Policy
sb admin | July 30, 2007By Liz Borkowski
After former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified that White House officials tried to weaken or suppress important health reports for political purposes, Washington Post reporters Christopher Lee and Marc Kaufman followed up on the case of a 2006 surgeon generalâs report on global health (draft here) whose publication was blocked.
Carmonaâs report described the global nature of diseases and the many factors involved (including food and nutrition, water and air, and violence), and concluded with a call for international collaboration to improve overall global health…
thusspakezuska | July 27, 2007What is this thing called feminist science studies?
Have you ever been asked that question, or perhaps asked it of yourself? You wanted a nice, short, pithy answer to hand over to your interlocutor. And yet, it's like being asked, what is this thing called science? The subject area is huge, the topics are diverse, the perspectives vary, contrasting and complementing one another.
Well. I don't have that nice, short, pithy answer for you today, but I do have a very nifty book to recommend: Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies, edited by Mary Wyer, Mary…
revere | July 27, 2007This may be the most hilarious headline I have ever seen:
Insane donor 'rational to give to Tories'
I'm not sure if it is exactly correct to call Britain's Tories (the Conservative Party) the counterpart to the Republicans in the US, but they are at least the primary opposition to the Labour Party, which bears a faint resemblance to the US Democratic Party (including having had a Bush enabler at the helm). So I'll make the comparison anyway, even though I know someone is going to comment how I "know nothing" about British politics. I'll give you my riposte ahead of time: Get a life. Anyway.…
j7uy5 | July 27, 2007This
is why some in Congress are issuing subpoenas and talking about
contempt citations. This is why...
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/AR2007062201291.html">William
Mercer
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052700896.html"
rel="tag">Sara Taylor
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/washington/16elston.html?ex=1339646400&en=1257150980027b82&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss"
rel="tag">Michael Elston
href="http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/06/monica-goodling-resigns/"
rel="…
jrosenhouse | July 24, 2007Here is one of the questions from last night's bizarre CNN/You Tube debate with the Democratic candidates:
QUESTION: Hi, I'm Zenne Abraham in Oakland, California. The cathedral behind me is the perfect backdrop for this question. This quarter reads “United States of America.” And when I turn it over, you find that it reads “liberty, in God we trust.” What do those words mean to you? Thank you.
And here's how Senator Biden responded:
COOPER: Senator Biden.
BIDEN: Religion informs my values.
BIDEN: My reason dictates outcomes. My religion taught me about abuse of power. That's why I moved to…
bcohen | July 24, 2007We bring you: Part II of Michael Egan's guest-blogging interview with Kevin Marsh about Marsh's new book, Drawing Lines in the Forest: Creating Wilderness Areas in the Pacific Northwest.
Part I is here.
All entries in our author-meets-bloggers series are here.
Continued from Part I...
ME: What does wilderness designation entail in terms of use?
KM: Wilderness designation in the U.S. is defined by federal statute, the Wilderness Act of 1964, with certain broad parameters: a minimum size of 5,000 acres, a generally "untrammeled" character to the land, an area off-limits to mechanized…
sb admin | July 24, 2007You may have heard about the amendment proposed to a Higher Education act by Harry Reid that would make colleges responsible for enforcing RIAA and MPAA policy. The text of the amendment is absolutely every bit as scary as the Inside Higher Ed article makes it sound. And, as one commenter (highlighted by Slashdot, even) notes, we shouldn't expect much sanity from the Democrats on this, because the government of the USA today is driven by the largest campaign donors, and of course the companies behind the music and movie industries are huge campaign donors to both parties. Indeed, the "…
bcohen | July 23, 2007World's Fair note: This post was written by guest blogger Michael Egan, whom you might recall was the subject of our first author-meets-blogger contribution. See here for background on Egan.
Another tour of author-meets-blogger, though with a twist: here we have an author-meets- guest-blogger-and-former-author.
Affection for wilderness, Roderick Frazier Nash and others have told us, is as American as apple pie (which, as a Canadian, I never really got--the apple pie part, not the wilderness part). The point is: it's key. And now there's a new book on the history of wilderness creation in…
jstemwedel | July 19, 2007When I was growing up in New Jersey, hurricanes were "on the radar" for us, one of many possible (if infrequent) weather patterns during summer and fall. Later, in my first semester of college in Massachusetts, the morning of my first broadcast on the college radio station was made memorable by the landfall of Hurricane Gloria; I remember the name of the storm because I closed my show by playing the U2 song "Gloria" before signing off the air at 7 am. (The governor of the Massachusetts had just declared a state of emergency, although it wasn't until some 30 minutes later that the trustees…
mikethemadbiologist | July 19, 2007It's bad enough when the mainstream media engages in ersatz psychology and semiotics. It's even worse when this pseudoanalysis has a bias--it's like Colbert's truthiness, except that it's not funny (italics mine):
Consider, then, the cheesesteak.
