science/technology

Crazy Vet offers us this rather amazing commercial for BP as an example of “green-washing” or an effort to make a company appear environmentally friendly:

What I think is especially remarkable about this example is how entirely free of any content it manages to be.  The commercial combines pretty colors, animation, babies, cute music, and whistling gas pumps.  That alone, apparently, is effective in convincing us that BP is environmentally benign.  It is pure emotion, completely devoid of an argument.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

If you’re teaching methods this semester and go over pie charts or proportions, many of your students were raised on Bill Nye, the Science Guy.  They might get a kick out of this:

This one’s for you, Bill!

More fun illustrations for methods classes here and here.

(Found here.)

Bloggers and journalists have enjoyed reporting the findings of a recent study that showed that people in socially conservative states subscribe to online pornography websites at a higher rate than people in socially liberal states.  Here is some of the data from the paper:

The paper goes on to discuss what variables are correlated with higher versus lower subscription rates, but ultimately concludes:

On the whole, these adult entertainment subscription patterns show a remarkable consistency: all but eleven states have betweeen two and three subscribers to this service per thousand broadband households, and all but four have between 1.5 and 3.5.  With interest in online adult entertainment relatively constant across regions, there’s little sign of  a major divide.

The reporting on this study, which emphasizes the findings, but not the low variance, is a nice illustration of how studies can be warped when they are picked up by both journalists and bloggers.

Other state-by-state comparisons: obesity, sodomy law, home vs. hospital births, incarceration rates, the marriage market, minority kids, and percent of women in state legislatures.

Browsing the Apple iTunes Application store the other day, I came across an application where guys can track their girlfriend’s menstruation cycle– and most importantly, their PMS symptoms– so that they can avoid the women in their lives who are going to be irrational, crazy, lunatics for a few days every month.

Take PMSTracker, for example, which tracks your “wife/girlfriend/sister/mom” so that you can avoid unexpectedly having your head bit off (or, in the example below, by your secretary).

And then there’s an application called “uPMS” which aims to help “all guys out there suffering the monthly Psychotic Mood Shifts” by warning them when to “keep their head down.”

My favorite is an app called “I am a Man” which advertisers itself as a better “lady tracking” application by making it easy to track several woman. And, according to the description, it will even somehow help you save money!

And here’s the calendar tracking several girls at once. Importantly, the application is password protected, and if one girl checks out the program she’ll only see herself list (and not various other girls that this guy must be hiding from her):

There are a few useful iPhone and iPod Touch apps geared toward women and couples for keeping track of their menstrual cycles, fertility cycles etc. I’m not an expert on social constructions of menstruation (maybe someone who is can add more to this!) but what’s interesting to me about these particular apps is that they (1) perpetuate the assumption that PMS turns women into complete, irrational lunatics. Yes, some women experience serious and real psychological PMS symptoms, but the degrees to which they do varies greatly. (2) They apps trivializes real PMS symptoms by making it a joke that women into lunatics once a month. Not every woman’s cycle is actual 28 days, and often isn’t predictable like clockwork. And (3) what about the physical symptoms of PMS that are often much more uncomfortable and debillitating for women?

Percent of internet users by region (from internetworldstats):

Akamai offers moment-to-moment data on internet use.  This is a screenshot from 11:34:55pm Pacific Standard Time:

You can choose any region to highlight.  Here are the United States and China, South Korea, and Japan:

Hits per second by region:

Via Graphic Sociology.

I’ve previously blogged about how, during World War II, Americans were expected to sacrifice in ways that we simply do not expect Americans to sacrifice today.  Specifically, my post addresses how people were encouraged to save gas and carpool (“Hitler rides in the empty seat!”), but people made all sorts of sacrifices: from going to work, to victory gardens, to eschewing panty hose.

Penny R. sent in another example that I found really interesting, staying off of phone lines during the hours when soldiers were likely to call home.  These government-sponsored ads were found in a 1944 Southern California Telephone Company phone books for West Los Angeles (found at This Book Is for You):

Text:  “Night-time is about the best time a service man has to call home.  That’s a good point to remember when you feel the urge to make a Long Distance call between 7 and 10 P.M.  If it isn’t important, we hope you won’t make it.   Let the men in service have first call on the wires.”

Text:  “We appreciate the help you are giving us in keeping the Long Distance lines open for war calls.  The production of munitions . . . the movement of troops . . . the building of ships and bombers . . . have put the Long Distance lines squarely up against their biggest task.  Materials for building telephone lines are no longer available — they are needed on the fighting fronts.  That is why we ask that only really necessary calls be made to war-busy centers.  Thank you for your fine co-operation.”

Text: “This year, war is on the wires.  And the Long Distance lines to war-busy centers must be kept open for calls that help to build planes and ships and move supplies and troops.  We cannot add to the lines–that would require the use of materials needed by our armed forces.  That is why we ask that only really necessary calls be made to war-busy centers.  Your co-operation means that we can do a better war job for you and for the Nation. Thank you.”

