênciarenzotaddei

20:03 18 July 2013 by Bob Holmes

Is war in our blood? Perhaps not, if you believe a controversial new study that suggests violence in primitive cultures is overwhelmingly the result of personal squabbles, rather than organised violence between two different groups. The finding contradicts the popular view that humans have evolved to be innately warlike.

In recent years, many anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have come to believe that warfare arose deep in humans’ evolutionary past. In part that is because even chimpanzees exhibit this kind of intergroup violence, which suggests the trait shares a common origin. Proponents of this view also point to the occurrence of war in traditional hunter-gatherer societies today, such as some notoriously quarrelsome groups in the Amazon, and hence to its likely prevalence in early human societies.

Yet the archaeological record of warfare in early humans is sketchy, and not all contemporary hunter-gatherers make war.

In a bid to resolve the issue, Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg of Åbo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, turned to the Ethnographic Atlas, a widely used database that was created in the 1960s to provide an unbiased cross-cultural sample of primitive societies.

From this, Fry and Soderberg selected the 21 societies that were exclusively nomadic hunter-gatherers – groups that upped sticks to wherever conditions were best – without livestock or social class divisions. They reasoned that these groups would most closely resemble early human societies.

Hello, sailor

The researchers then sifted through the early ethnographic accounts of each of these societies – the earliest of which was from the 17th century, while most were from the 19th and 20th centuries – and noted every reference to violent deaths, classifying them by how many people were involved and who they were. The records include accounts of events such as a man killing a rival for a woman, revenge killings for earlier deaths, and killing of outsiders such as shipwrecked sailors.

The pair found that in almost every society, deaths due to violence were rare – and the vast majority of those were one-on-one killings better classified as homicides than as warfare. Indeed, for 20 of the 21 societies, only 15 per cent of killings happened between two different groups. The exception was the Tiwi people of northern Australia, where intergroup feuds and retaliatory killings were common.

Fry and Soderberg say this suggests that warfare is rare in such primitive societies and may instead have become common only after the rise of more complex societies just a few thousand years ago. If so, then warfare would have likely played only a minor role in human evolution.

Anecdotal evidence

Not everyone agrees. For one thing, the data set Fry and Soderberg used is essentially a collection of anecdotes rather than a systematic survey of causes of death, says Kim Hill, an anthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. They are relying on the people who originally noted down these events to have included all the important details.

Moreover, they focus only on nomadic foragers and exclude any sedentary foraging societies – groups that would have foraged from a permanent base. Yet these sedentary foragers would probably have occupied the richest habitats and so would have been most likely to be involved in wars over territory, says Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University.

Fry and Soderberg are probably correct that most violent deaths are the result of homicide, not warfare – that was even true for the US during the Vietnam War, says Sam Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. He has put forward the idea that altruism evolved out of the need for our ancestors to cooperate during times of war. But even if warfare is relatively uncommon, it can still exert an important evolutionary force, he says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI:10.1126/science.1235675

The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science (Mother Jones)

04/07/2013Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Cognição, comunicação científica, Desastre, discurso ambiental, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Previsão, Psicologiarenzotaddei

How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the end of the world.

By Chris Mooney | Mon Apr. 18, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

“A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.” So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger [1] (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. But it was too early for that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually describing a famous case study [2] in psychology.

Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, “Sananda,” who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. The group was led by Dorothy Martin, a Dianetics devotee who transcribed the interstellar messages through automatic writing.

Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954. Some of Martin’s followers quit their jobs and sold their property, expecting to be rescued by a flying saucer when the continent split asunder and a new sea swallowed much of the United States. The disciples even went so far as to remove brassieres and rip zippers out of their trousers—the metal, they believed, would pose a danger on the spacecraft.

Festinger and his team were with the cult when the prophecy failed. First, the “boys upstairs” (as the aliens were sometimes called) did not show up and rescue the Seekers. Then December 21 arrived without incident. It was the moment Festinger had been waiting for: How would people so emotionally invested in a belief system react, now that it had been soundly refuted?

[3]. Read also: the truth about Climategate [4].

At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. A new message arrived, announcing that they’d all been spared at the last minute. Festinger summarized the extraterrestrials’ new pronouncement: “The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.” Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved Earth from the prophecy!

From that day forward, the Seekers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize. “Their sense of urgency was enormous,” wrote Festinger. The devastation of all they had believed had made them even more certain of their beliefs.

In the annals of denial, it doesn’t get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin’s space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there’s plenty to go around. And since Festinger’s day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called “motivated reasoning [5]” helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, “death panels,” the birthplace and religion of the president [6] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience [7] (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a “basic human survival skill,” explains political scientist Arthur Lupia[8] of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We’re not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn’t take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber [9] of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. “They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs,” says Taber, “and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they’re hearing.”

In other words, when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt [10]: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers [11] (PDF). Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

That’s a lot of jargon, but we all understand these mechanisms when it comes to interpersonal relationships. If I don’t want to believe that my spouse is being unfaithful, or that my child is a bully, I can go to great lengths to explain away behavior that seems obvious to everybody else—everybody who isn’t too emotionally invested to accept it, anyway. That’s not to suggest that we aren’t also motivated to perceive the world accurately—we are. Or that we never change our minds—we do. It’s just that we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one’s sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.

Modern science originated from an attempt to weed out such subjective lapses—what that great 17th century theorist of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, dubbed the “idols of the mind.” Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader processes of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.

Scientific evidence is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. Giving ideologues scientific data that’s relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-reasoning equivalent of a candy store.

Our individual responses to the conclusions that science reaches, however, are quite another matter. Ironically, in part because researchers employ so much nuance and strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation. Giving ideologues or partisans scientific data that’s relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-reasoning equivalent of a candy store.

Sure enough, a large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs. In a classic 1979 experiment [12] (PDF), pro- and anti-death penalty advocates were exposed to descriptions of two fake scientific studies: one supporting and one undermining the notion that capital punishment deters violent crime and, in particular, murder. They were also shown detailed methodological critiques of the fake studies—and in a scientific sense, neither study was stronger than the other. Yet in each case, advocates more heavily criticized the study whose conclusions disagreed with their own, while describing the study that was more ideologically congenial as more “convincing.”

Since then, similar results have been found for how people respond to “evidence” about affirmative action, gun control, the accuracy of gay stereotypes [13], and much else. Even when study subjects are explicitly instructed to be unbiased and even-handed about the evidence, they often fail.

And it’s not just that people twist or selectively read scientific evidence to support their preexisting views. According to research by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan [14] and his colleagues, people’s deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider “scientific consensus” to lie on contested issues.

In Kahan’s research [15] (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either “individualists” or “communitarians,” and as either “hierarchical” or “egalitarian” in outlook. (Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats.) In one study, subjects in the different groups were asked to help a close friend determine the risks associated with climate change, sequestering nuclear waste, or concealed carry laws: “The friend tells you that he or she is planning to read a book about the issue but would like to get your opinion on whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert.” A subject was then presented with the résumé of a fake expert “depicted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences who had earned a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from one elite university and who was now on the faculty of another.” The subject was then shown a book excerpt by that “expert,” in which the risk of the issue at hand was portrayed as high or low, well-founded or speculative. The results were stark: When the scientist’s position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a “trustworthy and knowledgeable expert.” Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist’s expertise. Similar divides were observed on whether nuclear waste can be safely stored underground and whether letting people carry guns deters crime. (The alliances did not always hold. Inanother study [16] (PDF), hierarchs and communitarians were in favor of laws that would compel the mentally ill to accept treatment, whereas individualists and egalitarians were opposed.)

Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

In other words, people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views—and thus the relative risks inherent in each scenario. A hierarchal individualist finds it difficult to believe that the things he prizes (commerce, industry, a man’s freedom to possess a gun to defend his family [16]) (PDF) could lead to outcomes deleterious to society. Whereas egalitarian communitarians tend to think that the free market causes harm, that patriarchal families mess up kids, and that people can’t handle their guns. The study subjects weren’t “anti-science”—not in their own minds, anyway. It’s just that “science” was whatever they wanted it to be. “We’ve come to a misadventure, a bad situation where diverse citizens, who rely on diverse systems of cultural certification, are in conflict,” says Kahan [17].

And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people is via evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

Take, for instance, the question of whether Saddam Hussein possessed hidden weapons of mass destruction just before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. When political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler showed subjects fake newspaper articles [18] (PDF) in which this was first suggested (in a 2004 quote from President Bush) and then refuted (with the findings of the Bush-commissioned Iraq Survey Group report, which found no evidence of active WMD programs in pre-invasion Iraq), they found that conservatives were more likely than before to believe the claim. (The researchers also tested how liberals responded when shown that Bush did not actually “ban” embryonic stem-cell research. Liberals weren’t particularly amenable to persuasion, either, but no backfire effect was observed.)

Another study gives some inkling of what may be going through people’s minds when they resist persuasion. Northwestern University sociologist Monica Prasad [19] and her colleagues wanted to test whether they could dislodge the notion that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were secretly collaborating among those most likely to believe it—Republican partisans from highly GOP-friendly counties. So the researchers set up a study [20] (PDF) in which they discussed the topic with some of these Republicans in person. They would cite the findings of the 9/11 Commission, as well as a statement in which George W. Bush himself denied his administration had “said the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda.”

One study showed that not even Bush’s own words could change the minds of Bush voters who believed there was an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

As it turned out, not even Bush’s own words could change the minds of these Bush voters—just 1 of the 49 partisans who originally believed the Iraq-Al Qaeda claim changed his or her mind. Far more common was resisting the correction in a variety of ways, either by coming up with counterarguments or by simply being unmovable:

Interviewer: [T]he September 11 Commission found no link between Saddam and 9/11, and this is what President Bush said. Do you have any comments on either of those?

Respondent: Well, I bet they say that the Commission didn’t have any proof of it but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that.

The same types of responses are already being documented on divisive topics facing the current administration. Take the “Ground Zero mosque.” Using information from the political myth-busting site FactCheck.org [21], a team at Ohio State presented subjects [22] (PDF) with a detailed rebuttal to the claim that “Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam backing the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, is a terrorist-sympathizer.” Yet among those who were aware of the rumor and believed it, fewer than a third changed their minds.

A key question—and one that’s difficult to answer—is how “irrational” all this is. On the one hand, it doesn’t make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. “It is quite possible to say, ‘I reached this pro-capital-punishment decision based on real information that I arrived at over my life,'” explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick [23]. Indeed, there’s a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly “rational.” In certain conservative communities, explains Yale’s Kahan, “People who say, ‘I think there’s something to climate change,’ that’s going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well.”

