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Decade in race, all brown people are the same

Noticed a piece at The Root, The Decade in Race: WTF Was That?: After the tragedy of 9/11, Arab American stereotypes morph from harmless convenient store owner to new American nigger. The Simpsons' Apuh is suddenly nowhere near as funny There really needed to be more said here. The convenience store owners were not usually Arab (though some were), generally, they were South Asian, most often Indian American. "Apuh" (it's spelled Apu, no "h") is an Indian American, and is depicted as Hindu on The Simpsons. Also, on the order of 50%* of Arab Americans aren't Muslim, they're Christian. Like the…

Happy Passover! Go vote!

There's something appropriate about having an election on the first day of our celebration of freedom. Turnout has reportedly been light, so be sure to vote today. In Lawrence, you can figure out which candidates best match your views with the Journal-World's handy candidate selector for the school board and the city commission. Click through for my endorsements. My plan is to vote for Highberger, Schauner and Maynard-Moody, which is how Mike and Diane are voting, too. On the School Board, Diane recommends Merrill, Minder, Pomes and Machell. Mike, who is focussed on domestic partner benefits…

Two days in: DonorsChoose progress report.

We kicked off the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive just over 50 hours ago. Since then: ScienceBlogs readers have made donations totaling $8498.73 SEED is matching that $8498.73, and will match up to another $1501.27. Doing the math, your donations plus SEED matches means at least $16, 997.46 will go to help teachers and students. But, we're going until July 1, so I know we can do better than that! Dave and Greta at Cognitive Daily are sweetening the pot even more -- they'll kick in their own money to add another 10% to any amount you donate to their challenge. (Don't forget, that gets…

Repeal the 22nd Amendment

I want Bill Clinton to be president again. First there was this savvy framing of the upcoming election: "This is an election unlike any other I have ever participated in. For six years this country has been totally dominated - not by the Republican Party, this is not fair to the Republican Party - by a narrow sliver of the Republican Party, its more right-wing and its most ideological element. When the chips are down, this country has been jammed to the right, jammed into an ideological corner, alienated from its allies, and we're in a lot of trouble ... The Democratic Party has become the…

Primo Levi on Carbon

While we are on the theme of consilience, here's a pretty perfect paragraph of prose that captures the kind of Third Culture I fantasize about. It's from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table: Carbon is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed, and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one…

Charles Murray

The hypocrisy is dazzling. Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame) just wrote a book arguing that the vast majority of American college students shouldn't actually be attending college, since they lack the cognitive ability to "deal with college-level material." Instead, he argues that these people should become skilled laborers. ("There are very few unemployed first-rate electricians...") He also insists that "the future of America depends on "the gifted," or those who are genetically blessed with above-average intelligence. I certainly don't agree with Murray's argument, but I understand that…

Culture, Disease, Personality

This seems a wee bit reductive to me, but it's still an interesting hypothesis: One of the more intriguing patterns in psychology is that different cultures are characterized by different personality types. A team of psychologists has proposed a new explanation: the legacy of disease. They matched the personality scores of people to historical data on the prevalence of major diseases in each country. They found that a history of disease in a country corresponded to a personality characterized by a less promiscuous orientation - especially for women - and by less extraversion and openness to…

Music and Words

Hit songs are getting wordier: Average word count of top-ten songs during the 1960s: 176 Average last year: 436 That's from the latest Harper's Index, via Marginal Revolution. I think this trend is pretty clearly a result of hip-hop and rap. Compare some Phil Spector Wall of Sound single - say, "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes - to some recent smash hit, like Umbrella or Lollipop, and it's easy to hear all those extra words. These new songs are not only faster but much, much wordier. (The slow decay of top 40 radio also means that songs can cross the three minute rubicon. Both Umbrella and…

Time Travel

Over at Marginal Revolution, a commenter asks Tyler a great question: I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else. Any advice would help. Tyler's answer is instructive: I hope you have an expensive gold wedding band but otherwise start off by keeping your mouth shut. Find someone who will take care of you for a few days or weeks and then…

The Hangover

Joan Acocella has an interesting article on the science of hangovers: Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as "the metaphysical hangover": "When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at…

