Search Content

Displaying results 13651 - 13700 of 87950

Swine flu: 20 US cases now identified [UPDATED--6 Canadian cases also confirmed]

According to new information from the CDC, in addition to the 2 cases in Texas, 7 in California, and 2 in Kansas, the 8 in New York have now been confirmed, and an additional case has also been confirmed in Ohio (I've not seen any info on that case)--UPDATED below. Investigations are apparently ongoing in at least 2 Canadian provinces, also (British Columbia and Nova Scotia). An investigation is also ongoing in New Zealand after teenagers took a trip to Mexico and have shown flu-like symptoms. Concerning to say the least, but crof and revere both have some excellent posts to keep things…

Friday Not-So-Random Five, December 29

Friday Not-So-Random Five I decided in honor of the new year, I'd do something a bit different this week. Instead of doing a random shuffle on my IPod, I separated out my favorites of the modern classical pieces that I discovered this year. Some of these are brand new recordings just released this year; others are older recordings that I just happened to discover this year. 1. **Igor Stravinsky, "Suite #1", from "Shadow Dances" performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.** Beautiful piece for a small orchestra. Very typically Stravinsky; some strange tonalities, but they're mostly very…

KITP: Z and M

Debra Fischer talking about correlations between metallicity and mass of stars and planets Two samples: Coralie data from Santos et al and Lick/Keck data need to get uniform sampled subsets, looking at giant mass planets known (cf Santos et al 2004, Fischer & Valenti 2005, Udry & Santos 2007) trend to N ~ Z2 for short orbital period giant planets over -0.5 < Z < +0.5 everyone is redoing their analysis, remeasuring Z and making use of bigger samples, longer observing stretches and higher velocity sensitivity (and hence lower mass planets) surface gravity, g, confounds Teff…

US uninsurance rate continues to decline, but state actions threaten gains

The latest findings on US health insurance coverage from the first quarter of the current year continue what is becoming a familiar story: The portion of the US population without health insurance continues to decline. This year, the estimate from CDC's National Center for Health Statistics is that 8.6% of US people of any age were without health insurance at the time of interview from January - March 2016. As it did last year, the report highlights the difference between states that have accepted the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion and those that have not: In Medicaid expansion…

UK CO2 (again)

Interesting little snippet on the news this morning: the EU carbon trading scheme is in some trouble, with prices heading down, because countries have issued excessive permits. Oops: someone has been careless (or naughty: I wonder which?). But thats for another day: today is: Reducing CO2 emissions from the UK power sector: A report for WWF-UK by ILEX Energy Consulting, May 2006. Whether its at all reliable I can't really guess. Its got lots of acronyms and tables and figures to baffle the unwary, though. Its only about CO2 from power. Its own take is: The analysis shows that relatively minor…

Turn off the bloody Bat-Signal! Bats huge reservoirs of viral disease

Know what sounds like fun? Testing almost 5,000 bats and over 4,000 rodents, from all over the world, for a cadre of viral infections ;) Im not kidding! Bats host major mammalian paramyxoviruses Think about this: Where did, say, measles, come from? How were humans originally infected? Where were they infected? Just because we have a vaccine for the measles that crossed over into humans that works really well-- what if a different version, not susceptible to our vaccine, crosses over again? Can it happen again? Without understanding a viruses past, you cannot adequately prepare for the…

What better place to find new organisms than a boiling pit of acid, amirite??

SWEEEEET! Scientists found a brand new branch of organisms in the boiling acid pools or Yellowstone National Park! Identification of novel positive-strand RNA viruses by metagenomic analysis of archaea-dominated Yellowstone Hot Springs HA! Before we had only found DNA viruses in these pools, DNA viruses infecting archaea. Youngs troupe of scientists thought there might be more... but how do you find something if you dont know what you are looking for? Well, with viruses we have some clues. There are some things viruses have that us 'normies' dont have. Like, RNA viruses need an RNA-…

Who is Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy?

