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The Moral Mind - NY Times Comment

Some people have asked me why I haven't written anything about Richard Dawkins' new book. To be honest, it's just another manuscript arguing that religions preach ignorance and can promote other societal evils. We've all heard this before. On the other hand, Marc Hauser's book, Moral Minds, is a trully original book, discussing the latest ideas from cognitive science. Just as Chomsky argued that we are endowed with a language instinct, Hauser proposes that we all have a morality instinct. In today's NY Times there is an article on his book: The proposal, [that people are born with a moral…

A new flavour of Global Warming denial

The IPA is the Australian version of the CEI, so you don't have to read an article they publish on global warming to know what the conclusions will be. But you do have to read it to find out what pretext will be used to dismiss concerns about warming. In the latest issue of IPA review we find an article by two economists (Sinclair Davidson and Alex Robson) that attempts to spread confusion about the IPCC fourth assessment report. The article is not online, but most of it is available here. They start off by taking a leaf from Michael Crichton's book -- they change the vertical scale on the…

Unification for Your Eyes and Ears

Image courtesy of the Cajal’s Butterflies of the Soul gallery at The Beautiful Brain. Noah Hutton is founding editor of The Beautiful Brain, an online magazine that explores recent neuroscience findings through monthly podcasts, essays, reviews, and galleries, with particular attention to the dialogue between the arts and sciences. Some of our greatest triumphs as a species have come from those who saw little difference between being a scientist and being a humanist. From Leonardo’s visionary notebooks to Herschel’s lunar poetry, science has provided a necessary resource for some great art;…

Why I am not a primatologist

One of the things I love about the blogosphere is the give and take, the ability of people to comment on each others' work, and the diversity of topics. The conversations that take place in the blogosphere have real value (a value which is so far under-recognized and under-utilized). Without the blogosphere, I would never be exposed to many of the things I read online, such as basic research in neuroanatomy and drug abuse, physiology, and primatology. Interest in primatology is sort of like love of chocolate---I suspect most of us are born with it. As the Bare Naked Ladies sang, "Haven't…

If these mice could speak

Nick Wade in The New York Times reports on new research where they inserted human FOXP2 genes into the mouse genome. Here are some of the findings: Despite the mammalian body's dependence on having its two FOXP2 genes work just right, Dr. Enard's team found that the human version of FOXP2 seemed to substitute perfectly for the mouse version in all the mouse's tissues except for the brain. In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure and produced less dopamine, a chemical…

Is Bisphenol A Responsible for Obesity?

According to the Boston Globe, bisphenol A levels lower than those found in 93% of people led to obesity in mice: Thousands of chemicals have come on the market in the past 30 years, and some of them are showing up in people's bodies in low levels. Scientists studying obesity are focusing on endocrine disrupters - which have already been linked to reproductive problems in animals and humans - because they have become so common in the environment and are known to affect fat cells. ...A recent US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that about 93 percent of the US population…

Scientia Pro Publica Has Been Published!

Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux). Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power) -- Sir Francis Bacon. Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was just published at Mauka to Makai. This edition is entitled Scientia Pro Publica 17: The EPIC Edition. The current host, Kelsey, author of Mauka to Makai, deserves our gratitude and appreciation for her super efforts to publish this edition despite the fact that she only had one submission on the Friday before the carnival was published -- due to the malfunctioning online blog carnival submission form. Scientia Pro…

Cannabis Helps MS?! What Are You, High?

