Policy
oracknows | June 28, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns again today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two about the same topic. Since I recently reran a really old post that started it all, I thought I'd follow up with the two additional posts about the same topic. This is the third one and…
tlambert | June 21, 2011Lanai Vasek in The Australian reports:
In the latest incident, Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies executive director Anna-Maria Arabia received an email today saying she would be "strung-up by the neck" and killed for her promotion of mainstream climate science.
The threat was emailed to her this morning before a "Respect the Science" campaign at Parliament House in Canberra today.
Shortly after before [see correction] she got the death threat, Arabia was attacked by Andrew Bolt:
At its annual gathering in Canberra today, the Federation of Australian Science and…
gregladen | June 20, 2011As you know, our own Minnesota Congressman Michele Bachmann is officially running for president. I wonder what it would be like to have the President of the United States of America, like when she goes home to visit her family for Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July or whatever, and all these limos and choppers are driving all over the place in Stillwater! Maybe they better upgrade that liftbridge after all!
Anyway, in celebration of having one of our own ready, willing and on the way to possibly becoming the Leader of the Free World and all, I'm reposting a selection of the well over 100…
mikethemadbiologist | June 11, 2011Links for you. Science:
The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias
Once more unto the "government waste" breach
Announcing The Batavia Open Genomic Data Licence
No joke: This is the biggest battery breakthrough ever
Other:
Making work
Beyond the Drug War: Drug Policy, Social Interventions, and the Future
The Rentier Regime
Against prudery
Weiner, Spitzer, Clinton and the Web of Authoritarian Sexual Politics
In defense of nekkid pictures, even of dudes
Hyperinflation for Hyperventilators
Our Wasteful Health Care System
cwilcox | June 9, 2011If you didn't already know because, by chance, you missed my tweets, posts, and facebook updates, there is a science blogging contest going on RIGHT NOW. The 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Prize is currently narrowing down the top 20 posts from 87 nominees. To get through the gauntlet, a post has to get enough votes. Rather than remind you again to vote for Observations of a Nerd, I figured I'd show you why you should. Over the next 24 hours, I'll be reposting the three posts in the competition in case you missed them the first time. If you like them, and haven't already, cast your vote!…
worldsfair | June 8, 2011(You can follow Dave on twitter @dnghub)
30 MINUTES, 70 FATES.
You don't know it, but as I write this piece, there is some serious procrastination going on. My attention span is weak and sidetracked constantly by a variety of diversions, and if you must know, it's taken me close to half an hour to write these first two sentences. Still, one could argue that none of us are strangers to procrastination, and 30 minutes is relatively short - only a minor instance of time in the grand scheme of things.
But a lot can happen in thirty minutes. Earlier, I had been looking over some 2009 UNAIDS…
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2011By now, you might have heard that politicovangelist possible presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been burbling inanities about Paul Revere, including this doozy:
He [Revere] who warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells, and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.
She then doubled down on her idiocy. Amanda Marcotte puts this into context:
But I think it helps to understand that, for right-wing populists, this thing we call "…
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2011I'll get to creationism in a bit, but first...
Last week, Yves Smith started a wee lil' ruckus among progressives with a post titled "Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name." In that post, she argued:
Bribes work. AT&T gave money to GLAAD, and now the gay rights organization is supporting the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. La Raza is mouthing the talking points of the Mortgage Bankers Association on down payments. The NAACP is fighting on debit card rules. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute supported…
tfk | June 6, 2011Jerry Coyne is trying to do math. A new survey out from Pew finds that, as in 2007, 61% of Americans say they'd be less likely to vote for someone who did not believe in God. Coyne thinks:
The unchanged level of disapprobation is a bit disconcerting, but at least gives the lie to accommodationist claims that vociferous atheism is turning people off. And we know that lack of religious belief is still increasing everywhere in America.
Several problems arise here, exacerbated by the generally handwavy attitude Coyne-as-blogger takes towards data and logical argument. We have to guess what…
mikethemadbiologist | June 1, 2011Links for you. Science:
Does Lack of Income Take Away the Brain's Horses?
Rinderpest, or 'cattle plague,' becomes only second disease to be eradicated
Stinging Caterpillars of the United States
Deadly bacteria lurk inside hospital wards
Other:
Is this what ended the American Dream?
Standing Up for the Existence of Atoms
Jared Bernstein Lets Slip Interesting Info About WH Economic Views
Doctors should share in the sacrifice (not sure I agree, but replace "doctor" with "teacher" becomes a very interesting exercise)
Stephanie Kelton: What Happens When the Government Tightens its Belt?
Doctors…
gregladen | May 24, 2011It didn't really occur to me that anyone actually believed that the world was going to end the other day. Honestly. I had assumed that some crazy preacher made the claim, that it was being used to scam the gullible here and there, but that almost no one was really taking it seriously. But, in reading a few of the post-Rapture updates, this is clearly not the case. And, I'm sure that this is one of those things everybody else knew and that I was blissfully ignorant of.
