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In which antivaccine activist J. B. Handley thinks attacking Andrew Wakefield's movie "backfired"

Nearly two weeks ago, a story that I had been blogging about almost nonstop for a week reached its conclusion when Robert De Niro decided to pull the antivaccine movie Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the Tribeca Film Festival, of which he was one of the co-founders. Before that, he had revealed that it was he who had bypassed the festival's regular selection procedures and asked that the film be shown. All of this happened after an uproar over a film so full of antivaccine quackery, conspiracy theories about William W. Thompson (a.k.a. the "CDC whistleblower" in antivaccine circles…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper:…

The Information Diet - five ways to improve your data consumption [SciencePunk]

Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been…

What if climatologists reversed the null hypothesis?

Kevin Trenberth's latest paper, which appears in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is uncharacteristically and refreshingly blunt right from the first few words of the introduction: Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever. There are arguments about how much and how important these effects are and will be in future, but many studies (e.g., see the summary by Stott et al.1) have demonstrated that effects are not trivial and have emerged from the noise of natural variability, even if they are small by some measures. So why does the science community…

From the Archives: Tor.com & Globe and Mail Books: What can library websites learn

During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from January 13, 2009. It ended up being pretty popular and was the reason that ALA Editions initially contacted me about doing a book. ===== This was a hard post to title, in that I wanted it to be reasonably short yet pack in a lot of information. The real post title should be: What can library web sites learn from commercial book-related web sites such as Tor.com and the brand new Globe and Mail Books site? First of all, a brief note…

ACTION: let's kill this anti-OA bill before it's even born!

You probably remember the wonderful new NIH law that passed last year: On Dec 26th, 2007, President Bush signed the Bill that requires all NIH-funded research to be made available to the public. The bill mandates all NIH-funded research to be made freely available to public within 12 months of publication. You probably also remember that the big publishers opposed the law, using some very unsavoury tactics. Well, guess what? They are at it again. They are trying to sneak through Congress a new bill that is, in essence, the repeal of the NIH open access law. The bill, dubbed in a typical…

Evolution of median fins

Often, as I've looked at my embryonic zebrafish, I've noticed their prominent median fins. You can see them in this image, although it really doesn't do them justice—they're thin, membranous folds that make the tail paddle-shaped. These midline fins are everywhere in fish—lampreys have them, sharks have them, teleosts have them, and we've got traces of them in the fossil record. Midline fins are more common and more primitive, yet usually its the paired fins, the pelvic and pectoral fins, that get all the attention, because they are cousins to our paired limbs…and of course, we completely…

The Other Panda's Thumb

If you could travel back to Spain about ten million years ago, you'd have no end of animals to watch, from apes to bear-dogs to saber-tooth tigers. With so many creatures jockeying for your attention (and perhaps chasing you down for lunch), you might well miss the creature shown here. Simocyon batalleri was roughly the size and shape of a puma, although its face looked more like a raccoon's. If anything were to draw your attention to Simocyon, it would probably be the animal's gift for climbing trees. Most big carnivorous mammals of the time were restricted to the ground; some may have been…

Hooters and breast cancer research fundraising: Part 2

Welcome feminist bloggers and commentors from Coturnix's guest post at Echidne of the Snakes. Howdy, folks. Let me introduce myself. I'm the guy who got this discussion started at Terra Sigillata, where Coturnix's home blog is hosted by ScienceBlogs.com. Short story is that I asked a rhetorical question about a single Hooters establishment (on the San Antonio, TX, Riverwalk) that sits within two blocks of the world's largest international breast cancer research conference held every December, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS). My wife is a medical oncologist specializing in…

What's Jimmie Walker's favorite arthropod?

"TRI-LO-BIIITE!" Oh, no, that was a terrible opening. You'll only know what the heck I'm talking about if you remember JJ from the television show Good Times, and it's such a pathetic joke it's only going to appeal to grade schoolers. So if you're a time-traveling 8 year old from the 1970s, you'll appreciate the reference. How many of those are reading this right now? Maybe this will work better. Here's a small chip of shale I keep at my desk. My son Alaric and I collected that on a trip to Delta, Utah over 20 years ago. We had permission from the owner of a commercial dig site to rummage…

Pat Michaels: "fraud, pure and simple"

In Paul Krugman's May 29 column he wrote about Pat Michael's "fraud, pure and simple" that James Hansen's 1988 prediction of global warming was too high by 300%. (Michael's fraud was described earlier by Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Hansen again and me.) Michaels has posted a denial, so I'm going to go back to the original sources so that everyone can see what Michaels did. In Michaels' 1998 testimony he stated: Ten years ago, on June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the House of Representatives that there was a strong "cause and effect relationship" between observed…

