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Academic Poll: Correlation and Evaluation

The always fraught question of student course evaluations has come up again on campus. In discussions, the correlation between "expected grade" and "overall evaluation" has once again been noted-- that is, students who report expecting a higher grade are more likely to give a good overall score to their professors than students who expect a lower grade. Which, of course, does not indicate a causal relationship between those two things, but that doesn't stop us from spinning hypotheses. Thus, a poll question: There is a positive correlation between the expected grade reported and the…

Belated Toddler Blogging 082710

Many apologies for posting this week's cute toddler picture twelve hours late, but we had a little bit of a meltdown last night, thwarting my plans to get a cute picture after SteelyKid had her bath. She's cutting some new molars (I swear, she's part shark, with all the teeth she's getting), and it's hard work being a toddler on the go. She woke up cheerful this morning, though: This is her taking a break from her new favorite pastime, watching old Sesame Street and Muppet Show videos on my computer, to mug for the camera. YouTube is a wonderful thing, by the way.

Sports Science Poll: Super Bowl

We're mere hours away from the start of the Super Bowl, the biggest football game of the year. Obviously, the question of who will win has been the subject of much debate over the last couple of weeks on sports media and in offices around the country. What these discussions have lacked, though, is Science!!! (with any number of exclamation points). So, let's employ science to determine the winner in advance, with a totally accurate Internet poll: Who will win the Super Bowl?(polls) The game kicks off around 6:30pm ET, so make sure you vote before then, if you want your vote to have…

Thursday Baby Blogging 100809

Winter is coming, and SteelyKid is getting ready. Here, we see her modeling the latest in baby headgear (handed down from a friend): It's very stylish. I'm not convinced that hugging Appa will take the place of a coat, though... A slightly better Appa-for-scale picture is below the fold: This morning at day care, Kate saw her playing peek-a-boo with another child, which was apparently about the cutest thing ever. It's neat to see that she's started to take an interest in playing with other kids, after months and months of viewing them as sort of mobile obstacles.

Congratulations to Ramakrishnan, Steitz, Yonath, and Curious Wavefunction

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome." I know just about enough to recognize this as something biochemical, but I'm sure there will be plenty of commentary about this around science blogdom. "Curious Wavefunction" is the name left by the commenter who predicted Yonath would win in this year's betting pool, and thus wins the right to author a guest post here. Congratulations, Curious. Send me email from the address you left in the comment form, and we can set…

Congratulations to Elizabeth Blackborn, Carol Greider, and HI

The Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak for "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." Who's HI, you ask? HI is the commenter who picked Blackburn and Greider in the official Uncertain Principles betting pool. Congratulations to Blackburn, Greider, and Szostak, who get to split about a million dollars. And Congratulations to HI, who gets the right to author two! guest posts on this blog. Send me an email from the address you left in the comment form, HI, and we'll get this set up.

Silly Poll: Beverages

I'm a little fried from yesterday's frantic running around, so while there are a couple of physics things I'd like to write about, I have neither the time nor the brainpower. So here's a silly little poll, prompted by the large amount of ice I go through at home (I'm trying to lose some weight, so I'm drinking a lot of ice water these days). How do you like your cold beverages to be served? How do you like your drinks?(online surveys) (It was that, or a rant about the silly faux-controversy over the Angels' post-game celebration, which is taking up wayyyy too much time on sports shows.)

Now Intersecting Elsewhere

Chris and Sheril announced today that The Intersection has gone over to the Dark Side moved to Discover's growing collection of high-quality science blogs. They're now available at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection. This is not entirely unexpected, but I wish them well in their spiffy new digs. They're the second blog to move from ScienceBlogs to Discover (after Carl Zimmer), and I believe the first of the original 14 blogs to move elsewhere (a couple have shut down, but the rest of us are still here). It's probably too early to really say whether this constitutes a trend or not.

Devil's Breath? Moi?

People often complain that I'm too mild-mannered in my personal appearances — that they want a real fire-breather. Well, my solution arrived as a gift in the mail today: a selection of fine fire-breathing aids from Chilestuff.com, including a spectacularly vivid t-shirt with that appropriate logo on it. Next talk I give, you should sit in the back row. Alas, this might make Skatje cry. She likes her food bland, but I'm going to have to sneak a little of the chile relish or the hot sauce into pale, tasteless, limp food — and then she'll look like the picture!

