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Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience, and Just Plain Bunk

Author: Peter Daempfle

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 144221726X

We are constantly bombarded with breaking scientific news in the media, but we are almost never provided with enough information to assess the truth of these claims. Does drinking coffee really cause cancer? Does bisphenol-A in our tin can linings really cause reproductive damage? Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience, and Just Plain Bunk teaches readers how to think like a scientist to question claims like these more critically. Peter A. Daempfle introduces readers to the basics of scientific inquiry, defining what science is and how it can be misused. Through provocative real-world examples, the book helps readers acquire the tools needed to distinguish scientific truth from myth. The book celebrates science and its role in society while building scientific literacy.

Just My Type

Author: Michael J. Rosen

Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books

Published: 2016-02-01

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 1467795798

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For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have searched for the keys to human personality. Today, personality testing is a multibillion-dollar business. Many people take personality tests online just for fun. Whether silly or serious, personality testing can be an eye-opening way to better understand yourself, your family, and your friends. Just My Type introduces readers to the history of personality profiling, ranging from ancient Chinese astrology, to Freud and Jung, to the modern-day Myers-Briggs and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) assessments. Examine the world of online personality assessments through mini self-administered quizzes. Learn how to distinguish useful applications from biased typecasting.

The Historian's Huck Finn

Author: Ranjit S. Dighe

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-04-25

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1440833494

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Putting Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in historical context, connecting it to pivotal issues like slavery, class, money, and American economic expansion, this book engages readers by presenting American history through the lens of a great novel. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is widely regarded as a classic American novel—a groundbreaking one in which the author attempts to accurately portray society through the use of at-times coarse vernacular English. In this book, readers can experience the full text of Twain's Huckleberry Finn accompanied by annotations in footnote form throughout. As a result, this classic is transformed into a fascinating historical documentation of 19th-century American life and society that touches on topics like slavery, the transportation revolution, race, class, and confidence men. Bringing the perspective of a social and economic historian, Ranjit S. Dighe offers more than 150 annotations as well as supporting essays that put the characters, incidents, and settings of the book into their historical context. First-time readers get to experience a great American novel with memorable characters, vivid imagery, and a great narrative voice while simultaneously learning about American history; teachers and students who have read Huckleberry Finn before will enjoy re-reading it, especially with insightful annotations that connect the story to the historical timeline. This book exposes the subtle lessons Twain's tale has to teach us about America's growth, development, conflicts, and mass movements in the nation's first century.

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System

Author: M. Chris Fabricant

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2022-04-05

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1636140386

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Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo. Praise from John Grisham, author of A Time for Mercy: "No one in America will ever know the number of innocent people convicted, sent to prison, and even executed because of the flood of rotten forensics and bogus scientific opinions presented to juries. In this intriguing and beautifully crafted book, Innocence Project lawyer M. Chris Fabricant illustrates how wrongful convictions occur, and he makes it obvious how they could be prevented." "Fierce and absorbing . . . Fabricant chronicles the battles he and his colleagues have fought to unravel a century of fraudulent experts and the bad court decisions that allowed them to thrive." —Washington Post "Junk Science is a book that should be on every true-crime reader's shelves. It is an eye-opening and infuriating tour through the failed idealism of forensic science as a discipline, how certain techniques like analyzing fibers and bite marks wilt under scrutiny, and how the criteria for 'experts' in a courtroom can be laughable at best and dangerous at worst, causing scores of innocent people to lose decades behind bars (or, in some heartbreaking instances, their lives.)." —Slate, one of "The Best New True Crime That Won't Make You Feel Gross" From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant's clients. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the "science" that destroyed their lives. Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City and beyond, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo. At turns gripping, enraging, illuminating, and moving, Junk Science is a meticulously researched insider's perspective of the American criminal justice system. Previously untold stories of wrongful executions, corrupt prosecutors, and quackery masquerading as science animate Fabricant’s true crime narrative.

Yes, We Have No Neutrons

Author: A. K. Dewdney

Publisher: New York ; Toronto : J. Wiley

Published: 1997-04

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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In this entertaining expose of science gone awry, the author of "200% of Nothing" tells the stories of eight notorious cases of "bad science"--research projects that turned out to be bogus, either because of faulty methodology or faulty interpretations of results.