A trick question, of course. The answer is "the author of a blog post at WUWT entitled IPCC’s Report on Climate Change: Myths & Realities". The blog posting itself is a more-than-usually-pointless mish-mash of nonsense, and isn't worth reading. I did anyway, though, and can assure you that "A World Meteorological Organization insider’s view of the IPCC report" is wrong, because it isn't really about the IPCC report at all; its just the usual stuff. But it is being sold on credentials as "A World Meteorological Organization insider’s view", and SJR claims to be "Formerly Chief Technical…

NCAA Tournament 2007: Not Quite Enough

The first weekend of the NCAA tournament wound down pretty much the way it started. There were a few good games, but almost all the higher seeds won. Only one of the top eight seeds failed to advance, and that was Wisconsin, who have looked shaky since the loss of Brian Butch. Purdue gave Florida a surprisingly good game, and Nevada hung with Memphis for a good while, but the only other upsets by seed were in the 4-5 games, with trendy pick Texas and VA Tech both losing. This is the chalk-iest tournament in recent memory, and my personal theory is that this is closely related to the other big…

Another one-sided battle

ERV is probably right. No one reads Uncommon Descent. I've noticed this before, and others have written to me about it. A link on any of the blogs of the creationist flavor, including UD, probably the most "popular" of the ID bunch, brings negligible traffic. I've been linked to with outrage and disparagement several times by UD and Evolution News and Views (remember Egnor?), and noticed no uptick in traffic, and they don't even show up in the few times I've looked at the referrals on sitemeter (although, to be honest, those aren't very useful anymore—getting to see the last 100 visitors…

Women of the Arxiv

Over at FiveThirtyEight, they have a number-crunching analysis of the number of papers (co)authored by women in the arxiv preprint server, including a breakdown of first-author and last-author papers by women, which are perhaps better indicators of prestige. The key time series graph is here: Fraction of women authors on the arxiv preprint server over time, from FivethirtyEight. This shows a steady increase (save for a brief drop in the first couple of years, which probably ought to be discounted as the arxiv was just getting started) from a bit over 5% women in the early 90's to a bit…

By eating fruit, birds protect Serengeti forests from beetles

Walks through a forest are often made all the more enjoyable by the chance to watch brightly coloured birds flit between the trees. But birds are not just mere inhabitants of forests - in some parts of the world, they are the key to the trees' survival. The Serengeti is one such place. Since 1950, around 70-80% of riverside forests have disappeared from this area. Fires seem to be a particular problem, opening large gaps in the canopy that forests can't seem to recover from. To understand why Gregory Sharam from the University of British Columbia has been monitoring the density of the…

You add +10 to your saving throw against nuclear bombs!

I think I read this in a Dungeons & Dragons manual. It's a magic spell called Agnihotra that puts a shell around you to resist nuclear fallout when an atom bomb goes off, only in this case, it's real…well, as real as the delusions of a freaky Hindu mystic can make it, which isn't very. But at least it's illustrated and explained! When a nuclear device is detonated, it gives rise to raja-tama predominant vibrations of the Absolute Cosmic Fire element. Discordant subtle sounds accompany these frequencies. These subtle sounds have a subtle harmful effect on the mind and intellect of the…

So that's what they mean by the “War on Poverty”

Minnesota is leading the way. Our Rethuglicans have figured out how to end poverty: by making it illegal to have money if you're poor? Wait, that makes no sense. Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. Lest you think our most contemptible lawmakers have no heart at all, consider that this is the generous version of their earlier plan. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all. I'm not sure what they're…

Isn't that special?

Every now and then a commenter at this or any number of other climate-oriented blogs spews out the phrase "the height of arrogance" and uses it in a way that defies logic. For example, one "Bruce" recently wrote "It is the height of arrgoance [sic] to suggest a trace gas like CO2 has anything to do with the climate cycles." No, Bruce, it's not arrogant to accurately portray the chemistry and thermodynamics of climatology. This morning, however, I did find a case to which the phrase might be applied with some degree of accuracy: Alberta's oil sands producers should be allowed to significantly…

No time to be timid

Words of wisdom are pouring from the pages of America's punditocracy, and many embrace a common theme: dare to be bold, Mr. President-elect. From E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post: The president-elect is hearing that his greatest mistake would be something called "overreach." Democrats in Congress, it's implied, are hungry to impose wacky left-wing schemes that Obama must resist. In fact, timidity is a far greater danger than overreaching, simply because it's quite easy to be cautious. From Paul Krugman of the New York Times: Right now, many commentators are urging Mr. Obama to think small…

Gravity from Saturn cracks and squishes one of its moons

Neat. One of the moons of Saturn, Enceladus, has cracks and eruptions that couldn't be explained by heat. (It is much too small to have volcanic actiivty.) They think that the cracks might be caused by tidal forces from Saturn's gravity: In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft flew by Enceladus and saw plumes of material erupting from the south pole of Enceladus. Scientists were surprised to see this because eruptions are powered by heat from an object's interior. Enceladus is tiny compared to most moons, only about 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter, so it should have lost its interior heat…

Was the reduction in Orlando rapes statistically significant?

