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Did I Attribute the 98 Percent Brandishing Number to Others?

[Note: This is a copy of a document found on John Lott's website on April 6, 2003. I have added critical commentry, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ] ------ Forwarded Message From: "Dave Kopel" Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 13:07:49 -0700 To: <cut> Subject: Re: FW: A quick question. John Lott I've got no specific recollection of editing the piece, but the evidence seems to indicate that attributing the 98% figure to Kleck was an error by the Independence Institute, rather than an error on the author's part. Dave Kopel ------ End of Forwarded Message Apparently, some credence is…

Why Are So Many College Professors Politically Liberal?

Over at Talking Philosophy, Mike LaBossiere takes up that question. Unfortunately, I think his answer is mostly wrong. Here's his introduction: One common conservative talking point is that academics is dominated by professors who are, if not outright communists, at least devout liberals. While there are obviously very conservative universities and conservative professors, this talking point has considerable truth behind it: professors in the United States do tend to be liberal. Another common conservative talking point is that the academy is hostile to conservative ideas, conservative…

Tough Love for City's Homeless: Pay Rent or Get Out!

tags: homelessness, unemployment, poverty, NYC Life, social policy A homeless woman eats dinner (it looks like "Sheba" brand cat food, doesn't it?) Image: orphaned. I awoke this morning at 5am, as usual, and one of the first things I heard on the morning news was Mayor Bloomberg, one of the richest men in the world, saying that the city is charging rent for the homeless to stay in a shelter. Blinking in the darkness, I thought I was listening to the Onion news report instead of NPR. Sure, I heard that Bloomberg was considering this, but never thought he was cruel enough to actually enact…

Climate change and the financial meltdown

I am not in the habit of reading classic horror stories but this weekend I picked up John Kenneth Galbraith's 1955 book, The Great Crash: 1929. Unfortunately it is non-fiction. And even more unfortunately it is selling well in the university bookstore. Galbraith is gone but his book lives on. In a new Foreword written in the 1990s he noted that it has never gone out of print since its publication more than 50 years ago, mainly because every decade or two we have a new stock market crisis to renew interest. Since 1929 these crises have all been harbingers of recession, not depression. It isn't…

Judge Finds States are Doing What Congress Intended

by Liz Borkowski  Bush appointees and polluting industries may oppose statesâ attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but courts have been ruling in statesâ favor. In April, the Supreme Court found that EPA, contrary to its insistence, does in fact have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Last week, a federal judge upheld a Vermont law establishing reduced greenhouse gas emission standards for new cars sold in that state. Like the Supreme Court justices, U.S. District Judge William Sessions found that state efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions are perfectly in…

So you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 1.5 - The Few, the Proud, The Astrophysicists

More re-runs from Ye Olde Blogge So, now you're at university, and you're headed for grad school ... (the following is horribly UScentric, 'cause that's where I am right now, the general principles are broadly applicable, the actual getting into grad school procedure bit in future post will be both US and THEM centric), now what? Well, each cohort in the US is about 4+ million people, about 4000 of those major in physics. Since participation in the further education in the US is almost 50%, that is 4000 out of about 2 million, or 0.2% of undergraduates (specifically, about 1.2 million…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At The New York Times, Jodi Kantor and Jennifer Medina report on Trump’s pick to head up the U.S. Department of Labor, fast food CEO Andrew Puzder, an outspoken critic of labor laws that benefit hourly workers. Puzder is expected to face tough questioning during his confirmation hearings, especially as his company’s restaurants have been accused of multiple labor law violations. The article explores Puzder’s entry into the fast food world, his work as a lawyer, and interviews current and former workers at one of the chains that Puzder runs, Carl’s Jr. Kantor and Medina write: In interviews…