This may help explain a curious pattern Nyhan and his colleagues found when they tried to test the fallacy [6] (PDF) that President Obama is a Muslim. When a nonwhite researcher was administering their study, research subjects were amenable to changing their minds about the president’s religion and updating incorrect views. But when only white researchers were present, GOP survey subjects in particular were more likely to believe the Obama Muslim myth than before. The subjects were using “social desirabililty” to tailor their beliefs (or stated beliefs, anyway) to whoever was listening.

Which leads us to the media. When people grow polarized over a body of evidence, or a resolvable matter of fact, the cause may be some form of biased reasoning, but they could also be receiving skewed information to begin with—or a complicated combination of both. In the Ground Zero mosque case, for instance, a follow-up study [24] (PDF) showed that survey respondents who watched Fox News were more likely to believe the Rauf rumor and three related ones—and they believed them more strongly than non-Fox watchers.

Okay, so people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or “narrowcast [25]” and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan’s Arthur Lupia, are “not well-adapted to our information age.”

A predictor of whether you accept the science of global warming? Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.

If you wanted to show how and why fact is ditched in favor of motivated reasoning, you could find no better test case than climate change. After all, it’s an issue where you have highly technical information on one hand and very strong beliefs on the other. And sure enough, one key predictor of whether you accept the science of global warming is whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. The two groups have been growing more divided in their views about the topic, even as the science becomes more unequivocal.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that more education doesn’t budge Republican views. On the contrary: In a 2008 Pew survey [26], for instance, only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college educated Republicans. In other words, a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the science on the issue. Meanwhile, among Democrats and independents, more education correlated with greater acceptance of the science.

Other studies have shown a similar effect: Republicans who think they understand the global warming issue best are least concerned about it; and among Republicans and those with higher levels of distrust of science in general, learning more about the issue doesn’t increase one’s concern about it. What’s going on here? Well, according to Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook, one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues. “People who have a dislike of some policy—for example, abortion—if they’re unsophisticated they can just reject it out of hand,” says Lodge. “But if they’re sophisticated, they can go one step further and start coming up with counterarguments.” These individuals are just as emotionally driven and biased as the rest of us, but they’re able to generate more and better reasons to explain why they’re right—and so their minds become harder to change.

That may be why the selectively quoted emails of Climategate were so quickly and easily seized upon by partisans as evidence of scandal. Cherry-picking is precisely the sort of behavior you would expect motivated reasoners to engage in to bolster their views—and whatever you may think about Climategate, the emails were a rich trove of new information upon which to impose one’s ideology.

Climategate had a substantial impact on public opinion, according to Anthony Leiserowitz [27], director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication [28]. It contributed to an overall drop in public concern about climate change and a significant loss of trust in scientists. But—as we should expect by now—these declines were concentrated among particular groups of Americans: Republicans, conservatives, and those with “individualistic” values. Liberals and those with “egalitarian” values didn’t lose much trust in climate science or scientists at all. “In some ways, Climategate was like a Rorschach test,” Leiserowitz says, “with different groups interpreting ambiguous facts in very different ways.”

Is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes: the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism.

So is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes: the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism. Its most famous proponents are an environmentalist (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [29]) and numerous Hollywood celebrities (most notably Jenny McCarthy [30] and Jim Carrey). TheHuffington Post gives a very large megaphone to denialists. And Seth Mnookin [31], author of the new book The Panic Virus [32], notes that if you want to find vaccine deniers, all you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods.

Vaccine denial has all the hallmarks of a belief system that’s not amenable to refutation. Over the past decade, the assertion that childhood vaccines are driving autism rateshas been undermined [33] by multiple epidemiological studies—as well as the simple fact that autism rates continue to rise, even though the alleged offending agent in vaccines (a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal) has long since been removed.

Yet the true believers persist—critiquing each new study that challenges their views, and even rallying to the defense of vaccine-autism researcher Andrew Wakefield, afterhis 1998 Lancet paper [34]—which originated the current vaccine scare—was retracted and he subsequently lost his license [35] (PDF) to practice medicine. But then, why should we be surprised? Vaccine deniers created their own partisan media, such as the website Age of Autism, that instantly blast out critiques and counterarguments whenever any new development casts further doubt on anti-vaccine views.

It all raises the question: Do left and right differ in any meaningful way when it comes to biases in processing information, or are we all equally susceptible?

There are some clear differences. Science denial today is considerably more prominent on the political right—once you survey climate and related environmental issues, anti-evolutionism, attacks on reproductive health science by the Christian right, and stem-cell and biomedical matters. More tellingly, anti-vaccine positions are virtually nonexistent among Democratic officeholders today—whereas anti-climate-science views are becoming monolithic among Republican elected officials.

Some researchers have suggested that there are psychological differences between the left and the right that might impact responses to new information—that conservatives are more rigid and authoritarian, and liberals more tolerant of ambiguity. Psychologist John Jost of New York University has further argued that conservatives are “system justifiers”: They engage in motivated reasoning to defend the status quo.

This is a contested area, however, because as soon as one tries to psychoanalyze inherent political differences, a battery of counterarguments emerges: What about dogmatic and militant communists? What about how the parties have differed through history? After all, the most canonical case of ideologically driven science denial is probably the rejection of genetics in the Soviet Union, where researchers disagreeing with the anti-Mendelian scientist (and Stalin stooge) Trofim Lysenko were executed, and genetics itself was denounced as a “bourgeois” science and officially banned.

The upshot: All we can currently bank on is the fact that we all have blinders in some situations. The question then becomes: What can be done to counteract human nature itself?

We all have blinders in some situations. The question then becomes: What can be done to counteract human nature?

Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

This theory is gaining traction in part because of Kahan’s work at Yale. In one study [36], he and his colleagues packaged the basic science of climate change into fake newspaper articles bearing two very different headlines—”Scientific Panel Recommends Anti-Pollution Solution to Global Warming” and “Scientific Panel Recommends Nuclear Solution to Global Warming”—and then tested how citizens with different values responded. Sure enough, the latter framing made hierarchical individualists much more open to accepting the fact that humans are causing global warming. Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a “culture war of fact.” In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

Links:
[1] https://motherjones.com/files/lfestinger.pdf
[2] http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9781617202803-1
[3] http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/history-of-climategate
[4] http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/field-guide-climate-change-skeptics
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2270237
[6] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/obama-muslim.pdf
[7] https://motherjones.com/files/descartes.pdf
[8] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lupia/
[9] http://www.stonybrook.edu/polsci/ctaber/
[10] http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/
[11] https://motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf
[12] http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/lord_ross_lepper79_JPSP_biased-assimilation-and-attitude-polarization.pdf
[13] http://psp.sagepub.com/content/23/6/636.abstract
[14] http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/DKahan.htm
[15] https://motherjones.com/files/kahan_paper_cultural_cognition_of_scientific_consesus.pdf
[16] http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1095&context=fss_papers
[17] http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/blogs/communicatingclimate/transcripts/Episode_10b_Dan_Kahan.html
[18] http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf
[19] http://www.sociology.northwestern.edu/faculty/prasad/home.html
[20] http://sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf
[21] http://www.factcheck.org/
[22] http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/FactcheckMosqueRumors.pdf
[23] http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/krosnick/
[24] http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf
[25] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrowcasting
[26] http://people-press.org/report/417/a-deeper-partisan-divide-over-global-warming
[27] http://environment.yale.edu/profile/leiserowitz/
[28] http://environment.yale.edu/climate/
[29] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-david-kirby/vaccine-court-autism-deba_b_169673.html
[30] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenny-mccarthy/vaccine-autism-debate_b_806857.html
[31] http://sethmnookin.com/
[32] http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781439158647-0
[33] http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jun/06-why-does-vaccine-autism-controversy-live-on/article_print
[34] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673697110960/fulltext
[35] http://www.gmc-uk.org/Wakefield_SPM_and_SANCTION.pdf_32595267.pdf
[36] http://www.scribd.com/doc/3446682/The-Second-National-Risk-and-Culture-Study-Making-Sense-of-and-Making-Progress-In-The-American-Culture-War-of-Fact

Global Warming Caused by CFCs, Not Carbon Dioxide, Researcher Claims in Controversial Study (Science Daily)

06/06/2013Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

May 30, 2013 — Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to a researcher from the University of Waterloo in a controversial new study published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week.

Annual global temperature over land and ocean. (Credit: Image by Q.-B. Lu)

CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now suggests that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, the researcher argues.

“Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” said Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry in Waterloo’s Faculty of Science. “In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming.”

“Most conventional theories expect that global temperatures will continue to increase as CO₂ levels continue to rise, as they have done since 1850. What’s striking is that since 2002, global temperatures have actually declined — matching a decline in CFCs in the atmosphere,” Professor Lu said. “My calculations of CFC greenhouse effect show that there was global warming by about 0.6 °C from 1950 to 2002, but the earth has actually cooled since 2002. The cooling trend is set to continue for the next 50-70 years as the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere continues to decline.”

The findings are based on in-depth statistical analyses of observed data from 1850 up to the present time, Professor Lu’s cosmic-ray-driven electron-reaction (CRE) theory of ozone depletion and his previous research into Antarctic ozone depletion and global surface temperatures.

“It was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth’s ozone layer was depleted by the sun’s ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere,” he said. “But in contrast, CRE theory says cosmic rays — energy particles originating in space — play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone.”

Lu’s theory has been confirmed by ongoing observations of cosmic ray, CFC, ozone and stratospheric temperature data over several 11-year solar cycles. “CRE is the only theory that provides us with an excellent reproduction of 11-year cyclic variations of both polar ozone loss and stratospheric cooling,” said Professor Lu. “After removing the natural cosmic-ray effect, my new paper shows a pronounced recovery by ~20% of the Antarctic ozone hole, consistent with the decline of CFCs in the polar stratosphere.”

By demonstrating the link between CFCs, ozone depletion and temperature changes in the Antarctic, Professor Lu was able to draw almost perfect correlation between rising global surface temperatures and CFCs in the atmosphere.

“The climate in the Antarctic stratosphere has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO₂ impact. The change in global surface temperature after the removal of the solar effect has shown zero correlation with CO₂ but a nearly perfect linear correlation with CFCs — a correlation coefficient as high as 0.97.”

Data recorded from 1850 to 1970, before any significant CFC emissions, show that CO₂ levels increased significantly as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but the global temperature, excluding the solar effect, kept nearly constant. The conventional warming model of CO₂, suggests the temperatures should have risen by 0.6°C over the same period, similar to the period of 1970-2002.

The analyses support Lu’s CRE theory and point to the success of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

“We’ve known for some time that CFCs have a really damaging effect on our atmosphere and we’ve taken measures to reduce their emissions,” Professor Lu said. “We now know that international efforts such as the Montreal Protocol have also had a profound effect on global warming but they must be placed on firmer scientific ground.”

“This study underlines the importance of understanding the basic science underlying ozone depletion and global climate change,” said Terry McMahon, dean of the faculty of science. “This research is of particular importance not only to the research community, but to policy makers and the public alike as we look to the future of our climate.”