Crime rates go up and crime rates go down. Before seizing on some possibly coincidental factor such as gun training or gun control as the cause of the change, we need to establish if the change was unusual, i.e. statistically significant. The only attempt I have seen to establish this is in Kleck and Bordua's paper which claims that the change was significant since it exceeded two standard deviations. This is wrong. A rate two standard deviations from the mean would be significant, but changes exceeding two standard deviations occur 15% of the time for normal variates, nowhere near the 5%…

The Human Family Tree

For centuries, people have wondered about our existence. Where did we come from? How did we get to where we are today? This kind of self-reflection has founded religions and spurred the greatest achievements in science. But only recently have we had the technology to truly trace backward and unravel the mystery of our origins. We have discovered our ancestors, and found clues as to how and when we branched from the other primates. But what about after that? How did we go from a small group of hominids in East Africa to a globally dominating species? Enter Kevin Bacon. No, seriously. Tomorrow…

Junk Science Writing

Almost a year ago the Washington Post, following on my own work in Mother Jones, reported on Fox News "junk science" columnist Steven Milloy's ties to ExxonMobil. The piece was by Howard Kurtz, and it included a reaction from Milloy: Milloy says Mother Jones has taken "old information and sloppily tried to insinuate that ExxonMobil has a say in what I write in my Fox column, which is entirely false. . . . My columns are based on what I believe and no one pays me to believe anything." Despite a mainstream scientific consensus, Milloy says that "the hysteria about global warming is entirely…

The Trip Part II - Brittany

From Normandy we headed to the Breton coast. But first we passed through Mont Saint Michel, a large rock that sits in the crux of a large bay that divides Normandy from Brittany. Mont Saint Michel is sometimes described as a tidal Island although it is in fact connected to the mainland by a man made road. There you'll find a small medieval town full of shops and tourists. As you climb towards the abbey, the view is spectacular. To give you an idea, here's an areial shot of the hamlet: We were fortunate enough to visit the island at low tide when the water recedes for miles. In the…

Precondition failed

A couple of readers have gotten an error message like this when they try to access my blog: Precondition Failed We're sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for / on this server. We have established rules for access to this server, and any person or robot that violates these rules will be unable to access this site. And then it goes on to list some suggestions on how to fix things. You can blame spammers if you get this message because it comes from an anti-spam plugin Bad Behavior. Spambots usually don't follow the correct protocols when accessing a website, because it is less work…

Salicylic Acid (Fake plastic trees)

The urea entry ended up with a discussion in the comments I encourage you to read about early organic chemists, one of whom was Kolbe, who first prepared acetic acid (an indisputably organic and biologically relevant molecule) from inorganic compounds. He worked with Wohler (mentioned in the urea entry) as well as Robert Bunsen (of burner fame). From the ACS bulletin above: In the course of work on chlorinated ethanes Kolbe effected the first complete synthesis of an organic compound, acetic acid, from inorganic precursors. His carbon source was carbon disulfide, chlorination of which gave…

Cold Spring Harbor Biology of Genomes meeting

I'll be spending the next few days at the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, NY - one of the most awaited events on the genomics calendar. I plan to blog here about the major themes emerging from the meeting; you can also follow me on Twitter if you want shorter, punchier updates, and I've set up a FriendFeed group for more complex topics. The meeting kicked off last night with a session on cancer genomics that gave a sense of the serious amounts of data currently being generated on the genetic origins of tumour development. Most of the work in this area has a fairly…

Footprint of the Atomic Age in the world's oceans

News outlets enjoyed a field day last month reporting on the amazing vitality of Porites sp. coral colonies in the South Pacific Bikini Atoll where Americans tested the fifth most powerful atom bomb ever exploded 54 years ago. The Bravo bomb was a 1000 times more powerful than the bomb at Hiroshima. It vaporized three islands, raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees, rocked islands 200km away and left a crater 2km wide and 73m deep. According to a recent field survey, the crater is filled today with luxuriant coral beds. Trees of branching Porites coral up to 8m high have been established…

