Policy
jstemwedel | May 12, 2006Welcome to Teaching Carnival #9. I realize that you, gentle reader, may be affiliated with a school whose term has already ended. You may be easing into those first intoxicating weeks of the summer break, where your "to do" list seems more theoretical and less urgent.
Academic calendars are somewhat arbitrary, so I know it's not your fault, but I'll thank you not to gloat. Some of us are in the End Times right now, hoping that our post-apocalyptic world resembles a summer break.
It may be too soon to call it.
In any event, this Teaching Carnival is dedicated to the teachers and learners…
jstemwedel | May 3, 2006There's an article in yesterday's New York Times about doubts the public is having about the goodness of scientific publications as they learn more about what the peer-review system does, and does not, involve. It's worth a read, if only to illuminate what non-scientists seem to have assumed went on in peer review, and to contrast that with what actually happens. This raises the obvious question: Ought peer review to be what ordinary people assume it to be? My short answer, about which more below the fold:Not unless you're prepared to completely revamp the institutional structure in which…
stcynic | April 25, 2006Nat Hentoff, long one of my favorite writers despite his surprising and indefensible position on the Terri Schaivo situation, has a column in the Village Voice about the importance of civics classes in public schools. He points to the abysmal ignorance that study after study has shown about some of the very basic facts about our system of law. I'll post a long excerpt from that column below the fold:
In a national study last year, Future of the First Amendment, funded by the Knight Foundation, more than 100,000 high school students were interviewed on what they know of the First Amendment.…
stcynic | April 19, 2006Ken Brown has a post pointing to Joe Carter's essay on the subject of theocracy and the fear of it that is often expressed by those on the left. Carter argues that accusations that the religious right is pushing for theocracy are empty political rhetoric. While he admits that "some conservative Christians in our country do want to establish a theocracy" he also argues that their numbers "are rather negligible and their political influence almost non-existence (sic)". I'm going to agree in part and disagree in part. Yes, I think the left often exaggerates the risk of theocracy and applies the…
cmooney | April 18, 2006I just gave a speech at George Mason, to a much more scholarly and academically oriented crowd than I'm used to addressing. The event, after all, was entitled "Who Owns Knowledge" and was sponsored by the cultural studies Ph.D. program. There was a time when these sorts of scholars, who study science in its social context, were at absolute loggerheads with members of the scientific community over the extent to which scientific knowledge is a) socially constructed; and b) profitably deconstructed.
I want to argue that those days have at least begun to be eclipsed, thanks to a clear and present…
pharyngula | April 12, 2006
I received 45 submissions for this edition of The Carnival of the Liberals, and the carnival rules required me to select only a final ten. That was harsh; there were many excellent links sent in, and I struggled with the need to reject so many. Ultimately, I just had to let my own biases rule my decision, so if you sent in a submission and I didn't use it, it's nothing personal and it says nothing about a lack of quality in your work—it just means it didn't fit my narrow criteria for what I wanted to read this time around. As you'll see, I tend to promote godless secularism and grappling…
stcynic | April 8, 2006Larry Fafarman has posted a long comment on a thread below and I'm moving it up here to answer it because it raises a really important point on this trumped up controversy over why the Dover school board didn't rescind the ID policy on Dec. 5, 2005 at the first meeting they were sworn in at. He begins by conflating two very different things:
WHY MOOTNESS WAS A REAL POSSIBILITY
It has been argued that because of the "voluntary cessation" doctrine ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mootness ), the judge could not have declared the Dover case moot even if the new anti-ID school board members had…
jstemwedel | April 4, 2006Last week Kevin Vranes wrote an interesting post about "skeptics". One of the things he brought out is that, depending on the context, "skeptic" can be an approving label (here's someone who won't be fooled by flim-flam) or a term of abuse (there's someone who stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the facts of the matter). As well, Kevin notes that, especially when scientists are dealing with folks from outside the scientific community (e.g., journalists or politicians), terms like "skeptics" and "the mainstream" can be used to designate something like tribal memberships: here are the people…
jstemwedel | April 2, 2006In a post last week, I was trying to work out whether science journalism can do something more for us than just delivering press releases from the scientists. Specifically, I suggested that journalists with a reasonable understanding of scientific methodology could do some work to assess the credibility of the research described in the press releases, as well as the credibility of the scientists issuing those press releases.
Although the post was concerned with the general question of whether science journalism can do this bit of evaluative work for a lay audience that, by and large, is both…
jstemwedel | March 27, 2006My students know that plagiarism is bad. You'd think a major wire service would know it, too.
But it would seem that maybe the Associated Press doesn't know that failing to properly cite sources is plagiarism. Or perhaps the AP does know, but doesn't care. When your business is built on the premise that you are a reliable source of information, it seems to me that this is a very bad strategy.