Professor Lu’s paper, “Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change,” also predicts that the global sea level will continue to rise for some years as the hole in the ozone recovers increasing ice melting in the polar regions.

“Only when the effect of the global temperature recovery dominates over that of the polar ozone hole recovery, will both temperature and polar ice melting drop concurrently,” says Lu.

The peer-reviewed paper published this week not only provides new fundamental understanding of the ozone hole and global climate change but has superior predictive capabilities, compared with the conventional sunlight-driven ozone-depleting and CO₂-warming models, Lu argues.

Journal Reference:

Q.-B. Lu. Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change. International Journal of Modern Physics B, 2013; 1350073 DOI: 10.1142/S0217979213500732

‘Belief in Science’ Increases in Stressful Situations (Science Daily)

06/06/2013UncategorizedAnsiedade, ciência, Cognição, Psicologia, Religião, Saúde mentalrenzotaddei

June 5, 2013 — A faith in the explanatory and revealing power of science increases in the face of stress or anxiety, a study by Oxford University psychologists suggests.

The researchers argue that a ‘belief in science’ may help non-religious people deal with adversity by offering comfort and reassurance, as has been reported previously for religious belief.

‘We found that being in a more stressful or anxiety-inducing situation increased participants’ “belief in science”,’ says Dr Miguel Farias, who led the study in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. ‘This belief in science we looked at says nothing of the legitimacy of science itself. Rather we were interested in the values individuals hold about science.’

He explains: ‘While most people accept science as a reliable source of knowledge about the world, some may hold science as a superior method for gathering knowledge, the only way to explain the world, or as having some unique and fundamental value in itself. This is a view of science that some atheists endorse.’

As well as stressing that investigating a belief in science carries no judgement on the value of science as a method, the researchers point out that drawing a parallel between the psychological benefits of religious faith and belief in science doesn’t necessarily mean that scientific practice and religion are also similar in their basis.

Instead, the researchers suggest that their findings may highlight a basic human motivation to believe.

‘It’s not just believing in God that is important for gaining these psychological benefits, it is belief in general,’ says Dr Farias. ‘It may be that we as humans are just prone to have belief, and even atheists will hold non-supernatural beliefs that are reassuring and comforting.’

The researchers report their findings in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

There is evidence from previous studies that suggests religious belief helps individuals cope with stress and anxiety. The Oxford University group wondered if this was specific to religious belief, or was a more general function of holding belief.

The researchers developed a scale measuring a ‘belief in science’ in which people are asked how much they agree or disagree with a series of 10 statements, including:

‘Science tells us everything there is to know about what reality consists of.’
‘All the tasks human beings face are soluble by science.’
‘The scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge.’

This scale was used first with a group of 100 rowers, of whom 52 were about to compete in a rowing regatta and the other 48 were about to do a normal training session. Those about to row in competition would be expected to be at a higher stress level.

Those who were competing in the regatta returned scores showing greater belief in science than those in the training group. The difference was statistically significant.

Both groups of rowers reported a low degree of commitment to religion and as expected, those rowers about to compete did say they were experiencing more stress.

In a second experiment, a different set of 60 people were randomly assigned to two groups. One group was asked to write about the feelings aroused by thinking about their own death, while the other was asked to write about dental pain. A number of studies have used an exercise on thinking about your own death to induce a certain amount of ‘existential anxiety’.

The participants who had been asked to think about their own death scored higher in the belief in science scale.

The researchers say their findings are consistent with the idea that belief in science increases when secular individuals are placed in threatening situations. They go on to suggest that a belief in science may help non-religious people deal with adverse conditions.

Dr Farias acknowledges however that they have only shown this in one direction — that stress or anxiety increases belief in science. They suggest other experiments should be done to examine whether affirming a belief in science might then reduce subsequent experience of stress or anxiety.

Journal Reference:

Miguel Farias, Anna-Kaisa Newheiser, Guy Kahane, Zoe de Toledo. Scientific faith: Belief in science increases in the face of stress and existential anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2013; DOI:10.1016/j.jesp.2013.05.008

Subcommittee Reviews Legislation to Improve Weather Forecasting (Subcommittee on Environmen, House of Representatives, USA)

31/05/2013Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Desastre, Incerteza, Mediação tecnológica, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

MAY 23, 2013

Washington, D.C. – The Subcommittee on Environment today held a hearing to examine ways to improve weather forecasting at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Witnesses provided testimony on draft legislation that would prioritize weather-related research at NOAA, in accordance with its critical mission to protect lives and property through enhanced weather forecasting. The hearing was timely given the recent severe tornadoes in the mid-west and super-storms like Hurricane Sandy.

Environment Subcommittee Chairman Chris Stewart (R-Utah): “We need a world-class system of weather prediction in the United States – one, as the National Academy of Sciences recently put it, that is ‘second to none.’ We can thank the hard-working men and women at NOAA and their partners throughout the weather enterprise for the great strides that have been made in forecasting in recent decades. But we can do better. And it’s not enough to blame failures on programming or sequestration or lack of other resources. As the events in Moore, Oklahoma have demonstrated, we have to do better. But the good news is that we can.”

Experts within the weather community have raised concern that the U.S. models for weather prediction have fallen behind Europe and other parts of the world in predicting weather events.The Weather Forecasting Improvement Act, draft legislation discussed at today’s hearing, would build upon the down payment made by Congress following Hurricane Sandy and restore the U.S. as a leader in this field through expanded computing capacity and data assimilation techniques.

Rep. Stewart: “The people of Moore, Oklahoma received a tornado warning 16 minutes before the twister struck their town. Tornado forecasting is difficult but lead times for storms have become gradually better. The draft legislation would prioritize investments in technology being developed at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma, which ‘has the potential to provide revolutionary improvements in… tornado… warning lead times and accuracy, reducing false alarms’ and could move us toward the goal of being able to ‘warn on forecast.’”

The following witnesses testified today:

Mr. Barry Myers, Chief Executive Officer, AccuWeather, Inc.

Mr. Jon Kirchner, President, GeoOptics, Inc.

Depression Linked to Telomere Enzyme, Aging, Chronic Disease (Science Daily)

24/05/2013Uncategorizedciência, Corpo, Depressão, Saúde mentalrenzotaddei

May 23, 2013 — The first symptoms of major depression may be behavioral, but the common mental illness is based in biology — and not limited to the brain. In recent years some studies have linked major, long-term depression with life-threatening chronic disease and with earlier death, even after lifestyle risk factors have been taken into account.

The first symptoms of major depression may be behavioral, but the common mental illness is based in biology — and not limited to the brain. In recent years some studies have linked major, long-term depression with life-threatening chronic disease and with earlier death, even after lifestyle risk factors have been taken into account. (Credit: © diego cervo / Fotolia)

Now a research team led by Owen Wolkowitz, MD, professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco, has found that within cells of the immune system, activity of an enzyme called telomerase is greater, on average, in untreated individuals with major depression. The preliminary findings from his latest, ongoing study will be reported today at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco.

Telomerase is an enzyme that lengthens protective end caps on the chromosomes’ DNA, called telomeres. Shortened telomeres have been associated with earlier death and with chronic diseases in population studies.

The heightened telomerase activity in untreated major depression might represent the body’s attempt to fight back against the progression of disease, in order to prevent biological damage in long-depressed individuals, Wolkowitz said.

The researchers made another discovery that may suggest a protective role for telomerase. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), they found that, in untreated, depressed study participants, the size of the hippocampus, a brain structure that is critical for learning and memory, was associated with the amount of telomerase activity measured in the white blood cells. Such an association at a single point in time cannot be used to conclude that there is a cause-and-effect relationship with telomerase helping to protect the hippocampus, but it is plausible, Wolkowitz said.

Remarkably, the researchers also found that the enzyme’s activity went up when some patients began taking an antidepressant. In fact, depressed participants with lower telomerase activity at baseline — as well as those in whom enzyme activity increased the most with treatment — were the most likely to become less depressed with treatment.

“Our results are consistent with the beneficial effect of telomerase when it is boosted in animal studies, where it has been associated with the growth of new nerve cells in the hippocampus and with antidepressant-like effects, evidenced by increased exploratory behavior,” Wolkowitz said. Wolkowitz cautions that his new findings are preliminary due to the small size of the study and must be confirmed through further research.

The researchers also measured telomere length in the same immune cells. Only very chronically depressed individuals showed telomere shortening, Wolkowitz said.

“The longer people had been depressed, the shorter their telomeres were,” he said. “Shortened telomere length has been previously demonstrated in major depression in most, but not all, studies that have examined it. The duration of depression may be a critical factor.”

The 20 depressed participants enrolled in the study had been untreated for at least six weeks and had an average lifetime duration of depression of about 13 years. After baseline evaluation and laboratory measures, 16 of the depressed participants were treated with sertraline, a member of the most popular class of anti-depressants, the serotonin-selective-reuptake-inhibitors (SSRIs), and then evaluated again after eight weeks. There were 20 healthy participants who served as controls.

The ongoing study still is accepting depressed participants who are not now taking antidepressants. Wolkowitz’s team also studies chronic inflammation and the biochemical phenomenon of oxidative stress, which he said have often been reported in major depression. Wolkowitz is exploring the hypothesis that inflammation and oxidative stress play a role in telomere shortening and accelerated aging in depression.

“New insights into the mechanisms of these processes may well lead to new treatments — both pharmacological and behavioral — that will be distinctly different from the current generation of drugs prescribed to treat depression,” he said. “Additional studies might lead to simple blood tests that can measure accelerated immune-cell aging.”

Wolkowitz’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health. He is on the scientific advisory board of Telome Health, Inc., a private biotechnology company.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided byUniversity of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The original article was written by Jeffrey Norris.

“eScience revoluciona a forma como se faz ciência” (Fapesp)

23/05/2013Uncategorizedciência, Mediação tecnológica, Previsãorenzotaddei

Novas ferramentas de computação possibilitam fazer ciência de forma melhor, mais rápida e com maior impacto, diz Tony Hey, vice-presidente da Microsoft Research (foto:E.Cesar/FAPESP)

16/05/2013

Por Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – Um software de visualização de dados astronômicos pela internet permite que cientistas em diversas partes do mundo acessem milhares de imagens de objetos celestes, coletadas por grandes telescópios espaciais, por observatórios e por instituições internacionais de pesquisa em astronomia.

Por meio desses dados, os usuários podem realizar análises temporais e combinar observações realizadas em vários comprimentos de onda de energia irradiada pelos corpos celestes, como raios X, radiação infravermelha, ultravioleta e gama e ondas de rádio, para elucidar os processos físicos que ocorrem no interior desses objetos e compartilhar suas conclusões.