Text:  “The trained eyes and fingers of telephone operators are needed, these days, at the switchboards that are heavily loaded with war calls.  Telephone equipment of every kind is deep in the war task.  Will you help us to make every bit of equipment count?  Here is one way: Please look in the Directory for any number you are not sure of.  Please look there first before you call ‘Information.’  Thousands of calls daily, in which ‘Information’ is asked to help, are for numbers that are IN the Directory.  Our foremost job is the war job. It just is not feasible to do all the things for our customers that we were able to do in peace time.  We appreciate your understanding and your friendly cooperation.”

Can you imagine being asked to stay off the internet every evening?  Impossible!!!

Aspic [noun]:  A clear jelly typically made of stock and gelatin and used as a glaze or garnish or to make a mold of meat, fish, or vegetables.

Gelatin [noun]: A jelly made with gelatin, used as a dessert or salad base.

If you peruse cookbooks from the 1950s, you’ll find a ton of recipes featuring aspic and gelatin.  Many of us, today, find many of these recipes, well, repulsive.  For example:

My friend, Emily, had a Mrs. Beeton party and I made avocado lime gelatin with mayonnaise (left), but it lost the competition for nastiest dish to the Cucumber Au Gratin (center):

Here is the cover of a cookbook devoted to “gel cookery”:

Was it just a fad?  It turns out, no.  It was status.  Or so says a blogger at The Good Old Days:

We’ve all wondered what the hell could motivate someone to [prepare, serve, and eat so many gel-based foods] — well, it was simply so they could brag about owning a refrigerator. You can’t solidify gelatin without refrigeration, and so you couldn’t serve Jellied Bouillon with Frankfurters unless you were above a certain income level…  So people started jellying vegetables, meats, salads, cream, and pretty much everything in their kitchen.

In case you missed it, a few years back there was a major brouhaha (limited mostly to the U.S.) because some astronomers began to argue that Pluto should be reclassified as a dwarf planet, part of the Kuiper belt. This started when, in 2001, the American Museum of Natural History (in New York) created a display about the solar system that did not include Pluto. At first the museum received letters (often from children) pointed out that Pluto was missing, such as this one (from an NPR story on the subject):

But then word got out that the museum left Pluto out of the display on purpose, and that the director of the museum argued that Pluto is not a planet. Then a real letter-writing campaign began, from both kids and adults (found here):

Text [some errors corrected for ease of reading]:

Dear Scientist,

What do you call Pluto if it’s not a planet anymore? If you make it a planet again all the science books will be right. Do people live on Pluto? If there are people who live there they won’t exist. Why can’t Pluto be a planet? If it’s small doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have to be a planet anymore. Some people like Pluto. If it doesn’t exist then they don’t have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive because I can’t read in cursive.

A Save Pluto movement had begun, including pro-Pluto websites, t-shirts, bumperstickers, and so on (at CafePress):

Some of these were clearly meant in a joking manner, but many of the letters sent to the museum or published in newspapers expressed realy anger over the change. Headlines announced that Pluto was being “demoted” from planet status. Amid lots of angry debate even among themselves, astronomers eventually voted to recategorized Pluto as a dwarf planet.

You might use these to talk about public controversies about scientific research. This is a particularly odd example because the public concern didn’t spring from arguments that the research was immoral or dangerous (claims used to oppose, say, embryonic stem cell research or cloning). The outrage about Pluto’s change in status mostly occurred in the U.S. and was based on the fact that people just seem to really like Pluto and consider it their “favorite” planet. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the museum, suggests that this might be because of Disney’s cartoon dog Pluto. Regardless, a significant number of people wrote angry and even threatening letters to various outlets about a scientific reclassification that didn’t affect them in any real way; they just didn’t like it.

It’s also interested that Pluto’s reclassification was interpreted as a “demotion,” as though being a dwarf planet is clearly inferior to being a “real” planet, as though the objects in the solar system are arranged in a hierarchy based on size, and being anything other than a planet is a sad, sad fate. DeGrasse Tyson stresses that to astronomers, a dwarf planet isn’t “inferior to” a “regular” one–it’s just another category of things that exist in the galaxy. It’s an interesting example of how scientists’ perceptions of what their research means and the public’s interpretations may differ wildly.

NOTE: Mordecai comments,

First I want to say: All scientific classification is arbitrary.  There is no such thing as a planet, or a mammal.  These are terms humans put on them to try to make sense of the universe, not some built in truth.

Absolutely. I didn’t mean to imply the scientists were applying some ultimate truth about the universe when they re-classified Pluto. What I find interesting is what the controversy was based on: not “we think the data is wrong,” or “this is immoral or harmful,” but “Leave Pluto alone! It’s our favorite!” And the fact that it was really only a scandal in the U.S. is striking as well–whether it’s the character of Pluto or not, for some reason Americans are pretty much uniquely concerned about Pluto’s status.