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What goes up must come down

Very few relationships in this world are monotonic. Not the price of stocks, not the traffic on this blog, and not global climate trends. Maybe if more people understood this, we'd have less nonsense about climate change clogging the media. By monotonic, I mean, if you plot a trend on a standard x-y graph, monotonic lines will always go in the same direction, whether it's up, down or flat, no matter what the scale. The fact that most functions aren't monotonic should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a while. The real world has a habit of being a little wonky. Even those things…

More weirdness from the Washington Post's op-ed section

Few technologies give rise to more spirited debates among environmentalists than nuclear power generation. So it was with some trepidation that I started to read an essay on the subject in last week's Washington Post. This is the same newspaper that took six weeks to run a rebuttal to George Will's latest attempts to obfuscate the climate change debate and still hasn't run a correction for the myriad mispresentations contained therein. So maybe it's not surprising that "5 Myths on Nuclear Power" by hitherto unheard of Todd Tucker is similarly hobbled by a lack of respect for reality. Here are…

The US: #2 in MRIs, #15 in Health Ranking

Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4 - - - Part 4 with Kelly Joyce, author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: Is your story of MRI one that is common to medical technologies? Common to the commodification (in an economic sense) or routinization (in the sense of technical practice) of machines in daily medical practice? Common to a story about the consequences of health care practice in the 21st century? Anything? KJ: The integration of MRI into medical practice is a story that shares issues…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (12/5/07)

Sean at Cosmic Variance does Q&A on why time has a direction: Is the origin of the Second Law really cosmological? We never talked about the early universe back when I took thermodynamics. Trust me, it is. Of course you don't need to appeal to cosmology to use the Second Law, or even to "derive" it under some reasonable-sounding assumptions. However, those reasonable-sounding assumptions are typically not true of the real world. Using only time-symmetric laws of physics, you can't derive time-asymmetric macroscopic behavior (as pointed out in the "reversibility objections" of Lohschmidt…

Chopra challenges eloquence with pretentious gobbledygook

That long-winded charlatan, Deepak Chopra, has scribbled up a whiny criticism of Hitchens' address in absentia to the American Atheists. Hitchens wrote a wonderful, brave, and inspiring exposition on his mortality, and urged everyone to keep up the gallant fight; Chopra carps and squirms, trying to find an excuse to reject Hitchens' argument. He fails pathetically. This was a tough one to address thoroughly, because every sentence, practically every phrase in Chopra's essay is foolish and wrong, so I've instead taken the path of annotating the central chunk of Chopra's chunder. My comments…

Foreign-Born TAs and Undergraduate Performance

This is a bit old, but in case you haven't seen it... A few weeks ago, Jake wrote a post about the importance of teaching during grad school. I couldn't agree more--some of my best experiences in grad school to date have been in front of a classroom of keen undergrads, their young minds yearning to be filled with the minutiae of microeconomic theory (or so I have convinced myself). I find it absolutely true that having to teach a concept cements it in my mind, and it is my fervent hope that a few of my students will at least consider becoming economists. There is also, of course, the…

Neural basis of spatial navigation in the congenitally blind

FOR most of us, the ability to navigate our environment is largely dependent on the sense of vision. We use visual information to note the location of landmarks, and to identify and negotiate obstacles. These visual cues also enable us to keep track of our movements, by monitoring how our position changes relative to landmarks and, when possible, our starting point and final destination. All of this information is combined to generate a cognitive map of the surroundings, on which successful navigation of that environment later on depends. Despite the importance of vision for navigation,…

Cronbach & Executive Function Training: Updating Training Shows Only Near Transfer (at the group-level)

In a recent issue of Science, Dahlin et al report the results of an executive function training paradigm focused on the process of mental updating. "Updating" is thought to be one of the core executive functions (as determined through confirmatory factor analysis), is thought to rely on the striatum (as determined through computational neural network modeling), and provides the dynamic gating capacity to working memory which may allow for "perceptual filtering" in which some items are attended and others ignored (as confirmed with neuroimaging). 24 subjects matched for age, education,…

Surprise! You Just Distorted Time.

"Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming." - William James, 1890 Extremely dangerous, traumatic, or surprising moments are often accompanied by reports that time seemed to "slow down" or "fly by." The perceptual basis of these subjective temporal distortions is unclear, but not for lack of trying: one recent experiment went so far as to drop subjects off a 400 foot tower while testing their ability to decipher a rapidly flashing string of numbers - a test of perceptual processing speed. Unfortunately, it didn't work…

Strategies In Memory: Temporal Dissociations in Prefrontal Activity In Long- & Short-term Memory

Early neuropsychology research indicated that long-term memory and short-term memory were separable - in other words, long-term memory could be impaired by damage to the hippocampus without any corresponding deficits in short-term memory. However, this idea has come under scrutiny in recent years. Neuroimaging technology has demonstrated that the same network of brain regions is active in both long-term and short-term memory tasks, suggesting that these regions may interact more than previously assumed. As noted in Speer, Jacoby & Braver's 2003 article, estimates of either type of…

What will January 20th do for medicine?

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…

Is computer science a science? (part 2: science)

In this next part of the strangely popular series "Is Computer Science a Science?", I'll look at whether Computer Science fits the definition of "science". (see parts 1 and 1a for the inaugural posts in the series) Most people seem to apply a certain litmus test of sorts to determine if something is a science. Something is a science if (1) it uses the scientific method (i.e., empirical research and observation) (2) it involves studying "fundamental principles" of the natural or physical world (1) is, I think, a bit easier to address. I use the scientific method all the time in my work: I…

Evolution: A Game Of Chance?

One of the toughest concepts to grasp about evolution is its lack of direction. Take the classic image of the evolution of man, from knuckle-walking ape to strong, smart hunter: We view this as the natural progression of life. Truth is, there was no guarantee that some big brained primates in Africa would end up like we are now. It wasn't inevitable that we grew taller, less hairy, and smarter than our relatives. And it certainly wasn't guaranteed that single celled bacteria-like critters ended up joining forces into multicellular organisms, eventually leading to big brained primates!…

Bush administration plans to unilaterally eviscerate Endangered Species Act.

This should come as no surprise, coming as it does on the heels of last week's revelation that the Bush Administration is planning to change the federal definition of abortion in an effort to make it easier for our homegrown religious extremists to deny women their right to good reproductive healthcare: we've just learned that the Bush administration is proposing rule changes that will eviscerate the Endangered Species Act. This is no joke. The National Wildlife Federation has a pdf of the leaked proposal, and their own analysis of the proposed changes. I've looked at the proposal, and NWF…

Why support troops?

All this talk about how Republicans or Democrats support the troops in Iraq (rarely Afghanistan, notice?) got me thinking. Why should we support troops? Don't get me wrong. You probably have me pegged as a radical leftwing communist pacifist anarchist. Not at all (I'm not even libertarian; they don't have a word for what I am). I'm not saying we shouldn't support our country's troops (I'm Australian, but my nephew is recently back from a tour as an SAS communications expert in Afghanistan). I'm asking why we do, and how we should. For a start, it ought to be noted that we rarely give the…

What's the best way to take a study break?

Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's not that the administration didn't try to encourage its students to socialize. The library did close at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. There was not one but two film societies, so often students had to choose…

Spell already broken, and I haven't even read the book

Daniel Dennett has this new book out, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I don't know that I want to read it. It was just reviewed by Michael Shermer in Science, and my general feeling was an uncomfortable vibration, liking some of what they said, but feeling at the same time that it was a tossup whether Shermer or Dennett is more annoying. Shermer has a tendency to be conciliatory towards religious babble, while Dennett has this overwhelming adaptationist bias that makes me cranky. I've put a chunk of the review below the fold, let me know what…

How can we know what babies are thinking?

My son Jim loved his bottle when he was a baby. By about 15 months of age, he loved baby formula so much that he was going through over a hundred dollars' worth a week -- more than the rest of the food budget for the entire family! (Yes, we were buying the powdered stuff, not pre-made formula.) There were weeks when we completely exhausted the local grocery store's supply. Needless to say, soon his pediatrician pointed out he was gaining weight too quickly, and we should cut his rations down to, say, three bottles a day. It was a painful transition. Previously, all Jim would have to do was…

Casual Fridays: What does it take to be rich -- and can we change your opinion?