Baldness genes: one old, one new

From a geneticist's point of view, male pattern baldness - also known as androgenic alopecia - is a tempting target. Baldness is common in the general population, with a prevalence that increases sharply with age (as a rule of thumb, a male's percentage risk of baldness is approximately equal to his age, e.g. 50% at age 50, and 90% at age 90), so there are no shortage of cases to study. It's also a strongly heritable trait, with about 80% of the variation in risk being due to genetic factors. Finally, baldness has been reported to be associated with a wide range of diseases such as prostate…

The Information Diet - five ways to improve your data consumption

Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been…

From the Archives: Open Access and the Democratization of Science

It looks like it's going to be a pretty busy day for me, so here's a post from the archives. I picked this one because it's still very timely (the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 is still in committee in the Senate) and it's related to my recent post on open peer review. (4 May 2006) As society slowly shifts toward more participatory forms of democracy, science policy will increasingly be subject to the will of the general population. The creation of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine via voter-initiated Proposition 71 in 2004 stands as a significant example of…

Another Week of GW News, July 26, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... July 26, 2009 Chuckle, Clinton in India, Clouds, Pachauri, AMS on Geoengineering, Upcoming Meetings, Carbon Tariffs Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Desertec, Aerosols, Grumbine, Noctilucent Clouds, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO,…

The Food Experience Meme

I found a fun meme via Rev. BigDumbChimp, involving food. I'm a sucker for anything involving eating. Venison: Nope. Nettle tea: yes. Didn't like it. Huevos rancheros: Yes, yummy. Steak tartare: nope. Crocodile: Yup. Mediocre. Not a bad flavor, but it had a nasty texture. Black pudding: Gads, no. Cheese fondue: Yup. Carp: Yup. Borscht: I'm an Ashkenazi Jew, of course I've had borscht. Out of a jar, it's absolutely, mind-bogglingly horrible. Cooked fresh, it's at best mediocre. Baba ghanoush: Yum! Calamari: Tried it once. Turned out that I'm violently allergic to it…

Want Black Lives to Matter? Want to Help End Racism? Read.

I don't know a single person on any end of the political spectrum who doesn't want to see an end to police shootings of black folk. I don't know a single person who doesn't want to make sure that shootings like the Charleston one never happen again. But most ordinary white people also don't have a clue how they could help with that, other than posting the occasional facebook meme or generally feeling it would be a good thing if something were done. Or maybe they'd like to do something, but are nervous about it - how will other people feel if they just show up to a protest or meeting? The…

The Fukushima Disaster, Hyperbole, Credibility, Skepticism, and the Future of Nuclear Power

I honestly think that it is too early to have this conversation, but alas, the conversation has been forced. I have yet to express my opinion about the efficacy or safety of the future use of nuclear power, or any way in which that opinion may be affected by the current tragic events in Japan. I did report (link to, really) with little comment on the current failings of the Fukushima nuclear plants (very much underway at this time), and when commenters took the opportunity to explain how nuclear power is totally safe and that this was demonstrated by how nicely things are working out at…

SfN: (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How will it Affect You?

I attended a panel discussion chaired by David van Essen entitled (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How will it Affect You? It was focused on what the implications of the Open Access movement in science are, and what scientists should expect from that. For those of you who don't know, the Open Access movement is a push to make all journal articles published freely available to the public. This while a very laudable goal raises some issues, not the least of which is who is going to pay for publishing if all the articles are free. Nick Anthis from The Scientific Activist and I debated…

How can so much stupidity about medicine be packed into one article?

Mike Adams is an idiot. There, I said it. Adams runs the NewsTarget website, a repository for all things "alternative" medicine. In it, he rails against "conventional" medicine as utterly useless and touts all manner of woo as the "cure" for a variety of diseases. I generally ignore his website these days because I fear that reading it regularly will cause me to lose too many neurons, and, as I get older, I want to hold on to my what neurons I have remaining for as long as possible, or, if I must lose them, to do so in a pleasurable way, perhaps as a result of a fine bottle of wine. But,…

