Policy
bcohen | August 24, 2009Part 1 (below) | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), with its author Julie Sze. Sze is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis, an environmental justice scholar, and the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project at the John Muir Institute for the Environment.
Noxious New York "analyzes the culture, politics, and history of environmental justice activism in New York City within the…
emjohnson | August 18, 2009As I've been preparing my formal review of Unscientific America I've been struck by the question: who was this book intended for? Clearly it was a critique of science communicators to be sure (more on that later) but as I realized in going through my notes, Mooney and Kirshenbaum's strongest sections are those discussing the intersection between science and politics. This should have been perfectly obvious before even reading the book as it is just that intersection which is the focus of their long running blog (first here at ScienceBlogs and now at Discover).
Chapters 5 and 6 of their…
tfk | August 15, 2009Of the assembled luminaries of the science/science policy world, guess who dropped the f-bomb?
And guess who was quoting RFK to do that, so it's totally cool?
Anyway, shorter panel: You don't have to be a scientist to defend science, and you do need to get involved. Schools matter, and politicians need to hear from you from the White House to the school house.
Many thanks to the packed room for a great session, with great questions and provocative interactions between the panel and the audience. I saw Kevin Drum, Amanda Marcotte, and Congressman Brad Miller in the audience, to name just a…
cortex | August 14, 2009I finally got the internet setup in my new apartment - I won't bore you with my customer service complaints - and I've never been so delighted to waste time on the web. At first, my information vacation was lovely, charming, an experiment in vintage living. It was like traveling back in time to 1994 - I'd wake up, buy an actual newspaper, and leisurely sip my coffee. No blogs, no twitter, no ESPN.com. I'm not going to lie and pretend that, once freed from the yoke of constant email updates, I suddenly found myself reading Tolstoy for hours on end - instead, I mostly watched more mediocre…
tqa | August 14, 2009
If you're holding out any hope that Harry Reid might actually be concealing - deep, deep down - an untapped well of leadership potential, it's probably because you haven't seen this story yet:
The Senate Finance Committee will drop a controversial provision on consultations for end-of-life care from its proposed healthcare bill, its top Republican member said Thursday.
The committee, which has worked on putting together a bipartisan healthcare reform bill, will drop the controversial provision after it was derided by conservatives as "death panels" to encourage euthanasia.
"On the Finance…
tfk | August 14, 2009Bill Clinton spoke to the Netroots Nation conference last night. It's an inspired speech, done without notes and with extemporaneous digressions based on a heckler's call.
Before he spoke, a range of Netroots Nation heroes spoke, including my hero in Congress: Brad Miller.
Miller has been awesome for blogger, for sciencebloggers in particular, and for science more generally. He's met with the attendees at ScienceOnline in past years, and has attended this conference as a panelist and a blogger for several years. Last year, heading to a Q&A with Nancy Pelosi, we were on the elevator…
mikethemadbiologist | August 7, 2009
'Her America' is disappearing. Supposedly, this is a bad thing.
(Doug Mills/New York Times)
TPM reports the following from a town meeting about healthcare in Arkansas:
The attendees' overall theme was that their way of life was being destroyed...
"At this point in my life, I have never seen my America turned into what it has turned into, and I want my America back," said one woman, on the verge of tears. "And I don't think the Representatives and Senators are gonna be able to do it. I'm scared!"
Her America. Not our America (of course, were she to use "our America", I suspect she wouldn't…
ejohnson | August 4, 2009Below, Lambros Malafouris responds to the question:
The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social issues, such as poverty, conflict, financial crises, etc. On what specific issue/problem do you feel we need to bring the scientific lens to bear?
I would say that more important than choosing one issue/problem over another is probably to emphasize and reinforce the important role that science in general can play, and indeed it has been playing, when offered the opportunity and given the necessary resources…
emjohnson | July 30, 2009
Artist Ricardo Cortes has a beautiful exhibition of his work in the current edition of Vanity Fair entitled Sketches of the Drug Czars. In his series he points out the steps that have led our country through the most expensive (and least effective) domestic policy in history.
Starting with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, Cortes describes the first federal restrictions on "medicines-gone-wild" such as morphine and cocaine (sorry Coca Cola) followed by the criminalization of marijuana in 1937, coincidentally taking place just a few years after the prohibition of alcohol was being…
drorzel | July 30, 2009
The missing research program for space colonization -- KarlSchroeder.com
"No amount of data about how the human body reacts to zero-G is going to answer the important question, which is: how does the human body react to extended periods under fractional gravity--like the moon's 1/6 G or Mars's .38 G? If there's a potential show-stopper to colonizing other worlds, it's going to be how our physiology responds to fractional gravity, not zero gravity."
