Policy
mikethemadbiologist | August 23, 2010
Meet your new Treasury Secretary
My guiding political principle is "people have to like this crap." That is, if a policy makes peoples' lives worse, then it's a shitty policy*. More about that in a bit.
Last week, a bunch of bloggers went to visit the Treasury Department, and one of the topics for discussion was the Home Affordable Modification Program ('HAMP'). HAMP has been accused of doing little to help people from avoiding foreclosure, and, instead, has only prolonged their attempt to meet a (doomed to fail) series of payments (this is derisively called "extend and pretend"). In…
mikethemadbiologist | August 21, 2010Razib, in a link roundup, wrote:
A Grand Unified Theory of Palinisms. Jacob Weisberg, Yale grad and Rhodes Scholar, wonders why Sarah Palin says "stupid and ridiculous things." An easy answer is that she's stupid. But I think the truth is that Sarah Palin is closer to the norm in intelligence and polish than the typical American politician. In fact she's probably somewhat above average in intelligence. The fact that she's a social conservative means that it's easy for Left-leaning elites to mock her, but if you go to a liberal college town in the Berkshires I'm sure you could talk to plenty…
jrosenhouse | August 16, 2010Monday Math is off this week. School starts in just two more weeks, and I have been making a last push to have as much of my books done as I can before it does. Cuts into my blogging time, alas.
Which is a shame, since there is plenty of fodder. For example, Peter Enns has a new essay up over at Huff Po. It's title is “Atheists Are Believers, Too” I suspect that everyone reading this could reconstruct Enns' argument from that title alone.. Still, let's consider the specifics.
Things start off well with this:
Christians sometimes claim to be certain about spiritual matters. This can be…
mikethemadbiologist | August 6, 2010Of course, some of us are already there. A long time reader has been saying ever since the first unveiling of the stimulus package that Larry Summers' poor advice was going to kill the Democrats--and be crappy policy. He's not the only frustrated one, as word is that Christine Romer, chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, is resigning.
Here's the crux of Summers' handiwork (italics mine):
Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for…
gregladen | August 3, 2010In the 1960s, the whole idea of a "greenhouse effect" was well understood, and assumed to be an important potential factor in climate change. So was glaciation, and the short and medium term future of the Earth's climate was less clear than compared to now. But the basics were there ... C02 was being released into the atmosphere, this could cause a greenhouse effect, and that would warm the earth. Certainly by the early 1980s, it was possible to make some thumb-suck estimates of how much the earth would warm given various assumptions about CO2, and it was not that difficult to see that a lot…
tqa | July 8, 2010
This is not the post I though I'd be putting up today. This morning, I fully expected to come home from work, post my already-written "I quit" post, and point you all to a WordPress blog I set up yesterday. As of this moment, I'm not leaving Sb. As of this time next week, who knows?
As some of you have gathered, a lot of the bloggers here have frustrations with Seed that extend well beyond the Pepsipocalypse, pressures that, in some cases, have already led bloggers to quit. I'm certainly in the frustrated group, and to be honest I was strongly considering moving on well before the latest…
tfk | July 7, 2010Let's set aside contentious topics like the PepsiBlog wars and try a nice, soothing discussion of science and religion.
You'll recall that, a month ago, I agreed with Chad Orzel that it was OK for the World Science Festival not to put a New/Affirmative/Explicit Atheist on their panel about Science and Faith. Then people got angry at me and I responded angrily, after which I got more flack, and walked back my position a bit. Basically, I had originally thought the panel was meant to be one thing â a personal look at how science and religion interact in some scientists' livesâ but as I looked…
tfk | July 7, 2010More and more of the other ScienceBloggers have weighed in on the Pepsi-written nutrition blog being hosted here at SB. A few more have announced blogging sabbaticals or simply shuttered their SB blog and opened up shop elsewhere.
