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Ethics and population.

Back at the end of November, Martin wrote a post on the ethics of overpopulation, in which he offered these assertions: It is unethical for anyone to produce more than two children. (Adoption of orphans, on the other hand, is highly commendable.) It is unethical to limit the availability of contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption. It is unethical to use public money to support infertility treatments. Let those unfortunate enough to need such treatment pay their own way or adopt. And let's put the money into subsidising contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: An iPod of woo

Alright, now they've gone too far. I can take a lot from woo-meisters. I can watch them claim that water has some sort of "memory" and that diluting a compound to nonexistence somehow seemingly by magic makes it more powerful and chuckle at their silliness. I can listen to them claim that by "alkalinizing your body" you can cure all manner of disease. I can even sit back and be somewhat amused when woo-meisters claim that making wine in a pyramid aligned to true north infuses it with pyramid power and makes it better or when they claim that drinking your own--shall we say?--reproductive…

Sean Hannity: Skeptic about "psychic medium" John Edward (not)

Last night, I was sitting on the couch, my laptop, appropriately enough, on my lap creating my paean to Homeopathy Awareness Week in which I had a little fun discussing homeopathic plutonium. Because Homeopathy Awareness week is not yet over, I'll probably have one more bit of fun at the expense of The One Woo To Rule Them All before it's over. However, while I was getting into the possibilities suggested to me by diluting and succussing plutonium in order to treat all sorts of "Pluto-y" illnesses, I happened to flip through the channels, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Realigning your frequency, triphase style

If there's one concept that seems to cross many "disciplines" of woo (a.k.a. "alternative medicine," a.k.a. "complementary and alternative medicine," a.k.a. CAM) is the concept of some sort of "life force" or "life energy." It is true that life does depend upon the utilization of energy, specifically chemical energy. That's what biologists and biochemists mean when they talk about life energy, but that's not what woo-meisters mean by "life energy." Rather, what woo-meisters mean by "life energy" can best be described as some sort of magical mystery energy field that means the difference…

Is a personal genome sequence worth $350,000?

This little USB drive represents the current pinnacle of luxury personal genomics. It's the product of Knome (pronounced "know me"), a Cambridge, MA-based biotech start-up fronted by genomics pioneer George Church (recently profiled in Wired). In return for $350,000, Knome's customers receive a shiny 8 Gb drive containing their entire genome sequence (or rather, a hefty fraction of it), along with specialised browser software for viewing it. $350,000 is a hell of a lot of money to fork over for a few gigabytes of data. So, how much of a return will these customers be getting on their…

On the Khaki Market: What Do You Do When the Food System you Need is Illegal?

What do you get when you cross Green, as in Green Markets - those emergent farmer's and craftspeople's markets that have given life to local food - with Black or Grey Markets - ie, illegal sales? Khaki is the color you get, and you get what I call "Khaki Markets" - the growing trend towards producing food, toiletries and other regulated substances outside of regulation. It is a hugely growing trend, from unlicensed sale of everything from produce to herbs to illegal raw milk sales to gourmet restaurants operating out of old school buses and people's apartments. Indeed, there are whole "…

The Good, Not So Good, and Long View on Bmail

Denialism blog readers, especially those at academic institutions that have/are considering outsourcing email, may be interested in my essay on UC Berkeley's migration to Gmail.  This is cross-posted from the Berkeley Blog. Many campuses have decided to outsource email and other services to “cloud” providers.  Berkeley has joined in by migrating student and faculty to bMail, operated by Google.  In doing so, it has raised some anxiety about privacy and autonomy in communications.  In this post, I outline some advantages of our outsourcing to Google, some disadvantages, and how we might…

The appalling process of GOPcare

We’ve written extensively (e.g., here, here, here, and here) about the problems with Congressional Republicans’ healthcare legislation, which would gut Medicaid and make it far harder for older people to afford individual health insurance plans, all in order to fund tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest. But the process by which Republicans are trying to pass their bill is equally alarming, and potentially disastrous for the future of the US legislative process. An imperfect but useful status quo Passing major legislation should involve extensive consideration of proposals’ likely impacts.…

Accelerated warming of the Southern Ocean and its impacts on the hydrological cycle and sea ice?

