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The hbd delusion

A confession: I have long disliked Nicholas Wade's science journalism. He has often written about biology in the NY Times, and every time he seems to make a botch of the reporting, because he actually doesn't understand biology very well. For example, in his very last article for the NYT, he described some work that identified 12 genes found on the Y chromosome that are globally expressed — they aren't just involved in testis development, for instance. This is no surprise. There are genes required for sperm differentiation found on autosomes, for instance, and the Y chromosome is not a…

Why not just castrate them? (Part 5) The Geiers' "Lupron protocol" metastasizes

Of all the bizarre forms of antivaccine autism quackery, one of the strangest has to be Mark and David Geier's "Lupron protocol." I've written about it many times, dating back to 2006 and, more recently, when the Chicago Tribune provided the first coverage I'm aware of of the Geiers' quackery in a major newspaper, thanks to Trine Tsouderos. If you want the details, feel free to click on the links, but I'll boil it down for purposes of this post. Basically, the father-and-son team of autism woo-meisters who operate out of the basement of the father's Silver Spring, MD house, Mark and David…

What is the ideal camera for the person who... well, you know....

The person who never seems to be able to operate, or be happy with, these modern digital cameras. The person who more often says "Oh, I'm so upset, I couldn't get a picture of that because this damn camera never works right" or the person who goes to take a shot but then quietly puts the camera away realizing it's full and remembering that one does not quite know what one does when the camera is full. And so on. I know a number of people who are utterly incapable of using a digital camera, even though those same people are highly intelligent, flexible, and able to easily do things that…

DuWayne Brayton: We should all eschew the rejection of the other as your subaltern, even if only by accident.

So, I said some things that got my friend DuWayne Brayton mad, and this caused him to write two blog posts (here and here), and now with a little time to spare I'm giving this the attention it deserves. I'm going to let DuWayne and you, dear reader, piece together most the threads that connect what he said and what I said and what he said and what I said. If you want. I highly recommend that you give it a skip. I have not been directly addressing DuWayne's questions, and his comments have little to do with anything I've said (sorry, but true). Given what DuWayne has said about what I…

When religion interferes with medical education

I've often written about the intersection of medicine and religion. Most commonly, I've lamented how the faithful advocate inappropriately injecting religion into the doctor-patient relationship in a manner that risks imposing the religion of the health care practitioner on the patient, sometimes through physicians feeling no obligation to inform patients of therapeutic options that violate their religious beliefs or pharmacists refusing to dispense medications that (they claim) violate their beliefs. Another common thread running through this blog is criticism of religion when it leads…

It looks like the University of Cincinnati is another candidate for the Academic Woo Aggregator

Having lived in Ohio for eight years and married a woman from the Toledo area, I had come to think that Ohioans had more common sense. I guess I was wrong. On the other hand, I should have realized that I was wrong. After all, Ohio is home to The Ohio State University Center for Integrative Medicine and the Cleveland Clinic Department of Integrative Medicine. So much for hard-nosed Midwestern skepticism, I guess. My only consolation as a University of Michigan graduate is that Ohio seems to be trying to surpass Michigan for promoting woo in academia. Or it would be were it not that a major…

Recall bias, vaccines, and illness

In the eyes, of anti-vaccine advocates, vaccines bear the brunt of blame for a variety of conditions, including autism, asthma, neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune disorders and a wide variety others. Often this link is based on retrospective data, in which parents or patients recall and self-report how many vaccines they've had and which ones. This self-recall is then correlated with the health condition under study, and sometimes correlations are found. However, it's long been known that self-reporting has a tendency to be unreliable, with a tendency to conflate incidents that may or…

When psychics attack, autistic children suffer

I just shook my head as I perused this item on Pharyngula earlier this morning. What else can you do? The irrationality and lunacy is beyond belief as I read a story about a mother named Colleen Leduc called into school because a report of sexual abuse was made about her autistic daughter Victoria: The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard - the principal, vice-principal and her daughter's teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they'd received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse - and that the CAS had been…