While perusing press releases for this week's online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, I came across one with some unintentionally humorous phrasing. The press release details how University of Washington/Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers using a mouse model of multiple sclerosis (MS) appear to have discovered that the disease inhibits the brain's production of neuroprotective endocannabinoids, which results in greater brain damage. Then, to my great joy, the press release twists itself into a pretzel to avoid saying that smoking pot actually…

Harvard bookstore says its prices are intellectual property

The Harvard Cooperative ("The Coop," pronounced like the coop in chicken coop) is a venerable institution whose main branch in Harvard Square is the principal retail outlet for textbooks to Harvard students. Generations have bought their texts and other books there. Like many college bookstores the old co-operative was bought out by a modern chain and the Harvard Coop is now a Barnes and Noble College Bookstore. The subsumption by a book retail giant some years ago was only one sign of a change in the book business, however. Now we have the internet which gives the modern cost conscious…

Marburg virus, bird flu and the bats out of hell

Pandemic influenza gets its share of headlines but there are other viruses out there that also are good tabloid fodder, most notably Ebola virus which causes Ebola hemorrhagic fever, whose gruesome effects were depicted in Richard Preston's book, The Hot Zone. Ebola has some close relatives in the filovirus family, among them Marburg virus. Like Ebola it can cause a gruesome demise. Marburg has cause several outbreaks in Africa, one of the largest in Angola at the end of 2004, early 2005 (see the Wikipedia article on Marburg for more details). One of the enduring mysteries is where the virus…

Long Cooked Vegetables

Lesley Porcelli has an article in this month's _Saveur_, "The Soft Approach" that raises an issue that I've been thinking about for a long time - that perhaps we've gone overboard in our resistance to long-cooking vegetables. Don't get me wrong - I grew up with grey, mushy broccoli and am grateful that those days are over. Ever since I read a Christopher Kimball recipe for beef stew, however, that had you adding the vegetables after most of the cooking is over so that the stew wouldn't have "overcooked" vegetables, however, I've wondered - is there any place for look cooked produce? I don…

Labor Secretary announces regulatory priorities for worker health and safety

Last week Labor Secretary Solis released in the Federal Register on April 26, 2010, her Spring 2010 regulatory agenda for the Department, including her rulemaking priorities for MSHA and OSHA. As required by the Regulatory Flexibility Act it was published on time in April, in contrast to her Fall 2009 agenda which was six weeks late. This document is described by the Secretary as a: "...listing of all the regulations it expects to have under active consideration for promulgation, proposal, or review during the coming 1-year period. The focus of all departmental regulatory activity will be…

Flawed Study Gets Congressional Hearing

Tomorrow, the House Small Business Committee will convene a hearing based on a study that is so flawed it could be used to teach students how not to do survey research. Last month, we wrote about this âsurvey,â conducted by the US Chamber of Commerce, purporting to show that compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley rules would be enormously burdensome to small business. It is difficult to believe anyone who reads the actual study would reach the same conclusion. The Chamber tried to identify small businesses that might be impacted by the law and asked almost 5,000 to complete a simple on-line survey…

Harry Potter and the Magical Kiss

tags: Harry Potter, kiss, Harry Potter and the Magical Kiss, online poll, fun Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) kissed by Maggie Smith (Professor McGonagall) World Premiere of Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince at the Empire Leicester Square cinema, London, England. Image: WENN.com Kiss kiss, kiss: it seems that everyone is thinking about kissy-face (snogging as the Brits say) -- and Harry Potter. In fact, after reading all those skanky tabloids, I've learned that Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) is an excellent kisser while Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) could use some further instruction in…

Kos screwed up

Everyone's talking about Kos, so in one sense he's done something smart, and he's going to rake in some more ad dollars over all this attention — but in another Kos has blown it, big time. He has dismissed the death threats against Kathy Sierra as a) same old story that he sees all the time, b) nothing to worry about, and c) reason to suggest that the victim ought to give up blogging, which, of course, is music to the ears of the "psycho losers" who carry out that kind of attempted intimidation. Is Kos really so tone-deaf that he doesn't realize he has just sided with people who threatened to…

Tech Note: Handheld File Transfer Woes

For the past two years I've been packing a soap-sized handheld computer named the Qtek 9100. It's a version of a design named the HTC Wizard, sporting a slide-out qwerty keyboard and running Windows Mobile. The machine's been good to me, though is has a few annoying quirks & glitches, and I would never go back to carrying anything with lesser capabilities. As I am phasing out Windows XP for Ubuntu Linux on my machines, one of the 9100's shortcomings has become an acute problem. It will only let you transfer files by cable using a glitchy piece of Microsoftware named ActiveSync, and this…