Four Months

SteelyKid turned four months on Sunday, and thus went in for a four-month check-up today. Since I'm sure you're all dying to know her progress, here's the OBGraph: She's one ounce shy of 14lbs, putting her in the 55th percentile for her age. She's now 25.5 inches in length, up from her initial 20, which is the proportional equivalent of me growing a bit more than 20 inches in four months. Babies grow really fast. See Kate's LiveJournal update for more fun baby stuff. No graphs there, though-- I'm the scientist in the family.

Comparative Vertebrate Video

A colleague in Biology had his Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy class make videos explaining something they studied in class. He's posted the results to YouTube and Facebook, so the students can see them, but thanks to the magic of the Internet, you, too, can learn about the bite force of bats from a college student in a ski mask and rubber wings: Other videos cover muscle retention in burrowing tree frogs, brachycardia in penguins, hypoxemia in penguins, and prey localization in sharks. It's pretty amazing what the kids these days get up to, with their cameras and their editing software and…

Festive Physics

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette offers her Top Ten events at the upcoming World Science Festival in New York City the week after next. The full program is at the festival site, and it looks like there's even something for the stamp collectors. Probably to keep the cool physics-themed events from being overcrowded. I would be all over this-- NYC is just a few hours away, after all-- were it not directly opposite DAMOP. Which offers its own comprehensive slate of physics programming, albeit with fewer celebrities. If you're within range of either of these fine events, check…

Political Indoctrination by Faculty

An ad-lib from yesterday's lecture about interactions between electric fields and neutral matter, paraphrased: So, we can divide macroscopic objects into two categories, based on what happens when you bring large numbers of atoms together. In materials that are insulators, the electrons aren't free to move. The atoms hold onto their electrons very tightly. They're kind of like Republicans. In materials that are conductors, on the other hand, the electrons are free to move. The atoms share their electrons freely through the whole material. They're basically Communists. Semiconductors are like…

Late to the Party, Again

But this time, being late is further proof of my point.  (It would have proved it more convincingly if I never went to a party.) href="http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_nq.php?im"> src="http://www.nerdtests.com/images/ft/nq.php?val=1795" alt="I am nerdier than 98% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!"> Additional evidence: in eighth grade, I got a book from the library to learn to use a slide rule.  When I was 17, I learned computer programing.  I use Linux.  I have two LCD monitors connected to the computer I am using now, which I built a few years ago.   One of…

Friday Beetle Blogging: Amphicrossus Sap Beetle

I admit to a soft spot for beetles in the family Nitidulidae.  Maybe it's the cute clubby antennae.  Or maybe it's just the shared fondness for beer.  In any case, the sap beetles are charming little insects. I found this Amphicrossus imbibing fermented tree sap from a wounded tree in downtown Champaign, Illinois.  Tree wounds and their associated yeasts are fertile hunting grounds for entomologists as they host a surprising array of often unique flies and beetles. Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing…

Reader question: who discovered the sex of ant workers?

A query from the inbox: Hi, my question is regarding the gender of the worker ants (and the ant queen). As we all know; they are female, however was this discovered many centuries ago or is this a recent discovery? I plead ignorance.  I know apiculturists had figured out the sex of worker bees in by the late 1700s, and that by the 1800s it was widely accepted that ant workers were also female. But that's the extent of my knowledge. So I'm punting to my diligent readers.  Do any of you know who first observed that ant workers are female?

Cartoon Mormon theology

Jim Lippard has dug up a bizarre animated summary of Mormon theology that was put together by some other religious group to debunk them. I know that at least some bits and pieces of the cartoon are accurate, but I can't judge the whole thing—I can tell you that religion looks pretty ridiculous when you explain its basic tenets with cheesy animation. Can we get a whole set of these made for Catholicism, Islam, Lutheranism, the Baptists, etc.? I don't think it would cost much. From the look of the Mormon story, maybe $9.99 each. Here's a picture of Mormon heaven. Looks just like Utah.

Wrong on Amblyopone

Amblyopone australis The correct pronunciation of this ant's name is Am-blee-ah-pon-ee, with the emphasis on the antepenultimate syllable and the final "e" audible.  But I don't know anyone who says it that way. Every English-speaking myrmecologist I know calls it "Am-blee-oh-pohn", with the final "e" silent.  That's a shame, because the right way is also prettier.  I mentioned this to May Berenbaum- whose office is across the hall from mine- and she pointed out that midwesterners inflict the same error on calzones, which New Yorkers say correctly as "cal-zon-ee."