Yes, the review you've all been waiting for. Before I start, let me point out that this has been discussed by WE at WUWT, who has pointed out the obvious problem. It has also been mentioned by KK, though that appears to be more of a meta-discussion about the paper's reception rather than the paper itself. [Note: follow-up here.] To quote KK: But back to the show. One commenter at WUWT, noting the negative reaction to Judith, gives her a backhanded compliment when he writes: I have to applaud Judith Curry on having the guts to present her paper in the boxing ring of climate blogs where the…

2016: The year bullshit was weaponized

This will almost certainly be my last post of 2016. Unless something so amazing, terrible, or just plain interesting to me happens between now and tomorrow night, I probably won't be posting again until January 2 or 3. Many bloggers like to do "end of year roundup"-type posts that list their best or most popular post, trends noted in 2016 relevant to their area of blogging interest, or predictions for the coming year as their last post of the year, but that's never really been my style. I don't remember the last time I did a post like that, and I'm too lazy today to bother to go and look it…

In which I am compared to Donald Trump by a pro-quackademic medicine activist...again!

John Weeks has long been an activist for alternative medicine—excuse me, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as it’s more commonly referred to these days, “integrative medicine.” Despite his having zero background in scientific research or the design and execution of experiments and clinical trials, for some bizarre reason in May he was appointed editor of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM). It didn’t take him long at all to use his new post to launch a nasty broadside against CAM critics in general (such as yours truly) and those who criticized a…

Interview with Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ

Welcome to the most recent installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the publishing/science blogging/computing communities. The latest is with Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ. PeerJ is a new startup in the scientific publishing industry, using a rather unique business model whereby authors will be able to pay one fee and they get a lifetime of publishing their articles in PeerJ. Please see my post with the PeerJ press release for more details. I recently had an opportunity to ask Peter and Jason some pre-announcement questions about PeerJ and I've included…

Swine flu vaccines, adjuvants, equity, safety: more discussion

As we expected, yesterday's vaccine piece provoked a lot of discussion, almost all of it thoughtful and pertinent. Since we've already said we might be wrong, we thought we'd take some time to respond, using it as a way to keep thinking things through on our end. Writing is thinking and thinking is needed in this situation. Over at FluTrackers.com (an excellent flu forum like Flu Wiki with highly informed people) there were a number of lengthy responses, most of them on the negative side. Since these folks follow events closely their opinions are also worth following closely. In addressing…

What caused the Cambrian explosion? MicroRNA!

No, not really — my title is a bit of a sensationalistic exploitation of the thesis of a paper by Peterson, Dietrich, and McPeek, but I can buy into their idea that microRNAs (miRNAs) may have contributed to the pattern of metazoan phylogenies we see now. It's actually a thought-provoking concept, especially to someone who favors the evo-devo view of animal evolution. And actually, the question it answers is why we haven't had thousands of Cambrian explosions. In case you haven't been keeping up, miRNAs are a hot topic in molecular genetics: they are short (21-23 nucleotides) pieces of…

Visiting Japan on the Cheap

Next year's World Science Fiction Convention is being held in Yokohama, Japan, the first time a Worldcon has ever been held in Japan. With this year's Worldcon out of the way, we're starting to see some discussion of who's going, and whether various US-based fans will make the trip or not. If I pass my tenure review, Kate and I are planning to go, and probably spend a couple of weeks doing touristy stuff before the convention as well (as a Worldcon in Japan is probably about the only way I'll get her to go...). A lot of people are, understandably, somewhat concerned about the whole idea-- it'…

The Economic Causes of Monogamy

The occasional 7-dwarf orgy notwithstanding (and you cannot convince me it never happened--I just know there was a night with a full moon and an opportunistic bottle of peach schnapps...), when most Western fairy tales end with "and they all lived happily ever after", they mean a prince and a princess. The ideal of one man and one woman united in marital bliss is so pervasive in the developed world that sometimes it takes an egghead (or a pervert) to question why. That is exactly what three researchers (so eggheads it is) at Hebrew University have done. In a paper in this month's AER, Eric…