Denominado World Wide Telescope, o software, que começou a ser desenvolvido em 2002 pela Microsoft Research, em parceria com pesquisadores da Universidade Johns Hopkins, nos Estados Unidos, é um exemplo de como as novas tecnologias da informação e comunicação (TICs) mudaram a forma como os dados científicos passaram a ser gerados, administrados e compartilhados, além da própria maneira como se faz ciência hoje, afirma Tony Hey, vice-presidente da Microsoft Research.

“Os telescópios espaciais, assim como as máquinas de sequenciamento genético e aceleradores de partículas, estão gerando um volume de dados até então nunca visto. Para lidar com esse fenômeno e possibilitar que os cientistas possam manipular e compartilhar esses dados, precisamos de uma série de tecnologias e ferramentas de ciência da computação que possibilitem fazer ciência de forma melhor, mais rápida e com maior impacto. É isso o que chamamos deeScience”, disse Hey durante o Latin American eScience Workshop 2013, realizado nos dias 14 e 15 de maio no Espaço Apas, em São Paulo.

Promovido pela FAPESP e pela Microsoft Research, o evento reuniu pesquisadores e estudantes da Europa, da América do Sul e do Norte, da Ásia e da Oceania para discutir avanços em diversas áreas do conhecimento possibilitados pela melhoria na capacidade de análise de grandes volumes de informações produzidas por projetos de pesquisa.

A cerimônia de abertura do evento foi presidida por Celso Lafer, presidente da FAPESP, e contou com a presença de Michel Levy, presidente da Microsoft Brasil, e de José Tadeu de Faria, superintendente do Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento no Estado de São Paulo, representando o ministro.

Também conhecida como ciência orientada por dados, a área de eScience integra pesquisas em computação a estudos nas mais variadas áreas por meio do desenvolvimento de softwares específicos para visualização e análise de informações.

A integração permite a interpretação dos dados, a formulação de teorias, testes por simulação e o levantamento de novas hipóteses de pesquisa com base em correlações difíceis de serem observadas sem o apoio da tecnologia da informação.

“Algumas tecnologias utilizadas na ciência da computação vão ajudar a resolver problemas científicos. Em contrapartida, a utilização dessas ferramentas para solucionar problemas científicos também possibilitará o próprio desenvolvimento da ciência da computação”, disse Hey, que foi professor da Universidade de Southampton, no Reino Unido.

Segundo Hey, a análise, visualização, prospecção (data mining, na expressão em inglês), preservação e compartilhamento de grandes volumes de dados representam grandes desafios não só na ciência hoje, mas também no setor privado.

Por isso, na opinião dele, é preciso treinar os cientistas para lidar com o big data – como é chamado o conjunto de soluções tecnológicas capaz de lidar com a acumulação contínua de dados pouco estruturados, capturados de diversas fontes e da ordem de petabytes (quatrilhões de bytes) – tanto para realização de projetos científicos, como também para atuarem, eventualmente, em empresas. “O data scientist [cientista capaz de lidar com grandes volumes de dados] será um requisito imprescindível para o cientista”, disse Hey.

A ciência intensiva em dados não é nova, mas as escalas espaciais e temporais de estudos realizados atualmente sobre temas relacionados às mudanças climáticas globais, por exemplo, são cada vez maiores, exigindo novas ferramentas. Por meio de novas tecnologias da informação, também é possível analisar dados gerados em tempo real, como no monitoramento de hábitats.

De acordo com Hey, desde 1950 se começou a utilizar computadores para explorar, por meio de simulações, áreas da ciência até então inacessíveis. “No início, no entanto, os cientistas não sabiam o que era ciência da computação e os profissionais da computação não entendiam a complexidade dos problemas científicos”, disse.

“Foi necessária a realização de um trabalho conjunto, de longo prazo, para que os dois lados entendessem qual era a contribuição que cada um poderia dar em suas respectivas áreas, e iniciar o desenvolvimento de novos algoritmos, hardware, software e da programação de linguagens para possibilitar a realização de experimentos em diversas áreas”, contou.

Oportunidades em temas ousados

Durante o evento da FAPESP e da Microsoft Research foram apresentados diversos projetos por pesquisadores que utilizam o eScience em diversos países, em áreas como energias renováveis, mudanças climáticas globais, transformações sociais, econômicas e políticas nas metrópoles contemporâneas, caracterização, conservação, recuperação e uso sustentável da biodiversidade, medicina e saúde pública.

Um desses projetos, coordenado pela professora Glaucia Mendes Souza, coordenadora do Programa FAPESP de Pesquisa em Bioenergia (BIOEN), pretende desenvolver um algoritmo para o sequenciamento do genoma da cana-de-açúcar e, com isso, possibilitar o desenvolvimento de variedades da planta com maior quantidade de sacarose e mais resistente a pragas e às mudanças climáticas.

“A colaboração entre a FAPESP e a Microsoft tem aberto para a comunidade científica do Estado de São Paulo inúmeras oportunidades de realizar pesquisas em temas ousados relacionados com o uso de tecnologias da informação em áreas como a de energia e meio ambiente”, disse Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, diretor científico da FAPESP, na sessão de abertura do workshop.

“Temos grandes expectativas em relação à eScience. Se soubermos utilizá-la adequadamente, ela poderá trazer grandes avanços não só em pesquisas mas também na própria maneira de se fazer ciência”, disse Brito Cruz.

Ele disse que a FAPESP planeja lançar em breve um programa voltado para apoiar pesquisas na área de eScience.

“Temos a clara convicção de que um papel importante da FAPESP é estar na vanguarda da inovação e do conhecimento, e consideramos muito importante o apoio à pesquisas em eScience, cuja aplicação em áreas como a de meio ambiente é inequívoca, mas que também apresenta um grande potencial de utilização nas Ciências Humanas, por exemplo”, disse Celso Lafer, presidente da FAPESP.

Levy destacou a parceria da Microsoft com a FAPESP e os investimentos em pesquisa e desenvolvimento realizados pela empresa no país. “A Microsoft tem aumentado seus investimentos na área de pesquisa e desenvolvimento no Brasil nos últimos anos e um dos mais importantes exemplos disso é a parceria bem sucedida que mantemos com a FAPESP”, afirmou.

Climate research nearly unanimous on human causes, survey finds (The Guardian)

23/05/2013Uncategorizedciência, Clima, Incerteza, Meteorologia, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Política, Previsãorenzotaddei

Of more than 4,000 academic papers published over 20 years, 97.1% agreed that climate change is anthropogenic

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 May 2013 00.01 BST

An iceberg melts in Greeland in 2007. Climate change. Environment. Global warming. Photograph: John McConnico/AP

‘Our findings prove that there is a strong scientific agreement about the cause of climate change, despite public perceptions to the contrary’. Photograph: John McConnico/AP

A survey of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals has found 97.1% agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.

Authors of the survey, published on Thursday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, said the finding of near unanimity provided a powerful rebuttal to climate contrarians who insist the science of climate change remains unsettled.

The survey considered the work of some 29,000 scientists published in 11,994 academic papers. Of the 4,000-plus papers that took a position on the causes of climate change only 0.7% or 83 of those thousands of academic articles, disputed the scientific consensus that climate change is the result of human activity, with the view of the remaining 2.2% unclear.

The study described the dissent as a “vanishingly small proportion” of published research.

“Our findings prove that there is a strong scientific agreement about the cause of climate change, despite public perceptions to the contrary,” said John Cook of the University of Queensland, who led the survey.

Public opinion continues to lag behind the science. Though a majority of Americans accept the climate is changing, just 42% believed human activity was the main driver, in a poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre last October.

“There is a gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception,” Cook said in a statement.

Guardian partners Climate Desk interview John Cook on his new paper

The study blamed strenuous lobbying efforts by industry to undermine the science behind climate change for the gap in perception. The resulting confusion has blocked efforts to act on climate change.

The survey was the most ambitious effort to date to demonstrate the broad agreement on the causes of climate change, covering 20 years of academic publications from 1991-2011.

In 2004, Naomi Oreskes, an historian at the University of California, San Diego,surveyed published literature, releasing her results in the journal Science. She too came up with a similar finding that 97% of climate scientists agreed on the causes of climate change.

She wrote of the new survey in an email: “It is a nice, independent confirmation, using a somewhat different methodology than I used, that comes to the same result. It also refutes the claim, sometimes made by contrarians, that the consensus has broken down, much less ‘shattered’.”

The Cook survey was broader in its scope, deploying volunteers from theSkepticalScience.com website to review scientific abstracts. The volunteers also asked authors to rate their own views on the causes of climate change, in another departure from Oreskes’s methods.

The authors said the findings could help close the gap between scientific opinion and the public on the causes of climate change, or anthropogenic global warming, and so create favourable conditions for political action on climate.

“The public perception of a scientific consensus on AGW [anthropogenic, ie man-made, global warming] is a necessary element in public support for climate policy,” the study said.

However, Prof Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University who studies the forces underlying attitudes towards climate change, disputed the idea that educating the public about the broad scientific agreement on the causes of climate change would have an effect on public opinion – or on the political conditions for climate action.

He said he was doubtful that convincing the public of a scientific consensus on climate change would help advance the prospects for political action. Having elite leaders call for climate action would be far more powerful, he said.

“I don’t think people really want to come around to grips with the fact that climate change is a highly ideological issue and it is not amenable to the information deficit model,” he said.

“The information deficit model, this idea that if you just pile on more information people will get convinced, is just completely inadequate, he said. “It strengthens the people who actually read and pay attention but it is certainly not going to change or shift the opinions of others.”

Jon Krosnick, professor in humanities and social sciences at Stanford university and an expert on public opinion on climate change, said: “I assume that sceptics would say that there is bias in the editorial process so that the papers ultimately published are not an accurate reflection of the opinions of scientists.”

Clouds in the Head: New Model of Brain’s Thought Processes (Science Daily)

23/05/2013UncategorizedCérebro, ciência, Cognição, Mediação tecnológica, neurociênciasrenzotaddei

May 21, 2013 — A new model of the brain’s thought processes explains the apparently chaotic activity patterns of individual neurons. They do not correspond to a simple stimulus/response linkage, but arise from the networking of different neural circuits. Scientists funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) propose that the field of brain research should expand its focus.

A new model of the brain’s thought processes explains the apparently chaotic activity patterns of individual neurons. They do not correspond to a simple stimulus/response linkage, but arise from the networking of different neural circuits. (Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Kaulitzki)

Many brain researchers cannot see the forest for the trees. When they use electrodes to record the activity patterns of individual neurons, the patterns often appear chaotic and difficult to interpret. “But when you zoom out from looking at individual cells, and observe a large number of neurons instead, their global activity is very informative,” says Mattia Rigotti, a scientist at Columbia University and New York University who is supported by the SNSF and the Janggen-Pöhn-Stiftung. Publishing inNature together with colleagues from the United States, he has shown that these difficult-to-interpret patterns in particular are especially important for complex brain functions.