Winter Husbandry

You'd be surprised at how warm our barn is on winter nights. A few nights ago, the thermometer read -10 as I headed out the door, and the wind was howling, but inside the barn it was below freezing, but surprisingly tolerable. Close down a comparatively small space, insulate the floors with dry bedding and fill it with warm life, and the combined body heats make it surprisingly pleasant. Up in the rafters, some of the chickens and the turkeys are nested for the night, and they snuggle together. In the rest of the barn, they also nest in a heap. The goats snuggle together for warmth,…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 130 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work? A Blog Around The Clock: Circadian Rhythm of Aggression in Crayfish A Blog Around The Clock: Co-…

So you want to be an astrophysicist? Part I - undergrad

Part 2 of Ye Olde Blog So You Want To Be an Astrophysicist? series. Lightly re-edited. Should you do astronomy as an undergrad? (the following is in part shamelessly cribbed from prof Charlton's freshman seminar for our majors): Do you like stars and stuff? If not, you probably should look for an alternative, on the general principle that at this stage of life you should at least try to do things you actually like. If you do, good for you. Now, do you have the aptitude? Professional astrophysics/astronomy is not about looking at stars (except at occasional star parties, for outreach or as a…

Powers of Ten (Dollars)

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. -Richard Feynman Not so long ago I wrote a snarky post about economics wherein I joined the chorus of voices deriding the ludicrously horrible track record of predicting the impact of the stimulus. Well, another month another data point, overlaid on the otherwise unmodified Obama stimulus prediction: Not only is it much worse than what the stimulus was supposed to…

Atheists can be stupid, too

This is the worst case of atheist buttery I've ever seen. I'm left with this terribly greasy, bloated feeling after going through it, and I think my arteries were clogging up just reading it. This fellow Malcolm Knox is an atheist who happily sends his kids off to the Catholic church, which is just fine (his wife is Catholic)…but he's got to rattle off ten terrible, awful, stupid excuses for why he has to do it. It's embarrassing how pathetic his reasoning is. And my SIWOTI syndrome compels me to take each one apart. In his 1995 open letter to his 10-year-old daughter Juliet, Dawkins…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Amy Freitag

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Amy Freitag from Southern Fried Science to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is…

Birds in the News 184 -- Nobel Prize Edition

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter "Magpie Menace" Pete Marshall, 2009, Oil [larger view]. Birds in Science By genetically modifying the brains of songbirds for the first time, scientists may have a devised useful new tool for studying neurological growth and healing in humans. "Songbirds have become a classic tool for studying vocal learning and neuron replacement. This will bring those two topics into the molecular age," said neuroscientist Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University, author of a study published recently in the Proceedings of the…

Good intentions, bad effects: the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

Remember the scares around December 2007 about lead in children's toys manufactured in China? Back then, people cried out for better testing to ensure that products intended for children were actually safe for children. Partly in response to this outcry, a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, was passed. The intent of the law is to protect kids from harm from lead (and other substances) in children's products. However, the effect of the law may be something else altogether. I've been meaning to post on this for awhile, but I've finally been spurred into action by my…

The Perils of Ideological Continua and Coordinate Systems

This post (from January 14, 2005) is how I see the political/ideological landscape in the USA. ---------------------------------------------------- We use the words Left and Right to describe Liberal and Conservative ideological and political leanings. The phrases stem, if I remember correctly, from the seating arrangement in the first French Parliament in the late 18th century. That was a long time ago. By now, most people realize that a straight Left/Right continuous line does not represent the ideological spectrum very well, yet the terms are still in constant use and, more importantly,…

The Perils of Ideological Continua and Coordinate Systems

This post (from January 14, 2005) is how I see the political/ideological landscape in the USA. ---------------------------------------------------- We use the words Left and Right to describe Liberal and Conservative ideological and political leanings. The phrases stem, if I remember correctly, from the seating arrangement in the first French Parliament in the late 18th century. That was a long time ago. By now, most people realize that a straight Left/Right continuous line does not represent the ideological spectrum very well, yet the terms are still in constant use and, more importantly,…

Moving Overseas, Part 9

This week has not gone very well, probably because I've been ill since Sunday with some sort of illness that makes me vomit a lot. Last week, I thought I had everything figured out, but this week, I've been confronted by an increasingly complex tangle of paperwork and problems and with having to make decisions about how to spend huge sums of money (well, huge sums in the view of this unemployed scientist). All the while, I am reminded how intelligent I was to resist the pressure put on me to relocate anywhere unless I knew I had a job first. Here's a list of everything that has gone wrong so…

Growing Again...Maybe?