Men with high testosterone more likely to reject gifts in ultimatum game (comments by both Jake and Kara)

One of the ways that scientists study human decision making is through the study of behavior in simple games -- loosely lumped into a field called game theory. Some of the most interesting and revealing findings involving such games is that human beings are not "strictly rational." Before everyone jumps all over me, let me define that statement. Strictly rational in this sense means that the behavior of human beings during these games does not always maximize expected value of the numerical (usually monetary) reward over the long-term. In laymans terms, if you offer someone $5 with no…

Where does the time go?

For those who know my blog well, you might think this is going to be another apology for a lack of posts. Surprise... it isn’t. No, honestly, I’m just pondering the nature of time and complexity again, or at least how it applies to this thing we call life. It seems like we’re obsessed with being on time: hurry up and wait; walk, don’t run, but aren’t you supposed to be there by now? Sounds stressful. Yet, if there is anything I’ve learned about life, it is that stress is a waste of time. Are we all caught in some fantastic Catch-22? Or is there a way out? All right.... this isn’t really a…

Faith healing everywhere in medical academia

When I'm trying to demonstrate the utter implausibility and mystical pseudoscience behind so much of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), which is now more commonly referred to (by its advocates, at least) as "integrative medicine," I like to point to two examples in particular of modalities that are so utterly ridiculous in concept that anyone can understand what I'm talking about. For example, as much as I might deconstruct the nonsense that is acupuncture, discussing how "meridians" don't exist, the "life force" known as qi whose flow acupuncture needles are claimed to redirect…

Why does currency value change?

After yesterday's article about conversion between the value of british pounds in the '70s versus british pounds today, someone sent me a link to an article at the National Review Online, which just about had me rolling on the floor laughing. The problem is, it's dead serious. It's written by an "engineer" named Louis Woodhill, who argues from what he calls an "engineering viewpoint" that the whole idea of fluctuating currency value is total nonsense, and we'd all be better off if we just assigned a fixed value to our currency, and never allowed it to change. The U.S. dollar is in a scary…

The Zika conspiracies have begun

Like cockroaches, the conspiracy theorists suggesting the Zika virus outbreak is anything but a normal, naturally-occurring event have begun to come out of the woodwork. To be expected, the theories they're espousing make no sense scientifically, and each theory is incompatible with the others, but why should anyone expect that conspiracy theorists would actually use logic? Claim One: the current Zika virus outbreak is due to the release of genetically-modified mosquitoes by British company Oxitec. The suggestion is that GMO mosquitoes were released in the same area of Brazil now…

Funding cuts put public health's emergency response capabilities on the line

by Kim Krisberg It only takes a few minutes of talking with Scott Becker to realize just how passionate he is about public health. In fact, his enthusiasm is contagious. Maybe that's why he isn't mincing his words. "What keeps me up at night is how we are going to maintain the core and critical services we have," said Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "If the question is 'how low can we go?' My answer is 'we're there.' I used to be on a more hopeful note, but I can't do that anymore." Becker is talking about the worrisome state of public health…

Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension

When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn't because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top. Tourists taking photos of each other in…

Robert O'Brien Trophy to Defenders of Christmas

November's Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly known as the Idiot of the Month Award) will, for the first time, be awarded to a group of people rather than to a specific person. In fact, it will be awarded not to a specific organization or group, but to a rather amorphous and undefined group of people who seem to be everywhere these days. I'll call them the Paranoid and Righteous Defenders of Christmas (PRDC). These are the folks who are screaming bloody murder over the alleged plot to destroy Christmas in America, a plot that appears to exist primarily in their delusions. The ridiculous…

Science Blogs: What Are They Good For?

Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees. You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I'm going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no less...), I better have some opinions.. The original post is very long, but can probably best be summarized by the following paragraph: My thesis is that it's not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don't have the…

Darwin on the Irish

The IDiot Dembski has written this: It’s a happy Darwinian world after all … William Dembski Every now and again when I want to feel good about our shared humanity, I curl up with Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN and read passages like the following: The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith,…

Is Eric Merola issuing bogus DMCA takedown notices against critics of Stanislaw Burzynski?

If there is one aspect of cranks that is almost universal (besides the aforementioned tendency to want to prove themselves through things like "live televised debates"), it's a tendency to want to shut down the criticism of its opposition. True, such a tendency is a human trait as well and used far too often by, say, corporations, but it's one that seems to be cranked up to 11 and beyond, as they say, in cranks. We've seen it time and time again. Most often, it takes the form of some sort of legal bullying, such as when the British Chiropractic Association bit off more than it could chew by…

I am a very naughty boy

I've barred the doors — I'm sure that any moment now, a squadron of goose-stepping nuns will come marching up the street to wag their fingers at me and rebuke me for what I've started. It seems the Youth of Today are going on YouTube and…flaunting their disrespect for crackers! People can find a video of almost anything on YouTube: babies' first steps, Saturday Night Live skits, news clips, concerts and now - to the shock of Catholics everywhere - desecration of the Eucharist. YouTube has long been a destination for Catholics seeking video clips of Masses, apologetics lectures or devotions…

Comments of the Week #52: from Einstein to the invisible

“That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.” -Kim Edwards And every time two particles interact with one another, the Universe is forever different from how it was a moment before. Here at Starts With A Bang, this past week saw us explore a number of aspects of our ever-changing reality, including: Why does E=mc^2? (for Ask Ethan), The astronomer who brought us the Universe (for our Weekend Diversion), A beautiful bridge between a lovely lens (for Mostly Mute Monday), Photonic Booms (a fantastic contribution from Sabine Hossenfelder),…

Another Week of GW News, December 23, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years 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 Anthropocene Antics Information is not Knowledge...Knowledge is not Wisdom December 23 2012 Chuckles, Bouquet, Solstice, COP19+, Post-Doha, Hargreaves, Retrospectives AR5 Leak, Subsidies, WB, Thermodynamics, Cook, TV Meteorologists Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Megafauna, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Fisheries,…

Modeling antiviral resistance, VI: the rule book

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] We continue our examination of the paper, "Antiviral resistance and the control of pandemic influenza," by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. We have gotten to the point where our population is divided into five categories. We follow the course of the epidemic on each of its days by…

ScienceOnline'09 - Interview with GG aka Dr.SkySkull

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Dr. SkySkull of the Skulls in the Stars blog, to answer a few questions. 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 (scientific) background? First, the name: I seem to have evolved many different aliases over my time in the blogosphere!…

The Ball State Kerfuffle

Eric Hedin, an assistant professor of physics at Ball State University, has come under fire for an honors course called, “Boundaries of Science.” The problem: the course appears to be little more than thinly veiled Christian evangelism. From The USA Today: “BSU appears to offer a class that preaches religion, yet gives students honors science credit,&rdqu; foundation attorney Andrew Seidel wrote to Gora. “BSU appears to have a class with a non-biologist undermining genuine science and scholarship of the Ball State biology department by teaching creationism, a religious belief ...…

Probability and Evolution

A number of years ago I attended an ID conference near Kansas City. One of the breakout sessions featured a fellow from the Heritage Foundation (an ultra-right-wing political think tank) presenting a lecture about probability and evolution. His talk was mostly just a watered-down version of William Dembski's standard talking points. His triumphant conclusion was that the probability of something or other having evolved by natural processes was one over something enormous, from which he concluded that evolution had been refuted. There were only about fifteen of us in the room. During the…

Sir James Black (1924-2010) - Physician, Pharmacologist, Gentleman

Have you ever taken one of the now-over-the-counter heartburn relief remedies like Tagamet, Zantac, or Pepcid? How about the beta-blocker atenolol (Tenormin) or metoprolol (Lopressor) for antihypertensive therapy, or the original less-selective beta-blocker propranolol (Inderal) for migraines, presentation anxiety or stage fright? If you answered yes to either question, you owe a debt of gratitude to Sir James Black, the Scottish physician who left us earlier this week at age 85. The best obituary I have seen memorializing Sir James comes from the UK Telegraph. Black was called the father…

What Does Your Music Say About You?