Last week's Casual Friday study was all about money. The basic question was simply what it means to be rich -- how much income and net worth does it take before you consider someone to be wealthy? We received over 1,000 responses. Perhaps our most interesting finding was simply the diversity of opinions about what "rich" is. Here's how the responses broke down: While most responses fell between $100 thousand per year and $500 thousand per year, 95 people said an income of below $100 thousand was still "rich," and 75 people said it would take $1 million or more per year to be wealthy!…

The Ashley Treatment for "Pillow Angels"

(I know Shelly has href="http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/01/post.php">already posted about this on Retrospectacle.  Hopefully, you'll see there is a different slant to this.)   Significant controversy arose over the idea of using pharmaceutical and surgical methods to permanently stunt the growth of children with severe disabilities.  The controversy arose with the publication of stories in the media about "Ashley X." The medical profession refers to this as "growth attenuation treatment."  In order to understand the controversy, it first is necessary to understand what was…

I can defend both Lawrence Krauss and philosophy!

Philosophers are still grumbling about Lawrence Krauss, who openly dissed philosophy (word to the philosophers reading this: he recanted, so you can put down the thumbscrews and hot irons for now). This is one of those areas where I'm very much a middle-of-the-road person: I am not a philosopher, at least I'm definitely not as committed to the discipline as someone like Massimo Pigliucci, but I do think philosophy is an essential part of our intellectual toolkit — you can only dismiss it if you haven't thought much about it, i.e., aren't using philosophy at all. So I'm pretty much in…

Focal Adhesions and Cell Motility

This is for cell motility aficionados. How do cells crawl? Well most in the field would say that actin polymerization generated by the Arp2/3 complex at the leading edge acts to generate an actin meshwork (see pic). The addition of actin monomers right under the membrane (arrows) act as a Brownian ratchet to push membrane forward. But for anyone who has actually monitored cell motility in the microscope, you must think that this idea is ludicrous. First of all, motility is more that pushing membrane, it's about transporting all your organelles and cytoplasmic components forward while…

The Wakefield verdict: A one trick pony does his one trick again

Ah, vacation. It's time to relax and unwind. Of course, blogging is one way that I relax and unwind; so my being on vacation this week doesn't necessarily mean that I'll stop my usual blogging, but it does mean I'll wind down. One way that I'll slow down is that I'll try to keep my logorrheic tendencies in check. I'll also probably miss a day (or two, or three) of new material, although in its place I'll probably post a couple "greatest hits." (At least, I hope they're "greatest hits" and hope they're as interesting now as they were then—or at least not so uninteresting that no one bothers to…

Luskin and the New Mexico creationists

Dave Thomas has written an op-ed opposing a bill in New Mexico that would promote Intelligent Design creationism in the classroom under the guise of academic freedom. This is a standard ID game; carefully word the bills so that they refer vaguely to some evidence that doesn't exist, so that they can pretend they are asking for equal time for the same category of scientific story when it is actually a case of promoting the guesswork, handwaving, and religiously-motivated biases of the creationists to have equivalent status with the evidence of scientists. Casey Luskin is on the job, though,…

Some monkey business in autism research, 2009 edition

As you may have noticed, I've fallen into a groove (or, depending on your point of view, a rut) writing about anti-vaccine lunacy. The reason is simple. While I was busy going nuts over Bill Maher's receiving the Richard Dawkins Award, the anti-vaccine movement has been busy, and there are some things I need to address that had backed up while I was distracted. There's one more thing I need to address before I move on to other topics. Over the last couple of months, I've noticed something about the anti-vaccine movement. Specifically, I've noticed that the mavens of pseudoscience that make up…

The World Health Organization disses homeopathy

If there's one form of pseudoscientific health care (if you can call it that) that rests on the most risibly implausible tenets, I'd have to say that it's homeopathy. Either that, or homeopathy and various "energy medicine" modalities would have to fight it out in a no woo barred cage match to the death for the title of most scientifically ridiculous medical "therapy." Unfortunately, because of its history, where in the 1800s it was often actually as good or better than the "scientific" medicine of the time (mainly because homeopathy is nothing more than water--in essence doing nothing--and…

