Policy
gregladen | June 23, 2008NASA's JPL has a new web site which focuses on surface conditions on one specific planet: The Earth.
It has a Sea Level Viewer which is basically a very fancy menu for a number of multi-media presentations, and a list of current or proposed missions. I am not overly impressed with this, but it may be a good resource for the kiddies.
Much more interesting, and in fact, quite impressive, is the "Climate Time Machine" ...
This shows ice melting, sea level change, CO2 emissions, and average global temperature. The CO2 emissions is fascinating, because CO2 emissions are an assay of…
scientificactivist | June 23, 2008I've been pretty open here about my support of Barack Obama's bid for the presidency, but one issue I certainly disagree with him on is his support of corn ethanol subsidies. Unfortunately, it looks like that this is one issue he's unlikely to improve on, as The New York Times reports today that ties to the corn ethanol industry permeate the highest levels of the Obama campaign:
Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests. But like any other politician, he has powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to domestic…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2008Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. St. Martin's Press, 1987.
There are a few books on my shelf that I can read any given number of times without being bored or impatient. One of these is And the Band Played On, a painstaking work of journalism that never feels laborious in the reading -- despite being in excess of 600 pages.
Randy Shilts, who was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on AIDS in the early 1980s, assembled an intricate chronological telling of the early unfolding of the AIDS epidemic, from the first glimmerings of…
bcohen | June 18, 2008Part 1 | Part 2
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about a most unique and forceful book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2007), with its author D. Graham Burnett. He is associate professor of history at Princeton University.
Professor Burnett is the author of three previous books, Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago University Press, 2000), A Trial by Jury (Knopf, 2001), and Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (American Philosophical…
nisbetmc | June 15, 2008Next week, I will be teaming up with Chris Mooney at Cal Tech for an evening lecture followed by a day long science communication seminar for the university's graduate students and post-docs. Details are below along with the suggested reading list.
Speaking Science Boot Camp
Matthew C. Nisbet & Chris Mooney
Over the past several years, the seemingly never-ending controversies over evolution, embryonic stem cell research, global climate change, and many other topics have led to a troubling revelation. Scientific knowledge, alone, does not always suffice when it comes to winning political…
tqa | June 8, 2008
Senator John McCain, it appears, is not a fan of William Jennings Bryan. In a recent interview with USA Today, the Republican Party's nominee for President compared the three-time Democratic nominee for president from the turn of the last century to the Party's current nominee:
"I believe that people are interested very much in substance," McCain said. "If it was simply style, William Jennings Bryan would have been president." (Bryan, a noted orator, lost three presidential elections as the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900 and 1908.)
It would be easy for me to dismiss McCain's dislike of…
scientificactivist | June 4, 2008Last night was a historic night, with Barack Obama finally effectively clinching the Democratic nomination by surpassing the "magic number" of required delegates. Barring any last-minute fight over delegate rules from Hillary Clinton's campaign (something that I think is not likely to happen), Barack Obama in the Democrats' nominee. Of course, we knew from the beginning that 2008 was going to be a trailblazing election--we just didn't know which way it would swing. Although it's been pretty clear since Obama's string of victories in February that he would eventually be the nominee, now it'…
gregladen | June 3, 2008AP has called the race. They have used 11 delegates expected today to be awarded to Obama from primaries, which is a little premature in my view (I mean, why not wait until after the election like we are supposed to). It also includes, and this is very interesting. 16 super delegates that have told AP they are going to throw their lot in with Obama but who have not yet done so. The existence of a bunch of such super delegates was heavily hinted at by various media mucky mucks over the last couple of days.
The following is from the AP report. My Snark added where appropriate (according…
tfk | June 2, 2008Neil Sinhababu writes:
It's good to see Nancy Pelosi get some positive coverage. I wish the article went into more detail on what's probably the grandest achievement of her political career to date -- holding the Democratic caucus together to destroy Bush's Social Security Privatization initiative in 2005.
Of the 200+ Democrats in the House, only one defected to Bush's side. Without bipartisan cover on an issue where Democrats have historically had the most credibility, and without enough Democratic support to make up for differences within the GOP caucus on how to make the finances work out…
laelaps | June 2, 2008
Who knew wearing paisley would be so controversial? A screen-grab of Rachel Ray from the Dunkin' Donuts commercial that's causing such a fuss amongst some conservatives.