A perfect storm of quackademic medicine and bad journalism

I sometimes wonder if the world is laughing at me. Let me explain. A while ago I compiled a list of academic medical institutions that--shall we say?--are far more receptive to pseudoscientific and downright unscientific medicine in the form of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), otherwise known as "integrative medicine." I dubbed this list my Academic Woo Aggregator, and lamented how big it was with much wailing and gnashing of skeptical teeth. Indeed, more than once I have reluctantly concluded that woo is fast becoming the future of American medicine. High up on the…

Houston, we have a problem: Attending to structure and process of science and science education policy

Candidate's promises and positions do not always match what is constitutionally or procedurally possible. It is possible to wrap oneself in the Constitution and hide behind it at the same time. Several years ago, a child died when a string attached to his 'hoodie' was caught in the frame of the playground slide down which he was hurdling. He was strangled. Over the course of any given year or two, a small number of children are run over by cars, killed or injured, as they run carelessly into the street in pursuit of the carillon-playing ice cream truck. The former incident, in…

A major victory for science-based medicine

The following is a collaborative effort by PalMD, the usual author of this blog, and Ames Grawert, JD, a soon-to-be-sworn-in attorney working in New York City. Proponents of science-based medicine have always had one major problem---human beings are natural scientists, but we are also very prone to cognitive mis-steps. When we follow the scientific method we have developed, we succeed very well in understanding and manipulating our environment. When we follow our instincts instead, we frequently fail to understand cause and effect. This is how people on the fringes of medicine and science…

Will naturopathic quackery be licensed in Michigan?

If I've pointed it out once, I've pointed it out a thousand times. Naturopathy is a cornucopia of almost every quackery you can think of. Be it homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, applied kinesiology, anthroposophical medicine, reflexology, craniosacral therapy, Bowen Technique, and pretty much any other form of unscientific or prescientific medicine that you can imagine, it's hard to think of a single form of pseudoscientific medicine and quackery that naturopathy doesn't embrace or at least tolerate. Indeed, as I've retorted before to apologists for naturopathy who…

The “no debate” debate, briefly revisited

Just yesterday, I commented on a typical whine from the antivaccine crew at the crank blog Age of Autism in which Dan Olmsted became indignant over being reminded that science does not support his belief that vaccines cause autism, that they don't work, and that they are dangerous. Olmsted, clueless as ever about science, viewed being reminded that the science overwhelmingly doesn't support his belief as being akin to George W. Bush trying to convince the country that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to invade or to Richard Nixon urging people to stop investigating Watergate…

A crank attacks the Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was one of the most massive scientific undertakings in recent years and, from a basic science and technology development standpoint, one of the most productive. The data gained formed the basis of the genomic revolution. And "revolution" is the right word. A mere 12 years after the human genome sequence was first published in papers in Nature and Science, we now have petabytes of sequence data pouring out of universities, research institutes, and genomics institutes. Sequencing a genome, which took several years to do for the HGP and cost billions of dollars,…

Worst Parts of Science

From the archives, in honor of Labor Day. 1 - Being scooped. There is nothing worse than working your ass off for 4 years (much of it in the coldroom) when BANG! a paper comes out making all your work useless. 2 - Begging for money. When scientists are not working, eating, sleeping or at some seminar/conference, they are ... writing grants, fellowships ... aka begging. Their applications can be summarized as follows "I'm so great, my work is so important, look at how sexy my results are" but in reality they meant to say "if you don't give me this grant, my lab is going to sink into a deep…

Should we have a third culture?

Yesterday a copy of John Brockman's The Third Culture arrived in the mail, and I was expecting it to contain a discussion about the modern mode of science popularization, or at least some insight into why many scientists decided to cut out the media middlemen and start writing books themselves. What I got was a collection of interviews (with the questions ripped out) and a whole lot of back-biting along the well-worn lines of evolutionary "pluralists" and "ultra-Darwinians," and the fact that the text is made up of interviews (rather than essays) undercuts the core of what the book is…