Luskin's foolish credentialism

Chris Mooney gave a talk in Seattle, and you know who else is up there in my home town: the Discovery Institute. They tried to go on the offensive and sic their version of an attack dog on him…which was, amusingly enough, Casey Luskin. This is the kind of attack dog that goes "yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap," though, and annoys you by peeing on your shoes. His initial volley was this: Why do so many people eagerly listen to a journalist with neither scientific nor legal training discuss a complex scientific and legal issue like intelligent design? It is awkwardly ironic for an unqualified…

Framing Iraqi Deaths

Last year AP-IPSOS surveyed Americans and asked them to estimate how many Iraqi civilians had died in the war. They grossly underestimated the number, with the median estimate being just 9,890. The Atlantic has now published Megan McArdle's latest anti-Lancet screed, where she argues that it would be better if the Lancet studies had not been published at all because they make people more willing to accept higher estimates of Iraqi deaths. Yes, for war-advocate McArdle, the big problem is that people's estimates of Iraqi deaths are too high. McArdle's piece reminds of me of Neil Munro's…

Monckton has a plan

Monckton tells Glenn Beck how he organised the lawsuit against An Inconvenient Truth: What happened is that I looked at Al Gore's movie with mounting horror and I identified three dozen scientific errors in it. So I had a weather mate of mine who takes an interest in these matters and also had the money to pay for a court case and I said I thought this film was rubbish. Two weeks later he rang up and said he wanted to do something to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense, which is what global warming is really all about. And so I said, well, the best thing…

The Australian's War on Science 54: selective quotations

To their credit The Australian has published an article by David McKnight: On climate issues The Australian still gives voice to a global PR campaign largely originated by the oil and coal companies of the US. On this score genuinely sceptical journalism is missing in action. Instead, an ideological sympathy with climate sceptics has been concealed behind a fig leaf of supposed balance. But what shines through in the attitude of the newspaper is its lack of intellectual and moral seriousness in dealing with the consequences of climate change. To their discredit they simultaneously published…

Knee Jerks

I couldn't have said it better myself so I won't try. I stumbled accross this yesterday (it's about a month old). Via Slate. This week, some big thinkers about biotechnology came to Washington for a "progressive bioethics summit." They invited me to go and talk to them. I like these people, but I'm not a progressive. I don't even think the word makes sense. And that made me ask something else: After two and a half years of covering moral debates about stem cells and other technologies, what do I think of this stuff? What the hell am I? I have problems with liberals. A lot of them talk about…

Let's slap ENCODE around some more

Since we still have someone arguing poorly for the virtues of the ENCODE project, I thought it might be worthwhile to go straight to the source and and cite an ENCODE project paper, Defining functional DNA elements in the human genome. It is a bizarre thing that actually makes the case for rejecting the idea of high degrees of functionality, which is a good approach, since it demonstrates that they've at least seen the arguments against them. But then it sails blithely past those objections to basically declare that we should just ignore the evolutionary evidence. Here's the paragraph where…

Defending Your Territory: It Pays To Have a Bigger Brain

Welcome to the second installment of Animal Territoriality Week. Today, we'll look at a case where differences in territory size can have implications for neuroanatomy. If you missed part 1 of Animal Territoriality week, check it out here. Let's say you have two very very closely related species. You might even call them congeneric, because they are from the same taxonomic genus. In most ways, these two species are very similar, but they differ behaviorally in some very big ways. Might those behavioral differences predict neurobiological differences? The different species of the genus…

Vox Day, Scientist

The anti-vaxxers are excited. A recent paper, Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination timing and autism among young african american boys: a reanalysis of CDC data, claims that there is evidence that vaccinations cause autism. Only one problem: it's a crappy paper. Orac has covered it to an Oracian level of detail, so let me give the short summary: The author, Brian Hooker, is unqualified. He is trained as a chemical engineer, although he now has a position as a biologist in a nursing program at a Christian college. The journal, Translational Neurodegeneration, is a new something-or-other with…

Dr. Snyderman, please be more careful...