Home Court Advantage

The secret to winning in the NBA playoffs this year is to play on your own court: teams at home are 20-1. At first glance, this makes little sense. It's much easier to understand why football teams (the noise can disrupt play calling) and baseball teams (each field is unique) might benefit from playing at home. But why basketball? The court is always the same and the offense doesn't rely on audibles. The only tenable hypothesis, it seems to me, is that teams on their home-court have an affective advantage.* The cheering fans make them more likely to be in the proper emotional state of mind.…

Frozen Food

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. My own holiday meal was the subject of a simple food experiment. I made two versions of the same dish: brussels sprout gratin with chestnuts, bacon and Comte. (Yes, it's as delicious as it sounds, even if you don't like baby cabbages.) One version was made with fresh brussels sprouts. (Cost: $13.25) The other dish was made with frozen brussels sprouts. (Cost: $5.97) I naively assumed that the fresh version would be clearly superior. I was wrong. While I slightly preferred the texture of the fresh sprouts - they were a bit less mushy - the frozen…

Exporting Depression

America is getting good at exporting our diseases. Everybody already talks about obesity and the way American eating habits are slowly fattening up the rest of the world. But that's not the only disease we are sending abroad. Here's VSL*: Americans are on pretty chummy terms with depression, chatting almost as easily about therapists and Paxil and Lexapro as we would about sports scores and the weather. But in Japan -- where Buddhism has encouraged the acceptance of sadness and warns against the pursuit of "happiness" -- the concept of depression is just now beginning to permeate public…

Save the Whales

Hendrick Hertzberg takes on the Navy sonar technology which is killing whales: Whales live in a world of sound. A large part of their brains, which in many species are larger than ours, is devoted to processing sound. We don't know how they subjectively experience the processed sound, but it is reasonable to speculate that their experience of hearing is comparable in depth, detail, and complexity to our experience of vision. (They may be able, for example, to "see" inside each others' bodies, giving them an analogue of the nonverbal communication of emotion for which we use gesture and facial…

The wealthy work harder?

In response to a Conor Friedersdorf post on hard-working high earners I decided to look around for some data on the differences between socioeconomic categories in terms of hours worked weekly. In the GSS I found a modest association between higher income and more hours, but the N's were rather modest as well. Looking through google scholar I stumbled onto a different issue. Below the fold is a table from The Overworked American or the Overestimated Work Week? Many years ago I did some QA data analysis for an engineering firm. More specifically it was a company which designed truck…

Red state, blue state, smart state, dumb state

Thoughts on educational attainment and voting patterns at the state level: The percentage of a state's population with a bachelor's-plus does not correlate nearly as strongly with estimated IQ scores based on NAEP data (.46) as the percentage of a state's population with less than a high school education (.72) does. The prolish behavior HS detests might be better indicated by the less than high school percentage than by the bachelor-plus number, depending on where the cutoff is*. Both measures include similar proportions of the population (19.6% of the population over 25 years of age has less…

Coming soon: a new edition of Tangled Bank

In one short week (on February 1, 2006), there will be a new edition of the Tangled Bank, hosted here at Adventures in Ethics and Science. Tangled Bank is a blog carnival of the best science writing (broadly construed) in the blogosphere. In previous editions, topics have ranged across many scientific disciplines and have included essays about the intersections of science and everyday life. The important criteria for submissions are that they be about science, nature or medicine, and that they have been published within the past two or three months on a blog. Following the example of…

Sakurajima can't keep its top on, sets new record

Sakurajima in Japan erupting in 2000. Sometimes, it is the volcanoes that erupt out of the blue that get all the attention, leaving the ones that are constant producers to be ignored by the fawning media. Sakurajima in Japan is just one of those constant erupting volcanoes that doesn't get its just due. Well, over the weekend, Sakurajima broke its own record as it produced its 549th explosive event this year - in June no less - marking the most explosions (video) in a single year at the volcano on record. The previous record for most explosive eruptions in a single year at Sakurajima was 548…

Recent eruptions on Venus (no April Fools this time)

