Policy
nisbetmc | January 20, 2010
The Katzen Arts Center on the American University campus will be host to a discussion of the civic and personal challenges that college students face on climate change.
Here's a head up on a very timely panel and forum to be held here at American University on February 9th and to be broadcast live on NPR affiliate WAMU. If you can't attend, the broadcast will be archived at the WAMU site. More details will be forthcoming, including a social media site where forum attendees and listeners can weigh in with their comments and feedback.
The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media and Politics…
drorzel | January 20, 2010
james_nicoll: In the spirit of Christopher Wren
"How much would it cost to rebuild Port-au-Prince with the infrastructure a modern, first-world city should have? Large sections of it will have to be rebuilt so it might as well be done right."
(tags: economics politics world blogs james-nicoll)
Hester Prynne, Schmester Prynne, or Sarah Palin's Ressentiment Clubhouse « Easily Distracted
"I think many people, even Sarah Palin's devotees, might concede under pressure that having a President who has a strong baseline knowledge about the world, about American history, about economics, and so…
drorzel | January 16, 2010
News: Duncan Challenges NCAA to Change - Inside Higher Ed
"Education Secretary Arne Duncan pulled no punches in a high-profile address here Thursday at the annual convention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, proposing a series of policy changes that he said could rid college sports of the "tiny minority" of bad actors that "stains" its reputation.
Duncan, former co-captain of Harvard University's basketball team and first-team Academic All-American, criticized the high-stakes recruiting wars that take place in sports like men's basketball and football. He wants further rules…
drorzel | January 15, 2010
Pondering a Ponderous Pendulum : Built on Facts
"Why the long discussion about the period of a pendulum yesterday? Because we're actually going to take a look at a particular pendulum today. This one hangs in the central atrium of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, which constitutes half of the beautiful and brand spanking new two-building complex now housing the Texas A&M department of physics."
(tags: science physics blogs built-on-facts education history)
Cocktail Party Physics: shameless self-promotion
The Damn Book is finally…
bioephemera | January 14, 2010Thanks to everyone who participated in the unscientific survey on commenting. The results are back, and I'd like to share them with you.
As many of you have noticed, we've been talking about comments a lot here lately, both at BioE and on Sb in general. There's also a big session on online civility coming up at SciOnline '10. So the main purpose behind the survey was to get you involved in that discussion.
I've brought the issues of uncivil and uninformed comments up in several posts, sometimes rather provocatively, but we already know that the majority of blog readers don't comment often,…
gregladen | January 13, 2010Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum tries to make several different points. The central framework of the book, on which all the arguments are hung, is that science has a status, a place, in American culture, politics, and economy, and that this status has changed over time. Mooney and Kirshenbaum make the claim that science rose to an increasingly higher status than it had ever previously enjoyed through a series of events and transformations during the early and middle part of the 20th century, and subsequently,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 13, 2010To follow up on Tuesday's post about Massachusetts' healthcare, it bears repeating: healthcare reform has to make people's lives better. In other words, people have to like this crap. And this isn't cutting it (boldface mine; italics original):
When it came time to renew my own insurance, I asked the insurance broker, what it would cost to buy good insurance in New York State. She said, "sit down". I held my breath in anticipation, she said, "$1300 a month."
When it came time for me to renew my health insurance which was a barely adequate policy with a $500 deductible, the new premium…
emjohnson | January 11, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
In Quentin Skinner's celebrated history The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he writes that:
If the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice.
In Part II of this series I highlighted how a common objection to the political theory of social Darwinism is that it was a misapplication of Darwin's science to already existing ideas. A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the…
agelman | January 7, 2010One thing I learned in econ class in 11th grade was that government policy should be counter-cyclical (spending more in recessions and cutting back in boom times), but that there's a lot of pressure to be pro-cyclical, which will tend to exacerbate business cycles. (Except I suppose they didn't say "exacerbate" in 11th grade.) At a personal level, too, it's natural to spend more when we have more and cut back when we aren't doing so well. Every now and then you hear about a "rainy day fund" but my general impression is that these are never big enough to counter the business cycle.
Political…
grrlscientist | January 1, 2010tags: Right Wing Calls For More Profiling Of Muslims, terrorism, politics, public policy, religion, crackpots, streaming video
After you watch this video, you too, will fear for the future of America. It's simply amazing what passes for logic among the right-wing religious crackpots. In fact, the evidence suggests that religion -- any religion -- causes brain damage. Don't believe me? Watch this video!