Nancy Snyderman isn't helping. At least, she wasn't helping yesterday. Don't get me wrong. I like the fact that NBC's Chief Medical Editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman is a staunch defender of vaccination. She's one of the rare talking head doctors on TV who pulls no punches when going after the anti-vaccine movement, so much so that the big macher of the anti-vaccine movement and head of the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism J.B. Handley has referred to her as a "NBC's pharma-whore in residence." Let's just put it this way: Anyone whom J.B. detests and labels with a term like that can't be all…

Bora and PalMD leave ScienceBlogs: What to do now?

I can't believe it. I really can't believe it. I really, really, really can't believe it. Bora has left ScienceBlogs. Readers of just this blog probably don't know what a body blow that is to the ScienceBlogs collective. Readers of multiple ScienceBlogs probably realize that Bora was the proverbial heart and soul of ScienceBlogs. It's news that's left Isis the Scientist speechless and GrrlScientist "deeply upset." Even ScienceBlogs' big macher PZ Myers has pointed out how Bora compared the situation here to to Bion's Effect, where the departure of a few people at a party triggers a sudden end…

Miss A and Miss W, Sexual Jealousy, and Julian Assange

Almost Diamonds has two interesting posts on the Julian Assange sexual assault/rape accusation/charges. I want to make a comment on part of the second post, but this may not make a lot of sense to you until you read both of them. They are concise and compelling so you will not regret the time you spend on them: Assange and the Presumption of Innocence Assange and the Victim Conspiracy The issue is that of jealousy or resentment. Some Assange defenders, for some reason, seem to feel the need to point out suspicious or negative aspects of the women, their actions, reactions, decisions, etc…

Pearl Harbor and the War on Christmas

Yes, there is a connection ... The Imperial Japanese of World War II and the Nazi Germans of the same era held one thing in common: You were with them or you were nothing. Non-Japanese prisoners were treated very poorly. The lives of non Japanese who did not swear allegiance to the emperor were not valued at all. For instance, when the Japanese exited Manila near the end of the war, they killed hundreds of thousands of Philippine people. The Nazi's slaughtered millions of Russian prisoners, those they considered "unfit" or otherwise different from them, and of course, attempted to…

When John Almost Died of Naturopathy

Recent discussion of Canadian Naturopathy caused this old memory of mine to surface, regarding a friend who nearly died because he had a treatable illness but was attended to only by a Naturopath. A stupid, badly dressed Naturopath who couldn't drive for shit. I won't say his real name, because he's reasonably well known, and I'm not sure how much he knows I know about this story. He was pretty private about it at the time, but when he was in the hospital still unconscious after the emergency surgery, his wife told me everything, much of which I already knew by observation, some I already…

The next document I put together will be done with LyX

I don't mean blog posts or emails. For blog posts I use souped up gedit, and for emails I use pico. (There was a time when I thought I'd be using emacs for both of those, but emacs suffers from a deep philosophical dysfunction.) I'm talking about longer documents that have sections with headings, bibliographies, etc. I may well make this transition with the never-ending paper I'm writing with Lizzie. It is hard to describe the difference between what are called markup systems and, say Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, or AbiWord to people, especially to some of the newer people who…

Magical thinking in data curation

Peter Keane has a lengthy and worthwhile piece about the need for a "killer app" in data management. It's too meaty to relegate to a tidbits post; go read it and see what you think, then come back. My reaction to the piece is complex, and I'm still rereading it to work through my own thoughts. Here's a beginning, however. In at least some fields, data are their own killer app. I expect the number of fields to grow over time, especially as socio-structural carrots and sticks for data-sharing grow, which I expect will happen. We don't have to talk about the uses for data in the subjunctive mood…

Careful, I might actually start to think that someone out there takes me seriously

I don't normally read the Financial Times. "What?" you say. "I thought that all doctors read the FT." Ah, but you forget that I'm an academic physician. Don't get me wrong; I make a comfortable living, more money than I've made in my entire life, but I could almost certainly increase my earnings by 50-100% by going into private practice. I'd probably work roughly the same hours with the exception that I'd be called in more often for emergencies and that I'd spend all of my time either in the clinic or in the O.R., in contrast to the situation now where I spend half my time begging for money…