I went to a high school at a time (one not that different from most others, I imagine) when musical preferences were a good clue to social group membership. There were, for example, the punks who listened to, well, punk; the stoners who listened to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" over and over and over again; the hipsters, who listened to what was the hip music of the time (grunge); and the "popular" kids who listened to pop, pop rock, and country (I went to high school in Nashville, where country music was the popular music). We all assumed that what a person listened to could tell you a lot about…

It's the 21st Century. Do you know where your files are?

I would wager that you don't know where many of your most important files are. If you are into music, and use iTunes, you can't find a particular song file using your file manager. You would need to locate it using iTunes. iTunes would then give you limited access to that file. It does not let you do the same thing your file manager would let you do. Many of your most important pieces of information are in emails or attached to emails. Where exactly are those things? Can you access them with your file manager with little effort, print, copy, delete, duplicate, or otherwise work with…

Modeling the head of a beer

When you pour a beer, there is this foamy top called the head. The size of the head decreases over time. What is this process dependent on? Clearly, little bubbles of beer are popping. Does each bubble have an equal probability of popping? Do only the bubbles on the top (or bottom) pop? I became aware of this idea from a colleague. Maybe he was going to do an analysis, but I haven't seen it yet. If you do (Gerard), I am sorry for doing this before you. This may have been investigated before, but in the spirit of re-doing everything I have not searched for previous beer head studies.…

Another Week of Global Warming News, March 16, 2014

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 Sipping from the Internet Firehose... March 16, 2014 Chuckles, COP20+, GCF, Tactics, RS/NAS, Warnings, Ides of March, Energiewende World Bank, Global Legal Framework, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Anniversary, Policies, Related Papers Melting Arctic, Methane, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, Svalbard, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, New Weather, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Aerosols Climate Sensitivity,…

As Andrew Wakefield's defenders circle the wagons

If my post today is a bit shorter on the usual Respectfully and not-so-Respectfully Insolent verbiage that you've come to know and love (or hate), I hope you'll forgive me. It's hard not to sit back, rest a bit, and enjoy the spectacle of Andrew Wakefield being pilloried in the press in the wake of the BMJ's article documenting his scientific misconduct in gory detail. He's gotten away far too long with trying to split the difference when credulous journalists "tell both sides of the story" so that to those not knowledgeable about his scientific fraud and incompetence it seems as though there…

Measure for measure from an attoparsec to the jerk

When you use as part of your daily work a unit of measure that Wired magazine lists as among the Best Obscure Units, you know you are in trouble. Thus I found pack-year, one of an epidemiologist's favorite smoking exposure measures listed there along with a couple of other units I knew about. Pack-years is a cumulative measure calculated by multiplying the number of packs of cigarettes a person smoked per day by the number of years they smoked them. Thus a 25 pack-year smoking history can be accrued by smoking a pack a day for 25 years, or, heaven forbid, 25 packs a day for one year.…

"Intellectual Conservative" seems to be an oxymoron

Many will argue with the conclusion of my title, but there are so many examples of outright intellectual vacuity from people who anoint themselves with the title "conservative" that it is fast becoming a synonym for "ignoramus". We've lately been laughing ourselves silly at the absurdity called Conservapædia, but here's another flabby, nutritionally empty scrap of junk food to chew over: a site called The Intellectual Conservative. In particular, I call your attention to yet another right wing rejection of a valid, well-established science by someone completely oblivious to either the…

Surprise! Relatively small decreases in vaccine uptake can lead to big increases in vaccine-preventable disease!