Idunn Mons on Venus with recent emissivity data from the Venus Express overlaid on the topography, suggesting recent lava flows. NASA released images today that suggest that the surface of Venus has experienced some relatively recent volcanic events (geologically speaking). By examining the surface in infrared, the Venus Express, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) has found that three spots on the surface exhibit signs of recent volcanism. The long-and-short of the research lead by Dr. Sue Smrekar of JPL is that a number of Venutian lava flows (shown above on Idunn Mons) show less…

Monday Musing: Iceland update, false alarm at Taal and the SI/USGS Weekly Report

Quick hits for a Monday morning (however, the week did have a good start). Lava fountaining on March 27, 2010 at the Eyjafjallajokull-Fimmvörduháls eruption in Iceland. The Eyjafjallajokull-Fimmvörduháls eruption is still going strong with two active fissure - and a lot of tourists poking around as well. If you watch the webcams closely, you can even see the cars and hikers trekking up near the erupting basaltic fissure (except today, as there seems to be a blizzard). Not to say that people are getting a little, well, nonchalant, but there is a story of serving meals cooked on lava up…

Turrialba in Costa Rica erupts and a close view at Poas

Yet another new eruption for 2010! Turrialba volcano in Costa Rica in an undated photo. Turrialba in Costa Rica erupted today, prompting the evacuation of tens of people from the region near the volcano. The eruption appears to be relatively small, producing ash and some pyroclastic material. The area around the volcano is not very populated and isn't near the profitable coffee-growing region of Costa Rica. This eruption is the first at Turrialba since 1866, over 130 years ago. That eruption was a VEI 3, so Turrialba is definitely a volcano to watch if the activity continues. Also in Costa…

New eruption overnight at Piton de la Fournaise

Piton de la Fournaise erupting on November 5, 2009. Image by Julian Balboni in Clicanoo. Eruptions reader Richard Oliver pointed out to me that Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island erupted (in french) on Thursday night. The volcano produced at least two lava flows that reached the ocean flowed downslope to ~1970 m above sea level, but by Friday morning, the seismicity and eruptive activity had waned considerably. Local residents of the island went out at night to see (in french) the lava flows, with the typical words of warning from local officials. The timeline for the eruption (in…

Another reason to ban official prayer at public meetings

Cynthia Dunbar, one of the wingnuts on the Texas board of education, is a revolting human being. She delivered a 'prayer' before a meeting that is an excellent example of grandstanding piety. She seems to be lecturing god on American history…her version of American history. Of course she wasn't actually lecturing god — that entity doesn't exist, and if you believe he does, then it would be an act of hubris to stand there and tell him what to think — but she was instead taking a moment to harangue the committee and audience with her far-right revisionist baloney without risk that someone…

Friday Flotsam: Kanlaon seismicity, the media loves Yellowstone and none like it hot.

Lets get right to it! "Manmade volcanoes": can they solve global warming? It does indeed seem that something is happening beneath Kanlaon in the Philippines. PHIVOLCS reports that the volcano experienced 257 volcanic earthquakes from August 23 to September 1, well above the usually "background" level of ~20-30 a week. Most of this seismicity is centered on the northwest slope of the volcano, suggesting that if magma is moving, it is moving up under this side of the system. However, the seismicity doesn't necessarily have to be magma moving up to erupt. It could very easily be moving up in…

Rumbling at Costa Rica's Turrialba

Turrialba volcano in Costa Rica. Turrialba, one of Costa Rica's active volcanoes, is apparently showing signs of life according to a brief report by Teletica 7 (in spanish). There is increased seismic activity and elevated gas emissions at the volcano that last erupted in 2007* and 1866 prior to that. The fumarolic activity at the summit crater is not a new occurrence, however the report implies that it has gotten more intense as the volcano has experienced increasing seismicity since early May. The Volcanism Blog does have an excellent summary of the rumblings at Turrialba since earlier in…

ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE

Shorter Richard Sternberg: Beginning to Decipher the SINE Signal: If science fiction weren't fiction, ID would be really good science. In responding tangentially to our earlier criticism of him for employing arguments of a paranoid schizophrenic nature which treated movies as if they were evidence of how science works, Sternberg pens an essay in which we're to pretend that we find monoliths on Earth's two moons and they send us crazy signals that make our computers suddenly intelligent. He quotes a hypothetical critic replying: We think youâre a nice guy, but your arguments are insane.…

