Religion and politics

by The Jamoker

Does religion make a difference in politics?:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]
From Barack Obama’s controversial pastor to Sarah Palin’s “secret religion”, religious values have continued to play a dominant role in the presidential election since John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic elected to president in 1960. Hoping to answer the question of which political party has a monopoly on the “best” values and how religion affects these values, Kennon Sheldon, a University of Missouri professor, compared the “extrinsic” values (financial success, status, appearance) with “intrinsic” values (growth, intimacy, helping) of self-declared Democrats and Republicans in four different samples.

read more

An interesting report. Seems that there are really very little differences between Conservatives and Liberals. Essentially both wanted to deal with intrinsic values.

Even religious and non-religious Liberals has very similar values. The only group who were different were non-religious Republicans, who did not care much for intrinsic values and mainly cared about money and status. In general, the values varied little between different people. We are more alike than different.

Of course, you’d not know it during an election season when it is to the advantage of each party to demonstrate how different the ‘other’ is.

Technorati Tags: Politics

New drugs may not help

Costlier new diabetes drugs don’t necessarily produce better outcomes, Stanford researcher says:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

The annual cost of prescription diabetes drugs nearly doubled to $12.5 billion between 2001 and 2007, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of Chicago. The researchers say the findings raise questions about whether the higher cost actually translates into improved care and better outcomes.

read more

This has to be of some concern. The hope for Big Pharma is that they can charge more for their new drugs because of better outcomes and lower overall cost.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science

Discussing Web 2.0

by notsogoodphotography
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Are scientists missing the boat?;.:
[Via Bench Marks]

….or has that boat already sailed?

I’ve read many a blog posting or magazine article declaring that scientists are behind the curve, and we biologists have been slow to pick up the new online tools that are available. I’ve repeatedly asked for examples of other professions that are ahead of the curve that we can use as models (are there social networks of bakers sharing recipes and discussing ovens?), but haven’t seen much offered in response. I tend to think that it’s not a question of scientists being slow, it’s that the tools being offered aren’t very appealing. Note how quickly scientists moved from paper journals to online versions, which only took as long as it did because of the slow progress on the part of journal publishers getting their articles up on the web. The advantages of online journals were obvious, and in comparison, the advantages of joining “Myspace for scientists” are less evident.

Are social networks )”Meet collaborators! Discuss papers!”) ever going to see heavy use from the biology community? Or are we starting to see that they’ve run their course in general, and scientists were prescient in not wasting their time?
[More]

There are too many advantages that arise from using many of these Web 2.0 tools (i.e. the ability to leverage human social networks in order to examine large datasets). However, the race will not be to have 5000 friends, as often seen out in the wild.

In a closed environment, such as a corporation, there are some very good uses for wikis, blogs, etc. They can not only help workflow tremendously but also can allow new metrics to be used in order to track just who contributed what to a project.

Moving tacit information from insides someone’s head outside into an explicit database will have important consequences for many organizations.

I don’t think the next generation will shun these tools. They will just have a better idea of how to interact with them more usefully, with a focus that can really help their workflow.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0