Saturday Amusements

Yesterday myself & Junior met up with Paddy K. Sr. & Jr. and went to Cybertown, a laser-game place in central Stockholm. Here we paid SEK 60 ($11) per head and donned vests with laser sensors and attached laser guns, forming Team Blue. Teams Red and Yellow each consisted of five ten-year-olds, and Team Green was a dad and his daughter. Then we entered a blacklit dry-ice-smoking dark labyrinth and spent 20 adrenaline-soaked minutes happily sniping at teams Red, Yellow and Green. We won! Not very surprising, given that our team was the only one with two dads. Individually, though, Green…

Swedish Skeptics 25 years

Today, the Swedish Skeptics Society celebrated its 25th anniversary with an afternoon seminar in Stockholm. I've been a member since 1997, a co-editor of the society's journal Folkvett since 2002 and a board member since 2004. The >2000-member society is Sweden's nearest equivalent of CSI (formerly CSICOP), but it has certain unusual traits. For one thing, its Swedish name, Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning, says nothing about either skepticism nor the paranormal. It simply means "The Society for Science and Popular Enlightenment". (Folkbildning, a word first documented in 1805, is…

Attention Twilight girls

Hi girls! **waves excitedly** Its a big day, right? YAY! I know you all are totally pepped up, and I dont want to be a Debbie Downer again... but well... see, when I was your alls age, 12-ish, I was in love with a family of vampires too. The main dude wasnt Edward, though. His name was Lestat. Tall, blonde, violet eyes (or as Meyer would describe them, amethyst). He wasnt nice like Edward, but he was a badass, and I loved him for it (common, he was a rock star, who could resist??). There was this other vampire in his family, Louis? I loved him too. So angsty. He was so pre-emo emo.…

Possibly Stupid Question: Why All These Extra Particles?

I've reached a point in the book-in-progress where I find myself needing to talk a little about particle physics. As this is very much not my field, this quickly led to a situation where the dog asked a question I can't answer. But, hey, that's why I have a blog with lots of smart readers... The question is this: What are all these extra particles for? Or, to put it in slightly more physics-y terms: The Standard Model contains twelve material particles: six leptons (the electron, muon, and tau, plus associated neutrinos) and six quarks (up-down, strange-charm, top-bottom). The observable…

Links for 2010-02-09

BBC News - More cat owners 'have degrees' than dog-lovers My favorite bit is the note that "Cat and dog numbers were last estimated in a scientific peer-reviewed journal in 1989," because, of course, peer review is critical to the process... (tags: pets dog society education social-science) Bright Idea: The First Lasers -- A history of discoveries leading to the 1960 invention. An excellent step-by-step history of the development of the laser, including interviews with laser pioneers. (tags: lasers science history physics optics atoms molecules) The highs and lows of this year's Super…

No good climate science communicators out there?

Forget about framing for a second. What about the messengers? Speaking to the BBC's World Service, Jim Hansen bemoans the dearth of good science communicators. Given the context of the interview, I think he's referring specifically to climate science communicators. The entire interview is online, but here's the most interesting comment, which I have transcribed for your immediate edification: The interviewer,Carrie Gracie, refers to the long history of conflict between science and the political establishment, and asks Hansen: "Do you see yourself as being along a frontline that;s always been…

Professorship in Science Communication at Free University-Berlin

The Free University Berlin has an associate professor opening in Science Communication, as part of their Department of Political and Social Sciences and their Institute of Media and Communication Studies. I have posted the full description below the fold. Contact Markus Lehmkuhl at kuhle@zedat.fu-berlin.de for more information. Freie Universität Berlin Department of Political and Social Sciences Institute of Media and Communication Studies invites applications for a tenured Associate Professorship in Media and Communication Studies, with special emphasis on Science Communication / Science…

Self-Branding on the web as a path to book success

In an interesting essay at Slate's The Big Money, Jill Priluck argues that book authors must "transcend their words and become brands" if they're to sell books. Andrew Sullivan agrees : My own view is that the publishing industry deserves to die in its current state. It never made economic sense to me; there are no real editors of books any more; the distribution network is archaic; the technology of publishing pathetic; and the rewards to authors largely impenetrable. I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the…

Next they'll tell me pigs can fly.