Occupational Health News Roundup

In “The Invisible Workforce: Death, discrimination and despair in N.J.'s temp industry,” NJ Advance Media reporter Kelly Heyboer investigated conditions facing temp workers in New Jersey, which now has one of the largest concentrations of temp workers in the nation. She reports that growing demand for temp workers has led to the proliferation of “temp towns” — places with dozens of temp agencies and neighborhoods full of temp workers, many of whom report low pay, wage theft, racial and sexual discrimination, and unsafe workplaces. Heyboer writes: The temp agencies in New Brunswick are easy to…

The Bacon Shortage

Bacon. Photograph by Flickr User Kentbrew It appears that there is going to be a bacon shortage. It is estimated that the total amount (in poundage, I assume) of swine that will be produced next year will be several percent, about 10% most likely, less than expected. It is said that there will be an approximate doubling of the cost of pork production, not necessarily doubling the cost of bacon and other products at the consumer end, but certainly squeezing the farmers and raising costs in the grocery store significantly. Presumably this will mean a shortage of all pork products, and quite…

Gender Issues Start Sooner Than You Think

Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald: As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between 'boy' and 'girl' is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets - and they receive the clear messages that collectively society gives out about the attributes implicitly associated with that distinction. Inevitably they are likely to 'hear' the message that boys are noisy, into everything and generally vigorous and enquiring, whereas girls are 'expected' to be good, docile, nurturing and passive. Parents may do all they can to…

Found On Road Dead: A rant about vehicular attitudes

You know how the right wing hates France? There was a time decades back when something really bad happened with Japan, and the right wing decided to extra-hate Japan. The right wing has always hated Japan and does now, but this was a nadir in this touchy relationship having to do with cars. Just at this time, we (the archeology team I was with) had a large contract that included expansive suburban neighborhoods. As we wandered between streets and rights-of-way behind people's homes, avoiding dogs and angry landowners who never check the junk that comes with their utility bills warning them…

"But I don't get mad when I play video games!"

We've reported on a variety of different studies looking video games and various measures of aggression (you can check out our "Video Games / Technology" category, and our archives) and a fairly common reaction, often coming from an avid gamer, is that this simply isn't true about him. Now one of the serious complications of doing psychological research is that our intuitions about how, or even what, we are doing can be dramatically wrong--this is why psychologists started doing experiments some one hundred and twenty odd years ago. You cannot refute a careful experiment with a personal…

The DCA zombie arises again

Remember dichloroacetate, also known as DCA? This is a relatively simple compound that showed promise in rodent models of cancer four years ago, leading to an Internet meme that "scientists cure cancer, but no one notices." It also lead to scammers trying to take advantage of desperately ill cancer patients. The whole sordid story is detailed in my series of posts, the most recent of which I wrote about a year ago and link to here. I've also appended a list of every post I've written on the subject since I first discovered DCA in January 2007. It's a story of hope, fascinating cancer biology…

Holocaust denier David Irving has found his calling

Thus far, the first decade of the 21st century not been good to that man who is arguably the world's most famous Holocaust denier, David Irving. The decade began its very first year with his crushing defeat in the libel lawsuit he instigated against Holocaust historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a defeat so resounding that it accomplished exactly the opposite of what he had intended: It ended with the judge concluding that he was, in fact, an "active" Holocaust denier (not just a Holocaust denier but an active Holocaust denier) Unfortunately, it cost Prof. Lipstadt and supporters a couple of…

Advice for a Mathphobe?

A reader named Amanda recently wrote me, asking for some advice: I graduated from NYU in 2007 and have been working in LA as an assistant, but I'm thinking about going back to college and getting a second degree. My first one is a BFA in screenwriting, so naturally I want to compliment that with a BS in geology in order to be a high school science teacher. Here's the thing: as obsessed as I am with geology, I'm terrified of actually studying it. I'm great with concepts, and applying things I've studied to real life. Problem is, I'm terrrible at any level of math higher than algebra. Because…