Off to South Africa

I'm leaving shortly for the 2008 International Congress of Entomology in Durban, South Africa. This means another break from the blog for me, but when I return in mid-July there will be plenty of African insect photos.  St. Lucia, where I'm headed the week before the conference, has African weaver ants, Polyrhachis, Tetraponera, and host of other photogenic critters.  Apparently, they also have a problem with inappropriate mingling of wheelchairs and crocodiles (photo in St. Lucia by flickr user Chuha): Fortunately, you won't be left all alone at Myrmecos blog.  Jo-anne will be guest-…

Book giveaway: What are you optimistic about?

I'm very busy this week, with visitors to our department, a stack of grading, and the usual drive to do more research and be a better mommy. Alice isn't in any better shape. I was wondering how I was going to write anything for the blog. And I was also contemplating a bookshelf full of books I'll never have time to read. A ha! I'll give the books to better homes via my blog...now that's effective multi-tasking. Three times this week, I'll be giving away a book from my shelf to the first reader who promises to read the book in a timely fashion (<6 months) and report back with a review on…

I'm a little more dead than last week

ScienceWoman has been a rockstar carrying the blogging load this week, and I'll have to crave her (and your) indulgence a little bit longer. Apart from discovering that both my university president and my university provost read our blog (hi again!), I had a site visit on Friday, attended a poster session one evening, am working towards a quarterly review, and am 3 weeks late on submitting my P&T document for my annual review. I hope to dig out of this soon; but for today, I am completely zonked. Sorry to not be pulling my harness in the blogging wagon still even longer... :-(

What are you good at?

You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty/post-docs/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: "What is one aspect of your professional life that you are good at?" How do you answer the question? (Please do, in the comments.) Tomorrow, we'll discuss. I'll go first. I'm ScienceWoman and, in my life as a blogger, I'm good at getting thoughtful discussions going in my comment threads. :)

Brace yourselves, LA

Every time I do this I get email from people who say they were startled to hear my voice on the radio, so I figure this time I'll warn you so I don't cause any traffic accidents. I'll be on Michael Slate's radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles this morning, and we're trying to do this on a monthly schedule. So if you're driving along (you're in LA, so you probably spend most of your time driving, right?) and you hear me announce over your radio that gods are hokum, it really isn't a divine communication.

The godless are getting rambunctious

We're getting rude, we dare to criticize the theistic evolutionists, and now Ophelia has done gone and poo-pooed the distinction between methodological and metaphysical materialism. I love it! Rise up, all ye fierce and firebreathing atheists! Much as I'd enjoy the squeals of agony from the usual protesters, I'm going to suggest that you might be better off arguing over it at Ophelia's. I'm doing a bit of traveling over the next two days, my access to the net might be spotty, and so I'll probably be slow to approve any comments that our annoying spam filters might hold up.

Greg Laden on Benazir Bhutto

After hearing this morning of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, I had wondered if any science bloggers might weigh in since Bhutto had attended Oxford and earned a BA at Harvard's Radcliffe College. Fellow ScienceBlogger, Greg Laden, relates a story from when Bhutto returned to Harvard to give the commencement address. Beyond the chaos among the general population, I cannot imagine trying to conduct scientific research in the current climate of Pakistan. The University of Karachi, in particular, maintains an excellent Department of Pharmacognosy in the School of Pharmacy - we…

News Flash: Unathletic Kids Unpopular and Lonely

From the University of Alberta, here comes this shocking finding: In a study published in The Journal of Sport Behavior, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton examined the relationships among perceived athletic competence, peer acceptance and loneliness in elementary school children. Their findings will likely confirm the experience of anyone who was picked last for the team in gym class: children seen as athletic by their classmates are also better liked and less likely to feel lonely, while unathletic children experience the opposite. Oh really? Thanks for the reminder of…

More of The Knack

Following this weekend's loss of musician Doug Fieger, I'm going through some YouTube vids and found two of my favorites from the less-appreciated 2nd album by The Knack, "But the Little Girls Understand." "I Want Ya" was the second cut - just a bunch of simple chords but Bruce Gary's drumming is even better than I remember. This is the cover of The Kinks', "The Hard Way," that I mentioned on Monday. And yes, I owned a black and a brown skinny tie - the only way to express individuality in a boys Catholic school uniform in the late 70s and early 80s.