Last Friday afternoon my mother and step-mother came to visit.  My mother had surgery on her foot back in the summer and has had a long, slow recovery, and is only now able to travel and drive, so this was the first visit in nearly six months.  As we sat around the table, we joked that it would be a great day for our family to get a phone call about a foster placement. Five minutes afterwards, my mother was walking by the phone when it rang and she called out "It is the county!"  I laughed, thinking she was joking.  She wasn't.  It was a call about a sibling group of five kids.  We said yes…

Snookered by OSHA's Weekly Fatality Report Site

In a blog post seven months ago, I gave federal OSHA credit for placing worker fatality information front-and-center on its homepage. The sobering feature deserving kudos was the scrolling list of fatal-injury incidents in which men and women died recently at US workplaces. I remarked that the change by OSHA was a good start, and that I considered it a work in progress. It seemed that OSHA did as well. The first few weekly entries (here, here, here, here) did not include work-related fatalities reported to OSHA State Plan states. Federal OSHA indicated that some State Plans "elected not…

Watchdogs of Democracy?

An informed public and open debate is vital to a healthy democracy, but they depend upon free access to the facts. A free and fair media is indispensable to democracy because they are the only institution that can regularly question the president and other public officials. However, not everyone thinks that the American media has been doing their job recently. One of those people is Helen Thomas. Thomas is a journalist who has covered Washington news for more than 60 years. In her new book, Watchdogs of Democracy? The waning Washington press corps and how it has failed the public (NYC:…

OSHA should undertake an educational campaign on finding and fixing chemical exposures

by Eileen Senn, MS OSHA's intention to finalize a list of chemicals on which to focus the agency's efforts to address outdated rules on workplace chemical exposures was officially announced in the December 1 issue of OSHA Quick Takes and described in my November 17 post, "OSHA Poised to Action on Chemical Hazards." No matter what approach or combination of approaches OSHA ultimately takes on chemical exposures, employer education and training must lay the foundation for voluntary compliance and enforcement. OSHA will need to undertake a campaign to teach employers, employees, and union…

Ask Ethan #9: Why everything rotates

"Galileo got it wrong. The Earth does not revolve around the Sun. It revolves around you and has been doing so for decades. At least, this is the model you are using." -Srikumar Rao It's the end of the week, so that means its time to take on another one of your questions from the question/suggestion box, and continue our ongoing Ask Ethan series! Even though there's a backlog of hundreds of questions, you should keep sending the new ones in, as all questions are fair game for any segment. This week's question comes from reader Brian Mucha, who asks us: Where did the sun and planets get their…

If the Candidates Talk About Big Science Issues ...

... maybe they'll actually do something about them. Remember the Democratic and Republican party debates that were held just before that major international meeting about climate change, participated in by every country in the world? Of course you do. Do you remember the candidates' responses to the questions about climate change posed during those debates? No, you don't. Not a single question about climate change, or any other big science issue, was asked. When we think about the big science issues, climate change is often one of the main topics that comes first to mind. But there are many…

Do you kind of wish Pokemon cards had REAL creatures not FAKE creatures?

If so, you should join this facebook group. Or to discuss further, please go to http://friendfeed.com/phylomon. Here's part of what started this group and project: a friend of mine passed on this "letter to Santa:" It quite nicely demonstrates an issue with advocates of biodiversity - that is, what can we do to get kids engaged with the wonderful creatures that are all around them? They obviously have the ability and the passion to care about such things, but it appears misplaced - they'll spend a ton of resources and time tracking down fictional things, when they could easily do the same…

Fishkiller

I write in my sleep. You see, the way it works is that if I have something on my mind when I go to bed, my brain will churn over it all night long, and because of the way my head works, it will spontaneously generate a narrative. I do that in all of my dreams — I float aloof from the events, mentally transcribing what's going on. My consciousness is a kind of disembodied reporter, I guess. This quirk can work out well. Lots of my longer posts are composed while I'm sleeping — I wake up in the morning and the structure of the story is all laid out in my head, with a jumble of words stacked…

Optogenetic fMRI

OF all the techniques used by neuroscientists, none has captured the imagination of the general public more than functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The technique, which is also referred to as functional neuroimaging and, more commonly, "brain scanning", enables us to peer into the human brain non-invasively, to observe its workings and correlate specific thought processes or stimuli to activity in particular regions. fMRI data affect the way in which people perceive scientific results: colourful images of the brain have persuasive power, making the accompanying data seem more…

Vegetative and minimally conscious patients can learn

THE vegetative and minimally conscious states are examples of what are referred to as disorders of consciousness. Patients in these conditions are more or less oblivious to goings-on in their surroundings - they exhibit few, if any, signs of conscious awareness, and are usually unable to communicate in any way. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to establish what these patients are experiencing, and the consciousness disorders are among the least understood, and most commonly misdiagnosed, conditions in medicine. Although technologies such as functional neuorimaging have enabled…