Last night I had this wonderful dream. It was a normal day in just about every way except I had this amazing ability. When I jumped, I was able to leap great distances and almost fly. No wings were involved - it was almost like I was able to levitate, and slowly drift between places. It was a very calm, serene feeling. Perhaps that's how the mice in Dr. Liu's lab felt. Advances in Space Research has published online today an accepted manuscript where researchers levitated mice. And, according to their observations, the mice took to the free-floating existence quite readily. The team first…

I love Walter ReMine

Some of you might be familiar with the work of Walter ReMine. He's been around the fringes of the online creation-evolution thing for quite a while now. His typical schtick involves the relentless self-promotion of his self-published book The Biotic Message, which he claims represents a revolutionary new origins theory of some sort. It's been a while since ReMine was last on my radar screen, but he's posted a couple of items over at Uncommon Descent recently. These are advertised as the first two parts of a multiple-part essay of unspecified length. He promises that this essay will…

June 16 Newsweek musings

Newsweek isn't really my mag - I'm more of a Ms, Mother Jones, Yes! magazine reader, or would be if I didn't have so much other stuff to read too - but I got a subscription as a gift, and it serves in lieu of conversation as my breakfast companion. Two articles of note this week: A great piece on why biology should be a general education requirement for everyone, by Sally Hoskins, a professor at the City College of New York. She writes, "Science isn't old information pressed like crumbling fall leaves between the pages of forgotten books. It's alive - growing and shifting and blossoming…

Optical buffering of light

Photons can carry enormous amount of information, but one of the problems in using them to encode information is that they are difficult to store for even short periods (they are moving at the speed of light after all!). University of Rochester scientists have taken a step in solving the practical problems of using photons to store information by creating an optical buffer for photons that slows them to more usable speeds: Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated that optical pulses in an imaging system can be buffered in a slow-light medium, while preserving the…

U.S. must face huge death toll of Iraqi civilians

Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts have an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun: Not wanting to think about civilian deaths in Iraq has become almost universal. But ignorance of the Iraqi death toll is no longer an option. An Associated Press poll in February found that the average American believed about 9,900 Iraqis had been killed since the end of major combat operations in 2003. Recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be 100 times worse than Americans realize. News report tallies suggest that about 75,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion. But a study of 13 war-affected countries…

Multivitamins Don't Work!

This isn't really anything new, but Emily Anthes has a nice summary in Slate today of what we currently know about the effectiveness of nutritional supplements--namely that they don't consistently show any clear benefits except in a few very specific situations: Vitamins--with their promise to bridge the gap between the nutrients our bodies need and those they get--have always seemed reassuringly simple: Just pop a multivitamin and let your body soak in those extra nutrients. But not any longer. During the past few years, study after study has raised doubts about what, if any, good vitamins…

Not-so Silent Sites

As we all know, the genetic code is redundant. Within protein coding regions, substitutions at silent sites do not affect the amino acid sequence of the encoded protein. Because of this property, these synonymous substitutions (so-called because they result in the same amino acid) are often used to estimate the neutral rate of evolution -- they should not be under selection. But there is evidence for natural selection operating on silent sites. That's because, even though different codons encode the same amino acid, the tRNAs for the synonymous codons are found at different frequencies within…

Learning thresholds

Kim Goodsell was not a scientist, but she wanted to understand the baffling constellation of disease symptoms that were affecting her. The doctors delivered partial diagnoses, that accounted for some of her problems, but not all. So she plunged into the scientific literature herself. The point of the linked article is that there is a wealth of genetic information out there, and that we might someday get to the point of tapping into the contributions of citizen scientists. But I thought this was the most interesting part: She started by diving into PubMed—an online search engine for…

