Policy
nisbetmc | January 15, 2007Back in the fall, after hosting a class "blog" debate on the Internet and community, more than a few readers asked me whether I would post the reading list for the undergrad course I teach here at American University. Below is the schedule of readings assigned for the spring semester, along with a course description. As of right now, this spring semester's blog debate is scheduled to take place between April 26 and May 3.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is an introduction to research exploring the many dimensions of "communication and society." As we will review, mass communication and…
razib | January 11, 2007Yesterday I watched Will Wilkinson and Ezra Klein on Blogging Heads. Will, as many of you will know, is a pragmatic libertarian (oh, they exist), while Ezra is a liberal. I was struck by (somewhat appalled in fact) by Ezra's irritation and contempt for the philosophical nerdiness of many libertarians. Ezra's emphasis on the empirical and the proximate, on a narrow sui generis fixation on a sequence of finite policies was set against a more expansive and theoretically scaffolded conception of the Good Life which Will seemed to be promoting (even a question of the nature of the Good Life).…
purepedantry | January 8, 2007Daniel Kahneman and Johnathan Renshon, writing in Foreign Policy, put forward a fascinating thesis that because of the way human beings are organized psychologically we are prone to be more hawkish. Basically the thrust of their argument is that social and cognitive psychologists have documented numerous psychological errors that human beings make consistently. In this sense human beings are not exactingly rational. Where our judgment consistently differs from pure rationality we make mistakes. With respect to foreign policy these mistakes make us more hawkish because they place a higher…
pharyngula | January 7, 2007I'm about to hop on a plane and fly off to New York for a few days, and now it seems like everyone is sending me op-eds from all over the place that are screaming against the "new atheism". We must be effective to inspire such denunciations, and we must be striking deeply to cause so much obvious pain. It's sad to see the agony people are experiencing as they witness the godless speaking out with such boldness, but they're just going to have to get used to it. After all, if they're really tolerant, they have to recognize people's right to believe or disbelieve as they will…but I guess we're…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2006One of my projects for the winter break has been to read some of the Iraq War books that keep showing up in the local Barnes and Noble. First up: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post.
The book makes for strange reading. On the one hand it is very hard to put down. The story it tells is gripping and it is written with considerable skill. On the other hand it is difficult to take for more than a few pages at a time. The story it tells is one of unrelenting arrogance and incompetence on the part both of the…
clock | December 29, 2006Which one are you? (December 25, 2005)
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Big debate over Wonkery and Activism on blogs is brewing around the biggies in the Left Blogistan. Let me rehash it quickly before starting my own rant.
It all started with a Washington Monthly article titled Kos Call by Benjamin Wallace-Wells:
"Moulitsas is just basically uninterested in the intellectual and philosophical debates that lie behind the daily political trench warfare. By his own admission, he just doesn't care about policy.
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He doesn't pretend to be a policy wonk. But the more that…
pharyngula | December 28, 2006Before there was The God Delusion and Letter to a Christian Nation, there was another excellent book on atheism: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Susan Jacoby. I can't recommend that book highly enough: it takes a purely historical perspective on American religiosity, and shows that it is a fairly recent aberration. I consider it superior to the more recent works by Dawkins and Harris; I wonder why it is so rarely acknowledged in the current interest in freethought?
Anyway, she has a recent short column well worth reading:
However, both atheism and…
clock | December 25, 2006Now that the 2006 Weblog Awards are over (and congratulations to all of my favourites for wins or good showing), we are all warmed up and ready for the Real Deal - the Koufaxes!
First, and most importantly, go over to Wampum and hit their PayPal button (on the left top side-bar), or their Amazon.com donation button, and hit it with as much as you can. The way Koufaxes are done is real - no paperless voting machines there! And that costs. And it helps the community if the good folks of Wampum have enough money for the generator (yes, they make their own power!), servers, new hard-drives and…
cortex | December 24, 2006The latest poll from my state of New Hampshire:
If the Democratic primary were held today, Obama would be in a statistical dead heat with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, according to a new Monitor poll. Last month, a Monitor poll showed Clinton trouncing her opponents, with Obama lagging 23 points behind.
Although Clinton commands considerable support among likely Democratic primary voters, she struggles in general election match-ups, according to the poll. If the contest were held today, both Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani would prevail over Clinton.…
integrityofscience | December 20, 2006Four of the five presentations from last week's American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting panel discussion, "Defining and Protecting the Integrity of Science: New Challenges for the 21st Century," are now online.