"Nobody still hasn't [sic] refuted the fact that 100% of Islamic terrorists are Muslim."
agelman | December 28, 2009I recently reviewed Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, for the journal Political Psychology. I wish I thought this book was all wrong, because then I could've titled my review, "The Myth of the Myth of the Rational Voter." But, no, I saw a lot of truth in Caplan's arguments. Here's what i wrote:
Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter was originally titled "The logic of collective belief: the political economy of voter irrationality," and its basic argument goes as follows:
(1) It is rational for people to vote and to make their preferences based on their views of…
bcohen | December 23, 2009(Ten Best of the Decade from Half of the World's Fair)
This series began with the kindness of a friend who agreed to let me ask him about his book about Barry Commoner, science, and modern environmentalism. It then spawned a series of 17 interviews with authors of books in science studies, environmental history, the history of science, and all combinations in between. Every one of them was enjoyable to do; every author was generous and insightful. I've been able to use some of these as thumbnail sketches of readings I use in class. In that, they stand as the best example of blogging as a…
tfk | December 21, 2009We knew that the Discovery Institute was wrong about evolution. They recently set out to prove to the world how wrong they are about global warming, having also shown how poorly they grasp the difference between weather and climate, how little they understand about tsarist Russia, about Social Security and foreign affairs, advanced medical directives, fiscal policy, and indeed about human genetics. Now Bruce Chapman, former Director of the Census for Ronald Reagan and head DJ of the Disco. 'Tute, shows how little he knows about current events:
Sen. John McCain could have been Barack Obama's…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2009Matthew Yglesias fires off a screed against Democrats who have told pollsters that they are unlikely to vote for Democratic congressional candidates in 2010 (I think Amanda's response sums up my thoughts rather well: people have to like this stuff, or surprisingly, they might not take the time to vote--or want to make the emotional investment in supporting you). Yglesias and others primarily pin the blame on the Blue Douchebags in the Senate. Yes, the Senate is dysfunctional. But to pin this all on Nelson, Bayh, Lieberman and the rest of the Asshole Caucus is overstating the case.
Ezra…
mikethemadbiologist | December 14, 2009Many people have been discussing the structural impediments to passing legislation, or what is often called legislative gridlock. As Matthew Yglesias put it:
The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it's not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it's the fact that the country has become ungovernable....
We're suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the…
bcohen | December 13, 2009I'm threading the needle between eight days of Hanukkah, twelve days of Christmas, Top Ten lists, seven deadly sins, and any other enumerations with this eleven-item top ten list. So, as promised earlier, to continue on this Marlowe-esque Long Goodbye here is a reprint of a post I enjoyed writing. It first ran here in February 2007.
I mean the title in a different sense than most science bloggers or SciBlog readers will likely presume. I mean it as one who studies science, not one who practices it - given the complexity, esteem, importance, and promise of the scientific enterprise, such…
awild | December 9, 2009In reading various web reactions to news that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained nearly 1 million dollars for ant research at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, it seems there's a lot of confusion about how something like ant behavior winds up getting a stimulus check. Here's an explanation.
Our starting point is the observation that stimulus has to be fast to be effective. The obvious problem is that we all know how fast goverment usually acts, and if the government were to put out a call for stimulus proposals with a full process of review and…
drorzel | December 8, 2009
News: Lincoln U. Ends Obesity Rule - Inside Higher Ed
"For the past few weeks, "Fitness for Life" may well have been the most discussed college course around. From now on, however, no one at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania will be required to take it.
The course became famous because of a requirement adopted at Lincoln for classes that entered in 2006 or later: that any students with body mass index scores above 30 show that they have lost weight or taken the course by the time they graduate. This year's seniors were the first to be covered by the requirement, attracting publicity that…
hrynyshyn | December 7, 2009William "Stoat" Connolley draws our attention to a couple of essays by Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia climate team on the role of climatologists -- and scientists in general -- in the policy-making process. I have to agree with William, it's not exactly clear just what Hulme is getting at. Some excellent points are raised, though, and the essays are worthwhile fodder for thought as the Copenhagen conference begins.
Hulme may be a fine scientist, indeed one of the best, but I have trouble following his line of reasoning on this subject in both the Wall Street Journal and the BBC…
mikethemadbiologist | December 7, 2009
This is not a needle exchange program center
(from here)
I've written before about the needle exchange legislation which is very good...in an imaginary world lacking parks, schools, and other places where children congregate. From Maine, we find out what this legislation really means:
Such a position could conceivably pave the way for additional federal money for needle exchange -- with one catch. Bill McColl is the political director at AIDS Action in Washington D.C., who's been following the needle exchange debate in Congress. "They did accept an amendment that would ban the use of…