Bad Astronomy

Author: Philip C. Plait

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2002-10-08

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780471422075

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Advance praise for Philip Plait s Bad Astronomy "Bad Astronomy is just plain good! Philip Plait clears up everymisconception on astronomy and space you never knew you sufferedfrom." --Stephen Maran, Author of Astronomy for Dummies and editorof The Astronomy and Astrophysics Encyclopedia "Thank the cosmos for the bundle of star stuff named Philip Plait,who is the world s leading consumer advocate for quality science inspace and on Earth. This important contribution to science willrest firmly on my reference library shelf, ready for easy accessthe next time an astrologer calls." --Dr. Michael Shermer,Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for ScientificAmerican, and author of The Borderlands of Science "Philip Plait has given us a readable, erudite, informative,useful, and entertaining book. Bad Astronomy is Good Science. Verygood science..." --James "The Amazing" Randi, President, JamesRandi Educational Foundation, and author of An Encyclopedia ofClaims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural "Bad Astronomy is a fun read. Plait is wonderfully witty andeducational as he debunks the myths, legends, and 'conspiraciesthat abound in our society. 'The Truth Is Out There' and it's inthis book. I loved it!" --Mike Mullane, Space Shuttle astronaut andauthor of Do Your Ears Pop in Space?

Unweaving the Rainbow

Author: Richard Dawkins

Publisher: HMH

Published: 2000-04-05

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0547347359

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From the New York Times–bestselling author of Science in the Soul. “If any recent writing about science is poetic, it is this” (The Wall Street Journal). Did Sir Isaac Newton “unweave the rainbow” by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as John Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says acclaimed scientist Richard Dawkins; Newton’s unweaving is the key too much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don’t lose their poetry because they are solved: the solution often is more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering deeper mysteries. With the wit, insight, and spellbinding prose that have made him a bestselling author, Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, combining them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder. This is the book Dawkins was meant to write: A brilliant assessment of what science is (and isn’t), a tribute to science not because it is useful but because it is uplifting. “A love letter to science, an attempt to counter the perception that science is cold and devoid of aesthetic sensibility . . . Rich with metaphor, passionate arguments, wry humor, colorful examples, and unexpected connections, Dawkins’ prose can be mesmerizing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Brilliance and wit.” —The New Yorker

We Built Reality

Author: Jason Blakely

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-07

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0190087374

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"Popular culture is saturated with claims to a science of human life. Demographics are said to predict how you'll vote; chemicals in your brain who you'll date; game-like scenarios how you'll spend your money; and genes what you'll think. This book explores this flood of scientism as it has spread in the last fifty years into almost all facets of daily existence. You'll discover how popular pseudoscience has radically changed the world we live in-in spheres as different as dating, economics, politics, and artificial intelligence. The abuse of popular scientific authority has had catastrophic consequences, contributing to the 2008 financial crisis; the failure to predict the rise of Donald Trump; increased tensions between poor communities and the police; and the side lining of non-scientific forms of knowledge and wisdom. But you also will learn a way out of the superstition and ideology of scientism. This book introduces readers to a movement called the "hermeneutic" or interpretive approach that promises to free ordinary people from the tyranny of pseudoscience. An interpretive approach to human life offers a way to become a better reader of both the many claims to science around you as well as the cultural spaces you inhabit and help create"--

What Every Science Student Should Know

Author: Justin L. Bauer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 022619888X

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Every year, six million students enter college with the intention of becoming a science major by the time they graduate, only 60% of them will actually follow through. This means that close to 2.4 million students, every year, drop out of the science track. According to the New York Times, roughly 40% of students planning science majors either end up switching their major or fail to get any degree. Furthermore, aspiring pre-medical students (who comprise a large percentage of the freshmen class at most colleges, but who may not be science majors) often cite frustrations with science coursework/grading as a main motivation for changing their career plans. What Every College Science Student Should Know teaches students everything they need to know about how to succeed in school and after graduation. It s a portable guide and mentor that teaches study skills, course selection and mastery, how to do scientific research, what to expect from majors, how to find mentors, and how to apply learned skills to career development and enjoyment. Written by recent college graduates for entering college students and seniors in high school, What Every College Science Student Should Know is an invaluable resource for those who want to pursue a science degree, and it s also an inspiring narrative of remarkable students who are already changing the world through science."