Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-9-2009

[andrewducker]

• One in Four
  Sexual Assault Statistics in the USA
  (tags: feminism statistics rape assault usa)
• Scouts to no longer bring penknives on camping trips
  Oh for goodness sake.
  (tags: news UK safety EpicFail)
• Floating challenge for offshore wind turbine
  A close-up look at the turbine floating in the North Sea. I really hope they can work the bugs out of this one...
  (tags: energy environment technology wind ocean renewables)
• Salem hypothesis - a name for a correlation that has been observed amongst scientists, between subscribing to creationism and working in an engineering discipline.
  A disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" - "why argue when there is one best solution" - and of "simplism" - ˜if only people were rational, remedies would be simple".
  (tags: creationism engineering philosophy aspergers)
• People with engineering degrees are massively overrepresented when it comes to terrorism
  The largest single group were engineers, with 78 out of 178, followed by 34 taking Islamic studies, 14 studying medicine, 12 economics and business studies, and 7 natural sciences. The over-representation of engineers applies to all 13 militant groups in the sample and to all 17 nationalities, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.
  
  A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.
  (tags: terrorism engineering aspergers)

Comments

[robhu.livejournal.com]

No, that's not the case. You get engineers at the level of university professor who are creationists, like Andy McIntosh (Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory at the University of Leeds - is that science or engineering? It's got quite an engineering lean, either way), and he's not alone.

[andrewducker]

Generally speaking academics fall onto the "theoretical" side of things like engineering, rather than the pragmatic side, which means that they tend to prefer nice simple theories to complex realities. Not always true, but it does seem to be a tendency. Certainly happens in comp-sci a lot.