Policy
lborkowski | June 16, 2010In 1999, two machinists who worked next to each other at a Pratt & Whitney jet engine plant in North Haven, Connecticut were diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare and fatal brain cancer. Their wives started compliling information about other employees at the same company who'd received similar diagnoses, and focused attention on the workers' illneses until Pratt & Whitney agreed to hire University of Pittsburgh biostatistician Gary Marsh to conduct a study. Carole Bass reports for the New Haven Independent on the findings, the second phase of which have just been released:
Marsh and…
hrynyshyn | June 14, 2010Smoke and Mirrors:
Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century
By Burton Richter
Cambridge University Press, 218 pages.
Do we really another book summarizing the science of climate change and the available response options? Sure. Why not? What's the harm? In this era of hyperfractionated audiences and echo-chambers, there's no such thing as too many arrows in our collective quiver. This one, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter, doesn't contribute anything new. But at this point in the conversation, there's not much new to contribute, just novel approaches to making the argument…
lborkowski | June 11, 2010James Surowiecki's latest New Yorker piece tackles the problem of weakened federal agencies failing to get tough on companies that need it. He notes that leading up to the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster, Minerals Management Service officials "had let oil companies shortchange the government on oil-lease payments, accepted gifts from industry representatives, and, in some cases, literally slept with the people they were regulating." And he gives other examples:
Mining regulators allowed operators like Massey Energy to flout safety rules. Financial regulators let A.I.G. write more than half a…
hrynyshyn | June 9, 2010NASA's James Hansen has few peers when it comes to the title of leading climatologist-turned-policy-wonk, but Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia (yes, that university) is giving him a run for his money. Hulme's latest entry is a cautionary tale involving the challenges involved in geoengineering.
In Yale e360, Hulme argues that the technical obstacles to making the Earth's climate do what we want aside, the politics of trying to change the radiative heat balance of the atmosphere are problematic in the extreme.
Who, he asks,
is entitled to initiate the large-scale deployment of a…
tfk | June 8, 2010In 2000, Will Saletan described Joe Lieberman's crusade against lurid Hollywood. Joe, he explained:
has spent years trying, through shame and intimidation, to cleanse movies, television, pop music, and video games of gratuitous sex and violence. [â¦]
When asked on Meet the Press about the possibility of "legal restrictions" on Hollywood, Lieberman swore allegiance to the First Amendment but added, "The average family feels as if it's in a competition with a lot of the stuff ⦠coming out of the entertainment industry, and government has to be on the side of standing with those people to help…
jgoldman | June 7, 2010Maryn McKenna, and her blog Superbug 2.0 has been downloaded (uploaded?) into the Borg.
As she says:
What you can expect to see on Superbug: antimicrobial resistance of course, and all the things we do to make it worse. (Anyone want to talk about chain drugstores giving antibiotics away for free?) But also: infectious diseases, especially emerging ones; zoonotic diseases, and the bacterial and viral traffic between us and the species we share space with; food policy and food safety; and public health, and especially public health policy and politics. Most of all, expect Superbug to be an…
tfk | June 7, 2010You remember Kris Kobach, right? Once a Congressional candidate with ties to white supremacists, before that a Justice Department staffer on a since-abandoned racial profiling scheme, after which he bankrupted the Kansas Republican Party, and is lately famous for authoring Arizona's "show me your papers" law. He's running for Kansas secretary of state, where he'd regulate state elections. At a recent event organized by the "Patriot movement" (which previously spawned domestic terrorists Timothy McVeigh, and Scott Roeder), Kobach made some rather remarkable claims, not least that:
terrorists…
mmckenna | June 7, 2010So, hi, Scienceblogs. I'm thrilled to be joining the conversation here.
By way of introduction, I'm Maryn McKenna, journalist and author and sole proprietor of Superbug, which has been running for 3+ years at Blogger but moves over here today, thanks to an invitation from the Sb staff and some extremely kind support from friends and colleagues who are already here.
Superbug began as online notes and digital whiteboard for my new book, SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), which is a narrative investigation of the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph.…
stoat | June 6, 2010Hans von Storch is a bit hard to pin down on GW: unquestionably a good scientist, but sounding oddly skeptical of late. His klimazwiebel is his current venue, where he posts with others including Eduardo "killer" Zorita. von S's posts are usually the more sensible ones. But now we have Nils Roll-Hansen: A lesson from Lysenkoism? which isn't actually by von S but is definitely sponsored by him.
What is this lesson? Well, von S says:
Please do not misunderstand this thread as another attempt to bring in Stalinism. My interest is in the interaction of policy/politics and science in the past - in…
drorzel | June 5, 2010
IPN announces Ninth Annual Bastiat Prize Competition | International Policy Network
"For the ninth year, International Policy Network (IPN) is accepting submissions for its annual Bastiat Prize for Journalism. The Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world whose published articles eloquently and wittily explain, promote and defend the principles and institutions of the free society.
Submissions must be received on or before 30 June 2010.