(tags: space science medicine blogs physics planets technology)
...My heart's in Accra » Fun and games with human misery
"The best $50…
razib | July 27, 2009
If you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs you will have already stumbled upon several reviews of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future. Janet Stemwedel of Ethnics & Science probably has the most thorough reviews, while P. Z. Myers' 'exchange' with the authors, Sheril Kirshenbaum & Chris Mooney, had the most 'spirit.' Chard Orzel of Uncertain Principles put up a short & sweet positive impression which covers the major points in Unscientific America very well, as well as the overall thrust of the book.
Of course as Chad noted If you read Sheril…
emjohnson | July 26, 2009
In the 1960s military strategists promoted the "domino theory" as a rationale for why the United States needed to intervene in what later turned out to be a Vietnamese civil war. The logic was that, as communist influence extended from Russian and China, every country that fell before the "Reds" would perpetuate yet another country going the same direction. However, as Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert McNamara, stated in his mea culpa documentary, The Fog of War, their logic was based on an erroneous foundation:
We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not what they saw it as…
mikethemadbiologist | July 26, 2009Katrina vanden Heuvel makes a good point about some bad framing in the healthcare debate--the 'centrists' aren't in the center at all:
Even a good regional paper like Louisville's Courier-Journal-- in rightly blasting the Blue Dogs as "deplorable" for being "unable to muster the spine to pay for health care reform with even so innocuous a measure as higher taxes on the richest 1 percent of Americans"--calls them "centrist".
The danger is that promoting the view that these conservative Democrats are somehow at the center of our politics plays into the hands of those who would like to…
mikethemadbiologist | July 25, 2009There are times I agree with this post by Ian Welsh:
My biggest weakness this year in doing analysis has been hope. I have let hope that the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress will do the right thing, and that they aren't corrupt and incompetent, get in the way of clear thinking. Enough. Hope isn't a plan, and hope isn't policy. Hope without good policy is a con-job.
There hasn't been a good, major, bill come out of this Congress this year. They have all been fatally compromised, from the stimulus bill (larded up with useless tax cuts and without necessary State relief) to…
mikethemadbiologist | July 22, 2009In an earlier post (with the strikethrough eliminated--weird, it didn't show up when I looked at the preview; it's been fixed), I mentioned that it was hard to determine what Mooney and Kirshenbaum want scientists to actually communicate. One commenter pulled this from Unscientific America:
After all, America doesn't merely need non-scientists to better understand the details of science, or the nature of the scientific method: we need them to see why science matters in their lives and careers whether they're working in politics, the media, the corporate world, or some other sector.
That's it…
nisbetmc | July 21, 2009As I noted last week, the Pew survey of scientists finds that more than 50% self-identify as liberals compared to just 20% of the public.
Which then leads to the question: what role does ideology play in shaping scientists' policy preferences relative to science, especially in those areas outside of their specialty? Or on those issues where there are high levels of uncertainty about risks, benefits, and trade-offs? Heuristic decision-making is common in politics and policymaking, are scientists as a group any different?
Put another way, in responding to the Pew findings, several commentators…
catdynamics | July 20, 2009"My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?"
B.B.
I had to look something up on nasa.gov earlier today, and was met with the grainy footage of an astronaut descending the ladder to the lunar surface, exactly 40 years ago today as I start typing this, thanks to the "flash" script that grabbed my browser as I entered the site.
I hadn't forgotten, just not…
dsalo | July 19, 2009Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. MIT Press, 2007. Worldcat page, Powell's page (no, I get no kickback).
This calm, clear volume provides a thorough grounding in the practices of academic researchers around their publications and their data, and how the Internet is—and in many cases, isn't—changing those practices.
Copiously researched, accurate, and logically presented, the book starts with a 30,000-foot overview of the current situation, then swoops through technology, law and policy, the existing scholarly-communication…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2009
This finishes the very silly part of the post
With Sarah Palin's unconventional resignation, there's been a lot of discussion of what Sarah Palin means, and why she has such appeal for a subset of Americans. While people have described Palin as engaging in identity politics, but that sells identity politics short. Palin along with the proto-movement surrounding her--Palinism--practices what could be call 'politics of the blood.' It's derived from Giovanni Gentile's description of fascism: "We think with our blood."*See Godwin disclaimer below In Palin's case, it's an emotional appeal to…
drorzel | July 16, 2009The most unfortunate thing about the furor over Unscientific America is that the vast majority of the shouting concerns a relatively small portion of the actual argument of the book. Far too much attention is being spent on the question of whether Chris and Sheril are fair to Myers and Dawkins, and not nearly enough is spent on the (to my mind more important) sections about political and media culture. Which is a shame, because unlike most bloggers, they make some fairly concrete suggestions about what ought to be done to address the problems they describe.
In particular, they make a fairly…