Policy
nisbetmc | November 4, 2008
Opinion-leaders are a commonly overlooked resource by science organizations and advocates. Public communication initiatives too often ignore the special individuals across communities and social groups that can serve as vital go-betweens and information brokers, passing on messages about an issue such as climate change that can speak directly to their otherwise inattentive peers, co-workers, and friends.
In a forthcoming article at the journal Science Communication, we synthesize past research from politics, marketing, and public health, presenting a toolbox of concepts, measures, and…
evolvingthoughts | November 2, 2008
I haven't seen a lot of commentary about what it will mean if the Republicans go down or if they win the White House and Congress. From half a world away, some reflections beneath the fold.
Republicans win the White House but lose the Senate
This will reinforce the politics of smear and division used by the Republicans against Gore, Kerry and now Obama. Karl Rove's legacy will become a permanent part of the political landscape, further devaluing democracy in the US. However, if they lose the Senate, there will be a continuing deadlock between the representatives of the states and the…
gregladen | November 1, 2008The last part ... what you need to do ... mainly applies to Minnesota residents. We'll get to that.
Right now the polls are all over the place. There are five new and recent polls to consider (data all sourced through RCP).
Public Policy Polling, covering October 28th to October 30th, with a margin of error of 3.0 percent, shows Franken with 45% of the vote and Coleman with 40. That is rather astounding.
Research 2000 has a poll covering October 27 to October 29, with a margin of Error of 4%, and in this case Franken has 40 percent and Coleman 43. A statistical dead heat.
A Mason Dixon…
clock | October 30, 2008On the Road: Charlotte, North Carolina:
An observation we've heard repeated in Obama offices across America, Crandall emphasized how beneficial the contested primary had been for building the foundation for record turnout. "We had real hints of it in the primary," Crandall said. The first-time voters the campaign energized for the May 6 vote foreshadowed what North Carolina is seeing today. Crandall remembers thinking "these are NOT your typical primary voters."
Pathetic yard sign captured in Raleigh - and Q of the Day:
By far I see more Obama stickers and signs in my town, including a…
clock | October 26, 2008Note to GOP - ACORN Was Defrauded and You Know It:
1. The GOP during the 70's, 80's and 90's employed a number of methods to register voters to insure the people they were registering were indeed Republican.
One method was to go through a neighborhood and register everyone who wasn't registered. Then they would throw out all the voter registration cards of those who had registered as "Democrats" - thereby building up Republican registration.
I am not saying that Democrats were saints. But Democrats did not have to employ this method. Democrats tended to go deep into poor and minority areas…
awild | October 26, 2008
A True Fruit Fly - Tephritidae
Fruit flies are a family, Tephritidae, containing about 5,000 species of often strikingly colored insects. As the name implies, these flies are frugivores. Many, such as the mediterranean fruit fly, are agricultural pests.
Drosophila melanogaster, the insect that has been so important in genetic research, is not a true fruit fly. Drosophila is a member of the Drosophilidae, the vinegar or pomace flies. They are mostly fungivores, and their association with fruit is indirect: they eat the fungus that lives in rotting fruit. Some pointy-headed…
pharyngula | October 24, 2008Oh, the pressure. This somewhat tardy edition of the Carnival of the Liberals happens to be the last one before election day, which makes it important to bring up the issues we ought to be considering as we make our decisions about who we're going to vote for…although, if you're liberal, this is a year when the decision is remarkably easy to make. So here we go with an issues-oriented carnival.
Foreign policy: What do you think of the Bush Doctrine, the idea that we should unilaterally and preemptively attack anyone we think might be a threat? Here's a better plan: Let's be the good guys.…
drorzel | October 24, 2008Chris Mooney visited Union on Wednesday, talking to two classes (one Environmental Studies class, and one class on presidential politics), and giving an evening lecture titled "Science Escape 2008." He's an excellent speaker, so if you're looking for someone to give a talk about science and politics, you could do a whole lot worse.
I enjoyed the evening talk quite a bit, in part because it echoed a lot of things I said in my talk at the Science21 meeting last month (video, live-blogging), thus reassuring me that I'm not a lone crank on these issues. He talked about his experience with…
sheril | October 22, 2008About a year ago, we had an idea to make science more prominent on the campaign trail this election cycle: ScienceDebate2008 was born.
It wasn't long before a lot of folks took notice and the initiative grew rapidly. Eventually, the presidential candidates weighed in.
This week, ScienceDebate2008 co-hosted Innovation 2008 with the Center for Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota--a conference bringing together academics, policy makers, business leaders, scientists, educators, artists, students, and the public to discuss solutions to the major challenges…
clock | October 19, 2008Voting For Obama Even If You Believe He Was A Terrorist:
This is a person who actually believes that Obama was in a "terrorist group," and she's still backing Obama. Relatedly, a remarkable finding in the new New York Times poll: While 64% said they'd heard a lot or some about William Ayers, only nine percent cited it as an association that bothers them.