Self-Tracking

Gary Wolf has a fascinating and really well written article in the Times Magazine on the rise of the "quantified self," or all those people who rely on microsensors to measure discrete aspects of their lives, from walking speed to emotional mood: Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors…

Health care now

Kevin Drum is right. As sucky as the current Senate bill is, it's a marked improvement over the status quo ante and it gives a path to more reforms later. Failing to pass a bill (as advocated by some progressive leaders) is suicide. Democratic voters are already demoralized from all the compromise, and outright failure to deliver a key promise will leave a lot of marginal voters either ready to vote Republican, or to simply stay home and give up on politics. 2008 energized a lot of new voters, especially new Democratic voters, and failing to pass this bill, even after the loss of Medicare…

Neurotypicals are irrational beasts

Arnold Kling highlights this section from a Scientific American article, The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts: But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators. One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested…

Why Do We Do This (Again)?

tags: meme, blogging, Why Blog?, navel gazing, lint picking Steffi Suhr, who writes Science Behind the Scenes at Nature Network, is (re)asking this popular meme in the wake of the internecine explosion that ensued after a misunderstanding at the recent Science Online 2010 conference expanded to encompass the two best and biggest English-speaking science blog sites in the world: Nature Network and ScienceBlogs. The questions; What made you start blogging? Is a sense of community an important part of blogging for you, or do you prefer blogging 'solo'? Are there blogs you never look at? If…

Teaching Carnival #13

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the Teaching Carnival where we discuss all things academic, from teaching to college life, from HigherEd policy to graduate school research. Last time, I separated the Two Cultures in a way. This time I want to keep them mixed - both sides of campus often deal with the same issues anyway. There are tons of links, so let's start right away... SATs and getting into college Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles commented on the top SAT essays published by the NYTimes. He argued that writing a decent essay in 25 minutes with a prompt not known in advance is…

The Labor Day Speech You Won't Hear

...or too much of anyway. One of the most eloquent speeches that I have ever heard was by Martin Luther King to striking sanitation workers. What's sad is that, while the particulars have changed somewhat, the overall picture remains the same. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine): My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their families, and to all of my brothers and sisters, I need not pause to say…

Martin Luther King: "All Labor Has Worth"

One of the things that is often neglected on Martin Luther King day is his dedication to economic justice. What is forgotten--often willfully--is that he was an advocate for racial and economic justice. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine): My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their families, and to all of my brothers and sisters, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be in Memphis…

Martin Luther King Supported Public Workers

As the ongoing assault against public sector employees continues, it's worth remembering why Martin Luther King was in Memphis when he was assassinated: he was supporting striking sanitation workers. Due to conservative revisionism, we seem to have forgotten the radicalism of King, that he detested both war and economic rampant inequality. There was much to King than the phrase "the content of their character." From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine): My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and…

MLK in Memphis: "Now is the time to make an adequate income a reality for all of God's children"

Image by Bettmann/CORBIS With ten percent unemployment, and nearly eighteen percent underemployment--and much of the political establishment unconcerned about this--Martin Luther King's passion for economic justice sadly is still relevant. What is forgotten about Kings--often willfully--is that he was an advocate for racial and economic justice. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine): My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of…

One Weekend After Glenn Beck and the Tea Buggers Misappropriate King, Let's Remember This Speech

(from here) Last weekend, Glenn Beck and his Tea Party dupes decided to 'reclaim' Martin Luther King's legacy. In light of that, this speech King gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis seems appropriate--and puts the lie to Beck's propaganda: My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their families, and to all of my brothers and sisters, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be in Memphis tonight, to see you here in such large and…

Statins for influenza. Why don't we know if it works yet?