Undoing faked Apollo Studio Videos (kidding)

Note: This is a repost from my old site. Time to move it over. First, what is different about motion on the moon and on Earth? Since the moon has a smaller mass in spite of its smaller size*, the moon has a smaller gravitational field. The gravitational field on the surface of the moon is 1/6th the field on the surface of the Earth. This means that the acceleration of a free falling on the object would be 1/6th the acceleration on Earth. So the question is: how would you change the time scale of a movie so that it looks like its acceleration is 1/6th of 9.8 m/s2? *If you make the size of…

Redoubt, oil and corporations: a tale of volcanic mitigation (or lack thereof)

The Anchorage Daily News has an excellent article today on the Drift River Oil Terminal, a depository for oil collected from the platforms in the Cook Inlet. This oil terminal stores at least 1,000,o00 barrels of oil (see article for why we're not sure) and sits, well, at the base of Redoubt (see map below from Anchorage Daily News) on the floodplain of the Drift River (~25 miles from the vent).  Now, this oil terminal was more-or-less destroyed during the last episode of volcanism at Redoubt twenty years ago when the terminal was wiped out by floods resulting from the eruptions. Not only…

Genomic diversity & historical inference

p-ter points me to a new paper, Global distribution of genomic diversity underscores rich complex history of continental human populations: Characterizing patterns of genetic variation within and among human populations is important for understanding human evolutionary history and for careful design of medical genetic studies. Here, we analyze patterns of variation across 443,434 SNPs genotyped in 3,845 individuals from four continental regions. This unique resource allows us to illuminate patterns of diversity in previously under studied populations at the genome-wide scale including Latin…

Mendel's Garden: Halloween Edition

October is a month of darkness, mystery, and dread. Only one holiday brings joy in October and even then, October joy is distilled through fear and apprehension. In the early evenings the sun hurries home and once familiar objects loom ominously in the dark. Giant spiders appear out the fog, lurking on webs that span our walkways and doors. Even Mendel's Garden is dark and malevolent when October greys our skies. genetics, Mendel's garden, blog carnival. Horror stories for adults October looks bleaker than usual if you're out of work and not getting paid. If your income matches this…

Digital Biology Friday: hot plants and viruses, the finale

How does grass grow in the extremely hot soils of Yellowstone National Park? Could a protein from a virus help plants handle global warming? Okay, that second sentence is wild speculation, but we will try to find the answer to our mystery by aligning our protein sequence to a sequence from a related structure. tags: plants, bioinformatics, sequence analysis, viruses, fungi, global warming, Read part I, part II, part III, part IV, and part V, to see how we got here. This week, in our last installment, we will seek the answers in a related structure. Last week, I found that my…

More on conflicts of interest in medical research

Tufts University is the latest institution to step in the Conflict of Interest mess and come out with shoes that smell. The University had organized a conference on conflict of interest in medicine and research, with Iowa's Republican Senator Charles Grassley as the keynoter. Grassley has been an indefatigable crusader against instances of fraud and abuse against the federal government, and is a principal author and defender of the Federal False Claims Act, which allows whistleblowers to share in the recovery of fraudulently obtained monies (for an excellent account, see Henry Scammell's…

Labor Day yearbook: All workers deserve safety, dignity, respect and justice on the job

Typically, we like to end the annual “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety” on an uplifting note. But this time around — to be honest — that was a hard sell. Take a quick look through the 2017 yearbook and you’ll quickly glean that worker health and safety is very much at risk under the new administration and from lawmakers in the states. From the attempted rollback of a new federal beryllium exposure standard to state efforts to weaken workers’ compensation systems, the view from 2017 does not seem terribly promising. On the other hand, the fight for workers’ rights has never…

A brief moment in the magnificent history of mankind

Isn't that beautiful? It's an ancient footprint in some lumpy rocks in Kenya…but it is 1½ million years old. It comes from the Koobi Fora formation, familiar to anyone who follows human evolution, and is probably from Homo ergaster. There aren't a lot of them; one series of three hominin trails containing 2-7 prints, and a stratigraphically separate section with one trail of 2 prints and an isolated single print. But there they are, a preserved record of a trivial event — a few of our remote relatives taking a walk across a mudflat by a river — rendered awesome by their rarity and the…