I don't often write about politics on this blog (at least politics not associated with science policy & education), but I'll make an exception in this case. TV personality Rachel Ray recently did a commercial for Dunkin' Donuts in which she wears a black & white fringed paisley scarf. It reminds me of a scarf that was tied around the neck of a stuffed peccary my mother once bought at a Texas airport, but I fail to…
razib | May 28, 2008Five years ago Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek's International Edition editor, splashed onto the public intellectual scene with The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. It's somewhat heterodox, at least for the mainstream, observation that liberal democracy is more than simple majoritarianism, earned him some notoriety. Enough so that he could receive a fawning profile in New York Magazine. But while five years ago Fareed promoted some rather academically well known but transgressive ideas about the necessity for institutional, economic and cultural supports for a…
mikethemadbiologist | May 26, 2008Chris Mooney comments on the recent attempt by movement conservatives to rebut the concept of a Republican War on Science:
A new wave of conservative science punditry--epitomized by an essay by Yuval Levin in The New Atlantis entitled "Science and the Left," which was itself recently publicized by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in an oped in the Washington Post--demonstrably lacks such candor. Setting out to debunk the idea that there really is a "war on science" coming from the right, these writers don't bother engaging on the facts of the case at all. They don't attempt to show…
mikethemadbiologist | May 18, 2008Last week, Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel from 2001-2005, came out in support of Sen. Obama. In light of the Republican propaganda about how Obama would be 'anti-Israel' or some other hooey, it's worth noting why Kurtzer supports Obama (italics mine):
We have one candidate who is prepared to do diplomacy. Only one candidate.
We have two candidates who have told us all the countries they don't want to talk to. They don't want to talk to Iran because Iran has a really awful government. And Iran does have a really awful government. And Iran is pursuing policies that are not on…
clock | May 15, 2008My regular readers are probably aware that the topic of adolescent sleep and the issue of starting times of schools are some of my favourite subjects for a variety of reasons: I am a chronobiologist, I am an extreme "owl" (hence the name of this blog), I am a parent of developing extreme "owls", I have a particular distaste for Puritanical equation of sleep with laziness which always raises its ugly head in discussions of adolescent sleep, and much of my own research is somewhat related to this topic (see the bottom of this post for Related Posts).
So, I was particularly pleased when Jessica…
nisbetmc | May 14, 2008
The irony of the 2008 presidential race is that this time around, the Democratic nominee is by far the more religiously devout candidate, promoting a born again language and professed faith. In a match up with John McCain, it's Barack Obama who can genuinely speak the language of evangelicals, softening some of the Democratic party's "God problem."
Indeed, news reports are speculating that many young Evangelical voters might break for Obama in the general election, a proposition that fits with some of the recent polling data that I have spotlighted at this blog.
The Obama campaign is already…
revere | May 14, 2008For all you climate change deniers out there dismayed at John McSame's apparent embrace of global warming, you have nothing to fear:
John McCain had the eager press lined up on this one for weeks. He was going to take a stand and differentiate himself from Bush by offering his solution to climate change. And today was the momentous day. McCain made his speech and no less than the New York Times dutifully trotted out an article titled McCain Differs With Bush on Climate Change. (Devilstower at Daily Kos)
The 71% of the electorate thinks the globe is warming and of these, human activity is…
sciencewoman | May 13, 2008A cool feature of ISEF is the science star power. This afternoon the judges were treated to a panel full of science luminaries: Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Robert Curl, Rich Roberts, Dudley Herschbach, H. Robert Horvitz, and Leon Lederman. I walked in a few minutes late, so I didn't catch the introductions, but the moderators voice sounded so familiar. At the end of the session, I discovered the reason...our panel was moderated by Joe Palca, from Science Friday. The session had an open microphone on the floor for questions from the audience. Both the questions and answers were incredibly thought-…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2008My home municipality of Nacka is governed by a coalition of right-wing parties. (This, in Sweden, means that our local politics are somewhat to the left [!] of the US Democratic Party.) Aard regular Lennart Nilsson is the chairman of the Nacka section of the Liberal Party, Folkpartiet. I just received a fresh copy of the local newspaper, Nacka Värmdö Posten, whose main front-page headline reads "Folkpartiet politician: 'The Christian Democrats have Medieval moral views'". Interestingly, this is one of the governing coalition's members criticising another. And who is the Christian-bashing…
mikethemadbiologist | May 11, 2008Tristero correctly points out those churches that are concerned that they will lose their tax exempt status have a solution to their problems:
...this is a lie because the reverend knows very well that the IRS is not banning him from endorsing a candidate. He is quite free to do so. Likewise, his church is also free to endorse whoever they want to.
All they need to do - and it's no big deal, really, unless the reverend and his church worship filthy mammon above all - is to forgo tax-exempt status...
Where I kind of disagree with Tristero is with this:
Maybe, but it is an indication of how…
terrasig | May 10, 2008Effective science communication and science advocacy in the public arena has been much discussed in the science blogosphere. But is ranting on science and medical blogs the most effective way to promote science, especially in the United States?
I've had some discussions with other scientists, including blog colleague PhysioProf, who submit that the best way for scientists to advocate for science policy is to become politicians themselves. To this end, I read with great interest this morning of an AP story written last night by Seth Borenstein, "A Crash Course in True Political Science":…