What goes on in the heads of apes

The researchers have focussed their attention on the activity patterns of 237 neurons that had been recorded some years previously using electrodes implanted in the frontal lobes of two rhesus monkeys. At that time, the apes had been taught to recognise images of different objects on a screen. Around one third of the observed neurons demonstrated activity that Rigotti describes as “mixed selectivity.” A mixed selective neuron does not always respond to the same stimulus (the flowers or the sailing boat on the screen) in the same way. Rather, its response differs as it also takes account of the activity of other neurons. The cell adapts its response according to what else is going on in the ape’s brain.

Chaotic patterns revealed in context

Just as individual computers are networked to create concentrated processing and storage capacity in the field of Cloud Computing, links in the complex cognitive processes that take place in the prefrontal cortex play a key role. The greater the density of the network in the brain, in other words the greater the proportion of mixed selectivity in the activity patterns of the neurons, the better the apes were able to recall the images on the screen, as demonstrated by Rigotti in his analysis. Given that the brain and cognitive capabilities of rhesus monkeys are similar to those of humans, mixed selective neurons should also be important in our own brains. For him this is reason enough why brain research from now on should no longer be satisfied with just the simple activity patterns, but should also consider the apparently chaotic patterns that can only be revealed in context.

Journal Reference:

Mattia Rigotti, Omri Barak, Melissa R. Warden, Xiao-Jing Wang, Nathaniel D. Daw, Earl K. Miller, Stefano Fusi. The importance of mixed selectivity in complex cognitive tasks. Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature12160

“Cientistas podem contar uma história sem perder a acurácia” (Fapesp)

21/05/2013Uncategorizedciência, comunicação científica, jornalismo, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, Opinião públicarenzotaddei

Dan Fay, diretor da Microsoft Research Connections, afirma que a tecnologia pode ajudar os pesquisadores a expor artigos e atrair mais leitores, sejam eles seus pares, formuladores de políticas ou agências de fomento (foto:Edu Cesar/FAPESP)

Entrevistas

21/05/2013

Por Frances Jones

Agência FAPESP – Com mais de 20 anos de Microsoft, o engenheiro Dan Fay faz parte de um seleto grupo de profissionais que vasculha o mundo científico em busca de parcerias entre a gigante de informática e autores de projetos relacionados às ciências da Terra, energia e meio ambiente.

São projetos como o software World Wide Telescope, desenvolvido em parceria com pesquisadores da Universidade Johns Hopkins, que permite que cientistas de diversas regiões do mundo acessem imagens de objetos celestes coletadas por telescópios espaciais, observatórios e instituições de pesquisa, manipulem e compartilhem esses dados.

“Nosso desafio é encontrar pesquisadores a cuja pesquisa podemos agregar valor e não apenas fornecer mais máquinas”, disse Fay, que, além de ser diretor da divisão de Terra, Energia e Ambiente da Microsoft Research Connections, o braço de pesquisas da Microsoft, integra o conselho consultivo industrial para Computação e Tecnologia da Informação da Purdue University, no estado norte-americano de Indiana.

Fay esteve em São Paulo para participar do Latin American eScience Workshop 2013, promovido pela FAPESP e pela Microsoft Research de 13 a 15 de maio, quando proferiu duas palestras a pesquisadores e estudantes de diversos países sobre avanços em diversas áreas do conhecimento proporcionados pela melhoria na capacidade de análise de grandes volumes de informações. Em uma delas, falou sobre como a ciência pode utilizar a computação em nuvem; na outra, sobre “como divulgar sua pesquisa internacionalmente”. Em seguida, conversou com a Agência FAPESP. Leia abaixo, trechos da entrevista.

Agência FAPESP – O que o senhor espera para o futuro com relação à eScience, a utilização no fazer ciência de tecnologias e ferramentas de computação?
Fay – O interessante sobre a eScience é combinar dados computacionais e novas técnicas nas mais diversas áreas. O que vemos agora é um uso maior da computação, mas o passo seguinte será o cruzamento dos diferentes domínios e o uso combinado dessas informações, como, por exemplo, da biologia e do meio ambiente juntos, fazendo uma análise transversal. Os dois domínios falam línguas diferentes. A passagem entre as áreas será um dos próximos desafios. Não se pode assumir que um dado significa algo. É preciso ter certeza.

Agência FAPESP – Como os pesquisadores podem utilizar a computação em nuvem para seus estudos?
Fay – A computação em nuvem fornece um novo paradigma para enfrentar os desafios da computação e da análise de dados nas mais diversas áreas do conhecimento científico. Diferentemente dos supercomputadores tradicionais, isolados e centralizados, a nuvem está em todos os lugares e pode oferecer suporte a diferente estilos de computação que são adequados para a análise de dados e para colaboração. Nos últimos três anos temos trabalhado com pesquisadores acadêmicos para explorar o potencial desta nova plataforma. Temos mais de 90 projetos de pesquisa que usam o Windows Azure [plataforma em nuvem da Microsoft] e temos aprendido muito. Como em qualquer tecnologia nova, há sempre pessoas que começam antes e outras depois. Há vários pesquisadores que começaram a usá-la para compreender como isso pode mudar a forma com que fazem pesquisa.

Agência FAPESP – O senhor acha que no futuro haverá uma mudança na forma de se divulgar ciência?
Dan Fay – Comentei com os alunos no workshop que sempre haverá os artigos tradicionais, de revistas científicas, que são revisados pelos pares. Com a quantidade de informações que temos hoje, no entanto, para tornar isso mais visível para outras pessoas e para o público em geral, os dados também podem ser apresentados de outra forma. Um artigo que se aprofunda nos detalhes também pode ser acessível a pessoas de diferentes domínios. Produzir fotos e vídeos, entre outros recursos, também pode ajudar.

Agência FAPESP – Esse é um papel dos cientistas?
Fay – Você pode usar os mesmos dados científicos acurados e contar histórias sobre eles. E permitir que as pessoas escutem diretamente de você essa história de forma visual. Essa interação é muito poderosa. É a mesma coisa que ir ao museu e ver várias obras de arte: as pessoas se conectam a elas. Os cientistas querem que seus colegas e as pessoas em geral se conectem dessa forma com suas informações, dados ou artigos. Acho bom encontrar outros mecanismos que possam explicar os dados. Estamos em uma época fascinante na qual há uma preocupação em divulgar a informação de um jeito interessante. Isso é verdade não apenas quando se quer falar para os seus pares, mas especialmente se você quer que os formuladores de políticas, o governo ou as agências de fomento entendam o que é o seu trabalho. Às vezes ele tem de ser apresentado de forma que possa ser consumido com mais facilidade.

Agência FAPESP – A tecnologia ajuda nesse ponto?
Fay – Sim. Parte disso porque essas formas fazem com que as pessoas leiam com mais profundidade os artigos. Há uma pesquisadora em Harvard, uma astrônoma, que criou um desses tours virtuais que temos sobre as galáxias. Ela calcula que mais pessoas assistiram a seus tours do que leram seus artigos científicos. Esse tipo de entendimento está aumentando. Se posso ajudar alguém a ler um artigo ao ver isso em outro lugar, isso é um avanço.

Agência FAPESP – O senhor acha que os cientistas devem entrar em redes sociais digitais, como o Facebook, para expor seus trabalhos?
Fay – Sim. Eles devem sempre se apoiar no rigor científico, mas ajuda empregar técnicas de design ou de marketing. Mesmo em seus pôsteres. É uma forma de divulgar melhor as informações.

Agência FAPESP – E as novas tecnologias promoverão a abertura dos dados científicos?
Fay – Para além da abertura de dados, há um problema social, no qual as pessoas se sentem donas de suas ideias ou informações. Encontrar formas de compartilhar os dados e dar o devido reconhecimento às pessoas que os coletaram, processaram e os tornaram disponíveis é importante. É aí, acredito, que estão vários desafios. Também há a questão dos dados médicos ou de outros dados que você não quer que fiquem soltos por aí.

Cientistas americanos conseguem clonar embriões humanos (O Globo)

19/05/2013UncategorizedÉtica, Células tronco, ciência, Clonagem humana, Genética, Mediação tecnológicarenzotaddei

Trabalho é o primeiro a obter êxito em humanos com a técnica que deu origem à ovelha Dolly

Autores dizem que não se trata de fazer clones humanos, mas sim avançar apenas até a fase de blastocisto para obter as células-tronco

Em 2004, sul-coreano anunciou o mesmo feito mas foi desmentido um ano depois

ROBERTA JANSEN

Publicado:15/05/13 – 16h03; atualizado:15/05/13 – 20h56

Clone de embrião obtido no estudo Divulgação

OREGON. Dezesseis anos depois da clonagem do primeiro mamífero, a ovelha Dolly, cientistas conseguiram, pela primeira vez, clonar um embrião humano em seus primeiros estágios de desenvolvimento. Os protoembriões foram usados para produzir células-tronco embrionárias — capazes de se transformar em qualquer tecido do corpo —, num avanço bastante significativo e há muito tempo esperado para o tratamento de lesões e doenças graves como Parkinson, esclerose múltipla e problemas cardíacos. Especialistas envolvidos no processo garantem que o objetivo não é clonar seres humanos, mas, sim criar novas terapias personalizadas.

Tanto é assim que os embriões humanos clonados usados na pesquisa foram destruídos em estágios ainda muito iniciais de desenvolvimento, logo depois da extração das células-tronco, e não levados ao crescimento, como no caso da ovelha Dolly e de tantos outros animais clonados depois dela. A técnica usada, no entanto, foi bastante similar à que criou a ovelha. Células da pele de um indivíduo foram colocadas em um óvulo previamente esvaziado de seu material genético e estimuladas a se desenvolver. Quando atingiram a fase de blastocisto, as células-tronco embrionárias foram extraídas e os embriões destruídos. O estudo foi publicado na revista “Cell”.

Conseguir gerar grande quantidade de células-tronco do próprio paciente era uma espécie de Santo Graal da atual ciência médica, como comparou o jornalista Steve Connor, no “Independent”. Embora o procedimento tenha sido feito com animais, até agora nunca tinha sido obtido com material humano, a despeito de inúmeras tentativas. Aparentemente, a dificuldade viria da maior fragilidade do óvulo humano.

Em 2004, um grupo coordenado por Woo Suk Hwang, da Universidade Nacional de Seoul, anunciou ter produzido o primeiro embirão humano clonado e, em seguida, obtido células-tronco embionárias a partir dele. Menos de um ano depois, no entanto, o grupo, que já havia clonado um cachorro, foi acusado de fraude e desmentiu os resultados obtidos. Outros grupos tentaram, mas os embriões não passaram do estágio de 6 a 12 células.