This is not science

We may have the answer to all of the big problems in physics! Or not. My money is on "not". Marcus du Sautoy, a very smart mathematician and the fellow who occupies the chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford formerly held by Richard Dawkins, made a stunning announcement. Two years ago, a mathematician and physicist whom I've known for more than 20 years arranged to meet me in a bar in New York. What he was about to show me, he explained, were ideas that he'd been working on for the past two decades. As he took me through the equations he had been formulating I began to see…

It's Difficult To Talk About Diversity When You Feel Ignorant And Are Afraid To Give Offense

Well, February has come and gone, Black History Month is over for another year, and we've had the first round of the Diversity in Science carnival. I am sure some of you who blog may have thought about contributing to this carnival but didn't for a variety of reasons. Maybe, like me, you had family issues and/or health issues going on; I almost didn't make it to contribute to the carnival myself. Maybe your job was making you crazy. Or maybe you thought to yourself, "I am not an expert on diversity. I don't want to offend anyone. I don't really know how to go about writing on this topic…

The Question of Emotion in Speaking of "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience"

As a graduate student, I observed the nascent field of functional magnetic resonance imaging and thought to myself with some amusement "modern phrenology! Now with big, fancy, expensive equipment!" Count me among those who have never been terribly impressed with fMRI, and certainly not with its applications in what is known as social neuroscience. Now we have this: Late last year, Ed Vul, a graduate student at MIT working with neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher and UCSD psychologist Hal Pashler, prereleased "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience" on his website. The journal Perspectives…

Steve Case rocks

I've always been a big fan of Steve Case. As head of the committee appointed to draft the science standards for the state of Kansas, he's been at the center of an often blistering battle, but I've never seen him anything but calm and friendly. Whatever smears are aimed at him personally, he's risen above it and addressed his commentary to the broader community, drawing people in rather than pushing them away. Even when his hard work is shredded by ideologues on the state Board of Education, he keeps his cool. His Op-Ed in today's KC Star does the same thing, pointing out how ID divides us…

The Laelaps Movie of the Week: The Last Dinosaur

The idea of a lost world, harboring Mesozoic remnants on a plateau in a steaming jungle or in a "hot spot" at one of the poles, has long enthralled writers of fiction, especially when there were truly blank spots on the map that had yet to be explored. The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle provided as wellspring of inspiration for later works (the film adaptation delivering convincing reconstructed dinosaurs for that era), the tale of a different lost world on Skull Island (King Kong) becoming a classic in cinema. Over time, however, such stories began to fade away, a rather late entry…

Body Games

Ever since Pac Man, video games have obeyed a few basic principles: A player sits down in front of a screen and presses a few buttons with his or her thumbs. Perhaps there's a joystick involved, or maybe the index finger has to do some work, too. But the body is essentially still. The only moving parts are the eyes and the fingers. The Wii changed everything. Unlike every other game console, the Wii controller isn't built around a confusing alphabet of buttons. Instead, Nintendo uses some nifty bluetooth technology to translate our body movements directly onto the screen. When we swing our…

The challenges of getting the story straight

I have noted before that communicating science to non-scientists can be, to put it technically, wicked hard. Some of this has to do with the current state of science journalism -- journalists who don't really understand scientific methodology or rules for engagement in disagreements between scientists get obsessed with "balance" rather than finding the center of gravity of the scientific community's understanding of a given phenomenon. I'm optimisitic that science journalism can be improved, but it probably won't be fixed by tomorrow. You might think, though, that there are some good bets…

What's in it for us? (Why spend public funds on basic research?)

My ScienceBlogs sibling Kevin Vranes asks an interesting question (and provides some useful facts for thinking about the answer): Why do we even spend taxpayer money on basic science research? Is it to fund science for discovery's sake alone? Or to meet an array of identified societal needs? The original post-WWII Vannevar Bush model was that the feds give money to the scientists for basic research, the scientists decide how to allocate that money, and society gets innumerable benefits, even if a direct link can't be made between individual projects and economic growth. But it turns out that…