Houston excavation company risks workers' lives, now it should lose government contracts

How is it that a construction firm that specializes in underground utility work and excavation can be so dense when it comes to knowing the fundamentals of protecting workers from cave-ins?  Or is it that they know the fundamentals but just choose not to apply them. The Houston-area excavation firm SER Construction Partners was cited last month by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for willfully failing to comply with standards for safe excavation practices.  The OSHA news release announcing the sanction appropriately, noting: "A cave-in can turn into a grave in a matter…

Florida reports first locally transmitted Zika cases; advocates push Congress to act on funding

This morning, the Florida Department of Health reported a “high likelihood” of the first localized transmission of Zika virus from mosquito to person in the United States. Up until now, the more than 1,600 documented Zika cases in the continental U.S. have been related to travel abroad; however, the news from Florida likely means that local mosquitoes are carrying the virus. The news also means that although public health officials have long warned that this day would come, local Zika transmission got here quicker than help from Congress did. Back in February, President Obama requested $1.9…

PNAS: Benoit Hamelin, Computer Security Developer

I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track. The eleventh profile of this round features Benoit Hamelin, a biomedical engineer turned network defense programmer. 1) What is your non-academic job? I am Chief Scientist for Arc4dia, a small company in the computer security and private network defense business. I develop software, lead…

Tuna and Nävragöl -- New Light On An Old Find

In April of 2007 I directed a week of metal detecting at sites in Östergötland where there was a potential for an elite presence in the period AD 400-1000. These investigations were part of a project that I published in my 2011 book Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats. One site that proved a dud for the project's exact purposes was Tuna in Östra Husby parish. But my friend and long-time collaborator (and these days, colleague) Dr. Tim Schröder found something pretty damn cool anyway: a gold finger ring from AD 310–375, the last phase of the Roman Iron Age. It had been twisted up and thrown into a…

Promoting MMR to anti-vax parents: What works? Kinda nothing.

The MMR vaccine does not cause autism. The guy who initially made that claim made it all up, and literally no one since has found any evidence to support that claim. We have known this for quite a while now, and yet, the anti-MMR fad is still going, and parents arent vaccinating their kids. And its the *kids* who suffer from their parents poor decisions. So what are scientists and physicians to do? How can we get the message across to anti-vax parents? Effective Messages in Vaccine Promotion: A Randomized Trial Researchers in this paper tried four approaches to educate/get parents to agree to…

Super-bacteria eat antibiotics for breakfast

Antibiotics are meant to kill bacteria, so it might be disheartening to learn that some bacteria can literally eat antibiotics for breakfast. In fact, some species can thrive quite happily on nothing but antibiotics, even at high concentrations. The rise of drug-resistant bacteria poses a significant threat to public health and many dangerous bugs seem to be developing resistance at an alarming rate. The headline-grabbing MRSA may be getting piggybacks from livestock to humans, while several strains of tuberculosis are virtually untreatable by standard drugs. But a startling new study…

The 13,000-year old tree that survives by cloning itself

In California's Jurupa Mountains, there is a very unusual group of tree - a Palmer's oak. Unlike the mighty trees that usually bear the oak name, this one looks like little more than a collection of small bushes. But appearances can be deceiving. This apparently disparate group of plants are all clones of a single individual, and a very old one at that. By repeatedly cloning itself, the Palmer's oak has lived past the separation of Britain from continental Europe, the demise of the mammoths and saber-toothed cats, and the birth of human agriculture. It is among the oldest plants in…

Tangling the Tree

I've been fascinated by this picture since I first saw it over the weekend. It's a hint of how we may be visualizing life in years to come. As Darwin was trying to figure out how new species could evolve from old species, he began to think of evolution as a tree. He scribbled some simple branches in a notebook, and then published a more elaborate one in The Origin of Species. Darwin didn't actually put any animals or plants on the branches of these trees; he was just thinking about the process itself. Today, though, evolutionary trees are a common sight in scientific journals, whether…

Exploration, Reinforcement, and Updating in ADHD

How do the symptoms of ADHD relate to the circuitry underlying executive function and working memory? An in-press article at Neuropsychopharmacology investigates the roles of dopamine and norepinephrine in ADHD, with evidence from both behavioral and simulated experiments. This post will make more sense if you've read my previous posts on norepinephrine and dopamine. Frank, Santamaria, O'Reilly & Willcutt review evidence that ADHD can be characterized by low dopamine levels in the basal ganglia, resulting from abnormally high levels of dopamine transporters. Recent work suggests that…