Study reveals how 'world's toughest bacterium' survives lethal radiation

Listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the world's toughest bacterium," Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand extreme temperatures and drought conditions, lack of nutrients and a thousand times more radiation than a human being. A new study by Cornell researchers reveals that nitric oxide -- a gas molecule used in many metabolic processes in animals and a pollutant in the atmosphere that leads to smog -- plays a key role in D. radiodurans' recovery when exposed to ultraviolet radiation (UV). The study, appearing online Oct. 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,…

And so it begins: Autism's False Prophets at The ScienceBlogs Book Club

Just a quick announcement here: The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back up and running, and this time the book under discussion is the latest by that Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, that Darth Vader to the antivaccinationist Luke Skywalker, otherwise known as Satan Incarnate to Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, Andrew Wakefield, Dan Olmsted, and the crew of antivaccinationists spreading misinformation and endangering public health and promoting an amazing panoply of quackery to "cure" autism, Dr. Paul Offit. The book under discussion is Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the…

Wanna go to hell?

Trade your soul for a DVD! All you have to do is post a video of yourself to youtube, stating that you deny the holy spirit, and you'll get a copy of The God Who Wasn't There. Why those magic words? Whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit can never be forgiven. Mark 3:29 More details on The Blasphemy Challenge are available online, and they have a trailer, even: Some of the comments on that video are hilarious. You know what I hate? Fanatic Christians? Know what I hate just as much? Fanatic Atheists. This 'challenge' is disrespectful on a level I can't even verbalize. It's juvenile and…

Framing Science sparks a seismic blog debate

Our Policy Forum article at Science has generated a monster blog discussion, one that is almost too much to keep up with. I continue to try to keep a summary here with my quick responses, where appropriate. I have also posted several comments at other blogs. I will continue to update as more blog commentary develops. Reactions so far: -->Over at The Intersection, a very strong endorsement from Flock of Dodos director Randy Olson: Nisbet and Mooney are taking on the odious job of being the messengers of the new era for the world of science with their excellent essay in Science this week. I'…

Friday Fun: Night owls are psychopaths, the perils of cat ownership and more: The Ig Nobel Prizes 2014!

The Ig Nobel prizes were awarded last week and as usual they are hilarious. And this time around a Canadian was included! Yay Canada! What are the Ig Nobel prizes? For the uninitiated they are a mock set of awards given out at a lavish ceremony at Harvard every year for interesting and bizarre real research and other actual "accomplishments." But with a humourous twist, of course. Here's what they have to say: The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then makes them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people…

New Site Pushes Peer-Reviewed Science Over Misinformation

A few years ago, next to a small barn converted into a winery, I noticed a flyer asking voters to support Measure M, an initiative in Sonoma county that sought to " prohibit the raising, growing, propagation, cultivation, sale, or distribution of most genetically engineered organisms." It pictured the destruction in New Orleans wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the bewildered gaze of George W. Bush. The flyer proclaimed "Who do you trust with your family's health and safety? When FEMA failed, more than a million Americans suffered." That flyer was typical of the misinformation about GE crops,…

Preparing Our Students for Success

Guest Blog By Jerry Baker Executive Director of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society Imagine a world where every child, who dreams of becoming a scientist or engineer, is provided with the opportunity to fulfill that dream. Think of the possibilities and the discoveries that can help humanity or global sustainability. Think of the new solutions that all those minds might discover. I look forward to meeting some of those young people during the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. on April 24-27, 2014. It is the largest celebration of science, engineering, technology…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Biologist Trying To Crack Communication Code Of Proteins: "Proteins interact; they 'talk' to each other," the associate professor says. "It's how they know what to do, and it's how most of the things that need to happen for living organisms get done." ---------snip-------------- "To begin understanding how proteins talk, we first made random mutations--we broke things and then asked what happened," Larsen says. "That strategy worked well and allowed us to identify the key 'words.' Now we want to know what the 'words' mean, and we are starting by asking what happens when we mix the 'dialects…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Big-brained Birds Survive Better In Nature: Birds with brains that are large in relation to their body size have a lower mortality rate than those with smaller brains, according to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The research provides the first evidence for what scientists describe as the 'cognitive buffer' hypothesis - the idea that having a large brain enables animals to have more flexible behaviours and survive environmental challenges. The Price Of Vanity: Mating With Showy Males May Reduce Offspring's Ability To Fight Off…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How Fish Species Suffer As A Result Of Warmer Waters: Ongoing global climate change causes changes in the species composition of marine ecosystems, especially in shallow coastal oceans. This applies also to fish populations. Previous studies demonstrating a link between global warming and declining fish stocks were based entirely on statistical data. However, in order to estimate future changes, it is essential to develop a deeper understanding of the effect of water temperature on the biology of organisms under question. How Trees Manage Water In Arid Environments: Water scarcity is slowly…