A corrida pela obtenção das células-tronco embrionárias faz todo o sentido. Cultivadas em laboratório, essas células podem dar origem a qualquer tecido do corpo humano. Por isso, em tese ao menos, poderiam curar lesões na medula, recompor órgãos, tratar problemas graves de visão, oferecendo tratamentos inéditos para muitas doenças hoje incuráveis. Como os tecidos seriam feitos a partir do material genético do próprio paciente (que, no caso, cedeu as células de sua pele), não haveria risco algum de rejeição. A medicina personalizada alcançaria o seu ápice.

— Nossa descoberta oferece novas maneiras de gerar células-tronco embrionárias para pacientes com problemas em tecidos e órgãos — afirmou o coordenador do estudo, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, da Universidade de Ciência e Saúde do Oregon, nos EUA, em comunicado oficial sobre o estudo. — Essas células-tronco podem regenerar órgãos ou substituir tecidos danificados, levando à cura de doenças que hoje afetam milhões de pessoas.

O grupo também conseguiu observar a capacidade de diferenciação das células obtidas em tecidos específicos

— Um atento exame das células-tronco obtidas por meio desta técnica demonstrou sua capacidade de se converter, como qualquer célula-tronco embrionária normal, em diferentes tipos de células, entre elas, células nervosas, células do fígado e céluas cardíacas — disse Mitalipov, em entrevista ao “Independent”.

No entanto, o estudo já levanta sérias preocupações éticas, sobretudo em relação à criação de clones humanos. Há o temor de que a técnica seja incorporada às oferecidas por clínicas de fertilização in vitro, como alternativa para casais estéreis, por exemplo. Outros grupos argumentam que é simplesmente antiético manipular embriões humanos.

— A pesquisa tem como único objetivo gerar células-tronco embrionárias para tratar doenças graves; e não aumentar as chances de produzir bebês clonados — garantiu Mitalipov. — Este não é o nosso foco e não acreditamos que nossas descobertas sejam usadas por outros grupos como um avanço na clonagem humana reprodutiva.

Leia mais sobre esse assunto em http://oglobo.globo.com/ciencia/cientistas-americanos-conseguem-clonar-embrioes-humanos-8399684#ixzz2TlwDWsur © 1996 – 2013. Todos direitos reservados a Infoglobo Comunicação e Participações S.A. Este material não pode ser publicado, transmitido por broadcast, reescrito ou redistribuído sem autorização.

Scientist Superheroes: The US Government’s Crisis Science Team (Quest)

17/05/2013Uncategorizedciência, Desastre, Política, Políticas públicasrenzotaddei

Post on May 13, 2013 by Peter Lollo, Guest Contributor for KQED Science (science.kqed.org)

If your town were suddenly struck by an earthquake or hurricane, you could count on the arrival of police, firefighters, and medical technicians to aid in the emergency response. As of this past January, the US government has added a new team of responders to this list—scientists.

The Strategic Sciences Group was formed under Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in order to help the department “act quickly, decisively and effectively when hurricanes, droughts, oil spills, wildfires or other crises strike.” The group was initially tested as a pilot program during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and is now a permanent part of the Department of the Interior.

But don’t expect to see people in lab coats rushing into burning buildings or diving into flooding rivers.

“The Strategic Sciences Group’s mission,” says group co-leader Gary Machlis, “is to very quickly assemble a team of scientists to develop scenarios of what the cascading consequences of a crisis might be.” These scenarios are projections of all the different ways in which the disaster might play out. The projections are then delivered to the President and other national leaders to help inform real-time, emergency-response decisions.

During Deepwater Horizon, for example, calculations regarding oil flow rates helped decision-makers respond to obvious problems such as ecosystem contamination, as well as some subtler consequences: long-term displacement of oyster harvesters, disproportionate economic impacts upon cultural communities, and diminished hurricane resilience due to wetland stress.

Deepwater Horizon in flames, April 21, 2010.

Deepwater Horizon in flames, April 21, 2010.
(AP Photo/U.S. Coast Guard)

With such a breadth of potential consequences to examine, its clear that the Strategic Sciences Group’s task is not simple. What is surprising however, is that many of the group’s difficulties stem from the nature of the scientific process itself.

“Scientists are very accustomed to being deliberate in their work,” says Marcia Mcnutt, who worked with the Strategic Sciences Group during her tenure as director of the United States Geological Survey. “The idea that they might get critical info on a Monday night and need to have their best guess of what that info means by six am Tuesday morning is just not the normal way science operates.”

And, Machlis adds, the rapidly determined results must also be communicated persuasively.

“It isn’t enough to do good science. You might have an extraordinary, complex scenario figured out that’s important for leaders to know, but if you can’t tell that story clearly and effectively, it’s of less value.”

These requirements—the ability to work with urgency, cope with uncertainty, and communicate well with non-scientists—separate crisis science from traditional scientific research.

When creating the Strategic Sciences Group, Machlis responded to these unique demands by borrowing ideas from an unusual agency: The Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, which was established during World War II to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines.

Machlis says he has learned four important lessons from the historic military-intelligence organization:

1. Who You Hire Matters

OSS founder Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan with members of the OSS Operational Groups

OSS founder Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan with members of the OSS
Photo Courtesy of the OSS Society

“The ideal candidate for the OSS were PhD’s that could win a bar fight,” says Machlis.

While martial arts training is not an actual requirement, the Strategic Sciences Group does seek scientists with a certain mental and physical tenacity. “They‘ve got to be expert in their own discipline, able to transcend their own discipline and work well with other scientists, and they have to be able to work extremely hard under very intense conditions.”

2. Expertise Not Representation

“Our goal is to get the very best people in the field working on these science teams. It is less about do we need one person from this agency and one person from this agency to make sure it’s representative.”

From government scientists to graduate students, anyone with the necessary skills can be recruited and put onto Machlis’ lists, or “rosters”.

3. Be Flexible

US Department of the Interior Strategic Sciences Working Group, New Orleans, LA, July 2010. Photo Credit: Jason Newman

Machlis ensures that the rosters are highly interdisciplinary. The 30 scientists who have already been called to action include “an anthropologist with expertise in disaster response from Louisiana, a public health medical officer from Washington, DC, a coastal geomorphologist from California, an ecologist working with a major natural history museum, and a Forest Service social scientist with expertise in urban ecology.”

Such diversity allows the Strategic Sciences Group to be highly adaptable.

“Each crisis that might happen, whether it’s an oil spill, whether it’s an earth quake, whether it’s a dam failure, there’s always going to be many elements of it that are unique. We need to be flexible enough to choose a team that has reliable expert scientists appropriate to that crisis.”

4. Avoid Bureaucracy

“We stay focused on the mission rather than developing a lot of complicated, time-consuming bureaucratic processes.”

In order to avoid creating a large government agency, Machlis only activates the rostered scientists when a disaster occurs. At all other times, the Strategic Sciences Group is made up of only three people.

This three person team, when there are no current crises, spends its time evaluating the consequences of potential crises.

By considering situations such as “a forest fire in the sierras during Yosemite’s tourist season, or a pandemic, or an arctic oil spill,” the group hopes to pre-emptively increase response preparedness. Ultimately, Machlis aims to have the capacity to address simultaneous, bi-coastal disasters. For example: an earthquake in California and a hurricane in New York on the same day.

When will the group be ready for such a situation?

“I would hope that we’re prepared for that within the year.”

Mark that down as December 31st, 2013–the date when you can expect not only police and firefighters, but also scientists, to play a role in addressing the next major natural or man-made disaster.

Lord of All I Survey (Slate)

08/05/2013Uncategorizedciência, Educação, Opinião pública, Política, Religiãorenzotaddei

By Phil Plait

Posted Thursday, May 2, 2013, at 10:30 AM

How much do you know about science and religion?. Illustration by Shutterstock/ollyy

Last week, a couple of online surveys came to my attention. Both were from the Pew Research Center (a non-profit, respected group); one was about public knowledge ofscience, the other about religion.

If you haven’t taken them, they are very short (13 and 15 questions each) and will literally only take a couple of minutes for you to fill out—they don’t ask for any specific personal info, and the questions are very simply stated. So please, go take them both before you continue reading here.

OK, all done? How did you do?

Bragging time: I got all the answers right, on both quizzes. But, apropos of a test on religion, I have a confession: I guessed on the last religion question; I’m not all that clear on the First Great Awakening (though I knew it wasn’t Billy Graham, so my odds went up to 50/50 for my guess).

I found the questions and results interesting. I’ll note the religious test was given out in 2010 (32 questions were used in the phone survey; only 15 are listed online), but I didn’t find the questions particularly dated.

Not surprisingly, I was pretty confident in the science test, and knew my answers were right. I was shakier on some of the religious questions; I have a broad knowledge of many religions, but specifics not so much. Still, I did well.

Also not surprisingly, Americans didn’t fare so well in the science test (maybe we should make members of Congress pass both tests before being allowed to sit on the House Science Committee). But more interesting is which questions were answered incorrectly, and by what percentage; Pew reports the results.

For example, only 20 percent of the respondents were correct in answering that nitrogen is the most abundant element in our atmosphere (over three times more abundant than oxygen, which I’d guess is what most people think makes up the majority of our air). I think people should know that, in that I think people should have a broad working knowledge of basic science and its principles. On the other hand, it’s not criticallyimportant that people know that. It won’t directly impact their lives, for example.

On the other hand, only 58 percent knew that carbon dioxide causes rising temperatures. Global warming is a fantastically important issue, even if you think (incorrectly) it’s not real. Either way, it’s a big political topic, and one our economy (and our very lives) depends on. Yet 42 percent of Americans don’t know the single most basic fact about it.

That’s terrifying.

What I found most fascinating, though, are the percentiles of the overall surveys; that is, how many people got how many correct total. By getting all the science questions right, I did better than 93 percent of the people surveyed (only 7 percent got all 13 questions right). By getting all the religion questions right, I did better than 99 percent of the people surveyed (only 1 percent got them all right).

Mind you, only a few thousand people were surveyed, there was probably no overlap between the two groups, and it’s a small number of questions. Still, this implies something interesting: people know less about religion than science!

I’m not sure how strong an inference to take here. How do you compare the two questions? After all, most Americans are supposed to get a basic science education, but I expect it’s extremely unlikely that most will get a firm basic knowledge of religions other than their own (and sometimes not even then). I’d even bet there’s a bias against it, in fact.

So I wouldn’t read too much into this. It’s just interesting. I suspect the real impact of this survey is personal. What did you get right? What did you get wrong? How important is the distinction to you?

I think there’s always room for more learning, and if these surveys spur that on, even a little bit, then that’s a pretty good thing.

Computer Scientists Suggest New Spin On Origins of Evolvability: Competition to Survive Not Necessary? (Science Daily)

27/04/2013Uncategorizedciência, Computação, Evolução, Evolucionismo, Mediação tecnológicarenzotaddei

Apr. 26, 2013 — Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment. But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase.