Obama Dominating Among Early Voters in Five Swing States:
What these results would seem to suggest, however, is that there are fairly massive advantages for the Democrats in enthusiasm and/or turnout operations. They imply that Obama is quite…
clock | October 18, 2008For some reason, my (rare) posts in which I make direct comparisons between Serbia and the USA (usually about politics) tend to become wildly popular (as in: spreading like wildfire on digg, redditt, stumbleupon, etc.). See, for example: Bush is Milosevic, Comparative Wingnuttery, Darwin in Serbia, More about me, The Warriors, Never Again!, Sixteen years ago today, We are now officially living in a dictatorship and When religion goes berserk! for examples of my typically inflamatory prose on the topic ;-)
Let me take a stab at another one, connected to the current US election. I'll try to…
jrosenhouse | October 14, 2008A few days ago I linked to this essay by Christopher Buckley, announcing his intention to vote for Barack Obama.
Buckley seems not to have realized that modern Republicans politics has nothing to do with arguments and ideas. It has to do with extreme stupidity and mindless hate for dissenters. National Review was so inundated with negative responses to Buckley's column, that he was effectively forced to resign. Buckley explains the situation:
I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column…
revere | October 14, 2008The fatuousness of the McCain-Palin campaign's attack on ACORN, a national organization that fights for the rights of low income citizens is matched only by its hypocrisy. McCain has been a past supporter of ACORN and McCain was a keynoter at a recent ACORN sponsored conference. McCain has no quarrel with ACORN. It is just another tactic in his desperate battle to win the election and he doesn't care who gets hurt as long as he gains. Classic McCain. Unprincipled, dishonest and dishonorable. Not new but a pattern that goes back to his youth.
For years, including years when McCain was an…
purepedantry | October 14, 2008Many scientifically-inclined voters were a bit shocked by McCain's comment criticizing Obama for supporting a "3 million dollar earmark for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago." The "overhead projector" in question was actually a top of the line piece of equipment for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and many did not consider this an earmark.
University of Chicago professor, Andrey Kravstov, responded in a comment on the NYTimes website (Hat-tip: Cosmic Variance):
The way Sen. McCain has phrased it suggests that Sen. Obama approved spending $3 million on an old-fashioned…
tfk | October 13, 2008On Saturday, Rep. John Lewis responded to the wave of violent rhetoric sweeping through McCain/Palin rallies:
"As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing today reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.
"During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state…
clock | October 11, 2008Hmmm, I have not done one of these in a few weeks, so if you depend on me for your political information, check under the fold:
The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama:
From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.
The Fraud Of Fraud:
It looks right now as if the election might not be…
scientificactivist | October 8, 2008When I think back to the presidential debate last night, one moment stands out in my mind more than any other. And, no, it wasn't McCain calling Obama "that one". It was the discussion following Tom Brokaw's question "Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?"
Health care came up several times throughout the debate, but here I thought the answers were most telling. This is in spite of the fact that I took issue with the way the question was phrased. Specifically, I felt that the third choice ("responsibility") was unnecessary and just gave the candidates an easy…
cmooney | October 8, 2008I've now been writing for this website since October of 2007, and have delighted to watch it mature into one of the top sites for serious science policy analysis on the web. To that end, my one year anniversary column, entitled "A Year's Worth of Thinking About Science Policy," enumerates five of the recurrent themes that have emerged from the site:
1. We need a new administration that takes science much more seriously across the board--that listens to scientists, that follows recommendations and wants to restore integrity to science in the federal government.
2. We need a similar…
gregladen | October 7, 2008The Science Museum of Minnesota recently developed an exhibit called "Race: Are we so different?" This exhibit is now at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and will be in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, Kalamazoo, Boston and Washington DC between now and June 2011.
If you get a chance, go see it.
In the meantime, a review of this exhibit has just been published in the current issue of Museum Anthropology, authored by Mischa Penn, Gil Tostevin, and yours truly, Greg Laden.
As one of the authors, it is obvious to me that this paper is brilliant! But I…
tfk | October 6, 2008
As ThinkProgress points out, John McCain tried to stop the government from prosecuting domestic terrorists:
McCain's terrorism problem dates back to the early 1990s, when he sided with right-wing domestic terrorists and voted against tough new legislation cracking down on a wave of anti-choice domestic terrorism targeting women who visited abortion clinics, their doctors, and clinic staff.
In both 1993 and 1994, McCain voted against the anti-terrorism measure. On each occasion, McCain was one of thirty radical anti-choice Senators to oppose the bill Fortunately, despite McCain's opposition…