Good security decisions require making intelligent trade-offs, but far too often we settle for poorly justified security measures based on fear and ignorance rather than reasoned risk analysis.

You can readily find computer and network security courses in most computer science departments, but it may be overly ambitious to call computer security a science. The profession certainly has aspects of an art, and it is fair to call much of the work engineering, but it lacks the rigor and objectivity of a science when put into practice. We highly desire security metrics to objectively measure the effectiveness of security technologies and to give the field this extra rigor, but they are difficult to come by. In fact, developing objective security metrics is considered one of the grand challenges of the field (INFOSEC Research Council 2005).

Part of the problem is the difficulty of quantifying risk in this field. Often, qualitative analysis is [...]

From Committee for Skeptical Inquiry | Main Feed
http://www.csicop.org//si/show/thinking_critically_about_computer_security_trade-offs
1/1/2001 12:00:00 AM
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In the wake of FRONTLINE's The Vaccine War, I was going to have a bit of fun with the reactions of the anti-vaccine fringe. After all, the spokescelebrity of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny McCarthy, has posted yet another brain dead screed at--where else?--The Huffington Post. So has everybody's favorite pediatrician to the stars and apologist for the anti-vaccine movement, Dr. Jay Gordon. Both are incredibly target-rich environments, each worthy of its very own heapin', [...]

From Respectful Insolence
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/insolence/~3/r_BQuQJvdH0/too_deliciously_ironic_for_words_gary_nu.php
4/30/2010 1:00:00 AM
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That place is just a magnet for nuts. There is going to be a review of the science curriculum next month, and the creationists on the state board of education are gearing up by appointing more creationists to staff the panels. Furthermore, they're gathering specific curriculum materials, and skewing them towards lunacy.

One submission has come from a company called International Databases, LLC. It's a one-man operation run by Stephen Sample, who says he has a degree in evolutionary biology and taught at the high school and junior college levels for 15 years.

The material he submitted consists of eight modules dealing with current issues in biology and ecology. Most are well within the mainstream scientific consensus. But there are two [...]

From Pharyngula
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/DHbdWAN_oaY/texas_again.php
5/20/2011 10:26:19 PM
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Senate Bill 893 — nicknamed, along with its counterpart House Bill 368, "the monkey bill" — is back. In April 2011, its sponsor Bo Watson (R-District 11), assigned the bill to the general subcommittee of the Senate Education Committee, in effect shelving it for the remainder of the year. But on March 7, 2012, it was revived and placed on the committee's calendar; on March 14, 2012, the committee voted 7-1 (with one member abstaining) to pass an amended version of the bill, although the exact wording of the amended version is not yet listed on the legislature's website. The bill now proceeds to the Senate Select [...]

From NCSE - National Center for Science Education
http://ncse.com/news/2012/03/monkey-bill-returns-tennessee-007251
3/16/2012 4:18:32 AM
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A vitamin D overdose is nothing to laugh about — it's painful and debilitating, can cause kidney damage, and can kill. This is a case where consuming excessive amounts of a vitamin supplement can do more than help you make expensive urine, and can lead to crippling illness and death. Gary Null is a thorough quack who has been raking in the dough with — you guessed it — nearly worthless vitamin supplements. Now this would simply be a tragic story of one of his poor deluded suckers clients had come to harm from his magic crap food, but it's almost funny that Null nearly killed himself by eating his own supplements.

It's not his fault, of course: he's suing the contractor who made his Ultimate Power [...]

From Pharyngula
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/oc0y15S__lQ/quack_gets_dose_of_his_own_med.php
4/29/2010 3:49:54 PM
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I've never liked Gary Null. Early in my blogging "career" I wasted thousands of words expressing my incredulity at his horrible health advice, his paranoid rants, and his shameless hucksterism. Then I saw something shiny and forgot about him for a while. But now blog bud Orac has ruined my reverie. He informs me that Gary Null took a dose of his own medicine---and nearly died.