Not just the genome

New in vitro fertilization technology is making it possible for someone to have two moms--one that provides the genome in the nucleus of the cell, and one that provides the rest of the egg cell, including the mitochondria. Since all mitochondria are passed down from the mother in the egg (sperm are just too small to provide anything but the father's genetic material to the fertilized embryo), transplanting the nucleus from a fertilized embryo to an egg from a different woman can bypass the transmission of any mitochondrial diseases that the mother carries. Because mitochondria have their own…

Major themes from Biology of Genomes meeting

It's difficult to distill down a meeting as data-rich as the Cold Spring Harbor Biology of Genomes meeting, but here's a first-pass attempt. We're sequencing lots of peopleOne of the highlights of the meeting was the update on progress from the 1000 Genomes (1KG) Project. I was fortunate enough to have been given a sneak peek at the data at the 1KG satellite meeting earlier in the week (which you can download yourself if you're so inclined), but it was still impressive to see it all put together in the presentation today by Goncalo Abecasis. Abecasis reported on the data emerging from the…

EPA's Lisa Jackon, lone gunslinger for science and the environment

The New York Times reports: E.P.A. Chief Stands Firm as Tough Rules Loom: In the next weeks and months, Lisa P. Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, is scheduled to establish regulations on smog, mercury, carbon dioxide, mining waste and vehicle emissions that will affect every corner of the economy. She is working under intense pressure from opponents in Congress, from powerful industries, from impatient environmentalists and from the Supreme Court, which just affirmed the agencyâs duty to address global warming emissions, a project that carries profound economic…

The origins of "woo"

Jim Lippard is tracking down the origin of the term "woo". He finds a few references (mostly to "woo-woo" or "woo woo") in the 1990s, and then a gap until this, from The North British Review, vol. 1, no. 11, p. 340, in a discussion of "Our Scottish fishermen" from 1842: When beating up in stormy weather along a lee-shore, it was customary for one of the men to take his place on the weather gunwale, and there continue waving his hand in a direction opposite to the sweep of the sea, using the while a low moaning chant, Woo, woo, woo, in the belief that the threatening surges might be induced…

All taxonomy is local?

Today Ed Yong has a post up, Social status shapes racial identity: To Penner and Saperstein, the study contradicts the idea that races, and the differences between them, are dominated by biological differences between groups of people. They see race not as a fixed entity that is purely determined from birth, but a flexible one, settled by a tug-of-war between different possible classifications. Biological traits like skin colour obviously have a strong pull, but they aren't alone - changes in social position can also affect how people see themselves and are seen by others. The researchers…

A new hypothesis on the evolution of blood-feeding: food source duality involving nectarivory. Catchy, no?

So in the previous post - required reading before you get through this one, sorry - we looked at the various hypotheses that have been published on the origin of sanguivory (blood feeding) in vampire bats. We saw that only two hypotheses matched with the phylogenetic pattern of feeding styles seen in phyllostomid bats and their relatives, and of those two theories - one proposing that vampires evolved from oxpecker-like ectoparasite-eaters, and the other proposing that vampires originated as insectivores that switched to wound-feeding - both have shortcomings. However, one final hypothesis…

Delays continue in Obama Administration on new worker safety protections

With five days left in calendar year 2012, the Obama Administration released to the public its current plan for regulatory and deregulatory activities, including those affecting individuals exposed to hazards in their work environment.  Executive Order 12866 (adopted in 1993) says the annual regulatory plan “shall be” published in October, and the Regulatory Flexibility Act (5 USC 602) says the semi-annual regulatory agendas “shall” be published in April (Spring) and October (Fall).   The Obama Administration failed to meet either of these deadlines, and simply issued for 2012 one regulatory…

How Tides Work

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. -Harriet Beecher Stowe Last week, our longtime reader Pamela asked if I could explain how the tides work. As you all know, when the tide comes in at the ocean, the water level appears to rise (and can do so significantly), while at low tide, the water level appears to drop. This goes in a cycle twice per day, with the ocean level reaching its highest point twice daily (high tide),…