No Virginia, evolution isn't ending

Updated: Follow up post End Update I've already the covered Steven-Jones-evolution-is-ending story at my other weblog. I notice that John Wilkins has also objected to Jones' exaggerations. When I initially read the quotes from Jones in The Times I was alarmed, but wondered if his position was being taken out of context or misinterpreted. I emailed a prominent evolutionary biologist who I suspected would know Jones well enough to clarify this issue. My correspondent responded that Jones really does believe this, and he finds Jones' ideas as ludicrous as I do (adding for good measure he doesn'…

Animal rights thugs: Researchers' children are not off limits

Remember Dario Ringach? He's the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing primate research. Terrorism and intimidation worked, but who could blame Dr. Ringach? He was afraid for his family. That's because it was more than just threatening e-mails and phone calls, but rather the campaign of intimidation included masked thugs banging on the windows of his house at night,…

What is public health: DailyKos interview, part II

On Sunday DailyKos frontpager, DemFromCT (who is also a founder of the FluWiki and a pulmonary specialist) finished up his two part interview with us. It's cross-posted here below the fold. If anyone doubted we were academics, the display of watching us argue with ourselves would have but those doubts to rest. Scientists cherish the hope that we will make difficult things simple, but often we wind up making simple things difficult. We see complications in everything, even the simple question of what is public health infrastructure. Witness: Q. Last week I asked you about public health…

New Research on Assessing Climate Change Impact on Extreme Weather

Three statisticians go hunting for rabbit. They see a rabbit. The first statistician fires and misses, her bullet striking the ground below the beast. The second statistician fires and misses, their bullet striking a branch above the lagomorph. The third statistician, a lazy frequentist, says, "We got it!" OK, that joke was not 1/5th as funny as any of XKCD's excellent jabs at the frequentist-bayesian debate, but hopefully this will warm you up for a somewhat technical discussion on how to decide if observations about the weather are at all explainable with reference to climate change. […

The Scientific, Political, Social, and Pedagogical Context for the claim that "Race does not exist."

These days, many people say that race is largely a social construct; while it may have a place in describing the population genetics of some species, is not particularly applicable to humans. I'm one of those people. The race concept is generally inapplicable or at best misleading when used as it often is with our species. This is why race should be abandoned in favor of other ways of describing human variation. At the same time, there are political, social, and pedagogical reasons to put aside the race concept. Race is not that useful of a concept to begin with, and beyond that it has…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The quantum homeopathic gyroscopic circle is complete

In my rigid, Western, scientific way of thinking, things generally have a beginning, a middle, and and end, the arrow of time marching relentlessly onward. However, it occurs to me that this is the very last edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo of its first year. Last June, when I started this, almost on a whim, I had no way of knowing how it would take on such a life of its own. Indeed, I fear that all the woo to which I subject myself on a weekly basis may be having an effect. I'm ceasing to see life as a straight line any more; such rigid thinking no longer suits me. Instead, like the more…

Skepticism undermined by an insufficient knowledge of history

I'll admit it. There have been at least two times since I started blogging that I fell for a dubious story because I exercised insufficient skepticism. The first time occurred very early on in my blogging history when swallowed a story about how legalization of prostitution was claimed to lead to the requirement that unemployed women take jobs as prostitutes or lose their unemployment benefits. More recently, I backpedaled a bit over a story about how supposedly history teachers in the U.K. were not teaching about the Holocaust out of concern for offending the sensitivities of certain of…

Barbara Loe Fisher versus the flu vaccine

Around about this time last year, the nation, nay, the world, was in the throes of a frenzy about the H1N1 influenza pandemic. It was also fertile ground for skeptical blogging for two reasons. First, it was a major health-related story. Second, the mass vaccination campaigns for H1N1 that governments thew together hurriedly was a magnet for quacks, cranks, and loons of the anti-vaccine variety. Truly, the craziness came fast and furious, with each new day bringing a new atrocity against science and reason. Indeed, even one of my favorite magazines, The Atlantic, wasn't immune, as…

Searing stupidity about "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) in Slate

I don't know who Kent Sepkowitz is other than that he he's an infectious disease specialist in New York and that he writes for Slate. I also know he's written about penis enlargement, his dislike of magazines' "best doctor" lists (a sentiment with which I can agree, actually), and that he has suggested that Americans should "eat more excrement." What I didn't know is that he was capable of slinging said excrement around (at least, the excrement left over after Americans eat more of it, I suppose), specifically slinging excrement about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)…

The costs and benefits of the latest, greatest cancer drugs

Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its medical section entitled, The Evidence Gap, described thusly: Articles in this series will explore medical treatments used despite scant proof they work and will consider steps toward medicine based on evidence. When I first saw the series, I was prepared for a crapfest. My experience has generally been that when reporters start examining the evidence for and against a treatment they usually do a pretty lousy job. This is most obvious when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), where we are routinely…

Nicholas Gonzalez on Steve Jobs: If only he had come to see me...

