Estrogen is bad.

[Oban]

So, not sure how to approach this...

Also affected are the ability to plan, respond to changing conditions and moderate or control one's behaviour.

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/08/01/estrogen-rats.html

[schild]

I know how to approach it. Explains a lot, but not enough.

[Righ]

It seems to reduce the ability to merge or use turn signals but enhances the ability to talk on cell phones. 

[Oban]

Considering that it has been proven that cellphone use decreases memory retention, the addition of estrogen to the brain while using talking should increase my chances of winning arguments based on past events by a factor of two or higher.

[Merusk]

Now's when the ladies come in and link the studies about testosterone exposure leading to emotional imbalance and heightened rage.

At the same time they won't understand why we're just plain OK with that. 

[Nebu]

Yet another mind blowing example of: things out of balance may cause new problems. 

This is anything but new news.  I love how the mainstream media is about 5 years behind when it comes to science.  Here's a tip for the media: unless you hire someone that can understand and read the scientific literature critically, please quit being sensational about finidings. 

[Oban]

Yet another mind blowing example of: things out of balance may cause new problems. 

This is anything but new news.  I love how the mainstream media is about 5 years behind when it comes to science.  Here's a tip for the media: unless you hire someone that can understand and read the scientific literature critically, please quit being sensational about finidings. 

Yes, let's cut out the 1% of stories that are science related on mainstream news shows so we can focus on discussing just how elitist Obama is or find out more about the latest white girl that has gone missing.

[Nebu]

Yes, let's cut out the 1% of stories that are science related on mainstream news shows so we can focus on discussing just how elitist Obama is or find out more about the latest white girl that has gone missing.

That or... I don't know... bringing something to the public that is important current science?   99.999% of the key scientific breakthroughs are missed by the media.  Just grab the latest issue of Science and Nature and you'll see what I'm talking about.

[Oban]

Nova?  Scientific American Frontiers?  Wired Science?  Daily Planet?

There are plenty of Science TV shows, but most of them are on during the coveted 8-10pm block.  So Joe and Jane Sixpack get to see a little bit of everything on the 11 o'clock news.

Hurray.

[MahrinSkel]

I remember having this discussion with my daughter, over how unfair it was that men assume that a irritable woman is one on or near her period.  It's not that men are any less influenced by our hormones than women, far from it.  Testosterone has to be the strongest mood-altering compound of all time and what it can do to effective intelligence is frightening (even at the time, if you're paying attention).  But it does pretty much the same thing all the time (on scales shorter than decades), and we learn to compensate.

--Dave

[K9]

That or... I don't know... bringing something to the public that is important current science?   99.999% of the key scientific breakthroughs are missed by the media.  Just grab the latest issue of Science and Nature and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I think you're wildly optimistic about the average person's ability to understand scientific papers. While I wholeheartedly agree that most of the interesting and relevant science is missed, and that the media is failing to bridge understanding between the level of contemporary research and joe public. I feel though that it is often the case that oversimplification leads to greater and worse misunderstanding than sheer ignorance, and that the real problem is that baseline science education is a joke.

I think there is also a problem that most scientists are "big picture"  people and can see how a seemingly insignificant or innocuous line of research can affect many other fields of investigation. The average person has such a wide range of gaps in their understanding of science that they fail to see the importance of many breakthroughs, and are generally only interested in stories which they can relate to themselves or their lives.

There's the ancilliary problem that the level of implied understanding and jargon-fu required to read most scientific papers is rightfully high.

[caladein]

Nova?  Scientific American Frontiers?  Wired Science?  Daily Planet?

There are plenty of Science TV shows, but most of them are on during the coveted 8-10pm block.  So Joe and Jane Sixpack get to see a little bit of everything on the 11 o'clock news.

Hurray.

Three of those shows are from PBS. Moreover, Scientific American Frontiers ended in 1999 (re-runs on PBS World though, so it's thankfully still on-the-air).

Closest anyone's going to get to a science show on major network TV is this lady (who, like WIRED Science is a product of Los Angeles):

[Nebu]

I think you're wildly optimistic about the average person's ability to understand scientific papers.

Hell, you could have said "science" in place of "scientific papers".  I just finished teaching a course in physical science this summer to non-science majors as a favor to my dean. The class was a high school level rehash of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology.  I made the class as easy as I humanly could and still had to curve it at the end or most of the class would have failed it.   Having taught nothing but MD, PharmD, and PhD students for the past 6 years, I had no idea how painfully low the level of baseline science understanding most people have is... and these were college students (so still what, the top third?). 

