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Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is also a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not modeling species distributions or battling creationists, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.
The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of the NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.
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January 29, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
Headline: BART eyes higher fares, reduced service. This is very, very dumb. Higher fares will reduce ridership at exactly the time BART is weaning people off of their addiction to driving. That's bad policy, and it's bad for BART revenue. While shifting from trains every 15 minutes to a 20 minute gap on weeknights and Sundays isn't awful, it also raises the barrier to easy mass transit, reducing the chance that people will leave their cars at home. And getting people to give up their cars is good public policy. It keeps the air clean, reducing asthma and other respiratory...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 10:46 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Policy and Politics
DaveScot, the semiliterate sycophant who used to administer Bill Dembski's ID blog, is in a tizzy. In addition to being an evolution denier, DS is a climate change denier and a promoter of medical woo, you see, and he thinks there's evidence that "[James] Hansen’s former boss at NASA declares himself an AGW skeptic." He is sure that: The video below is U.S. Senator James Inhofe describing the letter he received from former NASA supervisor and senior atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. TheonBut no! As Tim Lambert points out, and as any fully literate person could tell from the email...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 10:34 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
The endlessly entertaining Zero out of Five collects catastrophically wrong test answers. This one got 0 points, but I think that a recently passed law in Louisiana (and similar laws introduced in Oklahoma and elsewhere this year) might make that grade illegal: I think that illustration was copied from a Discovery Institute meteorology textbook. Surely that's worth partial credit. 1 point out of 2?...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 10:18 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Tough economic times are squeezing university budgets in Europe, creating tension between sceintists and their governments. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is unhappy with French scientists. In a recent speech Sarkozy lambasted the [French] research system as "infantilizing and paralyzing," argued that French scientists aren't productive enough, and announced that after decades of failed attempts at change, radical reforms are now his government's top priority. "The forces of conservatism and immobilism have always triumphed," he said, "and that has to stop."French scientists responded predictably. "Incensed by a provocative policy speech … France’s researchers’ unions have threatened to go on strike indefinitely...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:55 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 28, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
I suspect that when history remembers my Mayor, I expect they'll just quote Chip Johnson's summary of his state of the city address: To say the least, if Dellums had a theme, it was lost in the chaos that converged around him. I gotta say, focusing on crime was not the best move for Ron Dellums. Despite beefing up the police force, crime is basically constant in Oakland, and Dellums has shown no evidence of a clear plan to slow it. Bringing Guardian Angels in from LA is silly. It's a temporary measure, and it treats crime as something Oaklanders...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:29 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 26, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
Slacktivist has an interesting plan for abstinence education: Two things I've never been able to figure out about "abstinence only" sex education.1. Isn't it necessary, at some point, to describe what it is, exactly (or even generally), that they're supposed to be abstaining from?2. Since the goal here seems to be to put off or delay the onset of sexual activity, why bother with abstinence only sex ed at all? Why not just create a curriculum to instill a crippling social awkwardness?I sometimes wonder if that's not the real purpose of religious home-schooling. And of "Christian T-shirts." Clearly, this is...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 10:52 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 23, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
The new science standards survived without reinserting "strengths and weaknesses." That phrase has been abused by creationists in the past, and its removal is a giant victory. Disco. is trying to hustle a win out of some random changes to the evolution section of the Biology TEKS, but, as they say down here, that dog won't hunt. All they did was confuse the standards and take out specificity needed by teachers and textbook authors. Furthermore, how do they propose that anyone analyze and evaluate how natural selection doesn't apply to individuals but to populations? That's simply true, and doesn't require...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 9:27 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 22, 2009
Category: Policy and Politics
President GOBAMA! closes Gitmo, rebans torture, and says of the struggle against al Qaeda: We intend to win this fight, and we intend to win it on our terms.Damn straight....
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:17 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Policy and Politics
An amendment by Cargill is being passed around. It changes ESS standards. Will it change the age of the earth? Oh, I'm so anxious I could plotz. Amendment is on the page listing "(4) Earth in space and time." She says it adds qualifiers. Seeks "humility and tentativeness." She wants to insert "differing theories about" such that "observations reveal differing theories about" the structure, scale, composition, origin, and history of the universe." Dunbar and McLeroy go back and forth about tentativeness of theories, and how there used to be steady state theories. Craig: This is superfluous. I note that it's...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 1:58 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Policy and Politics
Ecto crash cost me a liveblog. Leo offered BS amendments which don't do much ultimate harm, but do hurt treatment of evolution. Each part of biology 7 gets "analyze and evaluate" at the beginning of the standard. This makes some sections ungrammatical or irrelevant. McLeroy passed an amendment requiring students to know the definition of evolution in section b(2) and understands it has limitations. This is mostly harmless, but silly and confusing. Insert new standard in evolution section. "7B: Describe the sufficiency or insufficiency of common descent to explain the sudden appearance, stasis and sequential nature of the fossil record."...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:40 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