Conservative threatens congressman's life over health insurance reform

Things are getting out of hand. The absurd disruptions at townhalls will backfire as people realize they are manufactured, and that the bills in question will help most Americans. But TPM reports Congressman Brad Miller's life was threatened in a call from a constituent: "[W]e have received a threatening phone call in the D.C. office, there have been calls to the Raleigh office," said Miller communications director LuAnn Canipe, in an interview with TPM. The threatening call in question happened earlier this week. "The call to the D.C. office was, 'Miller could lose his life over this,'"…

A new member of the TfK family

Sorry that blogging has been extra-crappy lately. Honestly, no Independence Day post? WTF? Well, it's like this. A while back I met Debra Berliner. She was smart and cute and made the same sorts of jokes I liked to make and laughed when I made them and enjoyed the same sorts of projects I do. Our interests meshed and we had lots to talk about. So we spent time together. We went to farmers markets. We went biking. We memorized Muppet movies and Decemberists songs. We knocked on doors in Reno and Las Vegas to get Obama elected. We looked at 3D images from Mars at NASA's Ames facility…

Religious attendance = more generosity

Religious Attendance Relates to Generosity Worldwide: Gallup data reveal that adherents of all the major world religions who attended religious services (attenders) in the past week have higher rates of generosity than do their coreligionists who did not attend services (non-attenders). Even for individuals who do not affiliate with any religious tradition, those who said they attended religious services in the past week exhibited more generous behaviors. These findings are based on Gallup surveys conducted from 2005-2009 in 145 countries, which asked individuals about whether they in the…

Is beating a woman ever justified?

Global Health Magazine has some data up on the "% of women who believe it is OK for husbands to beat them." If you click through the original data, the question is more extensive: % of girls and women aged 15-49 who responded that a husband or partner is justified in hitting or beating his wife under certain circumstances (2001-2007) I was going to cross-reference the data with the World Values Survey (which has a similar question), but I don't have time right now, so I'll simply pass on the raw data sorted by country. There's a rather large gap. Jordan 90 Guinea 85.6 Zambia 85.4…

Dana Milbank vs. Nico Pitney

I don't post much on contemporary politics, mostly because I don't have much value-add, but also because so much of it from the blogosphere is simply a critique of the mainstream press. In fact I think the mainstream press is essential and invaluable in many domains. The current crisis in print journalism is going to cause problems because these organizations serve as primary sources for many webloggers on abstruse or specialized topics. Who do you think puts bread on Carl Zimmer's table? But, I do believe that almost all "political analysis" and "commentary" in the mainstream media can be,…

That settles that then, I hope

That recent episode in which hackers broke into computers at East Anglia University and extracted private email from climate researchers was the subject of much triumphal rejoicing by the climate change deniers. The UK set a parliamentary Science and Technology Committee to review the affair and see if there was any substance to the claims of the denialists, and the report of the inquiry has been released. On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails—"trick" and "hiding the decline"—the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence…

Religious people support torture

John Schwenkler points me to Rod Dreher's shock that religious people seem to support torture more than the non-religious: And get this: the more often you go to church, the more pro-torture you're likely to be! What on earth are these Christians hearing at church?! Very sad indeed. John notes: There are plenty of data showing that Christians' attitudes toward abortion, contraception, and the rest don't differ very significantly from those of the rest of society; the real factor, of course, lies in political affiliations, and I have little doubt that most of the relevant findings can be…

The genetic architecture of different populations

Dan MacArthur has a post, Genetics of complex traits in Europeans and East Asians: similarities and differences: With those goals in mind, you can expect to see many more GWAS of non-European populations over the next couple of years, and some explicit comparisons of the differing genetic architecture of complex traits between populations. Exciting times for those of us interested in the genetic and evolutionary basis of between-population differences... This reminds me of A variant of the gene encoding leukotriene A4 hydrolase confers ethnicity-specific risk of myocardial infarction:…

Most bankers are not bad

Jacob Weisberg has a good corrective to anti-banking hysteria, The Case for Bankers. My post below, Kill the traders!, was an indictment of a small minority who have an outsized effect on the majority. We're talking a power law distribution, most of the havoc is due to a few. Weisberg notes: If you want to sputter, choke, and turn purple with rage at the people who wrecked your retirement, you might start with Cramer himself, the most prolific dispenser of bad advice to the investing public. But if you're looking for someone in the securities industry, you'd be justified in directing your…

Personalized medicine, the long introduction....