I debated a while about whether I should take this particular post on. It's not because there isn't a lot of fodder there deserving of that special form of not-so-Respectful Insolence that only Orac, in his usual inimitable fashion, can provide. There most definitely is. The problem, as is sometimes the case when I get on a roll, is that it represents going back to a topic that I've already covered very recently. In fact, it's a topic I've already covered twice, namely Steve Jobs and the insulinoma that ultimately killed him. Last week, I reposted what I wrote about him back in 2009 after he…

Making Graph Algorithms Fast, using Strongly Connected Components

One of the problems with many of the interesting graph algorithms is that they're complex. As graphs get large, computations over them can become extremely slow. For example, graph coloring is NP-complete - so the time to run a true optimal graph coloring algorithm on an arbitrary graph grows exponentially in the size of the graph! So, quite naturally, we look for ways to make it faster. We've already talked about using heuristics to get fast approximations. But what if we really need the true optimum? The other approach to making it faster, when you really want the true optimum, is…

Using Graphs to Represent Information: Lattices and Semi-Lattices

There's a kind of graph which is very commonly used by people like me for analysis applications, called a lattice. A lattice is a graph with special properties that make it extremely useful for representing information in an analysis system. I've mentioned before that you can use a graph G=(V,E) to describe a partial order over its vertices, where given two vertices a,b∈V, a<b if and only if either (a,b) ∈E, or there exists some vertex c∈V such that a<c and c<b. If this is true, G is called a partial order graph (POG). If we look at POGs, we can create a kind of completion…

Representing Graphs

One of the reasons that I like about graph theory so much is because of how it ties into computer science. Graphs are fundamental to many problems in computer science, and a lot of the work in graph theory has direct implications for algorithm design. It also has a lot of resonance for me, because the work I do involves tons and tons of graphs: I don't think I've gotten through a week of work in the last decade without implementing some kind of graph code. Since I've described a lot of graph algorithms, and I'm going to describe even more, today I'm going to talk a bit about how to…

Are Democrats the Party of Corporate America?

maha had a very interesting post about the eroding support among Corporate America for the Republican Party: I want to go back to the notion that the Bushies are agents of corporate America, verses the "lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies" apparent now even to CEOs. I think the Bushies saw themselves as agents of corporate America, people who would "run the government like a business," to recall a popular phrase of the 1990s. When the Bush Administration began the Bushies were full of the conceit that they were so much more disciplined and business-like than the Clintons they could…

Chickens and Group Selection

A while ago, Bora referred to a short article about David Sloan Wilson, whose research program examines group selection (among other things). Any discussion of group selection is almost always contentious, largely because there is a fundamental confusion (or conflation) of two different phenomena: the evolution of groups and selection among groups (i.e., group selection). Evolution of groups is a fascinating and fundamental issue in biology, whether it be the evolution of multicellular organisms from single cell organisms, or the evolution of behaviors that create coordinate group behavior…

Evolution, Tradeoffs, Ignoring Biology, and Influenza

Inspired by this excellent post by Revere about the evolution of influenza, I've delved deep into the archives of the Mad Biologist, and summoned up some evolutionary thoughts of my own about influenza: I meant to post something about evolution and influenza before my travels up north, but I was swamped by work and couldn't get to it. Thankfully, two colleagues, Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch, have decided to deal with Wendy Orent's faith-based virology. Orent writes (italics mine): Indeed, a strictly enforced quarantine could do more harm than good. Herding large numbers of possibly…

Vitamin D not so good for health?