One of the most common tropes used by antivaxers is to attack herd immunity as not being real. Herd immunity, or as its sometimes called, community immunity, is a name for a phenomenon in which in a population with high levels of immunity to a disease members susceptible to the disease are protected. Basically, because the vast majority of members of the population are immune to a disease, that disease can't gain a foothold in the population and lead to an outbreak or an epidemic. Basically, transmission from person to person is interrupted because any susceptible person who becomes infected…

Why National Health Care Is Necessary to A Sustainable Food System

While I recover from a nasty case of food poisoning, I thought in honor of the SCOTUS decision, it would be worth re-running this piece from 2009.  For all that this is not the national health care system the US needs, it is, in the end, a small step in the right direction. A while back, at a talk I gave, a small scale farmer asked me why my family didn’t farm full time.  I observed that one of the reasons we don’t is simply that we have young children and we feel that we have a need for benefits.  He pointed out that my state, New York, has a program to provide health insurance for the…

Pandemic influenza awareness week. Day 5: How ready are we, and what can YOU do?

Thus far this week, I've discussed the history of pandemic influenza in general, and avian flu in particular. I've discussed some issues that must be addressed to prepare us for a pandemic, and the groundbreaking resurrection of the Spanish influenza virus. Today I want to end the series with a look at how prepared we currently are as a nation, and highlight some personal preparedness steps you can take. If you recall from Tuesday, the first outbreak of H5N1 was back in 1997. The anthrax attacks were in 2001. Surely by now we're prepared for some kind of serious, large-scale, biological…

Autism & RNA????

Autism seems to keep popping up everywhere. In today's NYTimes there's an commentary on new Federal legislation whose aim is to boost Autism research. But that's not what I want to talk about. So I've been perusing a couple of blogs by autism researchers to discover that there is a thriving pseudoscience of Autism. For more on this visit BC's blog (Bartholomew Cubbins on Autism). And I know you've probably heard of the heavy metals fanatics (i.e. mercury in vaccines causes autism), but it's worse than that. Just follow this scary slippery slope of the ill-informed. So lets say that you buy…

Politics versus science

I've always been reluctant to attribute antiscientific attitudes to one political persuasion or another--and justly so, or so I thought. While it's true that antiscience on the right is definitely more prominent these days, with the Republican candidates conducting virtual seminars on how to deny established science. Evolution? They don't believe in it because, apparently, Jesus told them not to. Anthropogenic global warming? they don't buy that, either, because to admit that human activity is resulting in significant climate change would be to be forced to concede that industry isn't an…

State Farm hires, then drops The Richmeister. No more antivaccine copies—for now

I’m a State Farm customer. I have been for a very long time. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s inertia or the discounts that State Farm gives me because I’ve been with the company for so long. On the other had, I’ve had no complaints. State Farm’s service has been fine, and on the couple of occasions I had to make a claim the company didn’t jerk me around. Even better, it didn’t raise my rates because of it. So I had no plans to change my home or auto insurance to another company. At least, such was the case until I saw this: Yes, that’s Rob Schneider reprising his role as Richard…

Are fakers outliers or bellwethers?

Well, the new digs here at ScienceBlogs have thin walls (GrrlScientist, will you please turn down that stereo!), which means that sometimes we get sucked into the conversations our neighbors are having. And, almost as if this were the complex at Melrose Place (shut up!), a lot of us have been chattering about the same people, notably Hwang Woo Suk. So, for example, I've been hearing Chris Mooney telling his guests that, peer review or no peer review, the community of scientists will always include some fakers. Through the air-vent, I've got PZ Myers musing on how detection (or not) of the…

House passes bills that will make it harder for EPA to protect public health

The House of Representatives has passed two bills that, if they clear the Senate and are signed by President Trump, will make it much harder for EPA to do the important work of analyzing, warning about, and regulating health threats in the environment. The HONEST Act, introduced by House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Chair Lamar Alexander (R-Texas), would severely limit the research findings EPA could use in creating a wide range of communications, standards, and regulations. The EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act, introduced by Representative Frank Lucas (R-Oklahoma), would…