The average evolvability of organisms in each niche at the end of a simulation is shown. The lighter the color, the more evolvable individuals are within that niche. The overall result is that, as in the first model, evolvability increases with increasing distance from the starting niche in the center. (Credit: Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley. Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e62186 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062186)

In a paper published this week inPLOS ONE, the researchers report that evolvability can increase over generations regardless of whether species are competing for food, habitat or other factors.

Using a simulated model they designed to mimic how organisms evolve, the researchers saw increasing evolvability even without competitive pressure.

“The explanation is that evolvable organisms separate themselves naturally from less evolvable organisms over time simply by becoming increasingly diverse,” said Kenneth O. Stanley, an associate professor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. He co-wrote the paper about the study along with lead author Joel Lehman, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

The finding could have implications for the origins of evolvability in many species.

“When new species appear in the future, they are most likely descendants of those that were evolvable in the past,” Lehman said. “The result is that evolvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure.”

During the simulations, the team’s simulated organisms became more evolvable without any pressure from other organisms out-competing them. The simulations were based on a conceptual algorithm.

“The algorithms used for the simulations are abstractly based on how organisms are evolved, but not on any particular real-life organism,” explained Lehman.

The team’s hypothesis is unique and is in contrast to most popular theories for why evolvability increases.

“An important implication of this result is that traditional selective and adaptive explanations for phenomena such as increasing evolvability deserve more scrutiny and may turn out unnecessary in some cases,” Stanley said.

Stanley is an associate professor at UCF. He has a bachelor’s of science in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has over 70 publications in competitive venues and has secured grants worth more than $1 million. His works in artificial intelligence and evolutionary computation have been cited more than 4,000 times.

Journal Reference:

Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley. Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e62186 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0062186

Anthropologists should do a better job of promoting their field (Orlando Sentinel)

24/04/2013UncategorizedAntropologia, ciência, Enquadramento, jornalismo, Mídia, Opinião pública, Políticarenzotaddei

By Ty Matejowsky and Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster | Guest columnists

April 24, 2013

Anthropology has been in the news quite a bit lately.

The New York Times recently profiled Napoleon Chagnon on the eve of the publication of his memoir, “Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.”

Last August, Kiplinger named anthropology “the worst major for your career.”

Two months later, Forbes ranked “anthropology and archaeology,” as No. 1 on its list of “worst college majors.”

This newfound public shaming of anthropology only adds insult to injury in light of Florida Gov. Rick Scott‘s dismissive 2011 statements about anthropologists. More than once Scott, whose daughter famously earned an anthropology degree, quipped that Florida does “not need any more anthropologists.”

Overall, 2012 was anthropology’s annus horribilis, as Science magazine recently stated.

Of anthropology’s major subfields, cultural anthropology has probably fared the worst in recent public discussions. Although archaeology and physical anthropology get their fair share of positive media portrayals — think Emily Deschanel’s portrayal of sexy forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan on CBS’s Bones — it seems that journalists only acknowledge cultural anthropology when it is gripped by controversy.

Cultural anthropology suffers a public-image problem as our “brand” is now largely defined by others. Politicians, studies by business media with profit-driven measures of success, and pseudo-anthropological authorities like Jared Diamond have done much to define cultural anthropology in the popular consciousness.

In many ways, cultural anthropology lacks archaeology’s and physical anthropology’s “cool” cachet. While their practices and methodologies easily translate to National Geographic or History Channel programs, they necessarily involve some degree of commodification.

Bones, ruins, and artifacts all become objects for public consumption. Cultural anthropology is much more difficult to “sell” because it resists similarly commodifying living people. The 2013 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue with photos of tribal peoples alongside bikini-clad models serves as a prime example of this commodification.

Many cultural anthropologists have remained aloof amid this tumult. This remoteness is surely compounded by today’s academic environment. Public engagement counts little toward promotion and tenure and may even be viewed dismissively by fellow academics.

Many anthropologists, already burdened with increased class sizes, decreased institutional support, and ever-growing pressures to publish and secure research grants simply do not have the time, resources or motivation to publicly voice their opinions.

Cultural anthropology’s branding problem is largely superficial. Anthropologists possess unique knowledge and skill sets that have real-world value. Anthropology helps us understand the world in a way that cannot be reduced to numbers or captured in surveys.

The marketing industry is increasingly recognizing the value of anthropological methodologies. A recent Atlantic article highlights the way in which ethnography and participant-observation are used in market research. Moreover, the World Bank recently elected an anthropologist, Jim Yong Kim, as president.

Anthropologists need to take better ownership of our brand. The complexity of anthropological concepts such as “culture,” “power” and the “global” should not dissuade anthropologists from engaging in meaningful public discourse.

Evidence of such newfound public engagement is emerging within the Web and blogosphere. Jason Antrosio’s Living Anthropologically blog and the “This is Anthropology” initiative, a “jargon-free” website with the purpose of informing the public about anthropology, are well ahead of the curve in this way, providing anthropological perspectives on relevant social issues that are both accessible and engaging.

Revisiting anthropology’s history may be the best way to revitalize the cultural anthropology brand. Franz Boas, considered the father of American anthropology, argued that race is not biologically determined and that no race is genetically superior. His numerous speeches and public writings underscore his commitment to public engagement.

Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict continued Boas’ tradition by writing books read by millions. Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa” pushed gender and sex boundaries in the 1920s. Benedict’s book “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” transformed many people’s’ understandings of post-war Japan.

The much-loved fictional writing of Zora Neale Hurston was greatly informed by her anthropological training. These anthropologists, perhaps imperfectly, challenged prevailing assumptions by the general public in their times.

Challenging preconceived notions and assumptions is still central to our brand. Anthropology is critically engaged, proactive, holistic and progressive. More than anything, the anthropology brand is concerned with culture, an ever-changing process that both defines our reality and is defined by our individual and societal choices.

Ty Matejowsky and Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster are professors in the department of anthropology at the University of Central Florida.

The Tangle of the Sexes (N.Y.Times)

22/04/2013Uncategorizedciência, Cognição, Gênero, Psicologiarenzotaddei

GRAY MATTER

By BOBBI CAROTHERS and HARRY REIS

Published: April 20, 2013

MEN and women are so different they might as well be from separate planets, so says the theory of the sexes famously explicated in John Gray’s 1992 best seller, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”

Jonny Negron

Indeed, sex differences are a perennially popular topic in behavioral science; since 2000, scientific journals have published more than 30,000 articles on them.

That men and women differ in certain respects is unassailable. Unfortunately, the continuing belief in “categorical differences” — men are aggressive, women are caring — reinforces traditional stereotypes by treating certain behaviors as immutable. And, it turns out, this belief is based on a scientifically indefensible model of human behavior.

As the psychologist Cordelia Fine explains in her book “Delusions of Gender,” the influence of one kind of categorical thinking, neurosexism — justifying differential treatment by citing differences in neural anatomy or function — spills over to educational and employment disparities, family relations and arguments about same-sex institutions.

Consider a marital spat in which she accuses him of being emotionally withdrawn while he indicts her for being demanding. In a gender-categorical world, the argument can quickly devolve to “You’re acting like a typical (man/woman)!” Asking a partner to change, in this binary world, is expecting him or her to go against the natural tendency of his or her category — a very tall order.

The alternative, a dimensional perspective, ascribes behavior to individuals, as one of their various personal qualities. It is much easier to imagine how change might take place.

But what of all those published studies, many of which claim to find differences between the sexes? In our research, published recently in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we shed an empirical light on this question by using a method called taxometric analysis.

This method asks whether data from two groups are likely to be taxonic — a classification that distinguishes one group from another in a nonarbitrary, fundamental manner, called a “taxon” — or whether they are more likely to be dimensional, with individuals’ scores dispersed along a single continuum.

The existence of a taxon implies a fundamental distinction, akin to the difference between species. As the clinical psychologist Paul Meehl famously put it, “There are gophers, there are chipmunks, but there are no gophmunks.”

A dimensional model, in contrast, indicates that men and women come from the same general pool, differing relatively, trait by trait, much as any two individuals from the same group might differ.

We applied such techniques to the data from 13 studies, conducted earlier by other researchers. In each, significant differences had been found. We then looked more closely at these differences to ask whether they were more likely to be of degree (a dimension) or kind (a taxon).

The studies looked at diverse attributes, including sexual attitudes and behavior, desired mate characteristics, interest in and ease of learning science, and intimacy, empathy, social support and caregiving in relationships.

Across analyses spanning 122 attributes from more than 13,000 individuals, one conclusion stood out: instead of dividing into two groups, men and women overlapped considerably on attributes like the frequency of science-related activities, interest in casual sex, or the allure of a potential mate’s virginity.

Even stereotypical traits, like assertiveness or valuing close friendships, fell along a continuum. In other words, we found little or no evidence of categorical distinctions based on sex.

To some, this is no surprise; the psychologist Janet Hyde has argued repeatedly that men and women are far more similar than different. Yet to many others, the idea that men and women are fundamentally different beings persists. The Mars/Venus binary aside, it is all too easy to reify observed behavioral differences by associating them with the categories of the people doing the behaving, be it their sex, race or occupation.

It is important to keep in mind what we did not study. We looked only at psychological characteristics, qualities often associated with the behavior of women and men. We did not look at abilities or skills, and we did not directly observe behavior.

Just to be safe, we repeated our analyses on several dimensions where we did expect categorical differences: physical size, athletic ability and sex-stereotyped hobbies like playing video games and scrapbooking. On these we did find evidence for categories based on sex.

The Mars/Venus view describes a world that does not exist, at least here on earth. Our work shows that sex does not define qualitatively distinct categories of psychological characteristics. We need to look at individuals as individuals.

Bobbi Carothers is a senior data analyst at Washington University in St. Louis. Harry Reis is a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.

Female Anthropologists Harassed (The Scientist)

19/04/2013UncategorizedAcademia, Antropologia, Antropologia física, ciência, Gênero, Machismo, Violência sexualrenzotaddei

[Why the photo of Maasai people? -RT]

A new survey finds a high incidence of sexual harassment and rape among women doing anthropological field work.

By Jef Akst | April 15, 2013

The Maasai tribe in Kenya. WIKIMEDIA, MATT CRYPTO

More than 20 percent of female bioanthropologists who took part in a new survey are victims of “physical sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact” in the course of their scientific research, primarily at the hand of superior professional colleagues, even their own mentors.

After talking to a friend that had been raped by a colleague, anthropologist Kathryn Clancy of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign decided to look into the matter further. “It was like a slap in the face to learn that this was happening to my friends,” Clancy told ScienceInsider.

She began posting anonymous stories of sexual harassment, shared with her by her female colleagues, on the Scientific American blog Context and Variation. The stories began to draw comments of other researchers’ harassment stories. “This is definitely not limited to just my discipline,” Clancy told ScienceInsider—nor is it limited to females, she found.