Peter Gleick President, Pacific Institute (presiding);
“The Integrity of Science: Identifying Logical Fallacies, Deceitful Tactics, and Abuse of the Public Trust” (PDF)
Judith Curry Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology
“Falling out of the Ivory Tower: a Case Study of Mixing Hurricane Science, Politics, and the…
nisbetmc | December 18, 2006
For those closely watching Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential prospects, and what a Romney presidency might look like in terms of science-related policy questions such as stem cell research, abstinence education, and emergency contraception, you will want to check out this Sunday Boston Globe article:
In Governor Mitt Romney's metamorphosis from social moderate to self-styled conservative presidential candidate, Nov. 9, 2004 , stands out as a seminal date. On that day, Romney and two aides met in his State House office with renowned Harvard University stem cell researcher Douglas A. Melton. In…
clock | December 15, 2006More than a year ago (September 26, 2005), and what has changed?
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The other day I saw (on a blog, from an e-mail? Don't remember now...) this article about a porn website on which our soldiers in Iraq exchange gory photos of mutilated Iraqi bodies for a free subscription to porn. War Pornography was published on a news website I was not familiar with, so I posted the link in the comments to a couple of good liberal blogs, asking for the verification of the story.
The next day, Nation published a shorter story on the same topic: The Porn of War, which…
jrosenhouse | December 14, 2006There was a remarkable exchange on the MSNBC show Hardball yesterday, between host Chris Matthews, and commentators Roger Simon and Chris Cillizza:
MATTHEWS: Yes, well, isn't it funny, Roger--and I love the way you cover politics. You get the richness of it. You have fish fry dinners with Jesse Jackson in the middle of the night and write about it. Here we are with a president--who most people who are honest about it would say came to the office pretty much unprepared to deal with the third world.
He listened to a bunch of jughead neoconservatives who talked him into a war that doesn't…
thusspakezuska | December 13, 2006Today marks the debut of guest-blogger Cynthia Burack at TSZ. A professor at the Ohio State University, Cynthia is a political scientist who tools are feminist political theory and political psychology. We have worked together in the past on several projects, including work on group dynamics and resistance to diversity (see sidebar, NWSA Journal article) and on evaluating STEM department websites for diversity. What follows, however, is entirely Cynthia's work. I am grateful that she has allowed me to present it here. I think it is very important for all scientists to hear.
Zuska has…
integrityofscience | December 13, 2006At what point is the science certain enough on an issue?
Is there a line of policy involvement that scientists shouldn't cross?
What will the new Congress mean for science and scientists?
These were some of the questions aired at science integrity-related events at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting on Tuesday. At the morning discussion "Defining and Protecting the Integrity of Science: New Challenges for the 21st Century," panelists tackled the personal, the political, and much in between. Later in the day, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) sponsored a workshop for…
thusspakezuska | December 11, 2006The Chronicle of Higher Education published a little tongue-in-cheek holiday gift guide in the December 8 issue. I really liked this item: the Scientific Integrity Calendar, published by the Union of Concerned Scientists and available at their website.
In the summer of 2006, creative minds throughout America had the opportunity to show off their artistic and comedic talents in support of independent science by entering Science Idol: the Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest. Artists of all skill levels submitted hundreds of entries dealing with political interference in science,…
sb admin | December 11, 2006by PotomacFeverishÂ
In the first of what may be numerous resignations, Scott Gottlieb, MD has announced that he will leave his post as Deputy Commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration. He has been at the center of the political science practiced at the FDA as noted by Time last year:
Nowhere in the federal bureaucracy is it more important to insulate government experts from the influences of politics and special interests than at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency charged with assuring the safety of everything from new vaccines and dietary supplements to animal feed and…
clock | December 8, 2006Here's another topic seen through the Lakoffian looking glass (July 23, 2005):
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Why is there a widespread belief that the difference between patriotism and nationalism is one of degree: loving one's country versus loving it even more? I think that the difference is not quantitative but qualitative - the phrase "love for one's country" used by the two kinds of people (patriots and nationalists) is based on very different meanings of the words "love", "for", "one" and "country".
I am assuming that this confusion arises from the fact that…
j7uy5 | December 7, 2006This has been a topic at ScienceBlogs before. Now, finally,
the New England Journal of Medicine is catching up. They have
an editorial on the ethics of vaccination against Human Papilloma
Virus. It turns out that there are many facets to this issue.
The background is this: HPV is a major factor in the
development of cervical cancer. About 10,000 women are
diagnosed with cervical cancer each year in the USA, and there are
about 3,700 deaths per year from the disease.
To put that in perspective, that is more than the total number of
deaths in the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
Previous…
mikethemadbiologist | December 6, 2006Snuggles McCain demonstrating his vaunted 'independence'
It seems more and more people are finally paying close attention to Mitt Romney and John McCain. While I've talked about Romney's idiocy before, The Boston Phoenix did a great job of skewering McCain, so I'll turn it over to them:
Arizona senator John McCain appears to be the nation's most popular Republican. That, at least, is what most polls show. It's not entirely clear why. He has authored little noteworthy legislation during his 20 years in the Senate and, in fact, has accomplished almost nothing beyond co-sponsoring the McCain-…