choofnagle | July 26, 2007Jesse McKinley reports in the Times:
It was a good day for the Devil in San Francisco on Tuesday, as the Taxicab Commission voted to keep the Dark Lord's favorite number -- 666 -- affixed to an allegedly cursed cab.
The vote, which came after an amused period of public comment and annoyed looks from the commissioners, extended the satanic reign of Taxi No. 666, which is driven by one Michael Byrne (pronounced burn).
Mr. Byrne, who did not appear at the hearing on Tuesday night and was not reachable for comment, had lobbied -- out of superstition -- to have his medallion number changed, and…
denialism | July 26, 2007The Washington post reports on new efforts by insurance companies to rate doctors performance and their policies that penalize doctors for performing poorly according to their metrics.
After 26 years of a successful medical practice, Alan Berkenwald took for granted that he had a good reputation. But last month he was told he didn't measure up -- by a new computerized rating system.
A patient said an insurance company had added $10 to the cost of seeing Berkenwald instead of other physicians in his western Massachusetts town because the system had demoted him to its Tier 2 for quality.
...
In…
choofnagle | July 25, 2007Seth Stevenson over at Slate describes all 12 types of ads in the world and urges us to resist them all:
To me, the 12 formats serve...well as a weapon of defense for the consumer under assault from endless advertising messages. It's like learning how a magic trick works: Once the secret's revealed, the trick loses all its power.
Hat tip: Consumerist.
denialism | July 25, 2007Steven Novella at Neurologica has written a thoughtful essay on where the limits of academic freedom should lie in light of the firing of Ward Churchill based on allegations of plagiarism and research falsification. Of course, many believe that calling 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns" might have had something to do with it as well.
Novella considers the current standards for protection of academic speech and brings up a good point. Academic freedom is not meant to protect professors from the consequences of lying and incompetence.
The purpose of tenure is to protect academics from being…
denialism | July 25, 2007I'm putting out my request for nominations for the 66th Skeptics Circle, to be held Thursday August 2nd (eight days from now). I'd like to have entries in by Tuesday July 31st at the latest.
Either self-promote some of your own entries or recommend others' you've enjoyed to mark at denialism dot com.
denialism | July 24, 2007Between electronic "smog" and their incessant bleating that every weather event is due to global warming, I have come to the conclusion that the Independent, with stories like this one, are trying to bring down the science of global warming from the inside.
It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity.
More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established…
denialism | July 24, 2007Gene Sperling in the WaPo points out that holding the NIH budget flat is like a cutting our budgets as inflation forces budget cutbacks. He forgets to mention the wasted expense of the NIH roadmap and the significant portion of the intramural budget devoted to security, but otherwise he's dead-on. The steady ramping of funding led to a lot of people being trained, and the sudden cut-off has led to a lot of people abandoning science.
And I don't usually link Kos, but seeing this quote from Bill Kristol:
There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get…
denialism | July 24, 2007I've been reading Chris Mooney's Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming for the last week or so, and I've got to say, this is excellent science writing. A book on science for the non-expert reader should accomplish 5 things. It should let you know the history of the field and its prevailing theories, it should give you background and explanations that allow you to attain a basic grasp of the science or key concepts, it should be well-written, it should make you care about the subject, and it should be entertaining. Mooney gets a 5/5. It also was highly…
denialism | July 23, 2007So, who has heard of the Rife Machine? It is a quack device that purports to destroy diseases by homing in on their resonant frequency, and disrupting them with radiofrequency (RF) waves (like a soundwave shattering a wine glass). I've met true believers of this stuff before, and there is little you can do to dissuade them of the magical power of these machines, that when dissected reveal they're little more than batteries with flashing LED-lights - and no capability of generating specific radio frequencies. I just got an email this weekend about recent hucksters selling these in…
denialism | July 22, 2007Now that all of you have burned through the 7th Harry Potter book like GWB with an 8-ball of coke in the 70s, what is left for you to do? How to combat that remorseful feeling of being out of such perfectly fluffy literature?