Patient's DNA May Be Signal to Tailor Drugs: The colon cancer drugs Erbitux and Vectibix, for instance, do not work for the 40 percent of patients whose tumors have a particular genetic mutation. The Food and Drug Administration held a meeting this month to discuss whether patients should be tested to narrow use of the drugs, which cost $8,000 to $10,000 a month. To some extent this sort of thing is a gimme; intelligent & proactive patients already "help" their medical professionals by channeling them appropriately in terms of decisions because with the veritable tsunami of data no human…

I get email

I wondered what the creationists were doing after last night's debate, when all the godless rationalists were partying down. They were composing a condescending letter to rationalize away their defeat! Here's what Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association sent me and Mark Borrello and Jerry Bergman this morning. Thank you all Thanks to you all for keeping the debate on a courteous intellectual level. Obviously not all the questions were addressed but the event illustrated that it can be extremely valuable to do so. Dr. Myers, you have a unique position, with your immensely…

Coburn's NSF Idiocy

There's been a lot of discussion about the report released by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) alleging waste and fraud by the National Science Foundation (NSF), including posts by Dr. O, Steve Silberman, Namnezia, NeuroDojo, The Prodigal Academic, and Stephanie Pappas. The first thing to realize about Tom Coburn is that he's a full-blown wackaloon--in 2004, Coburn was warning us about the looming lesbian threat: OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - The Republican Senate candidate in Oklahoma warns of "rampant" lesbianism in some schools in the state in a tape released Monday by his Democratic opponent. The remark…

Levels of selection: controversies no one cares about?

Bora made two quick references to "group selection" today. I don't have much time...and shouldn't be blogging, but I want to make a few quick points before this topic goes down the memory hole (I know, unnecessary caveat, but I am driven by personal guilt in expressing it, not public shame). For those "not in the know" (e.g., most readers), Bora and I have a history. Update: Robert Skipper's ruminations are worth a read, as always. And of course I was just making shit up about his political views and draft.... My problem with Bora comes down to assertions like this: And I have realized…

The Flawed Assumptions of the Bailout Bill

(from here) Well, the bailout bill passed, and we'll have to see if it actually does anything. What's gone missing in the discussion surrounding this bill (among other things) is any discussion of the assumptions underlying this legislation. Ian Welsh spells them out: If you believe any of: 1) That the paper will not return high enough [profits] to recoup losses, since Treasury will be buying it at above market value; 2) That this is the beginning of more than a normal recession; 3) That Paulson in particular and Treasury in general will not make getting the money back a priority, but…

The US governments pandemic flu non-plan

The Federal government's flu plan is in it final stages of recapitulation -- sorry, I mean, the final stages of preparation. The headline of the AP news story says it all: U.S. Pandemic Flu Plan: Hole up at Home. Jeez. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pitching the plan at medical meetings and aims to send it out for review by the end of the year. State and local governments have asked for unusually detailed and specific advice on such matters as closing schools and canceling public events, one CDC official said. This week, CDC awarded $5.2 million in grants related…

Music Mondays: Gaga, Bennett, Bowie & Blue: The jazz conversation continues

The fallout of the Great Sonny Rollins Jazz Satire Blowup of 2014 is still reverberating through the jazz community, prompting new uproars and bouncing off a surprising number of new jazz eruptions in the wider culture. Definitely interesting times to be a jazz fan, if not always for the right reasons. Some cool stuff going on, see links below. Tony Bennett teams up with Lady Gaga, of all people, to put out a duets album David Bowie teams up with Maria Schneider on a song for his new greatest hits package Annie Lennox doesn't team up with any famous jazz people for her new jazz standards…