In addition to a mea culpa sent to the bloggers, the overlords have made some adjustments to the Pepsi blog to better reflect its advertising content. The blog's banner includes the PepsiCo logo, and the Profile now explains: "This blog is sponsored by PepsiCo. All editorial content is written by PepsiCo's scientists or scientists invited by PepsiCo and/or…
drorzel | July 6, 2010As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won't solve the problem, but it'll give me something to point to the next time I get asked.
So, what communications skills should scientists have? The answer depends on what kind of science you're going to do, and what you want to do with it.
First and foremost, though: If you want to be a successful scientist, you need good communications skills. Full stop.…
hrynyshyn | July 1, 2010My first reaction to the papier du jour among climate communications activists was "meh." It's not that Chris Mooney's latest ruminations on the gap between what the public thinks about scientific issues and what scientists have to say isn't worth reading. It's just that we've been down this road so many times now, the standards of what passes for new and remarkable are getting rather high.
That didn't stop Andy Revkin, Joe Romm, and Evil Monkey from posting lengthy and hard-hitting responses, though. So I gave it a second look, and I've now concluded that "Do Scientists Understand the Public…
sb admin | June 29, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes:
Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…
lborkowski | June 29, 2010Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes:
Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…
clock | June 29, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Eric Roston, author of The Carbon Age and blogger on Climate Post and Carbon Nation (also on Twitter) to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? What is your (…
pharyngula | June 29, 2010One of the outcomes of the Copenhagen gathering of atheists was the formulation of a set of principles. It has now been posted on the web, so it's time for everyone to discuss, comment, and criticize…have at it!
The recent Gods and Politics conference in Copenhagen adopted the following Declaration on Religion in Public Life. The conference was the first European event of Atheist Alliance International, and was co-hosted by AAI and the Danish Atheist Society.
We, at the World Atheist Conference: "Gods and Politics", held in Copenhagen from 18 to 20 June 2010, hereby declare as follows:
We…
palmd | June 27, 2010Author Chris Mooney has a provocative piece up at the Washington Post today. He argues that scientists are misunderstanding the dynamics of science-policy debates. Because, he argues, ideology often trumps scientific fact in the minds of the public, we (scientists) need to work harder to engage the public to win their hearts before we win their minds (please forgive me, Chris, if I didn't get this quite spot on).
While I appreciate Chris's general point---that we can't just "fact" people into submission---I think some of his arguments beg for a more critical analysis. Point one,…
gregladen | June 25, 2010I am all in favor of the White House and the military being at odds over policy and politics. I have this notion that the elected civilians need to remind the officers that in our country, at least, the elected civilians are in charge. It's that respect for the concept of democracy deep within my little cowboy heart that gets alarmed whenever I sense that the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are too much on the same page.
Continue reading this post by Mike at QM
stoat | June 24, 2010 An unfair headline; but I think it is a known phrase: the "Dumb America" phenomenon, wherein the public has the hubris to believe that they really have something valuable to contribute to discussions that they can hardly begin to understand (I'm assuming that if you aren't part of DA then you're intelligent enough to realise I'm not talking about all Americans).
Yes, I'm talking about the comments in Under the Volcano, Over the Volcano by Willis Eschenbach at Wattsup (ht: mt). Incidentally, anyone tempted to complain about my sneering or elitist tone is invited to comment somewhere else. If…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
clock | June 21, 2010June edition of the Journal of Science Communication is out. Focus seems to be on communication in physical space and democracy. Check out the table of contents:
Bringing the universe to the street. A preliminary look at informal learning implications for a large-scale non-traditional science outreach project:
"From Earth to the Universe" (FETTU) is a collection of astronomical images that showcase some of the most popular, current views of our Universe. The images, representing the wide variety of astronomical objects known to exist, have so far been exhibited in about 500 locations…
mikethemadbiologist | June 17, 2010President Obama has been arguing that if he had tried to regulate the oil industry before the BP disaster, it would have gone nowhere and Republicans would have pissed and moaned about oppressive regulations:
In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: "I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is…