Statins for influenza are in the news again, this time because of a paper given at the Annual Meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). We'll get to it in a moment, but first a little background. Statins are cholesterol lowering drugs that are taken by tens of millions of people (including me; I take 20 mg of generic simvastatin a day). The statins are a group of drugs that competitively inhibit an enzyme, 3 hydroxy 3 methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase (HMG-CoA reductase). They are quite effective in lowering cholesterol and have an excellent safety profile (not perfect,…

Planning for Irene

If you live in the Eastern US, particularly, but not exclusively the eastern coastal US, you need to be prepared for quite a storm. No one is sure what track Irene will take, or how much damage she will do, but everyone between New England and the Carolinas, potentially including NYC and NJ are in the potential landfall range for what is being described as a huge storm. Most of the latest forecasts suggest the storm will avoid landfall in North Carolina. "However, this is a very dangerous storm and much of the East Coast, including North Carolina, should be prepared for a landfall," said…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The great spirit squid of doom DIABETES

It's been five months since I first started Your Friday Dose of Woo. I started it on a whim, after wondering if I should have a Friday feature, as so many other ScienceBloggers do (Friday Cephalopod, Friday Sprog Blogging, The Friday Fermentable, among others). In those five months, this thing has taken on a life of its own, producing woo more woo-ey than any that I had ever encountered before, woo like DNA activation, quantum homeopathy, Dr. Emoto's water woo, spiritually guided surgery, detoxifying boots, and the global orgasm. Sometimes the woo had religious overtones; sometimes it abused…

6 New Age cures that are (mostly) as full of crap as you think

Sometimes you find good skepticism in strange places. One example of this has been Cracked.com. Normally, Cracked.com is a humor site based on the magazine that I used to read sometimes back in 1970s. Unfortunately, the magazine folded several years ago, but the website lives on. For example, Cracked.com once did a snarky article making fun of the "heroes" of the antivaccine movement and contrasting them to "villains" like (of course!) Paul Offit. It even featured for emphasis the infamous "baby eating" poster that Age of Autism ran a couple of years ago that featured Steve Novella, Paul…

Microsoft, Merck, and Bill Gates: Eugenicists?

Since I wrote about a man who is arguably the biggest seller of quackery on the Internet, namely Joe Mercola, yesterday, I thought I'd turn my attention to someone who is arguably another of the biggest promoters of quackery on the Internet, namely Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com. If Joe Mercola is proof positive that quackery sells, Mike Adams is proof positive that there are conspiracy theorists out there who are so reality-challenged that they'll believe virtually anything. Whether it's his despicable assaults on dead celebrities as having been "killed by modern medicine," his constant…

climate of innuendo

strange allegation that NASA climate scientist, James Hansen, was "paid" by the Soros foundation... NASAwatch points to an op-ed in Investor's Business Daily where they claim: "How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?" That's right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's "politicization of science" program. Huh?…

Anti-vaccine grande dame Barbara Loe Fisher cries "intimidation"

A couple of weeks ago, I sounded the alarm regarding a highly deceptive public service announcement/infomercial being run on some Delta Airlines flights, courtesy of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). That's the organization founded by the grand dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, who features prominently in the PSA. I call this PSA deceptive because, although it tries mightily to pass itself off as a reasonable series of strategies for avoiding catching influenza, in reality this PSA is a very sneaky and clever bit of anti-vaccine propaganda. Why do I say this…

Spin, Lies, and the Straight Bullsh-t Express

Recently, a loyal reader related to me that the house next door to where I grew up sold at about fifteen percent less than the original asking price (not two years ago, housing prices were still climbing). This slashing of housing prices was euphemistically referred to by the broker as a "price enhancement." Some might call that turning a frown upside down, but its proper name is spin. While the term price enhancement is spin, it does bear some relationship to truth: after all, it did encourage the buyer to buy. From the buyer's perspective, this is an enhancement--less money, same amount…

Breathing 102---bringing the woo

(This one is cross-posted over at Science-Based Medicine. FYI. --PalMD) If you've been a regular reader of SBM or denialism blog, you know that plausibility plays an important part in science-based medicine. If plausibility is discounted, clinical studies of improbable medical claims can show apparently positive results. But once pre-test probability is factored in, the truth is revealed---magic water can't treat disease, no matter what a particular study may say. So it was with great dismay that I read an email from a reader telling me about parents buying hyperbaric chambers for their…