Long time readers of this weblog will know I have an interest in Vitamin D. It has been hypothesized to be one of the major causal factors in generating human skin color variation, and we know from evolutionary genomics that the genes which underly skin color have been under very recent & powerful selection pressures. There is also data that Vitamin D levels may have a relationship to endemic diseases such as flu, and chronic ones such as arthritis. And then we find out nuggets such as the fact that most non-whites in Canada are Vitamin D deficient. But what if we're putting the cart…

Cats

The "domestic" cat, Felis silvestris catus, has been with us for nearly 10,000 years. Recently, a 9,500 year old burial of a human and their companion cat was discovered on Cyprus. Cats are not indigenous to the island, so it seems that the presence of this cat must be owed to human intervention in some manner. Though we are used to thinking about how humans shaped cats through selective breeding the recent data on Toxoplasma gondii suggests that cats might have an impact on human behavior that could explain cultural differences! Some intellectuals have posited that the selection of…

Regarding Rick Warren, This Whom the Obama Administration is 'Reaching Out to'

I really wasn't going to say much about the decision to have Rick Warren, civil rights opponent and evolution denialist, until Pam Spaulding bravely put on her slime guard and went to see what the rightwing denizens of Free Republic had to say. Warning--not safe for workdecent human beings: LOL the homo's are taking a right beating lately. This is just great, what is it ah yes change we can believe in have you got that homo's? change you never thought LOL Since his election to the position of President Elect, Obama has shown increasingly that he may be (emphasis on "may be") a pure old…

Why Were the Donut Fearers Ever Taken Seriously?

If you haven't heard by now, some theopolitical conservatives are angry at the Krispy Kreme doughnut chain because they used "doughnut of choice" in an ad campaign. I think Amanda's take on why these wackaloons fear TEH DONUTZ is right on target: What made reading this move from the "merely hilarious" column to the "fucking scary" column for me, though, is that I'm currently reading Matt Taibbi's latest book The Great Derangement, and he spends a good deal of his time in the book pretending to be a Christian attending James Hagee's church in San Antonio....what Taibbi explains is something…

Why 'Fixing Teachers' Is As 'Unrealistic' As 'Fixing Poverty'

I've spent the last two days discussing the problems with value-added teacher evaluation, and I thought I would turn it over to the readers, since there has been some really good discussion. At the end, I'll revisit some statistical and methodological issues, but I want to address a good question raised by becca--and, in other posts about education, this question has been raised: But do you really think it's easier to fix poverty than it is to get good teachers? Two responses to that. First, it's not clear to me that teacher quality plays anything more than a minor role--and a transitory…

Lessons from How Rome Fell

A while ago, I finished reading Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell. While there are far too many inane comparisons between the Late Roman Empire and the U.S., this summary of Goldsworthy's thesis seems appropriate (italics mine): That is not to say that the latter emperors were more selfish, but simply that they could never be as secure. Many may have had the best of intentions to rule well, but the government of the empire became first and foremost about keeping the emperor in power - and at lower levels, about the individual advantage of bureaucrats and officers. The Late Roman Empire was…

PalMD of White Coat Underground Says... [The Rightful Place Project]

Make no little plans; they have no power to stir men's blood. ---Daniel Burnham The last eight years have seen subtle and not-so subtle predations on the practice of medicine. Will the new administration be able to promote the kind of change we need? Let's review some of the challenges facing the Obama administration. Ethical apocalypse Bush's evisceration of the Constitution of the United States has affected health care professionals. For example, the military has likely always used psychologists to assist with interrogations, but the last eight years has seen a huge increase in the…

Back to the story of the hurricane

Today marks the official start of North Atlantic hurricane season. So... One of the key differences between genuine climatology and anti-scientific denialism of anthropogenic climate change is the flexibility of the former and the stubbornness of the latter when it comes to our ever-evolving understanding of how the world works. The connection between hurricanes and climate is a perfect example. When the "An Inconvenient Truth" crew was filming Al Gore deliver his now-familiar presentation, they couldn't have anticipated that two major hurricanes would, as if on cue, roar through the Gulf of…

Jared Diamond: GMOs and a Guide to Reducing Life’s Risks

Respected writer Jared Diamond recently published an overall excellent opinion piece in the New York Times discussing how we often obsess about the wrong things, while failing to watch for real dangers.    Jared Diamond’s Guide to Reducing Life’s Risks - NYTimes.com.   Many of us in the Plant biology community were quite surprised at one phrase buried in an otherwise excellent article:   'It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation…

What is an “atheist community”?