Over at Huffington Post, Larissa Alexandrovna relates the details. She did painstaking legwork to put together a story about changes to the U.S. guidelines about who gets access to classified…
pharyngula | March 19, 2006When I say it, I get a rush of protest proclaiming that not all Christians are like that. I know they aren't, but we ignore the theocratic Right at our peril.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse—among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. [Phillips] convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the…
cmooney | March 14, 2006This is a heady day. For the first time, perhaps, we can actually say that the Bush administration, charged with some type of interference with science, has responded by cleaning up its act, rather than by denying or ignoring that the problem exists. Alas, it's really only a small sliver of the administration that is behaving in such a constructive manner. Nevertheless, it's a start.
The agency to be commended appears to be NASA, which is going to let its scientists speak freely (as long as they don't claim to represent the agency) and which is being praised by said scientists for doing so.…
stoat | March 13, 2006ClimateScienceWatch is Promoting integrity in the use of climate science in government. But you know that because you read Chris Mooney. Lots of interesting politics-type stuff there. In Inhofe stuff is fun. I must post on the NAS stuff sometime.
So I pass quickly onto the second, which is more about the science than the politics: A Few Things Ill Considered by Coby Beck. Coby has being doing an excellent job on sci.env for quite a while, displaying a remarkable patience in explaining the obvious to skeptics again and again. His site is a great reference for some of the more obvious FAQ's on…
pharyngula | March 6, 2006Amy Sullivan is not one of the people I want advising the Democratic party…unless, that is I suddenly decided I wanted to be a Republican, and was feeling too lazy to change my voter registration. She's got one note that she plays loudly over and over again: Democrats need to be more religious. Why? So we can get more religious people to vote for our candidates, and so we can steal the Republicans' identification as the party of faith.
Nationally, and in states like Alabama, the GOP cannot afford to allow Democrats a victory on anything that might be perceived as benefiting people of faith.…
stoat | March 1, 2006Well yes indeed, someone has leaked bits of the upcoming IPCC AR4 report to the BBC. The only odd thing is that its taken this long. The draft has "do not cite or quote" written on it, of course, but so many people have access to it that its hard to believe the media don't. Chris Mooney has noticed the BBC; but the Grauniad had much the same a day earlier. RP predictably enough uses this as a peg to hang his favoured IPCC-is-politicised hat on; but this is nonsense: there is no evidence at all to connect this to anyone IPCC-ish.
The Grauniad leads with The Earth's temperature could rise…
cmooney | February 28, 2006Without holding anything back, I've tried to be respectful in my criticisms of Bush science adviser John Marburger. He's a well regarded scientist, after all. And I doubt he's responsible for any of the troublesome behavior of the administration.
But Marburger's defenses of the administration are getting more and more indefensible. His latest interview with NPR is a case in point. The interviewer let Marburger off far too easily, but anyone familiar with recent news about politics and science can read between the lines. So, let's parse this interview, based upon a transcript provided by Nexis…
pharyngula | February 27, 2006We shouldn't be surprised when the Bush administration jiggers the scientific books:
In short, Oregon State University scientists reported in Science magazine that some logging practices may contribute to forest fires, rather than curbing them as conventional wisdom leads us to believe. The report ran contrary to current federal policy under the Bush administration, and the funding for the research group was suspended.
When reality conflicts with your ideology, it must be reality that's in error.
jstemwedel | February 27, 2006Student Pugwash USA, whose mission is to promote social responsibility in science and technology, is having the first of a series of regional conferences March 31 - April 1 at Purdue University. (Other conferences are planned at Rockeller University, Carnegie Mellon, and UC-Berkeley.) The conference is aimed at (and open to) science students of all disciplines (including policy and philosophy of science). The focus of the Purdue Pugwash Regional Conference is scientific integrity in the pharmaceutical industry, and the keynote speaker is Dr. Arden Bement, Director of the National Science…
cmooney | February 26, 2006I frequently get asked how I plan on following up The Republican War on Science, a book that received a considerable amount of attention (and that will probably continue to do so, since there's still a paperback to look forward to). This is a subject to which I've devoted a lot of thought--probably too much thought. Over the past year I've been hot and cold on a number of different book ideas, investing too much energy in ideas that didn't merit it and feeling unjustifiably fickle about ideas that probably should have turned into books (like, for example, a narrative account of the Dover…
jstemwedel | February 26, 2006Yesterday, I discussed what scientists supported by federal funds do, and do not, owe the public. However, that discussion was sufficiently oblique and ironic that the point I was trying to make may not have been clear (and, I may have put some of my male readers at greater risk for heart attack).
So, I'm turning off the irony and giving it another try.
The large question I want to examine is just what publicly-funded scientists owe the public. Clearly, they owe the public something, but is it the thing that Dean Esmay is suggesting that the public is owed?
So as not to present a "flash-…