To get a better handle on the frequency with which such harassment occurs, Clancy and colleagues conducted a (still ongoing) online survey, asking scientists to report on their field-work experiences. Preliminary results, presented Saturday (April 13) at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) annual meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, indicated that about 30 percent of both men and women reported the occurrence of verbal abuse “regularly” or “frequently” at field sites. And 21 percent of women reported having experienced physical sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact; one out of 23 men also reported such abuse.

Notably, fewer than 20 percent of the reported cases of harassment involved the local community; rather, most of the abuse came from other researchers, primarily those further along in their careers. But why are such experiences so rarely reported?

“Quitting a field site, not completing and publishing research, and/or loss of letters of recommendation can have potent consequences for academic careers,” collaborator Katie Hinde of Harvard University told ScienceInsider. “Taken together, these factors result in a particularly vulnerable population of victims and witnesses powerless to intervene. As a discipline, we need to recognize and remedy that an appreciable non-zero number of our junior colleagues, particularly women, are having to endure harassment and a hostile work environment in order to be scientists.”

Fetal Exposure to Excessive Stress Hormones in the Womb Linked to Adult Mood Disorders (Science Daily)

08/04/2013UncategorizedCausalidade, ciência, Genética, Herança/transmissão, Hormônios, Psiquiatriarenzotaddei

Apr. 6, 2013 — Exposure of the developing fetus to excessive levels of stress hormones in the womb can cause mood disorders in later life and now, for the first time, researchers have found a mechanism that may underpin this process, according to research presented April 7 at the British Neuroscience Association Festival of Neuroscience (BNA2013) in London.

The concept of fetal programming of adult disease, whereby the environment experienced in the womb can have profound long-lasting consequences on health and risk of disease in later life, is well known; however, the process that drives this is unclear. Professor Megan Holmes, a neuroendocrinologist from the University of Edinburgh/British Heart Foundation Centre for Cardiovascular Science in Scotland (UK), will say: “During our research we have identified the enzyme 11ß-HSD2 which we believe plays a key role in the process of fetal programming.”

Adverse environments experienced while in the womb, such as in cases of stress, bereavement or abuse, will increase levels of glucocorticoids in the mother, which may harm the growing baby. Glucocorticoids are naturally produced hormones and they are also known as stress hormones because of their role in the stress response.

“The stress hormone cortisol may be a key factor in programming the fetus, baby or child to be at risk of disease in later life. Cortisol causes reduced growth and modifies the timing of tissue development as well as having long lasting effects on gene expression,” she will say.

Prof Holmes will describe how her research has identified an enzyme called 11ß-HSD2 (11beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2) that breaks down the stress hormone cortisol to an inactive form, before it can cause any harm to the developing fetus. The enzyme 11ß-HSD2 is present in the placenta and the developing fetal brain where it is thought to act as a shield to protect against the harmful actions of cortisol.

Prof Holmes and her colleagues developed genetically modified mice that lacked 11ß-HSD2 in order to determine the role of the enzyme in the placenta and fetal brain. “In mice lacking the enzyme 11ß-HSD2, fetuses were exposed to high levels of stress hormones and, as a consequence, these mice exhibited reduced fetal growth and went on to show programmed mood disorders in later life. We also found that the placentas from these mice were smaller and did not transport nutrients efficiently across to the developing fetus. This too could contribute to the harmful consequences of increased stress hormone exposure on the fetus and suggests that the placental 11ß-HSD2 shield is the most important barrier.

“However, preliminary new data show that with the loss of the 11ß-HSD2 protective barrier solely in the brain, programming of the developing fetus still occurs, and, therefore, this raises questions about how dominant a role is played by the placental 11ß-HSD2 barrier. This research is currently ongoing and we cannot draw any firm conclusions yet.

“Determining the exact molecular and cellular mechanisms that drive fetal programming will help us identify potential therapeutic targets that can be used to reverse the deleterious consequences on mood disorders. In the future, we hope to explore the potential of these targets in studies in humans,” she will say.

Prof Holmes hopes that her research will make healthcare workers more aware of the fact that children exposed to an adverse environment, be it abuse, malnutrition, or bereavement, are at an increased risk of mood disorders in later life and the children should be carefully monitored and supported to prevent this from happening.

In addition, the potential effects of excessive levels of stress hormones on the developing fetus are also of relevance to individuals involved in antenatal care. Within the past 20 years, the majority of women at risk of premature delivery have been given synthetic glucocorticoids to accelerate fetal lung development to allow the premature babies to survive early birth.

“While this glucocorticoid treatment is essential, the dose, number of treatments and the drug used, have to be carefully monitored to ensure that the minimum effective therapy is used, as it may set the stage for effects later in the child’s life,” Prof Holmes will say.

Puberty is another sensitive time of development and stress experienced at this time can also be involved in programming adult mood disorders. Prof Holmes and her colleagues have found evidence from imaging studies in rats that stress in early teenage years could affect mood and emotional behaviour via changes in the brain’s neural networks associated with emotional processing.

The researchers used fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to see which pathways in the brain were affected when stressed, peripubertal rats responded to a specific learned task. [1].

Prof Holmes will say: “We showed that in stressed ‘teenage’ rats, the part of the brain region involved in emotion and fear (known as amygdala) was activated in an exaggerated fashion when compared to controls. The results from this study clearly showed that altered emotional processing occurs in the amygdala in response to stress during this crucial period of development.”

Abstract title: “Perinatal programming of stress-related behaviour by glucocorticoids.” Symposium: “Early life stress and its long-term effects — experimental studies.”

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided byBritish Neuroscience Association, via AlphaGalileo.

Brain scans can now tell who you’re thinking about (Singularity Hub)

05/04/2013Uncategorizedciência, Mediação tecnológica, neurociências, Previsão, Vigilância, Visualidaderenzotaddei

Written By: Peter Murray

Posted: 03/23/13 7:48 AM

[Source: Listal]

Beware stalkers, these neuroscientists can tell who you’re thinking of. Or, at least, the kind of personality he or she might have.

As a social species humans are highly attuned to the behavior of others around them. It’s a survival mechanism, helping us to safely navigate the social world. That awareness involves both evaluating people and predicting how they will behave in different situations in the future (“Uh oh, don’t get him started!”). But just how does the brain represent another person’s personality?

To answer this question a group of scientists at Cornell’s College of Human Ecology (whatever that means) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neuronal activity while people thought about different types of personalities. The 19 participants – all young adults – learned about four protagonists, all of whom had considerably different personalities, based on agreeableness (e.g., “Likes to cooperate with others”) and extraversion (“Is sometimes shy”). They were then presented different scenarios (such as sitting on a bus with no empty seats and watching an elderly person get on) and asked to imagine how each of the four protagonists would react.

Varying degrees of a person’s deemed “agreeableness” and “extraversion” combine to produce different brain activation patterns in the brain. [Source: Cerebral Cortex]

The study’s lead author, Nathan Spreng, said they were “shocked” when they saw the results. The brain scans revealed that each of the four distinct personalities elicited four distinct activity patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain known to be involved in decision making. In essence, the researchers had succeeded in extracting mental pictures – the personalities of others – that people were thinking of.The study was published in the March 5 issue of Cerebral Cortex.

Sizing up the personality of another or thinking what they’re thinking is unique to social animals and in fact to do so was until recently thought to be uniquely human. But there’s now reason to believe the network – called the ‘default network’ – is a fundamental feature of social mammals in general. As Spreng explained in an email, “Macaque [monkeys] clearly have a similar network, observable even in the rat. All of these mammalian species are highly social.”

The fact that the mental snapshot of others was seen in the neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex means the current study may have implications for autism, Spreng said in a Cornell University news release. “Prior research has implicated the anterior mPFC in social cognition disorders such as autism, and our results suggest people with such disorders may have an inability to build accurate personality models. If further research bears this out, we may ultimately be able to identify specific brain activation biomarkers not only for diagnosing such diseases, but for monitoring the effects of interventions.”

Previous work has shown that brain scans can tell us a lot about what a person’s thinking. With an array of electrodes placed directly on the brain, researchers were able to decode specific words that people were thinking. In another experiment fRMI scans of the visual cortex were used to reconstruct movie trailers that participants were watching.

Much of neuroscience explores how the brain processes the sensory information that guides us through our physical environment. But, for many species, navigating the social environment can be just as important to survival. “For me, an important feature of the work is that our emotions and thoughts about other people are felt to be private experiences,” Spreng said. “In our life, we may choose to share our thoughts and feelings with peers, friends and loved ones. However, [thoughts and feelings] are also physical and biological processes that can be observed. Considering how important our social world is, we know very little about the brain processes that support social knowledge. The objective of this work is to understand the physical mechanisms that allow us to have an inner world, and a part of that is how we represent other people in our mind.”

Uma (in)certa antropologia

An (un)certain anthropology

Arquivo da tag: ciência

Poor Concentration: Poverty Reduces Brainpower Needed for Navigating Other Areas of Life (Science Daily)

Climate Panel Cites Near Certainty on Warming (N.Y.Times)

The Battle Over Global Warming Is All in Your Head (Time)

Digest This: Cure for Cancer May Live in Our Intestines (Science Daily)

They Finally Tested The ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ On Actual Prisoners — And The Results Were Not What You Would Expect (Business Insider Australia)

Vendettas, not war? Unpicking why our ancestors killed (New Scientist)

The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science (Mother Jones)

Global Warming Caused by CFCs, Not Carbon Dioxide, Researcher Claims in Controversial Study (Science Daily)

‘Belief in Science’ Increases in Stressful Situations (Science Daily)

Subcommittee Reviews Legislation to Improve Weather Forecasting (Subcommittee on Environmen, House of Representatives, USA)

Depression Linked to Telomere Enzyme, Aging, Chronic Disease (Science Daily)

“eScience revoluciona a forma como se faz ciência” (Fapesp)

Climate research nearly unanimous on human causes, survey finds (The Guardian)

Clouds in the Head: New Model of Brain’s Thought Processes (Science Daily)

“Cientistas podem contar uma história sem perder a acurácia” (Fapesp)

Cientistas americanos conseguem clonar embriões humanos (O Globo)

Scientist Superheroes: The US Government’s Crisis Science Team (Quest)

1. Who You Hire Matters

2. Expertise Not Representation

3. Be Flexible

4. Avoid Bureaucracy

Lord of All I Survey (Slate)

Computer Scientists Suggest New Spin On Origins of Evolvability: Competition to Survive Not Necessary? (Science Daily)

Anthropologists should do a better job of promoting their field (Orlando Sentinel)

The Tangle of the Sexes (N.Y.Times)

Female Anthropologists Harassed (The Scientist)

Fetal Exposure to Excessive Stress Hormones in the Womb Linked to Adult Mood Disorders (Science Daily)

Brain scans can now tell who you’re thinking about (Singularity Hub)