Policy
mixingmemory | March 24, 2008It would be a horrible cliché to begin a post about the reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory with a Proust quote, so instead I'll begin with something only slightly less cliché: beginning something about memory by talking about my own experience. You see, I'm southern, as anyone who's ever heard me pronounce the words "pen" and "pin" exactly the same, or refer to any soft drink as a "coke," can attest. In the south, it's not uncommon to find people sitting around a grill, or a kitchen table, or pretty much anything you can sit around, participating in what might be described as…
purepedantry | March 21, 2008I have been thinking a lot lately about the problem of expertise. By the problem of expertise, I mean how people who know better should relate to those who don't. Whether you are a physician or a physicist, this issue comes up a lot. People want the opinions of educated people -- pundits of various stripes proliferate -- but they do not always follow those opinions in their personal lives. Further, nearly every controversial scientific issue today involves some element of the knowers trying to impose their views on the know-nothings (or at least those who know significantly less). How…
thusspakezuska | March 17, 2008You just have to read Non Sequitur today. It's a great strip in general but I really liked today's comic for reasons that will be obvious to you.
Lab Cat has announced a Fortnight-long Food Fest.
In fact I am so excited about food and my "F" that I am having a food fest for the next two weeks. I am not going to promise that I will only post about food*, but I am going to try to center my blog around food science, food, molecular gastronomy. If you want to join in my Fortnight-long Food Fest, post a link in the comments.
That's Lab Cat's comments, not mine, of course.
The Science Debate…
mikethemadbiologist | March 12, 2008Things look better on the FISA front: the Democrats, in an uncharacteristic fit of intelligence, agreed to compromise by attaching provisions that allow telecommunications companies to present evidence to a FISA court that they did not break the law even if the president classifies the information, thereby getting around the argument that they need retroactive immunity because they can't defend themselves in court.
Amazingly, the Democrats appear to have gotten the policy and the politics right on this. That being said, the 'Bush Dog' Democrats (who roll over and let Bush rub their tummies…
bcohen | March 11, 2008Part 1 | Part 2
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The World's Fair is proud to discuss British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2007) with its author, Jan Golinski of the University of New Hampshire. Golinski is a Professor of History and Humanities, the Chair of the Department of History at UNH, and a leader in the field of the history of science.
Golinski's work has become influential and well-respected in the history of science and science studies in the past decade-and-a-half, likely because of a rare match between graceful writing style and rigorous theoretical grounding.…
purepedantry | March 5, 2008Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has launched a broadside at NYTimes Science Blogger John Tierney (also here) over what he (Quiggin) considers politicization of science:
One of the big problems with talking about what Chris Mooney has called The Republican War on Science is that, on the Republican side, the case against science is rarely laid out explicitly. On a whole range of issues (evolution, passive smoking, climate change, the breast-cancer abortion link, CFCs and the ozone layer and so on) Republicans attack scientists, reject the conclusions of mainstream science and promote…
tfk | March 3, 2008I've said it before, and will keep saying it until it becomes some sort of meme: Like all great indie acts, John McCain's early work was better.
There was a time when McCain at least put on a good show, presenting himself as an opponent of the corrosive effects of money on politics, and working to close loopholes. He was also slightly saner than other Republicans on global warming, though that hasn't translated to policy. And, while he shares their atrocious opposition to a woman's right to control her own body, he was also willing to denounce Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of…
gregladen | March 3, 2008On one hand, we have the Huckabee factor ... Huckabee's draw on hard right voters in tomorrows primary may lead anti-evolutionists to victory. On the other hand, we have the Obama factor ... Obama's draw on moderate republicans may lead to a cleansing of pernicious liberal elements from the Republican party.
Hilary Hylton has an interesting and informative piece in, of all places, Time, about tomorrow's events in Texas. You need to know this.
Texas has a state-wide school board. This means that when it comes to textbook adoption, Texas is the largest single customer, and thus,…
mikethemadbiologist | March 3, 2008In the most recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, there is a perspective piece by Sara Rosenbaum that bluntly describes how the Bush Administration's opposition to S-CHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) is based on ideology and not economic cost (italics mine):
Why would the President veto bipartisan legislation that does precisely what he insisted on -- namely, aggressively enroll the poorest children? One might blame the poisonous atmosphere that pervades Washington these days, but other important social policy reforms have managed to get through.
One answer…
mikethemadbiologist | February 28, 2008
I shall destroy all blogs!! I look like this. Really.
Over at Bayblab, there's a jeremiad about how we at ScienceBlogs are destroying science blogging. We're also money grubbing whores--because that $2-4 a day goes really far. I don't get paid that little at my day job.
