Policy

We have a new 527 political organization specifically set up to fight for the representation of science and engineering in politics and policy. Michael Stebbins has the details, and you can read the scientists' and engineers' bill of rights here. If you're interested, join now!

So, now that you have a better idea how great it was last year, are you coming to ConvergeSouth this year? On October 14th (yup, one day instead of two). Last year was about journalism and blogging. This year, the theme is "beyond blogging", both technologically (podcasting, vlogging) and socially (building communities, etc.). I am especially interested in the Facebook session (you may have heard already that Facebook opened its doors to non-"edu" e-mail addresses today) and hope that there will be a lot of young users of Facebook there telling us how they think about it instead of us old…

Yesterday, Senator James Inhofe, Chair of the Committee on Public Works & the Environment, issued a challenge to journalists to stop what he called the "media hype" over global warming. Inhofe compiles a list of what he considers exaggerated distortions of global warming from recent and past news coverage. Of course, Inhofe's tactic is all too familiar. Conservatives have long complained about a "liberal media bias" generally, relying heavily on anecdotal evidence to back up their claims. When news reports don't favor preferred policy positions, whether it is election politics or…

This sessions tried, once again, to answer the old question "Where are the female political bloggers?" Continuing the ConvergeSouth coverage.... Friday late morning: This was probably the most exciting session of all. Tiffany of Blackfeminist blog was going to discuss the problem of an emerging hierarchy within the blogosphere. All the so-called "A-listers" are middle-class, middle-age, white, straight, and usually Christian, men. Every three months or so, one of them looks around and posts a question "Where are all the female political bloggers?". What inevitably ensues is a big fight in…

A report from the Department of Education's Inspector General says the government broke the law in how it promoted particular programs through its Reading First program. The director of that program: repeatedly used his influence to steer money toward states that used a reading approach he favored, called Direct Instruction, or DI. In one case, the report says, he was told a review panel was stacked with people who backed that program. "That's the funniest part _ yes!" he responded in e-mail dating to 2002. "You know the line from Casablanca, 'I am SHOCKED that there is gambling going on in…

Nature is one of the premier scientific journals in the world. But they are also getting out in front on some important issues in their news and Editorials. They are fast becoming THE premier scientific journal in the world. Its chief rival, Science hasn't changed with the times. Nature has embraced the new medium of the internet in very innovative ways and continues to experiment with it. Nature is adapting successfully. Its rivals are being left in the dust. Nature is published in the UK. So it is strange that they, rather than the US-based Science, has weighed in on the disarray at CDC,…

The New York Times reports: Dr. Kochi said the most substantive change in the W.H.O.'s guidelines on the use of insecticides would extend the reach of the strategy. Until now, the agency had recommended indoor spraying of insecticides in areas of seasonal or episodic transmission of malaria, but it now also advocates it where continuous, intense transmission of the disease causes the most deaths. Dr. Kochi's new policies and abrasive style have stirred the small world of malaria experts. Dr. Allan Schapira, a senior member of the W.H.O. malaria team who most recently oversaw its approach to…

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of George Lakoff's new book Thinking Points. You can read more here or download a PDF of the first chapter here. You have heard many of these ideas before, including repeatedly on my blog, but it is nice to see them all stated succintly and collected in one place: 1. The Issue Trap We hear it said all the time: Progressives won't unite behind any set of ideas. We all have different ideas and care about different issues. The truth is that progressives do agree at the level of values and that there is a real basis for progressive unity. Progressive…

Man, Orin Kerr is working John Yoo like a speedbag right now. In his latest post at Volokh, he finds yet more evidence of Yoo's utter hypocrisy in defending the Bush administration's attempts to expand executive power. He provides this transcript of a portion of a talk Yoo gave at the Cato Institute in 2000: First, I think, in order to achieve their foreign policy goals, the Clinton Adminisitration has undermined the balance of powers that exist in foreign affairs, and have undermined principles of democratic accountability that executive branches have agreed upon well to the Nixon…

Granted, I've supported Paul Waldman's thesis that politics revolves around a personal narrative and not logical discussions of policy analysis is the right way to view things--depressing as that is. But after reading this post by Kos, I'm thoroughly discouraged. Kos writes: The key is to find that negative value, and base the entire campaign to define the opponent around it. Then, every single issue that arises can be neatly slotted into that value, reinforcing it in the media and the voters' minds. I think he might be right, but how the hell did we as a people get so collectively stupid…