While running for president, John Kerry ordered a cheesesteak with Swiss cheese. The sane response to that fact is, of course, "who cares?" The media response was to mock Kerry for ordering the "wrong" cheese. Supposedly, it reinforced his "elitist" image. Kerry's cheesesteak order continues to draw media attention years later.
During that same…
denialism | July 18, 2007Is it just me or is Tom Coburn recommending a policy of shoot first ask questions later for our borders?
The patrol's deadly force rules were questioned at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing concerning the conviction of two agents who shot a fleeing, unarmed drug trafficker and covered it up.
"Why is it wrong to shoot the [trafficker] after he's been told to stop?" asked Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma.
A new low for Coburn.
jjacquet | July 16, 2007Posted by Dr. David Wilmot, dave@oceanchampions.org
When I returned from Washington, DC last weekend, my son told me he will learn (8th grade social studies) how we make laws. I can imagine his textbook will have a neatly drawn two-page diagram of the process, with each step fitting precisely in a box.
As we all know, our process is neither neat nor precise. Democracy is messy. A bill may travel through the process but instead of fitting into boxes, it spills over the edges, through the halls, and out in the streets.
Enter the Ocean Conservation, Education, and National Strategy for the…
sb admin | July 16, 2007In Canada, asbestos is so sacred that the Canadian Cancer Society struggled with a decision about whether to call for a ban on a substance thatâs internationally recognized as a carcinogen. Martin Mittelstaedt reports in the Globe and Mail:
The cancer society had initially considered an asbestos policy that would have largely backed the federal government's position that it can be safely used provided those importing it are informed of its health risks, according to a draft of the policy viewed by The Globe and Mail.
But the positions in the draft caused an outcry among occupational health…
denialism | July 16, 2007William Saletan takes the position that progressives have no real bioethical position on stem cells in his most recent column in Slate. I'm a bit disappointed with Saletan over this one, because in his never ending quest to be thoughtful about everything, he's usually much more fair to people - even those he disagrees with. But listen to his characterization of "progressive bioethics".
I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about religion as though it's a communicable disease. Some are amazingly obtuse to other people's qualms. They show no more interest in an embryo than in a…
clock | July 13, 2007In the USA:
Effective this week, both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have proposed FY08 spending bills that direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to change its Public Access Policy so that NIH-funded researchers are required to deposit copies of NIH-funded research into the online archive of the National Library of Medicine.
This is big step toward making the policy a success -- we need your help now more than ever.
The bills now go to the full House and the Senate for approval. To help ensure success there, we ask that all supporters contact their Representatives AND…
sb admin | July 12, 2007The Kaiser Family Foundation has launched the website health08.org âto provide a central hub for resources and information about health policy issues in the 2008 election.â In a Boston Globe editorial, KFF president and CEO Drew Altman observes, âIn a short period of time health has gone from an issue that was not even included on the list of seven issues voters were asked about on the national exit poll in last November's election to the number one domestic issue and the number two issue overall behind Iraq on several recent polls.â Even so, he goes on to state, âThere will no chance at…
oracknows | July 11, 2007I thought I'd take a bit of a break for a change of pace. At the risk of falling flat on my face, I'm going to wander far afield from the usual medical and biological topics of this blog into an area that I rarely say much about. The reason is an incident that happened nearly two weeks ago when I was in Chicago. Lately, I've been becoming increasingly interested in how bad scientific arguments make it into the collective consciousness and stay there. While it's true that there are such things as astroturf campaigns and paid flaks whose job it is to get such messages in the medium and keep…
bcohen | July 10, 2007Part II of our talk with Saul Halfon about his new book, The Cairo Concensus.
Part I is here.
All entries in our author-meets-bloggers series here.
TWF: What about contraceptives? You said they were part of the technology you deal with in the book.
SH: Of course. Population control has always been about contraception - reducing births. This is very tricky terrain, strategically and analytically.
First, it is important to recognize the very long and deep history between population policy and contraceptive development. The pill, the modern IUD, Norplant and a range of other contraceptives…
clock | July 9, 2007In a few minutes, I will post the interview with Sen. John Edwards on this blog. All the questions are related to science (and yes, it was not easy to cut down the number of questions and the length of each question - there is so much to ask) so they should be of interest to the readers of this blog.
As I am not a journalist or an analyst who needs to preserve an appearance of 'balance', I have always been unabashedly open about my support for John Edwards, first in 1998 when he ran for the Senate (that was the first election I could vote in after becoming a US citizen), then in 2003/04 when…
cmooney | July 4, 2007The Bush administration climate "policy" is a sham and an embarrassment. The number of abuses against science--and of power--that we've seen on this topic over the past six years is overwhelming.
Sometimes, though, one choice quote can capture it all far better than a laundry list of well-documented misbehaviors. A choice quote like, say, this one from a recent Rolling Stone expose on Bush and climate:
One e-mail exchange about the study underscores just how many industry foxes were guarding the climate henhouse. When Matthew Koch (a White House energy adviser who today lobbies for API) saw…