As a compassionate human being, I can only hope he recovers quickly with no serious sequelae. As a physician, educator, and writer, I hope we can use this as an object lesson in the dangers of idiotic medical advice.

What happened?

From the news reports, it appears that Null suffered the toxic effects of too much vitamin D, a condition known as "hypervitaminosis D". Vitamin D has multiple, complex effects on our [...]

From White Coat Underground
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/whitecoatunderground/~3/BuCZ0nunBg4/too_much_of_a_bad_thing_or_nul.php
4/30/2010 6:53:46 AM
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Thanksgiving is in some ways the best holiday because it is all about ... gravy. But when you dig a little you find racism and religiosity and other icky stuff. Here's an example of what can go wrong:

From Greg Laden's Blog
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GregLadensBlog/~3/iSPpxrfPQ2A/thanksgiving_bar_ad_demonstrat.php
11/25/2010 12:33:55 PM
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Atheists, agnostics, humanists, and other nontheistic Washington, D.C. residents will have no representation at Mayor-Elect Vincent Gray’s first official inaugural event—an ecumenical prayer service entitled “One City … Praying Together” at 8 a.m. Sunday, January 2, 2011.

“We would prefer that a government function such as an inauguration not be entwined with religion,” said Amanda Knief, a Humanist Celebrant and government relations manager for the Secular Coalition for America (SCA). “However, we find it overtly discriminatory when we request to be part of an ecumenical prayer service that is supposed to unite the entire city and are told there is no place for nontheists.”

Within hours of learning about the prayer service through a public press release on Monday, [...]

From Secular News Daily
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2010/12/30/atheists-excluded-from-d-c-mayor-elect-gray’s-inauguration/
12/31/2010 5:09:10 PM
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[ Read the first part ]

The Design and Reported Results

In September 2006, Swedish tabloid Expressen published an article titled "Scientist proves tricky telephone classic" (2006). Reuters news agency reported that Rupert Sheldrake claimed he had evidence of telepathic ability in conjunction with e-mails and phone calls. In [...]

From Garvarn's Blog
http://garvarn.blogspot.com/2010/06/droppings-of-crank-sheldrake-research.html
6/1/2010 9:51:00 AM
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Reposted from The Conversation. This is the eleventh part in a two-week series Clearing up the Climate Debate. CLEARING UP THE CLIMATE DEBATE: Professor David Karoly goes down the rabbit hole of Bob Carter’s climate theories.

In his book Climate: The Counter-consensus, Bob Carter describes three different realities on climate change; a science reality, a virtual reality and a public reality.

After finishing the book, I realised that there is another reality on climate change, the Carter reality, which seems to be from a different world.

From Skeptical Science
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=834
6/26/2011 7:45:13 AM
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Guest post by Alden Griffith from Fool Me Once

My previous post, “Has Global Warming Stopped?”, was followed by several (well-meaning) comments on the meaning of statistical significance and confidence. Specifically, there was concern about the way that I stated that we have 92% confidence that the HadCRU temperature trend from 1995 to 2009 is positive. The technical statistical interpretation of the 92% confidence interval is this: "if we could resample temperatures independently over and over, we would expect the confidence intervals to contain the true slope 92% of the time."  Obviously, this is awkward to understand without a background in statistics, so I used a simpler phrasing. Please note that this does not change the conclusions of my previous [...]

From Skeptical Science
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=304
1/1/2001 12:00:00 AM
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The latest Carnival of Evolution is at Evolving Thoughts, hosted by that guy Wilkins who usually covers the philosophical beat…but we'll let him out of that cage this one time.

The Carnival of Evolution 48 will be held right here, on Pharyngula. You can submit entries via the carnival widget; get them in before 1 June, or I'll ignore them and they'll be passed on to the next carnival host, who doesn't exist. And therefore doesn't have a blog. Which means your carefully crafted science post will be shipped off to dev:null. So you might also consider volunteering for the hosting duties some time. The electrons you save might be your own.

