Technology
sb admin | March 9, 2009Today, President Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies regarding scientific integrity. It begins:
Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security.
Itâs wonderful to have an administration committing so clearly to the use of science to inform health and environmental…
dgmacarthur | March 6, 2009Over at Opposing Views, bioethicist Jacob Appel argues that pre-implantation genetic screening for severe disease mutations should be compulsory for parents undergoing IVF.
Appell dodges one obvious criticism of this suggestion - that it unacceptably limits parental autonomy - by pointing out that "Western societies have long acknowledged that parental authority cannot undermine the medical interests of a child". As examples, Appell cites the facts that Jehovah's Witnesses cannot deny their own children blood transfusions, however strong their religious opposition, and that "American courts…
tqa | March 5, 2009
As of this morning, it appears that the nominations of both John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco (the President's picks for Science Advisor and NOAA Administrator, respectively) are still stalled in the Senate. If we don't raise more hell over this issue - and keep raising hell - it's likely that these nominees will remain stuck in limbo for quite some time, and the Administration's efforts to forge a new science and environmental policy will be hampered as a result. Do you want that to happen?
The issue is receiving relatively little attention from the traditional press, but one report…
nisbetmc | March 5, 2009I'm blogging from Chicago's O'Hare airport, on my way to Portland to participate in a unique summit bringing together philosophers, scientists, social scientists, poets, filmmakers, and artists to consider new strategies for shifting the popular zeitgeist on sustainability and climate change. The workshop is sponsored by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State. I hope to have more to report later, but for now, participants are asked to consider the following questions.
For readers, how would you answer these questions?
MAIN QUESTION: Let's jump ahead to 2020 and imagine that, in just a…
rskloot | March 2, 2009
The other day, the NY Times ran a story called "Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF. It reported on a new Centers for Disease Control study that found that children conceived through the most common infertility treatments had a slightly increased risk of several birth defects, including cleft palate and septal heart defects.  believe this is one of the largest studies looking into the connection between Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and birth defects, but it's not  the first. Â
Way back in 2003, I wrote a story for Popular Science called "Sally Has Two Mommies + One Daddy…
oracknows | February 27, 2009Let's try this again.
Two days ago, I tried to get away from blogging about antivaccinationists. I even succeeded for one day. Unfortunately, that was all, because J.B. Handley and his crew of antivaccine loons cooked up a really big, really deceptive, and really desperate gambit that just couldn't go unremarked upon. Thus was I sucked back in again. Even worse, this all came hot on the heels of a very sad time in the lives of my wife and myself. I needed something to lift my spirits.
And nothing lifts one's spirits quite like fine, grade-A woo.
Or perhaps I need my bio-photons analyzed with…
bioephemera | February 24, 2009My friend Nicole sent me this WSJ article about a month ago - it's about the sad reality that artworks made with nonarchival materials often don't outlive the artist:
Art is sold "as is" by galleries or directly from artists. (Can you imagine Consumer Reports reviewing art?) Still, dealers hope to maintain the goodwill of their customers, and artists don't want to develop a reputation for shoddy work. But it's not fully clear what responsibility artists bear to their completed work, especially after it has been sold. That's particularly the case for artists who purposefully use ephemeral…
jwilbanks | February 23, 2009Sorry for the long delay between posts. I was robbed at the beginning of the month, losing my laptop, passport, other pieces of digital technology and identification, house keys, work keys, pens, papers, business cards and so forth. I'm just now catching up with all the real-life work that piled up during the seven-days-without-a-computer phase.
I have some posts queued up, trying to finish out the lengthy series on copyright and databases. And I am going to try to write something approaching a final summary on why I don't like licensing as an approach for databases, instead preferring the…
tqa | February 20, 2009
In his opening remarks for the latest entry in our ongoing debate about public financing for science, Timothy Sandefur suggests that after this post, we move on to concluding remarks. That strikes me as a reasonably good idea (and not just because he's generously offered me the last word). We may not have yet reached a point where we're talking past each other, but we're definitely getting dangerously close to that point.
After reading through Tim's latest post, I'm going to respond to his points out of order. I'm going to start out by looking at the more concrete examples that we've been…
neurophilosophy | February 19, 2009Working memory refers to the process by which small amounts of information relevant to the task at hand are retained for short periods of time. For example, before cellular phones became so ubiquitous, calling someone usually involved first finding the number and then remembering it for a just few seconds by repeating it to oneself several times. Once the digits had been dialled, they are immediately forgotten.