Timothy Burke is thinking up new classes all the time, which is probably the bane of any academic. It's probably more common in the humanities, where the curricula are more mutable, but even us science types usually have a couple of ideas that would make for a good course if only we didn't have to teach introductory classical mechanics again... This is as good an excuse as any for re-posting an old post I wrote on the subject back in 2004. I actually did one of these, in a very limited way-- I did one lecture of "How to Lie With Statistics" as part of a class on the election of 2004 (which…

For readers in the Beltway, I will be presenting at this upcoming panel on blogging sponsored by the DC Science Writers Association. It's free if you don't plan to partake in the food and beverages before hand. Here's the scoop on what I will be discussing, followed by details on the full event: Science Blogs: The Intersection with Science, the Media, and the Public Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D. Assistant Professor School of Communication American University How does blog reading connect to traditional and online news use? Do political and science blogs reach new and diverse audiences, or only…

Gene Expression Categories: Biology, Philosophy of Science Razib has a degree in the life sciences and works in information technology, but he also nurses a strong interest in evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. Gene Expression deals primarily with the intersection between new developments in molecular and evolutionary biology, and older established fields such as systematics and paleoanthropology. In person, Razib is an 'adult kid' who doesn't plan on growing up any time soon, and his non-science interests span from ancient Chinese history to science fiction. Good Math, Bad Math…

Discovering Biology in a Digital World Categories: Biology, Academia Sandra Porter earned a BS in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota, and an MSc and PhD in microbiology from the University of Washington. She did a postdoc at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and spent a decade leading the biotechnology program at Seattle Central Community College. Now she engages in "semi-random acts of teaching" while also working for a bioinformatics company called Geospiza. She writes about how bioinformatics can be used as an educational tool, and what and how we can learn from it.…

Slate offers up this depressing article, by Amy Sullivan about how religious people view the Democratic Party: Which is why it is startling that in the two years since this Democratic revival began, the party's faith-friendly image has dimmed rather than improved. The Pew Research Center's annual poll on religion and politics, released last week, shows that while 85 percent of voters say religion is important to them, only 26 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is "friendly" to religion. That's down from 40 percent in the summer of 2004 and 42 percent the year before that--in…

I wrote this post on Dec 23, 2004 and posted it both on Science And Politics and DailyKos. Then, on April 03, 2005, I reposted it on my blog again. Many good books have been published since then, but the list would not have changed too much if I have made it today, e.g., I would have replaced E.J.Graff's book on the history of marriage with much better book on the same topic by Stephanie Coontz, and I probably would have replaced the last two on the list with new books by John Dean and Geoffrey Nunberg on the strength of reviews and what some smart bloggers said, as I have not read them…

One of the measures I use to judge whether someone is a serious thinker in Kansas politics is by seeing where they stand on water policy. It seems like there are drought warnings every summer, and those droughts have let other states leap ahead of Kansas in wheat production – a major part of our economy. This summer looks to be no different: Although the entire state is now under a drought warning, it has been a weird summer with some places inundated with water while others just a few miles down the road remain dry. “We’ve seen some rain showers around the state, but overall it’s still very…

William Saletan has a roundup and commentary on the ruckus surrounding circumcision and HIV transmission. There are two issues here, The health & public policy The cultural angle The think the evidence is pretty clear from individual studies and cross-cultural comparisons: all things being equal, circumcision cuts down on the rate of HIV transmission (especially from female-to-male). On the other hand, there are the important cultural issues that are often not mooted with clarity, especially in the United States. You see, the USA is one of the few nations where adult circumcision occurs…

Here's some interesting articles I pulled off the internets for you: Publius argues "The fact that Iraq was so incompetently executed is actually the least of its problems. The bigger problem is that the idea of it represented a staggering failure of vision and judgment in terms of anti-terrorism policy. It's simply not possible to devise an anti-terrorism policy more at odds with the nature of the threat facing us." An interesting NY Times magazine article by Michael Young on how Hizbollah relates to the Lebanese political scene (as opposed to the War on Terra). Neil the Ethical Werewolf…

Talk2Action has an interesting expose` on Paul Weyrich, the most important religious right leader you've likely never heard of. Weyrich has had an astonishingly busy and effective career in politics. He's probably the single most important figure in the religious right, though nowhere near as well known as Dobson, Falwell, Robertson and others. He's the power behind the throne, the prime mover behind the scenes. Among other groups he has founded: the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, the Council on National Policy, and the Free Congress Foundation. More than any other man, he is the…