Time for computer science to grow up?

That's the question asked by Lance Fortnow in a recent Communications of the ACM Viewpoint article (free fulltext). Fortnow's article continues a discussion about scholarly communication patterns in computer science that's been going on for a while in the "pages" of the CACM. I've blogged about it a couple of times here and here. Fortnow's main idea is that CS needs to get past the youthful stage of using conferences as the main vehicle for disseminating new ideas and move to a journal-based model, like most of the rest of scientific disciplines. In the end, it's all about peer review:…

On my last scientific paper, I was both a stunt-man and the make-up artist.

This is a repost of an November 6, 2007 post (as always, click on the icon to see the original and its comments): Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry. But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put…

Science publishing also suffers from its curmudgeons

I've been having fun lately watching this guy struggle with the 21st century realities of scientific publishing which has a lot of parallels with the struggle that journalistic curmudgeons have - too steeped in the 20th century model to have the courage to think in a new way: Socialism in science, or why Open Access may ultimately fail: OK. So here's the argument: Science needs to be made known through publishing. In order for science to be published, we need a team of people who will do the job of supervising the review process, editing, storing, and distributing bite-sized pieces of science…

Historical OA

More and more societies are compiling their 'classical' papers. Here is another one. And here I wrote, among else: "In discussions of Open Access, we always focus on brand new papers and how to make them freely available for readers around the world as well as for people who want to mine and reanalyse the data using robots. But we almost never discuss the need to make the old stuff available. Yet we often lament that nobody reads or cites anything older than five years. Spending several years reading everything published in the field in the 20th century up until about 1995 (as well as some…

On my last scientific paper, I was both a stunt-man and the make-up artist.

Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry. But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put some order in the question of authorship. Different scientific areas have different traditions. In one discipline…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Evolution Of Animal Personalities: Animals differ strikingly in character and temperament. Yet only recently has it become evident that personalities are a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom. Animals as diverse as spiders, mice and squids appear to have personalities. Personality differences have been described in more than 60 species, including primates, rodents, birds, fish, insects and mollusks. Eavesdropping Comes Naturally To Young Song Sparrows: Long before the National Security Agency began eavesdropping on the phone calls of Americans, young song sparrows were listening to…

Spring Awakening

On Friday, the Bride of Coturnix, Coturnietta, a friend of hers and I went to DPAC to see 'Spring Awakening'. As you may already know, this is a rock adaptation of an old play located in late-19th century Germany, following the growth and maturation of a group of high school students surrounded by a disciplinarian and authoritarian adult world, in which sex is taboo (so they have to learn on their own, feel guilt about it, and suffer consequences) and strict, dogmatic religion trumps every attempt at independent thought or questioning. I have not seen the play before, though I have heard the…

Obama's regulatory czar should pay attention to the uncertainty he creates

"Regulation in an uncertain world," was the title of a speech that President Obama's regulatory czar Cass Sunstein delivered on June 20, 2012 at a National Academy of Science's government-university-industry research roundtable on "Decision Making under Risk and Uncertainty."  Mr. Sunstein's speech, as prepared for delivery, tried to make the case that under his leadership at the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) the Administration has instituted new procedures and practices that make the federal regulatory system more rigorous, evidence based, and transparent…