|
|
Review/synopsis of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirschenbaum, Basic Books, NY, 2009:
Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World issued this sober warning:
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Continue reading Unscientific America
Forget the ‘precautionary principle.’ The amount of risk to which the public should be exposed is greater than zero. —Michael Krauss, Financial Post, June 20, 2008.
Almost without exception the critical or contentious issues of our times involve numbers–even “intelligent design” advocates usually try to juggle inconvenient dates or data. Errors with numbers are ubiquitous. Sometimes these are amusing as with:
Ideal Toy Company stated on the package of the original Rubik cube that there were more than three billion possible states the cube could attain. It’s analogous to MacDonald’s proudly announcing that they’ve sold more
Continue reading Numeracy, relative risk and public policy
Semiotic fiddling while a digital Rome burns
“So to summarise, according to the citation count, in order of descent, the authors are listening to themselves, dead philosophers, other specialists in semiotic work in mathematics education research, other mathematics education research researchers and then just occasionally to social scientists but almost never to other education researchers, including mathematics teacher education researchers, school teachers and teacher educators. The engagement with Peirce is being understood primarily through personal engagements with the original material rather than as a result of working through the filters of history, including those evidenced within mathematics education
Continue reading Semiotic fiddling while a digital Rome burns
Albert Einstein once wrote:
“On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in
Continue reading Einstein on the “cosmic religious feeling” as motive for scientific research
|
|