Slate has an article by Paul Bloom on why religious people are nice and atheists are mean. As you might guess, I have some difficulty with the premise of the article — in my experience, atheists have been far friendlier, while the religious have been downright vicious — but it does make some interesting points (and, of course, it cites me as "prominent", which is very flattering). In particular, his main argument, which I entirely agree with, is that if religion has any virtue, it is not in the belief itself, but in the community that forms around it. The positive effect of religion in the…

Making it up as you go along – a guide to a happy career in science.

Guest Blog by Dr. Catherine Mohr Senior Director of Medical Research, Intuitive Surgical USA Science & Engineering Festival X-STEM Speaker I work on surgical robots - at the intersection of cool, high tech, and helping people get well. One of the things I like most is that my job changes every day as I look for new technologies that might help us improve patient outcomes.  For example, one day we may play with new kinds of lasers for cutting bone, the next we are looking for new less invasive ways of accessing the body to do more effective surgeries, and the next we are looking out 10 to…

The Need to Connect on An Emotional Level With STEM Learners

By Larry Bock  Co-Founder of USA Science Science & Engineering Festival  No doubt, the influences that move individuals into their chosen field of science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) are often as different as night and day, but one thing seems constant: most STEM professionals, in remembering how they made their selection, can trace that ¨A-ha!¨ moment back to a pivotal experience in their lives that connected them on an emotional level for the first time with their chosen line of work. That moment for scientist James E. West, inventor of the foil electret microphone,…

mikeroweWORKS Joins Forces with The USA Science &Engineering Festival on Pioneering Skilled Trades Pavilion!

By F. Mark Modzelewsk Effort will highlight STEM’s massive impact on vocational education and careers The USA Science & Engineering Festival (www.USAScienceFestival.org) is pleased to announce that mikeroweWORKS (mikeroweworks.com) will be hosting the “mikeroweWORKS Pavilion” at this year’s Festival. Today’s trade careers are being driven by hardworking, technologically-skilled workers and one of the goals of this partnership is to shine a spotlight on them at the Festival and to encourage young people to explore a multitude of career options in industries with millions of job openings.…

Meet the Next 5 of the Top 20 Finalists for the Kavli Video Contest! Vote for "The People's Choice Award"!

The Kavli Science Video Contest has wrapped up with over 260 entries! Now it's time for the People's Choice Vote, in advance of the awards ceremony on April 29, in Washington, DC, as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival. People's Choice Voting begins April 2 and closes April 13. Voting is easy, just view the videos on YouTube and click 'like" for your favorites. Click here to view the videos. We have been highlighting the Top 20 Finalists on our blog for the past two weeks. In today's blog get to know the next five of the Top 20 Finalists: SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST…

Is Science Just for Nerds? Ask will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas

When was the last time you saw a science special in prime time on one of the major networks? Better yet, when was the last time you heard rock stars speaking passionately and convincingly about the value of science, engineering and technology? If you had to think long and hard before answering, you're not alone. These phenomena are as rare today as sightings of Halley's comet. But they did happen -- in case you missed it -- as recently as this month when will.i.am, the front man and producer for the award-winning musical group The Black Eyed Peas, teamed up with eminent technology innovator…

Death Is an Angel

"Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet'." -Carlos Castaneda "When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. And his thoughts soon clash.…

CDC: the times they need a changin'

The Atlanata Journal Constitution, hometown paper of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (aka, "CDC") continues to lift the rocks and uncover the stuff beneath. In the latest installment it has obtained an internal memo from CDC's international health office to CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding about the problems in filling overseas posts (see also this post summarizing things at DailyKos by my Wiki partner, DemFromCT). The memo is long but revealing. One of the chief obstacles resides in a political office at the Department of Health and Human Services headed by George H.…