Almost a hundred years ago, some guy named Miller came up with the idea that the world would end in 1843 or so. I…
lborkowski | May 23, 2011The saying "demography is destiny" reportedly dates back to 19th-century social scientist Auguste Comte, and it's still popular among journalists. Earlier this year, for instance, Alan Wheatley of Reuters warned about the challenges Asian countries (especially Japan) will face as over-60 residents make up ever-larger shares of their populations. His article also touches on the challenges for countries that face the opposite problem: a large proportion of young residents, or "large cohorts of angry, unemployed young men" prone to causing turmoil.
A recent Council on Foreign Relations report…
gregladen | May 19, 2011Everything is connected to everything else. Sometimes, the connections are non-trivial. Often they are fundamental, sometimes exploitable, and now and then very potent sources of debate and discussion. I've come to think that a measure of sanity is the degree to which one limits a sense of connection when taking in new information. For instance, I was lambasted by a fellow blogger a few months ago when he insisted that there were connections ... of influence, of a pecuniary nature, at least ... between me and a major Big Science institution which caused me to say things that he thought I…
mikethemadbiologist | May 16, 2011Links for you. Science:
MRSA, Meat, and Motown
More on the criteria for earning the Ph.D.
N50 talk length at CSHL Biology of Genomes conference
Other:
If You Haven't Been On Food Stamps, Stop Trying to Influence Government Policy (must-read)
The Koch Brothers and the End of State Universities
Count Me In With the Unsophisticated Six Year Olds
Macroeconomics is a rancid, putrefying pseudoscience
Fun With Charts: Making the Rich Look Poor
Mike Rowe's Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (on the need for skilled labor)
Hyperbole (and Progressive…
mikethemadbiologist | May 10, 2011...you know things are getting weird. David Warsh writes:
I belong to a luncheon club whose smartest member is a longtime investment manager whom I have observed for many years, He walked out of the room after a global tour d'horizon talk the other day and said on the sidewalk in front of the building, "The only things that can possibly address inequality of a magnitude that will soon be judged to be unacceptable in this country are much higher levels of taxation on the well-to-do and a negative income tax for the poor." I hadn't heard it put so simply or succinctly before, but in the…
stoat | May 5, 2011 However, I'm inclined to think that he isn't a tosser, just naive (as someone said, I don't think Tim understands the policy world very well). He looks a bit naive in his picture, doesn't he? And that is a sure-fire way to tell. But maybe that is me being naive. Well, let me tell you and you can make up your own mind.
Assuming you can be bothered, go off and read his piece in Nature: 2 °C or not 2 °C? That is the climate question (you ought to; please don't rely on my biased reporting of him :-). Tim has a laudable aim: he wants to ensure that global efforts to tackle the climate problem…
tfk | May 3, 2011Cosma Shalizi, 11/4/2007: "The object of torture is torture":
The point of this torture is not to extract information; there are better ways to do that, which we have long used. The point of this torture is not to extract confessions; there are no show trials of terrorists or auto-de-fes in the offing. The point of this torture is to exercise unlimited, unaccountable power over other human beings; to negate the very point of our country, to our profound and lasting national shame.
This, it must be emphasized, is all that torture has ever been good for. Torture did not lead us to Osama bin…
hrynyshyn | May 3, 2011Climate change activists in Canada are understandably depressed by the results of Monday's federal election, which produced a majority Conservative government run by a party with zero interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There are shards of good news lying in the rubble, although they only hint at the possibility of progress in the far-off future.
The fact that the new Official Opposition, the New Democrats, support cap-and-trade legislation isn't as positive a development as it could be, considering that they have no chance of influencing government.
More interesting is the…
tfk | May 2, 2011
Via the White House Flickr site, a tense moment in the Situation Room yesterday, as the national security team was updated on the raid on a Pakistani compound where Osama bin Laden had been in hiding. The weight of the moment plays out a little differently on each face. The political, diplomatic, and military cost of failure would have been enormous. The mission was, as we all know by now, successful, and led to spontaneous parties in streets around the world, with firefighters in New York making an impromptu pilgrimage to the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.…
worldsfair | May 2, 2011It's election time again and, as is the norm, we see teachers using the opportunity to talk to their students about things such as Prime Ministers, parliaments, senates, and, well, basically - how this thing we call the "Canadian Government" is meant to work. My own daughter who is in Grade 4 is in such a class, and has been asking me all sorts of questions: the most prevalent of which is "Who is Alice Wong?" Not a surprising question, since her face is fairly ubiquitous in Richmond, BC where I live, being set against the many blue Conservative signs and placards (she is our incumbent MP…