I desperately need to recalibrate my thinking.  The people here don't help... most of the people that post here regularly make me fell stupid on a daily basis. Some smart folks on these here forums.

[apocrypha]

One of the problems is the deliberate mis-use of science and particularly statistics by politicians, advertisers and the media.

Most important scientific studies rely heavily on statistics and an understanding of probability. New drug improves cancer survival rates by 85%!! Very few column inches given to explaining the study size was 150 terminal patients with survival expectations below 5% over 6 months and the 95% confidence interval meant that there was a 5% chance (1 in 20) that the result was caused by pure statistical randomness and nothing to do with the drug in question. Etc etc.

Hardly a day goes by without some blatant misuse of statistics by drug companies trying to sell viagra alternatives, researchers desperate for more funding so they can keep their jobs, advertisers trying to capitalise on the latest food scare and bad reporting of all of those.

Is it really any wonder that a constant stream of outright abuse of the fundamentals of understanding science has an effect on people's ability to understand it themselves?

[Merusk]

It's easy to misuse science and stats (higher math) when neither are a priority for the public.  Science is one of the lowest-priority classes from primary through high school.  Our system is based around the "Three R's" which tells you right there that even two of those "R"s isn't all THAT important.   The whole 12 years is considered a success if you can regurgitate a very short list of facts, read and write enough to get by and do some very basic math.

We make lip-service to education as a nation because we're supposed to, it's been ingrained in us for a while now.  Actions outweigh talk, though, and our actions have shown for a long time that education simply isn't a priority.  We're in the 21st century and still have an 18th century attitude about schooling.

So, yeah, it's NOT all that surprising that those who truly are educated see no point in trying to explain minutiae to the public. Or that there's a large segment of uneducated people drawing incorrect conclusions when they get their hands on those reports.

For further attacks on science using flawed quasi-science: Here. (politics thread.. be warned!)

[Jeff Kelly]

Well often it's the people making the study that misuse statistics or rather don't have a clue either how statistics work.

I used to tutor biology, pharmaceutical and medicine students and they all hated maths with a passion. Statistics was the course where most failed on. Those are the kind of people that later might publish studies with statistical data as part of their jobs.

That few years baiscally destroyed my faith in medical and biological studies at all and that destruction is reinforced whenever I have to read a study as part of my work.

[K9]

I never quite understood why so many of my fellows on my Biology degree absolutely loathed maths. From my point of view most (not all) things come down to numbers sooner or later.

On a related note, there was a very interesting commentary on the BBC not so long ago reflecting on how in Britain it is socially acceptable for people to be proud of their inability with maths. Things like this are killing us slowly.

I think to an extent it's human nature that people feel compelled to give oppinions on stuff, even when they are grossly uninformed. I do not know why, but I always have the impression that not being able to express an opinion is seen as more dysfunctional than admitting to not understanding something. Combine this with science's innate inaccessibility and you get some of the problems listed in this thread. I would love to see a way to improve science education and development, but as it stands I don't. I guess part of the problem is that there is very little incentive for anyone who has any reasonable level of scientific ability to teach it at the level where the world needs good science teachers, ditto for maths. That's not to say that there aren't some incredibly talented people who turn to teaching, just that these are exceptions.

[apocrypha]

I never quite understood why so many of my fellows on my Biology degree absolutely loathed maths. From my point of view most (not all) things come down to numbers sooner or later.

On a related note, there was a very interesting commentary on the BBC not so long ago reflecting on how in Britain it is socially acceptable for people to be proud of their inability with maths. Things like this are killing us slowly.

I think to an extent it's human nature that people feel compelled to give oppinions on stuff, even when they are grossly uninformed. I do not know why, but I always have the impression that not being able to express an opinion is seen as more dysfunctional than admitting to not understanding something. Combine this with science's innate inaccessibility and you get some of the problems listed in this thread. I would love to see a way to improve science education and development, but as it stands I don't. I guess part of the problem is that there is very little incentive for anyone who has any reasonable level of scientific ability to teach it at the level where the world needs good science teachers, ditto for maths. That's not to say that there aren't some incredibly talented people who turn to teaching, just that these are exceptions.

Spot on I think. Maths is so incredibly badly taught most of the time that most people never even get how everything rests on maths. I spent 16 years as a molecular biologist researcher and out of all of the things I was taught at A level and in my undergraduate degree the maths and statistics was by far the most useful.

