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Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

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“Until relatively recently, and with a very few exceptions, cannibalism would have been regarded as anything but normal. As a result, until the last two decades of the 20th century, few scientists spent time studying a topic thought to have little, if any, biological significance. Basically, the party line was that cannibalism, when it did occur, was either the result of starvation to the stresses related to captive conditions. It was as simple as that. Or so we thought.”

ScienceCannibalismZoologyPopular Science
Book:Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History
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“The point of the prey being paralysed rather than killed, by the way, is that they don't decay but are eaten alive and are therefore fresh. It was macabre habit, in the related Ichneumon wasp, that provoked Darwin to write: 'I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent god would have designedly created the Ich-neumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars...' He might as well have used the example of a french chef boiling lobsters alive to preserve their flavor.”

GeneticsNatural SelectionPopular ScienceRichard Dawkins
Book:The Selfish Gene
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“Lysenkoism may be useful only because it provides a lesson. Whether we like it or not, the days of the independent scientist and of independent science are about over. The more important science becomes in the lives of individuals and of nations, the more it will need popular support and will have to submit to social control. But the forms and techniques of this support and control have not yet been devised and tested. The problem is a new one. The Soviet rulers have tried a solution, but their solution has resulted in lysenkoism, and thus proved to be a dismal failure.”

Public OpinionPseudosciencePopular Science1952Science Funding
Book:The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
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“Included in the GSM standard for mobile devices was the ability to use the mobile network's control channel (the parhway that controls the call but doesn't carry the call itself) to send short alphanumeric messages. It was envisioned principally as a means for one-way communication from the company to the subscriber (such as "your bill is due"). That changed when the functionality was discovered by Norwegian teenagers in the late 1980s.”

ScienceHistoryTechnologyTechPopular ScienceSms
Book:From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future
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“By the mid-1980s, [Stephen Jay Gould] had emerged as a major public figure, using his background as a paleontologist to dive into controversies with radical stances on the ways new species emerge and how evolutionary change comes about. His [popular history of life] college class was composed of around six hundred students who, taking it as a distributional requirement, were unlikely to become science majors. This audience proved an ideal focal group for Gould to try out his new theories and presentations. Every Tuesday and Thursday in the fall he held forth, lecturing with dramatic flourish to undergraduates who either sat rapt in the front rows or sprawled sleeping in the rear ones.”

EvolutionPopular ScienceMotivated ReasoningStephen Jay Gould
Book:Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA
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