Well here's an open thread to discuss those other series which may provide a HP-like fix for those who are starting to suffer. I have a suggestion that is no mere methadone substitute.
The series I'd recommend wholeheartedly would be George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series that begins with A Game of Thrones.
Martin has created the most interesting series I…
choofnagle | July 20, 2007I know that my earlier post on Gen Y kids was a bit bogus. There are huge generalizations and no real data in the argument. But I'm going to stir the pot more by posting portions of an earlier column by Jeffrey Zaslow on Generation Y that has a bit more anecdote and information about how the business community is dealing with younger workers:
...as this greatest generation grows up, the culture of praise is reaching deeply into the adult world. Bosses, professors and mates are feeling the need to lavish praise on young adults, particularly twentysomethings, or else see them wither under an…
denialism | July 20, 2007Writing for HuffPo, Charlottesville's own Barbara Ehrenreich takes on positive psychology. I have to remember to drop by sometime with a cake and welcome her to the city, even if it is a year too late.
She addresses something very annoying about the belief that positive thinking is a universal good (and provides a backhanded slap to Depeak Chopra and "the Secret"), that there isn't much proof that it really works - at least not in situations of ongoing stress. Further, a more insidious aspect of the emphasis on positive thinking is a blame-the-victim mentality inherent in its proponents…
choofnagle | July 19, 2007The Wall Street Journal continues its campaign against Generation Y with an article by Jeff Zaslow that tries to explain why so many young people act with such a sense of entitlement. It pins the blame on, among other things, California, indulgent parenting, and consumer culture. But I suspect that the culprit is the last one listed: the self-esteem movement.
The self-esteem movement. In 1986, California created a state task force on self-esteem. Schools nationwide later adopted "everybody's a winner" philosophies. One teacher told me that her superiors advised her to tell students that…
denialism | July 19, 2007The Angry Toxicologist is here!
He's already got a bunch of posts up and he's clearly a man after my own heart. Show him some love.
denialism | July 19, 2007Skeptic's Circle #65 is up at Neurologica.
I think I have to do it next time, is that right Orac?
denialism | July 18, 2007New Scientist has an interesting article by Patrick Leman on the psychology of believing in conspiracy theories.
Belief in conspiracy theories certainly seems to be on the rise, and what little research has been done investigating this question confirms this is so for perhaps the most famous example of all - the claim that a conspiracy lay behind the assassination of JFK in 1963. A survey in 1968 found that about two-thirds of Americans believed the conspiracy theory, while by 1990 that proportion had risen to nine-tenths.
One factor fuelling the general growth of conspiracy beliefs is…
denialism | July 18, 2007This article in PLoS caught my eye today. It's entitled, "Calories Do Not Explain Extension of Life Span by Dietary Restriction in Drosophila", and is an extension of the body of science showing that caloric restriction in a variety of animals, from fruit flies to non-human primates, may dramatically extend life-span.
Currently the mechanism is not well understood, but this surprising new result suggests that rather than absolute calorie restriction, decreased protein intake may be more critical for this beneficial effect.
In this study, fruit flies were fed a mixture of carbohydrate and…
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.
denialism | July 18, 2007Two Guardian articles appear today on Andrew Wakefield and his associates. The first is a discussion of his unethical and invasive methods used in his now-debunked study that purported to show a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
Vulnerable children were subjected to "inappropriate and invasive" tests by a doctor who prompted one of the biggest health controversies of the past 10 years, it was alleged today.
Andrew Wakefield, who linked the MMR vaccine to autism, was described at a General Medical Council (GMC) fitness panel as having breached "some of the most fundamental rules of…
denialism | July 17, 2007No.
It's the same tired junk DNA argument from the ID creationists. But I find this one particularly funny - you'll see why. Luskin says:
It's beyond dispute that the false "junk"-DNA mindset was born, bred, and sustained long beyond its reasonable lifetime by the neo-Darwinian paradigm. As one example in Scientific American explained back in 2003, "the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes ... 'were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.'" But once it was discovered that introns play vital cellular roles regulating gene production within the cell…