However, I was lucky, I had enough of a natural ability at maths to muddle through despite the shite teaching. My first A level maths teacher was so bad that students had to regularly correct her work on the board as she was trying to explain calculus or something to us. At least once a lesson she'd leave the class for 10-15 minutes and come back smelling strongly of cigarettes, alcohol and extra-strong mints. Yeah being an alcoholic sucks and she clearly needed support that she wasn't getting, but hey, we needed a maths education that we weren't getting either.

I do strongly feel though that there are some vested interests in keeping people ignorant of maths. Makes your populations so much easier to control when any old shitty lie you care to make up about the efficacy of today's new wonder drug or the nutritional content of this week's processed meat by-product or the validity of statistical studies extrapolating numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq since the occupation can be sold with some poor statistics and confusing numerology.

Another example (yeah I'm waffling, sorry) - ever notice how in the supermarkets (in the UK anyway) they show the price per unit weight for packaged items but that they vary the unit weight between items? E.g. bags of apples, one bag gives (in tiny lettering) a price of £1.58/kg but the other bag right next to it says 14p/100g? That kind of shit is deliberately designed to make it hard to make easy price comparisons. And yeah, that's mind-bogglingly simple maths (multiply by 10! Woohoo!) but that's the kind of stuff that huge numbers of people are left unable to do because of shitty teaching.

[Signe]

Estrogens keep the hair off your chinny chin chin!   

[Engels]

This thread isn't about you Signe.

[Oban]

This thread isn't about you Signe.

LOL

[Signe]

[Lantyssa]

Estrogens keep the hair off your chinny chin chin!   

To be pedantic, a lack of dihyrotestosterone keeps the hair off your chinny chin chin.

[Signe]

But that word is so gynormous.  There is no need for gynormous words like that!

(I made a woman pun-type medicalesque type joke thing.  HA!)

[FatuousTwat]

Nova?  Scientific American Frontiers?  Wired Science?  Daily Planet?

There are plenty of Science TV shows, but most of them are on during the coveted 8-10pm block.  So Joe and Jane Sixpack get to see a little bit of everything on the 11 o'clock news.

Hurray.

Has anyone else noticed how shitty Nova Science NOW! is compared to regular Nova? Also, I'm pretty sure they stopped showing Wired Science and Scientific American Frontiers on OPB. I'll have to check their schedule.

[Signe]

You sound a bit bitchy, Twat.  Maybe you should have your estrogen levels checked. 

[Righ]

America needs a weekly news magazine similar to New Scientist, IMO. Much of it is composed of short news articles which summarise the in-depth technical articles found in the specialist journals. It aims its articles at the college-level educated non-specialist, which means that, unlike an article in Nature, you don't need to have a significant background in particular fields of research or reference cited articles. Sometimes the editorial trips over itself in an attempt to simplify complex areas of research, but on the whole its one of the best resources for science news if you don't possess four of five different degrees in disparate fields.

[Oban]

I thought we did have New Scientist here.  I pay about seventy dollars a year for my subscription.

[K9]

America needs a weekly news magazine similar to New Scientist, IMO. Much of it is composed of short news articles which summarise the in-depth technical articles found in the specialist journals. It aims its articles at the college-level educated non-specialist, which means that, unlike an article in Nature, you don't need to have a significant background in particular fields of research or reference cited articles. Sometimes the editorial trips over itself in an attempt to simplify complex areas of research, but on the whole its one of the best resources for science news if you don't possess four of five different degrees in disparate fields.

I feel even New Scientist is given to hyperbole, although I guess I would have to concede that they probably need attention-grabbing covers to help get sales. The Nature Reviews XXX journals are far more readable than the pure journals I'd say, it'would be nice to find some middle ground between that and New Scientist I think.

[Signe]

I read Cosmo.  It's full of estrogen.

[Margalis]

Estrogen can't be that bad.

As evidence I give you exhibit A, bewbs.

[Engels]

produce exhibit A plz.

[Oban]

I present all natural exhibit A:

[TheWalrus]

I read Cosmo.  It's full of estrogen.

I read Playboy. Also full of estrogen. 

[Signe]

I actually don't read Cosmo.  I just said that.  I thought I should own up to my lie.  Can you imagine ME reading Cosmo?  Taking those stupid quizzes about finding men?  Cosmo is so not me.  I'm more the "Weird New Jersey" or "Fortean Times".  And I only read magazines in the bathroom.