Policy
stoat | October 6, 2007Broon bottles it says the BBC. Well no, they put it more politely: "Gordon Brown has said he will not call a general election this autumn". Jolly good, all the politico-types can go back to sleep again. Of course, the true Brown Bottle (scroll to the bottom) was in Viz, but it proven hard to find a picture online.
From the point of view of the smaller parties (Green :-) this is a relief and will make my personal autumn a bit easier. But where does it leave Brown?
Looking fairly stupid says Beeb blogoid, which is what I thought. As far as I can tell Broon only talked about the election to…
catdynamics | October 4, 2007Fifty years ago today, the first tiny step was taken off planet.
We may be more introspective nowadays, but we sure know how to Have Fun 2.0
Here is a selection of finds from the blogosphere, trawled up over the last few weeks. Some of these were sent in, some I picked as good examples of blog posts on physical science or related issues in the last month or so.
Sputnik!
The launch of Sputnik, fifty years ago today, inspired a generation of scientists and spurred a renaissance in science, education and technological development.
Academia:
Quantum Pontiff celebrates a great historical event…
stoat | October 4, 2007Another study weighing in against biofuels, this time by Nobel Prize winning Paul Crutzen. Yes, I said that just to wind up Maribo - read his take. I've long been skeptical (septical?) of the biofuels stuff, especially corn-based ethanol, which looks more like pork for farmers than a sensible policy. On the conventional view, CBE is at best marginally useful in reducing CO2 emissions (but in which case the same money would be far better off spent elsewhere) or actually harmful. In a sense, this doesn't matter, because its driven by pork barrel politics not science, but I suppose we can hope…
nisbetmc | October 4, 2007
Tomorrow at the University of Washington I will be speaking to the Department of Communication in the morning and then joined in the evening by Chris Mooney to deliver our Speaking Science 2.0 lecture. In the afternoon, we will also be hosting a discussion with graduate students on the topic of "When Science Turns Political..."
The events are sponsored by the Forum on Science, Ethics, and Policy (FOSEP) and the Pacific Institute. The evening talk at the Pacific Science Center, free and open to the public, starts at 7pm (details on the full day's events).
Using the anniversary of Sputnik as…
jjacquet | September 25, 2007Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
For those of us who follow the world of ocean politics (and politics generally), Leon Panetta is the closest thing we have to a rock star. Panetta served as the chairman of the Pew Oceans Commission, and prior to that was President Clinton's Chief of Staff, head of the Office of Management & Budget, and a seven-term Congressman from Sam Farr's current district (Monterey/Santa Cruz). He was the guy who brought all the players together to create the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and was a major force in creating the still-standing…
sheril | September 24, 2007
Somehow when it comes to elections, lots of folks seem to get confused into thinking they're watching ESPN. Sure it's fun to feel part of a victory, but what matters politically far outweighs any championship ring, cup, or a trip to Disneyworld - even if the media would have you believe otherwise during Superbowl season. So while it's easy rally around one side depending on where you fall in the old color scheme of things, the truth is that politics aren't so black, Blue, right, white, Red, or left. These kind of delineations are enough to make anyone dizzy.
The myriad of vital issues at…
mikethemadbiologist | September 22, 2007A follow up to yesterday's blast from the past:
Ever since Majikthise, Pandagon, and Alternet linked to my post about Yglesias, my sitemeter hit-counter thingee has blown a gasket (and, Majikthise, um, thanks for the very kind words, but low expectations are much easier to live with...). Anyway, it's been interesting to read what other people think about the post.
One general angle I've noticed is that many commenters are focusing on the politics of evolution. Granted, this post was picked up largely by political websites, so this is to be expected. Regarding the politics, I'm not naive: I…
jrosenhouse | September 20, 2007I've just started reading Jonathan Chait's new book The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics.
One of the more remarkable developments in the last twenty-five years of American politics is the takeover of the Republican party by the lunacy of supply-side economics. Chait explains how a view of the economic world that is absurd on its face (that the behavior of a large, complex economy can be predicted solely on the basis of marginal tax rates) and has been proven to be false over and over again (for example, the uniform, and uniformly…
mikethemadbiologist | September 20, 2007...most good science reporters like science. Most political reporters don't like governance.
One of the important things about going to scientific conferences for scientists is 'catching up.' While part of that is genuine social interaction with friends (when else are you going to see friends from graduate school who now have jobs on the opposite coast?), there's also a lot of gossipy-type information exchange: who has a new job, what jobs are coming open, difficulties in getting tenure or funding, and so on. Sometimes, there's even juicy gossip that is utterly personal (not that one…
stoat | September 18, 2007Yes, thats right, all the power plants will be in Northern Ireland, ha ha. Anyway Huhne plans zero-carbon Britain sez the grauniad. Interesting. The policy paper is here, reassuringly titled "final". Nice to see a major party advocating this stuff.