Fumento's sidekick

We last saw Fumento blundering around in a field of rakes. Now read on. John Fleck commented on the situation: The thing is, Fumento is, at times, a quite talented journalist. But then, over and over again, he shows himself to be a complete tool. My first encounter with his work was a solid take-down in Reason of Gary Taubes' New York Times Magazine piece on the wonders of the Atkins diet. I probably liked the piece because it fit my biases, but whatever. It was a solid piece of work. And true to form Fumento managed to make a complete fool of himself with an evidence-free claim that…

Egnor responds, falls flat on his face

The other day, the Time magazine blog strongly criticized the DI's list of irrelevant, unqualified scientists who "dissent from Darwin", and singled out a surgeon, Michael Egnor, as an example of the foolishness of the people who support the DI. I took apart some of Egnor's claims, that evolutionary processes can't generate new information. In particular, I showed that there are lots of publications that show new information emerging in organisms. Egnor replied in a comment. He's still completely wrong. The Discovery Institute has posted his vapid comment, too, as if it says something, so let…

Basics: Making graphs with kinematics stuff

**pre reqs:** [kinematics](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-kinematics.php) Suppose there is some experiment in which you throw a ball up and collect position and time data (with video analysis). What do you do with this data? Your instructor told you to make a graph, but how do you do that? Here is the fictional data you (or I) collected:  Here is the text file with the data if you want to reproduce the graphs I make here [kinematics data](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/kinematics_data.…

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do

If there is one "politics" book you should read this year, it is Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Now, this sort of acclamation does need to be tempered by the fact that I myself don't really read "political" books very often. But despite the modest N, I'm rather confident that anyone who picks up Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State will not be disappointed. To a great extent the collective of Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi and Jeronimo Cortina have produced a work which is a response in substance, if not…

SiBlings

Since my move here to SEED scienceblogs, I made a mistake of assuming, quite wrongly, that most of my visitors are aslo science bloggers (or people interested in science) who, almost by definition, regularly read all of the other SEED sciencebloggers as well. I forgot that some of the readers are not new readers, but people who came over here with me, people who have read one of my three old blogs for a long time before my move. They may be liberal/progressive bloggers, or fans of John Edwards, or North Carolina bloggers, or Balkans bloggers, or edubloggers or academic bloggers. Not to…

The Global Amphibian Crisis, 2009

Last year was Year of the Frog (nothing to do with the Chinese calendar, but instead a global effort to raise awareness about the plight of the world's declining amphibian species). I hope that you've not forgotten that the global effort to slow amphibian extinction continues unabated. For various reasons, I haven't blogged about amphibians for a while, so, in an effort to bring balance (something I strive for, yet will always fail to achieve) I feel the need to bring you up to speed. What has happened lately in the world of amphibian conservation? [Pirri harlequin frog shown here: a species…

A New Labor Day Tradition: The Year in Occupational Health & Safety

In honor of (US) Labor Day, Celeste Monforton and I have started what we intend to be a new Labor Day tradition: publication of a report that highlights some of the important research and activities in occupational health in the US over the past year.   The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2011 - Summer 2012 is now available online. We want it to be a resource for activists, regulators, researchers, and anyone else who values safe and healthy workplaces. Much as the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report focuses attention on workplace injury and illness statistics each…

Moving toward a saner health insurance system: rocky but necessary

Friday will be the two-year anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, and there's plenty of discussion about the law's impacts and the upcoming Supreme Court oral arguments. While many of the law's provisions won't take effect until 2014, it's already having an impact on some aspects of health insurance. I described several of these in a post on the law's one-year anniversary, so now I want to focus on two recent stories that underscore the difficulty and importance of changing how the US handles health insurance. First, it's important to remember that the law isn't an overhaul…

ANSI’s Nail Gun Safety Standard ignores safety research, ANSI process criticized

You’ve probably seen on-line the grim photos showing a construction nail embedded in a person’s skull or hand. The culprit: nail guns. In particular, those with “contact actuation triggers.” An estimated 37,000 pneumatic nail-gun related injuries are treated in US emergency rooms every year, with slightly more than half being work-related. Nail guns are the leading cause of tool-related injuries in the US construction industry that result in hospitalization. As researchers who study nail gun safety wrote in the March 2015 issue of Professional Safety: “Before pneumatic nail guns were…