In addition to the Bastiat Prize for Journalism (First - $10,000; Second - $4,000; Third - $1,000), we are again awarding the Bastiat Prize for Online…
lborkowski | June 1, 2010DemFromCT had a great post up at Daily Kos this past weekend about risk communication. He considers the somewhat unusual circumstances of the Gulf oil spill, noting, "unlike pandemics and hurricanes, this volatile mixture in the water has an equally volatile mix of politics, companies, government and media to sort out policy and communication." The post also includes insights from risk communication expert Peter Sandman, who (with input from Jody Lanard) gave a detailed response to this question from DemFromCT:
Given the potential for failure of the top kill approach, and the length of time…
jrosenhouse | June 1, 2010On most issues my politics are decidedly left-wing, but there is one big exception to that. That exception is Israel. On the subject of Isreal I get very right-wing.
When I look at Israel I see a Western-style democracy that has achieved extraordinary things in just sixty years. Their universities and technological achievements are among the most impressive in the world. They have achieved a standard of living for their people that puts the surrounding, mostly despotic, Arab regimes to shame. This they have done while facing relentless terrorism and threats to their existence from…
tfk | May 18, 2010Recent weeks have brought a steady stream of interesting reports about Israel's internal politics and how those politics relate to the rest of the world.
To whit: Israel Roiled After Chomsky Barred From West Bank:
Front-page coverage and heated morning radio discussions asked how Mr. Chomsky, an 81-year-old professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could pose a risk to Israel and how a country that frequently asserts its status as a robust democracy could keep out people whose views it found offensive. â¦
The decision to bar him from entering the West Bank to speak…
pharyngula | May 17, 2010I'm glad someone occasionally looks into the other side of the net to see what they're talking about — I can't bear to read religious forums, myself. Here's why: take a look at what they're saying on BaptistBoard.
I believe women in politics have done a great disservice to the sovereignty and resolve of a our great Republic. Many issues that face our nation, from without and within, need to be decided from a place of strength instead of weakness. Women are gifted from God with a lot of skills that are good in the home, but not in the Government. They tend to base their decisions from a…
drorzel | May 13, 2010
Cocktail Party Physics: oily hair is not a problem - its a solution for the gulf coast
"One of the more interesting solutions proposed (aside from dropping trash in the pipe to block the oil) also involves using fibers; however, the fibers in question are human hair. Chicken feathers, straw, and wool have all been used to collect oil in the past, but human hair seems to work particularly well. A big advantage is that the oil is adsorbed rather than absorbed. Adsorbed oil forms a very thin layer - a molecule or two thick - at the surface of the hair. Because the molecules are only weakly…
drorzel | May 3, 2010
Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data | Magazine
"Statistics is hard. But that's not just an issue of individual understanding; it's also becoming one of the nation's biggest political problems. We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what the data mean. If you don't understand statistics, you don't know what's going on -- and you can't tell when you're being lied to. Statistics should now be a core part of general education. You shouldn't finish high school without understanding it reasonably well -- as well, say,…
revere | May 1, 2010Arizona, you are looking ugly. Defenders claim its Draconian measures are a result of the failure of US immigration policy, and I have to agree. Everyone seems to agree on the need for immigration reform, but like the weather, no one wants to do anything about it. The Democrats have a bill, but no one seems to think it will succeed in an election year and may be only window dressing, anyway. The bill puts securing the border first, followed by provisions for fraud-proof identity cards. Bringing up the rear are tough requirements that would allow a path to citizenship for people currently…
gregladen | April 30, 2010The Island of Doubt was the blog of James Hrynyshyn, and it dealt with environmental issues, and especially the politics of denialism. Well, James has shut down Island of Doubt and started a new blog called "Class M." That new blog is here.
James is one of those people I've come to trust for information about environmental, climate, energy, and related issues. Plus he's a genuinely nice guy. I've had the fortune of spending a fair amount of time with him at the ScienceOnline conferences, and that has been very enjoyable.
Go check out Class M. James intends for this new blog to be fairly…
mikethemadbiologist | April 28, 2010Like InstaPutz, I too am tempted to do horrible things if I read another post about the 'epistemic closure of the conservative mind' (besides, the obvious joke writes itself). Instead, I want to discuss Marc Ambinder's recent post, "Have Conservatives Gone Mad?" To his credit, he's one of the first 'big names' in political punditry to raise what regular readers of this blog already know: the conservative movement is batshit loony. Ambinder also makes this very good point:
Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but…
tlambert | April 24, 2010The Australian renews its war on science by printing an opinion piece by Richard Lindzen. Arthur Smith comments:
From his latest piece one can only conclude that either Lindzen has descended into the epistemic closure of paranoia and conspiracy theories that has become far too prevalent among some Americans lately or, worse, that he is consciously participating in the malicious disinformation campaign on climate that has recently been extensively documented by Greenpeace and elsewhere
Smith gives a detailed analysis of how he came to this conclusion.
Marc Ambinder also weighs in:
"Climate…