Scare tactics: merits and lack thereof

In what New York Magazine is calling the most-read article in the publication's history,  David Wallace-Wells writes about what will happen if we don't stop burning fossil fuels soon. In a nutshell: the climate "will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us." This has made more than a few climatologists rather cross. The argument is that because "The Uninhabitable Earth" focuses on an unlikely worst-case scenario, and therefore might needless scare the public into inaction. There are a few questionable statements regarding the science of climate change. You can…

ScienceBloggers Walk Down Memory Lane

I was born in 1984. My earliest memory of a computer is thumbing through a plastic box of black, square 5.25-inch floppy disks, trying to decide whether I wanted to play The Oregon Trail, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, or Word Munchers on the family Compaq 386. Since most of the ScienceBloggers have a few years on me, we thought it might be fun to have a stroll down their technological memory lanes. Here's what they remember about old-school computing. (Feel free to give them a hard time about their ages; they're all extremely sensitive.) Revere (b. A long time ago) "My first computer…

Modeling antiviral resistance, XIII: effects of fitness costs of resistance

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] In this post we explain the remaining results presented in the paper by Lipsitch et al. in published in PLoS Medicine (the subsections headed, "Effects of resistance on epidemic size" and "Dependence of outcomes o fitness cost and intensity of control" on page 6). These sections and the…

Promise them anything: Health Information Technology

If the 1960s film, The Graduate, were to be made today (Graduate, II: The Stimulus), the iconic scene at the party where a friend of the family takes Dustin Hoffman aside and whispers in his ear, "I have only one word for you, Plastics") would be transmogrified into, "I have only three words for you, Health Information Technology." HIT, and its love child with the recently passed stimulus package, the Electronic Medical Record, have all the characteristics of a good idea destined to go bad. One of my vivid memories from my early career was being shown a new kind of quiet printer, called an…

Andrew Wakefield, autism, vaccines and science journals

My sciblings at Scienceblogs have done a pretty thorough fisking of the Andrew Wakefield affair.To recap breifly, a paper by Wakefield and others in The Lancet in 1998 raised an alarm that the widely used measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine was the cause of some cases of childhood autism and a chronic inflammatory bowel disease. The incriminated agent was alleged to be measles virus contained in the vaccine (MMR has never contained mercury preservative). The impact was dramatic and this issue became a powerful engine propelling the anti-vaccine movement. The result has been a real public…

The Lark-Mouse and the Prometheus-Mouse

Two interesting papers came out last week, both using transgenic mice to ask important questions about circadian organization in mammals. Interestingly, in both cases the gene inserted into the mouse was a human gene, though the method was different and the question was different: Turning a Mouse Into A Lark The first paper (Y. Xu, K.L. Toh, C.R. Jones, J.-Y. Shin, Y.-H. Fu, and L.J. PtáÄek Modeling of a Human Circadian Mutation Yields Insights into Clock Regulation by PER2. Cell, Vol 128, 59-70, 12 January 2007) is concerned with the human clock mutation that is responsible for FASBS (…

Why writing my grant takes so long

When I first started teaching as an academic and told my family I taught 6 hours a week, they probably thought I had it pretty easy. I'm also sure they wondered what I did the rest of the time. Teaching a couple of new courses is a big job and it often absorbs more than the usual 40 hour week, but it's hard to account for your time. The same with writing grants. The idea that writing my grant (I can hear the groans, already; he's not going to talk about that again, is he?) is going to occupy 7 days a week until it's due at the beginning of April probably sounds inexplicable and impossible to…

Is California keeping people safe at work? Labor advocates say no

In 2012, the most recent year for which US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures are available, 375 people died on the job in California  – an average occupational fatality rate of more than one person every day. At the same time, research by Worksafe and other California labor advocates shows that while California’s workforce has grown by about 22 percent in the last 20 years, the number of safety inspectors for the 17 million people employed in the state’s 1.34 million workplaces has decreased by about 11 percent. This leaves California – which has the largest workforce of any US state…