From Pharyngula
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/_lUOJo-NDNU/carnival_of_evolution_47.php
5/2/2012 1:01:02 AM
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This post is from Eureka Alert

A popular belief that specific dietary changes can improve the symptoms of children with autism was not supported by a tightly controlled University of Rochester study, which found that eliminating gluten and casein from the diets of children with autism had no impact on their [...]

From Left Brain/Right Brain
http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2010/05/gfcf-of-no-benefit/
5/20/2010 4:51:09 AM
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Following the discussion of whether homophobia is an evolutionary adaptation, Bering responded to his critics with an interview with Gallup, the author of the original study.

There is a lot of incidental wrongness in Bering's response.  Like when Gallup says that men have a monopoly on paraphilias and kinky sex... Really, Gallup, you think so?  Yoder points out even more errors.  But I will have to ignore most of these so I can stick to the main point.

I agree with Bering on a few points.  First, Gallup's theory in no way implies that Gallup is or is not a homophobe.  In fact, that was never the [...]

From Skeptic's Play
http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2011/03/bering-is-still-wrong.html
3/25/2011 12:49:00 AM
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In a college English class I was teaching, filled mostly with African American and Hispanic students, a reading assignment prompted a discussion of ethnic minorities' economic disadvantages in the United States. Assuming we were all on the same page, as a “liberal” I couldn't resist weighing in and expressing my own professorial indignation on the subject as well. But one slightly older student (let's call him Roberto), who until now had said little during the semester, politely demurred.

“I don't believe that,” he said. “I can't believe that.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I was in the Marines,” he answered. “They told me about ‘the door.' Do you know what I'm talking about?”

No one did, so he explained: “In the Marines they taught me that no matter what horrible situation I might find myself in, there will be a door that will let me out, and if I look for that door I will find it. If you tell me because I'm Hispanic I'm screwed, I can't [...]

From Committee for Skeptical Inquiry | Main Feed
http://www.csicop.org//si/show/the_right_stuff
1/1/2001 12:00:00 AM
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTCKuYKNqJc I really didn’t know that much about the guy before this — seems rather that he’s getting a bit of poetic justice out of all this palaver.

From Divisible By Pi
http://www.divisiblebypi.com/2010/05/12/and-with-this-comparison-gary-null-has-officially-hit-rock-bottom/
5/12/2010 3:00:00 PM
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Are athletes role models? Should they be? Should parents be concerned that many of their children’s sports heroes have all the moral graces of slime mold? To that last question, at least one study suggests “no.” Bear in mind it was one study, conducted in the UK. And the athletes were soccer [...]

From 360 Degree Skeptic
http://360skeptic.com/2010/04/null-news-on-athletes-as-role-models-to-impressionable-youth/
4/27/2010 10:21:02 PM
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There's been a lot of discussion about the proper way to engage in thinking about evolution. When faced with a new problem, some people think that it's proper to begin by investigating adaptationist explanations. Others think that the proper way to begin is by assuming that the character in question is mostly influenced by random genetic drift. We are having a lively debate about this at Dawkins, Darwin, Drift, and Neutral Theory.

Part of the discussion boils down to a debate about the proper "null hypothesis" in evolutionary theory.

Here are some explanations from the textbooks that may help explain the "null hypothesis."
The most widely used methods for measuring selection are based on comparisons with the neutral theory, in which variation is shaped by the interaction between mutation and random genetic drift (Chapter [...]

From Sandwalk
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/null-hypothesis-in-evolution.html
2/25/2011 3:52:00 AM
Search rank: 299

As Skeptical Science readers are well aware, there is a scientific consensus that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous global warming.  The Australian Climate Commission recently concluded that we need to limit global human CO2 emissions to no more than 1 trillion tons between 2000 and 2050, which requires that we take immediate steps to significantly reduce our emissions.  Scientists generally don't offer advice as to how we should achieve the necessary carbon emissions reductions, but in its recent report, America's Climate Choices, the US National Academy of Sciences concluded that a price on carbon emissions would be the most effective way to achieve significant [...]

From Skeptical Science
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=792
6/9/2011 6:43:41 PM
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