Very little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying working memory, but very recently some advances have been made. Last month, a group from the University of Texas Medical…
dgmacarthur | February 18, 2009I was surprised by the response to my brief post on the question of whether group (race or gender) differences in intelligence are a valid topic for scientific investigation: not only because of the volume of comments, but also because the ensuing debate was largely civil and on-topic. The post was sparked off by two conflicting essays in the most recent issue of Nature, one by Steven Rose opposing research into such differences, and another by Ceci and Williams arguing that sealing off certain lines of enquiry - however contentious - is dangerous and unscientific.
There's now more on this…
tqa | February 17, 2009
A few days ago, Timothy Sandefur posted his second entry in our ongoing debate on the benefits and pitfalls of government funding for the sciences. I've been a bit busy, and I'm just finding time to respond now - I apologize for the delay. While I was doing other things over the weekend, he also posted a response to an article by Steven Quake that I blogged about earlier. This is my response to his rebuttal to my earlier post. I may or may not find the time to reply to his examination of the Quake article later on.
The Internets:
In my first post in the debate, I pointed out that this…
mikethemadbiologist | February 17, 2009...at one point, anyway. It was good to see Pelosi and the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party hold the line against the Blue Dogs. Anyway, here are some science-, health-, and education-related stimulus increases:
Pell grants for higher education: $15,840,000,000
School improvement grants awarded based on the number of homeless students identified in a state: $70,000,000
Energy efficiency and conservation block grants: $3,200,000,000
Weatherization Assistance Program (increases maximum income level and maximum assistance): $5,000,000,000
Advanced batteries manufacturing, including…
drorzel | February 17, 2009I no longer remember the context, but the Gravity Probe B experiment came up in discussion around the department last week, and nobody could really remember what the status of it was. It came up again during the "Physics: What We Don't Understand" panel Saturday morning, where Geoff Landis was able to supply a few details from inside NASA. It came up again during a later panel on the year in physics and astronomy, and again, Geoff was able to supply some details.
I'm not sure what the deal is, but there's evidently something in the air at the moment making people think about Gravity Probe B,…
oracknows | February 16, 2009Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…
clock | February 16, 2009Insights on Economic Choices From Game Theory and Cognitive Psychology:
How game theory and insights from cognitive psychology can shed light on the economic choices people and corporations make will be the focus of a topical lecture presented by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) behavioral economist Colin Camerer at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).*
It's Hard Work That Fosters Responsibility In Teen Programs:
Millions of American teenagers participate in Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, 4-H, and other programs designed to develop…
clock | February 15, 2009Being quite busy lately, I accumulated a lot of links to stuff I wanted to comment on but never found time. Well, it does not appear I will find time any time soon, so here are the links for you to comment on anyway (just because I link to them does not mean I agree with them - in some cases quite the opposite):
In Defense of Secrecy :
Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable. One of the first official communications issued by the new…
dgmacarthur | February 15, 2009In a comment on my previous post, Tera Eerkes is skeptical about the utility of routinely performing whole-genome sequencing on newborns:
I found this comment absolutely fascinating, given the recent
reports on translational analysis, that indicate an actual lack of
clinical utility of KRAS testing and other drug-gene interactions.
I believe these reports are indicative of a trend, not an exception.
I think it is remarkable that anyone feels, even optimistically,
that we're going to need a genome-wide scan for clinically useful
indicators by 2019.
I predict that there will be a…
rallain | February 13, 2009The local Society of Physics Students invited me to watch the movie Sunshine and then participate in a post movie discussion. There was one thing in the movie that really got me. Of course the movie made many of the common space mistakes. But this one didn't seem necessary. Let me outline this part of the movie (I guess I should say spoiler alert - although this isn't central to the main plot). Here are three frames of a comic I drew to reproduce the scene.
After watching Sunshine, the astronauts try to go from one ship to another without space suits (well, one of them had a suit).…
dgmacarthur | February 12, 2009I'm slowly catching up on genomics news from the last week - this story in particular has been getting a lot of press.
The executive summary: Jay Flatley, CEO of genomic technology manufacturer Illumina, predicts that whole-genome sequencing of newborns will become routine within a decade.
Flatley has an obvious financial interest in this prediction coming true, since Illumina provides the most commercially successful next-generation sequencing platform currently on the market, the Genome Analyzer, and has recently invested heavily in emerging "third-generation" sequencing technologies (by…