Things that want to eat your brain

This is the fourth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Eric Wika. Let's face it, it's a dangerous world to be a brain. The brain is so soft and squishy it cannot even support its own weight. That's right, even gravity itself is enough to take out an unprotected brain. Besides these passive threats, there are several factions out there that active try to damage your brain! Zombies are an ever present menace which wish to eat our brains. TV will rot our brains, drugs will fry our brains and bullies will offer to “beat your brains in”. It's no wonder mother nature had to come up with the…

Study: Kids with chronic health problems will face greater financial burdens if forced out of CHIP

More than 8 million U.S. children depend on the Children’s Health Insurance Program for access to timely medical care. The program is authorized through 2019, but its federal funding expires in September and it’s unclear what Congress will do. That uncertainty stresses all the systems and families that depend on CHIP, but it may be especially risky for the 2 million chronically ill children who get care through the program, which was originally designed for families falling in the gap between market affordability and Medicaid eligibility. In a study published this month in Health Affairs,…

Bush and Plame

On my recent trip to Denver to see my brother's graduation ceremony, my father and I talked a lot of politics, as we always do when we're together. My father is a lifelong Republican who has, to my knowledge, never voted for anyone but a Republican in any race above the local level. Nonetheless, he told me that he thinks the Bush administration is the single most corrupt administration in history (pretty incredible, given the last one!) and that he will be voting for anyone but Bush this fall. Probably the biggest reason why he thinks that is the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair. Joseph…

That Some Scientists are Mean is Generally Acknowledged, But Also Not Relevant

This is pretty funny, but also quite true. It is from a comment on a post at Chicago Boyz: One of the arguments in Jonathan Rauch's "In Defense of Prejudice," is another dirty secret is that, no less than the rest of us, scientists can be dogmatic and pigheaded. "Although this pigheadedness often damages the careers of individual scientists," says Hull, "it is beneficial for the manifest goal of science," which relies on people to invest years in their ideas and defend them passionately. And the dirtiest secret of all, if you believe in the antiseptic popular view of science, is that this…

The delusion of immortality

Imagine all the poor transhumanists who were born in the 19th century. They would have been fantasizing about all the rapid transformations in their society, and blithely extrapolating forward. Why, in a few years, we'll all have steam boilers surgically implanted in our bellies, and our diet will include a daily lump of coal! Canals will be dug everywhere, and you'll be able to commute to work in your very own personal battleship! There will be ubiquitous telegraphy, and we'll have tin hats that you can plug into cords hanging from the ceiling in your local coffeeshop, and get Morse code…

John Daniel, the civilized gorilla

It wasn't so long ago that, if the price was right, you could buy an ape. Plucked from Africa and sent to Europe and America, apes often changed hands several times for large sums of money before expiring after only a few weeks, months, or years. Writing of the attempts of the Bronx Zoo to keep gorillas at the dawn of the 20th century, for instance, William Hornaday doubted whether it would ever be possible to successfully house gorillas for more than a few weeks. When you got news of a gorilla arriving at the zoo, you made haste to see it. Only some of the apes were housed in zoos, however…

The 1/6th People

@EricRWeinstein is at it again in twitterland, this time on the subject of the funding of science. For an intriguing read about the glut of Ph.D.s versus science funding, he links to his (circa 1998?) article titled: "How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers." An interesting read, to say the least. Then @michael_nielsen points to Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion by Daniel Greenberg which I now have to go out and buy. Damn you internet for pointing me to things I should read!…

Religion and Science

You've probably all heard about the Beyond Belief series, in which scientists give talks about the conflict between science and religion, as well as the science of religion. I've only watched the cognitive scientists (and Dawkins, for reasons I'll mention below), so far, and that's probably all I'll watch. If you're looking for them, V.S. Ramachandran is in Session 4, Patricia Churchland is in Session 5, Elizabeth Loftus is in Session 6, Mahzarin Banaji and Scott Atran are in Session 7, Atran is in Session 8, Paul Churchland participates in the discussion in Session 9, and Ramachandran is in…

Why ethics matter to science.

