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"... a body of knowledge collected an nurtured by experts according to neutral, objective, and universal standards." That's from an entertaining article with the staggeringly unoriginal title "The Management Myth" in the June issue of The Atlantic (which was kindly passed on to me by Brother Hrab). Hmmm, doesn't strike me as a great definition. Who are these "experts"? And what are these "neutral, objective, and universal standards"? But most of all, I still think that science is fundamentally observational . To give some context, the author of the piece, Matthew Stewart, was discussing the historical development of "scientific management". (Full disclosure: I co-authored a paper in the journal Management Science a few years ago.) To my mind, unless there's an attempt to take careful observations, it's not science. As an aside, I'd like to comment on an ambiguity in the word observational . Sometimes people disting...

Models are central to science. A scientific model is a kind of representation of physical reality, an analogy if you like. For example, the image on the left is of the "planetary model" of a nitrogen atom. The power of analogy is that it lets us think about one thing in terms of something else—often something simpler or more familiar. An example of this is metaphor : when we say, for example, that "life is a journey", we are using the relatively simple model of a journey (with a starting point, a period of travel, a destination, etc.) to understand the more nebulous concept of life. The importance of metaphor was first revealed to me by the marvelous book Metaphors We Live By , now available in a second edition . (About 15 years ago, I picked up a copy at a used bookstore more or less by chance. It had a tremendous impact on my thinking; it was some time later that I learned that it's actually rather a famous book.) The authors, Lakoff and Johnson, argue not on...

Canada's Conservative government wants to extend the stay of Canadian troops in Afghanistan another two years beyond the current February, 2007 deadline. (See reports from The Globe & Mail and CBC .) After a 6-hour debate tomorrow, members of parliament will vote, and Canadians will have to live with the consequences. Pronounced Prime Minister Stephen Harper: "What we are doing there is not just protecting our national interests, but providing international leadership and providing real advancement to the standard of living and human rights of the Afghan people." Do these claims stand up? First, how is the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan protecting our national interests? No doubt there will be some grand words in the House of Commons tomorrow, but I'd like to hear a cogent argument, not just hot air. A national child-care plan would be in our national interest, but the Conservatives won't hear of that. Next, does a foreign military adventure demons...

Definitions are wonderful and terrible. Wonderful because carefully chosen definitions bring thought into focus. But terrible because conflicting definitions are the source of endless misunderstandings. Try to define something carefully and it won't be long before someone suggests that "it's just semantics!" Translation: you're wasting your time on words instead of what really matters. While I agree that it's invalid "to draw conclusions about what is true about the world based on what is true about a word" (I'm quoting from the Wikipedia page on semantics ), that hardly makes semantics irrelevant! Semantics is, after all, the study of meaning. I don't imagine anyone has ever objected that "it's just meaning!" The trouble is, some words carry around a lot of baggage. As I've just indicated, an unfortunate example is semantics itself! Lately, I've been thinking a lot about evidence. Not easy to define, but everybody see...

I'm a big fan of optical illusions. And I just found a blog devoted to them , from which I copied the remarkable image shown here. I got there from Blogs of Note , which features daily links to "Interesting and noteworthy Blogger-powered blogs, compiled by the Blogger Team." Their archives go back more than 5 years—great for semi-random web surfing! By the way, for more cool optical illusions, I'd recommend the book Incredible Visual Illusions by Al Seckel.

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It's Sunday evening, and rather than coming up with something thoughtful myself, here are some miscellaneous items of interest. A cornucopia if you will, as illustrated at left. First, something important—an urgent appeal from Amnesty International Canada: On May 9th the U.N. General Assembly will elect the members of the new UN Human Rights Council. Canada, which is standing for election, has a critical role to play in ensuring that the Council's mandate of protecting all human rights for everyone is not a hollow promise. Send an email to Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Honorable Peter MacKay, and urge him to ensure Canada demonstrates clear leadership in the respect and fulfillment of human rights norms and standards. Take action before May 9th! If you're in a science-and-public-communication mood, this post is worth reading. Next, something fun (via Antonella Pavese's interesting blog ): a very entertaining manifesto on how to be creative by advertis...

In the last month I've discussed various aspects of the evidence-based debate . I'd now like to present some of my ideas on the subject. As I've suggested previously, the definition of evidence seems to lie at the heart of the dispute. But before I attempt to define evidence, I think it's useful to consider the word itself. Evidence is the noun form of the adjective evident , ultimately deriving from the Latin evidens from ex- (out, forth) + videre (to see). The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definitions for evident : "1. a. Conspicuous b. Obvious to the sight. 2. Clear to the understanding or the judgement; obvious, plain. 3. Indubitable, certain, conclusive. —1653." And the primary definition of evidence is simply "The quality or condition of being evident." So a very literal interpretation would take evidence to be what can be seen, or "shown forth". It seems natural to extend this beyond vision to sense perceptions...