Even back at the old site, where 300 hits was a really good day, I've never let site hits dictate what I write about, probably to the chagrin to Our Benevolent Seed Overlords (and site hit total). I've always written about politics. Why? Because it matters. If you think scientific research happens in an apolitical…
jjacquet | February 27, 2008Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
As this Wall Street Journal piece points out, Rep. Wayne Gilchrest's primary loss two weeks ago accelerated the decline of another endangered species: the Moderate Republican.
Organizations like the Club for Growth, which raised and spent over $1 million for Gilchrest's primary opponent, have aggressively targeted what they refer to as "RINO's" (Republicans In Name Only), with the explicit goal being to run them out of the party.
The result is an increasingly uni-polar Republican party that brooks no dissent from party orthodoxy, rather…
scientificactivist | February 25, 2008It's difficult to find too many substantive policy differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (especially considering the much larger gulf that exists between them and the Republican candidates), but one area that's brought up time and time again is health care. In light of this, it's worth taking a look at how much the two agree and disagree here, especially since health care policy is purportedly one of Clinton's selling points.
To look at the actual plans from each of the candidates, you can click here for Obama's and here for Clinton's. The most thorough--but still accessible…
goodmath | February 21, 2008 Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet
Stemwedel, our resident ethicist, has been writing about academic
dishonesty and how professional researchers should respond to it.
I've been on the receiving end of dishonesty on three occasions -
ranging from a trivial case (arguably not dishonest at all) to the profound.
I'll describe my three experiences, along with how I did respond to them, and how I could have responded to them. Unfortunately, my experience isn't very
encouraging, and most of my advice comes down to: always, always keep a paper trail: it can't hurt, but don't count on…
mikethemadbiologist | February 20, 2008By way of maha (and also Roger Ailes the Good), I came across this screed from the conservative National Review's website (italics mine):
... Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City--a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but…
oracknows | February 19, 2008In response to my post yesterday castigating J. B. Handley of Generation Rescue for hypocritically accusing the American Academy of Pediatrics of "manipulating the media" when manipulating the media is Generation Rescue's raison d'être, Mike the Mad Biologist turned me on to a rather fascinating article in the New York Times by its Public Editor Clark Hoyt entitled The Doctors Are In. The Jury Is Out. It discusses a topic very near and dear to my heart, namely how newspapers report scientific or medical controversies, specifically, how the NYT covers controversies in which one side is the…
nisbetmc | February 18, 2008At the Science Friday broadcast from AAAS (audio), there was a focus during the discussion on the necessary collaboration between science and religion in solving societal problems. Below is from the transcript. First the audience question and then answers from Francesca Grifo, Union of Concerned Scientists; James McCarthy, president elect of AAAS; and David Goldston of Harvard University. From the transcript:
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I'm really very interested in asking your panelists - the great conversation here at the - perhaps talk about the relationship between science, religion, moral…
tqa | February 18, 2008
Suppose that you are taking a walk through the hills above a town, and you reach the foot of a dam. There's a crack in the dam, and it's getting wider. You run back down to the town, and you knock on doors, and you yell and make a fuss, and you tell everyone that the dam is breaking. They thank you for the news, and go back to bed. What do you do next? Do you grab some tools and do what you can to fix the dam, or do you turn and walk away?
Strangely, a number of people (including ScienceBlogger Matt Nisbet) seem to think that the role of the scientific community in those circumstances…
sheril | February 16, 2008Many said it would never happen so call February 16, 2008 'historic' because there's been a science debate here in Boston at AAAS (the largest science conference on the planet) between the presidential campaigns!
With a day's notice, conference organizers invited representatives from all the candidates in both parties to come to a session moderated by Claudia Dreifus of the NYTimes. The Clinton and Obama camps took the invitation very seriously demonstrating they not only care, but indeed, they want to be engaged in discussing the significance of science and technology on the campaign trail…
hrynyshyn | February 11, 2008The past few days have seen wild thermometer swings in my neck of the Blue Ridge woods. Overnight lows are hitting a few degrees below freezing and by the mid afternoon it's almost room temperature. Measuring all that in Fahrenheit only makes more confusing. What this country really needs, says this Canadian ex-pat, is a presidential candidate who thinks in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit....
OK. Not really. I'm talking metaphorically. But for me there really is a connection between American resistance to the metric system and the absence of anything more than lip service paid during this…
tsmith | February 8, 2008
The fever hit suddenly in the form of a piercing headache and painful sensitivity to light, like looking into a white sun. At that point, the patient could still hope that it was not yellow fever, maybe just a headache from the heat. But the pain worsened, crippling movement and burning the skin. The fever rose to 104, maybe 105 degrees, and bones felt as though they had been cracked. The kidneys stopped functioning, poisoning the body. Abdominal cramps began in the final days of illness as the patient vomited black blood brought on by internal hemorrhaging. The victim became a palate…