Regular readers of this blog know that I teach an ethics class aimed at science majors, in which I have a whole semester to set out ethical considerations that matter when you're doing science. There's a lot to cover, so the pace is usually more breakneck than leisurely. Still, it's rather more time for detail and reflection than I get in the four 50 minute lectures of the ethics module in the introduction to engineering class. In that context, my main goal is to persuade the students that ethical considerations aren't completely disconnected from the professional community of engineers…

Brain-Friendly Giftables, part 3: Building sets.

The human mind seems to like creating things, and kids will use whatever tools are at their disposal to build. My uncle used to build death-defying systems of roadways with Hotwheels track and masking tape. A childhood friend of mine built elaborate structures out of Fig Newtons (largely because they were in abundance in her home and she couldn't stand to actually eat them). When you have a creative itch, almost anything can serve as the scratcher. Here are some toys for building that are probably less likely to attract ants than are Fig Newtons: Gearation Strictly speaking, you might…

How can one know?

If there was one thing about going to TAM7 last week, it was the opportunity to contemplate among a thousand fellow skeptics just what critical thinking and reason mean. If there's one thing about woo, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories in all their forms, it's not just a lack of critical thinking and a plethora of logical fallacies. More importantly, it's the question, "How do we know what we know?" Certainly science is the primary means by which we explore the natural world and make conclusions about how it works, however imperfect they may be, but not everyone uses science, reason, and…

Reflections on 300 examples

Originally posted at The Evolution Project. Chris Mooney asks "should scientists refer to the well-adapted features of a given organism as having been 'designed,' even though we all know these are the result of natural selection?" and cites this article in The Scientist :: Journals and intelligent design: Biologists often get angry about the publication of studies defending "intelligent design," the notion that biochemical systems could not have been produced by evolution because they are "irreducibly complex," and as such, must have been "designed" by an unknown entity. But a careful…

An antivaccine activist explains how she uses Facebook reporting algorithms to harass and silence pro-science bloggers

I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not. Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic that I first heard about over two years ago, when antivaccine activists affiliated with what was then called the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) used the same sort of tactics to target pro-science bloggers and activists associated with a group…

Strike

Tomorrow, November 2, will be a general strike in Oakland. The move was approved nearly unanimously by the roughly 1600 people voting at last week's Occupy Oakland general assembly, held the night after police from Oakland and several surrounding areas attacked nonviolent protesters with tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbags, flashbang grenades, and nightsticks. The plan is to gather at 9 am in Frank Ogawa Plaza - renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by the folks occupying it - and protest. Different people will surely come focused on protesting different issues, but the major theme is sure to be the…

BPA gets attention from industry spinmeisters (leaked minutes)

We've had occasion to write about the endocrine noise-maker bisphenol-A (BPA) quote a few times (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here for starters). The word about BPA has gotten to consumers and they have fled BPA-containing products like they are swine flu carriers. Meanwhile the scientific evidence is piling up and what the market hasn't done will likely bring BPA into the cross-hairs of food safety regulations, if not via the FDA then by state and local governments, some of which have already acted. So it looks like the writing is on the wall for BPA unless the food…

One of a Mind: Interview with Shelley Batts

Shelley Batts and I are of the same "generation", meaning that we became SciBlings on the same day. You need to hurry up and check out her blog Retrospectacle before she moves to a new blog in a few days. At the Science Blogging Conference last month Shelley moderated the Student blogging panel--from K to Ph D. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job? I'm an end-stage Neuroscience graduate student at the University of Michigan, my thesis is related to…