Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

The effects of insecticides on insects have been extensively studied. At high enough doses, insects will die. At lower doses, insects may survive, but present physiological and behavioral changes. Insecticides that target the nervous systems of insects can directly affect the ability of insects to properly orient. In the 1980s, I worked for a company that developed pheromones for insect control. We noted that for some pests, pheromones alone would prevent or suppress mating if the pest population was sufficiently low. At high enough pest density, mating was no longer suppressed. However, by sticking a sublethal dose of a pyrethroid insecticide to a pheromone dispenser, mating could be suppressed at higher population densities. In this case, male moths were visiting pheromone dispensers and contacting a dose of insecticide that did not kill the moths. Instead, the pesticide interfered with the ability of the male moth to follow a pheromone plume…

The weather forecast for the American West is startling. An extreme blocking pattern that has persisted there since last year is now set to hit its highest amplitudes yet, allowing a massive heat dome to grow and sprawl out over the west for an extended period. The result will likely be a deadly heatwave that could send temperatures rocketing high enough to shatter Earth’s all-time record.

This blast-furnace heat is forecast to begin this weekend with temperatures expected to reach 126 to 129 degrees (Fahrenheit) in Death Valley, California. This range is very close to the all time high record Earth temperature of 134 degrees. So even a minor intensification of this predicted heat wave could result in a new Earth temperature record.

Other regions in the West are also predicted to experience record heat. Temperatures for both Phoenix and Las Vegas are expected to exceed 110 degrees (F) and…

Michael Billig offers some cautionary advice – Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences.

Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig’s witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples from diverse fields such as linguistics, sociology and experimental social psychology, Billig shows how technical terminology is regularly less precise than simpler language. He demonstrates that there are linguistic problems with the noun-based terminology that social scientists habitually use – ‘reification’ or ‘nominalization’ rather than the corresponding verbs ‘reify’ or ‘nominalize’. According to Billig, social scientists not only use…