There are lots of bits in there, but the bit I was trying to source was "Setting a target for 30 per cent of the UK's electricity to come from clean, noncarbon emitting sources by 2020, rising to 100 per cent by 2050" ("clean" in this context means not-nuclear). Thats just 'lectric, but they also say they "would also set targets for increasing the…
cmooney | September 18, 2007Drum roll please...
We are now officially able to announce that Andrew Binder, a graduate student in life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has won our "Crash the Intersection" banner contest.
Andrew's successful banner--which I've taken to calling the Sign & Cross-Genes--can be viewed at the top of the page, or here. You'll notice that we're still having technical difficulties in putting it up, though these should soon subside. Meanwhile, Andrew's various promised goodies are wending their way to Madison. (Cool town, by the way.)
We will display the banner…
denialism | September 17, 2007Let's keep this ball rolling. On Friday we started talking about the importance of the OTA
It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of…
thusspakezuska | September 12, 2007There's a wonderful three-part interview with Shobita Parthasarathy, author of Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care , over at The World's Fair. The interview is broken up into three parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Here's an excerpt from Part 1 to get your mouth watering:
WF: What's your argument?
SP: I argue that the influence of national context is felt far beyond public policy and political debate to the level of practice, fundamentally influencing human genome science and technology. Through a comparison of how genetic testing…
nisbetmc | September 12, 2007Gallup has released a cross-national polling analysis that challenges the conclusion that Muslim extremism is at the heart of support for terrorism, that terrorism derives from a rejection of Western values and modernity, and that the solution is to replace Muslim faith with a Western secular view. From the report:
To begin to understand the danger of this diagnosis, we must first understand the factors that do and do not drive sympathy for violence. As a starting point, Muslims do not hold a monopoly on extremist views. While 6% of Americans think attacks in which civilians are targets are "…
bcohen | September 10, 2007Part 1 | 2 | 3
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The World's Fair sits down with Shobita Parthasarathy, author of Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (MIT Press, 2007), Assistant Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Co-Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the University of Michigan.
Shobita Parthasarathy's research focuses on the comparative politics of science and technology in the United States and abroad, with a focus on issues related to genetics and biotechnology. She is particularly interested in…
clock | September 6, 2007When Klaus-Martin Schulte attacked Naomi Orestes and she responded, there was quite a lot of blosopheric response to it. If you look no further than scienceblogs.com, there were no less than eight direct responses (and some lively comments as well): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight.
What I was unaware of until today is an earlier article in Guardian by Jonathan Wolff about an outsider's look at the "controversy" around her 2004 Science paper. I saw it first on this post by Kaitlin Thaney (who also writes on the Science Commons blog), which links back to a post by Maxine…
revere | September 2, 2007Politics aside, Mrs. R. and I are real Americans in one important way. We like to shop. Not shop as in "buy." We couldn't afford that. Shop as in entertainment. We like each other's company (we've had many years to get used to it), so when we go to a new place we wander in and out of shops, looking at things. Maybe not the most uplifting of pursuits -- better we should be going to museums, I suppose -- but we like it. So a new study by The Nielsen Company (TV ratings) piqued our interest. Essentially it wanted to know what went into brand loyalty and why that loyalty seemed to be more…
sb admin | August 30, 2007by Celeste MonfortonÂ
Max Follmer of The Huffington Post reports that MSHA has rebuffed a request from the Crandall Canyon families to designate the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to serve as their representative during MSHA's formal accident investigation.Â
"In a statement e-mailed to The Huffington Post, MSHA spokesman Dirk Fillpot defended the agency's actions, saying federal officials have spent 'untold hours' briefing the families of the missing miners. We are disappointed that the UMWA is trying to use a law enforcement investigation for its own purposes."
Hmmm. Where…
clock | August 28, 2007Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma got out in paperback today, so if you have not read it yet, now is the time.
Also, in his mailing-list letter, Pollan announces that he has "...just completed a new book, a short manifesto about diet and health called "In Defense of Food." It's scheduled to be published January 1."
On the Farm Bill, currently going through the Congress, he writes:
The House Bill was a disappointment in many ways, leaving the current subsidy system undisturbed, though there are a handful of creative provisions tucked into it regarding school lunch and local food…
bcohen | August 28, 2007Part 1 | 2 | 3
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Part II with Lizzie Grossman, author of High Tech Trash, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: At least once a month, someone's invoking Thomas Friedman to say new information technologies have made the world 'flat' and national borders meaningless. That perspective has always seemed naïve and superficial. (As a friend of mine points out, just because five people in a town have internet access doesn't mean the world is suddenly flat.) At best, I'd say the world is lumpy. Does your story about electronics manufacturing,…