Aww, I missed the Creationist Conference in Portland

It's too bad, too, since I would have learned weeks ago who our ascended master was. It's Stephen Hawking, of course: "Most of you know who Stephen Hawking is, right? He talks through a computer and that makes him even more bizarre. People sit with their mouths open, taking it all in like this is the gospel from the ascended master. That's demonic!" It's also a surprise to learn that creationists are also trying to build a 'life'-sized copy of Noah's Ark in the Pacific Northwest. This is the first I've heard of that…anyone know anything more?

Twomillionniversary

According to Sitemeter, Not Exactly Rocket Science passed 2,000,000 page views today!!! Virtual hugs, high-fives and fist-bumps all round. As near as I can make out, the hit that did it came from Israel and was directed to yesterday's autism post via Stumbleupon. A quick retrospective calculation tells me that it took the first 35 months of NERS to get the first million hits and the last 7 to get the second million. I really am constantly delighted and humbled by the fact that people are actually reading this and that more seem to do so. Thanks to all of you for reading.

British wildlife - a photo tour

The British Wildlife Centre is one of my favourite places in the country. It's like a small zoo focusing solely on British wildlife and everything in it lives in lovely open enclosures with naturalistic environments (the otters have about three lakes to play around in). It's a fantastic place to visit, especially for people who've most likely only ever seen a badger or a fox as a roadside carcass. Here are some photos from yesterday's trip: Badger Buzzard Eagle owl Frog (pool frog?) Harvest mouse (note size of blackberry for comparison) Otter Wotta lotta otter Pine marten (Britain rocks for…

Forget the usual suspects: Here's something to really worry about if we don't curb our CO2 emissions (a.k.a. the return of the Blob)

...The Blob has been dormant for half a century, but it's out there and the only thing preventing it from squishing through the streets of our cities right now, leaving a slimy trail of death in its wake, is the biting cold of the polar ice cap. Remember? That's where the Air Force marooned it after a bunch of teenagers neutralized the thing by freezing it with CO2 fire extinguishers. Steve McQueen himself assured us that we were safe "as long as the Arctic stays cold." As long as the Arctic stays cold. . . Read the full piece at the Science Creative Quarterly here (by Laurence Hughes)

Fishing for climate change

The Real Climate gang rarely disappoint. But the latest post from Gavin Schmidt is not just useful, but downright brilliant: Imagine a group of 100 fisherman faced with declining stocks and worried about the sustainability of their resource and their livelihoods. One of them works out that the total sustainable catch is about 20% of what everyone is catching now (with some uncertainty of course) but that if current trends of increasing catches (about 2% a year) continue the resource would be depleted in short order. Faced with that prospect, the fishermen gather to decide what to do. Read the…

ID and YEC in Britain

New data on creationism in Britain. The, ahem, âhighlightsâ 51% agree that "evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages." 40% disagree. 32% agree that "God created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years." 60% disagree. Thus, support for ID runs at 51% and support for YEC runs at 32%. Update: Below is the cross-tabs for the preliminary results from the poll. These are, apparently, preliminary results.   News report here; preliminary report in this pdf; Apparently the full…

The Panther

  From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted  that it no longer holds anything anymore.  To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand bars, and behind the bars, nothing. The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride which circles down to the tiniest hub is like a dance of energy around a point in which a great will stands stunned and numb. Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise without a sound . . . then a shape enters,  slips though the tightened silence of the shoulders,  reaches the heart, and dies. Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Robert Bly) <…

SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009

Jim Lippard is organizing SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009. A SkeptiCamp is "a conference whose content is provided by attendees. Where BarCamp is focused on technology, SkeptiCamp instead focuses on topics of interest to skeptics, including science, critical thinking and skeptical inquiry." The event is planned for February 21st and I've already agreed to talk on "Academic Freedom" and the Intelligent Design movement. If you are an Arizona skeptic, or even from further afield, wander on over to the Camp Wiki and sign-up either to attend or present. There's a FaceBook group as well, by the way.

Friday Poem (12/12)

AGRIPPA (A Book of The Dead) by William Gibson I hesitated before untying the bow that bound this book together. A black book: ALBUMS CA. AGRIPPA Order Extra Leaves By Letter and Name A Kodak album of time-burned black construction paper The string he tied Has been unravelled by years and the dry weather of trunks Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen Until they resemble cigarette-ash Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite Now lost Then his name W.F. Gibson Jr. and something, comma…

Best Paper Awards

A note from Ivan Deutsch, Secretary-Treasurer of the APS GQI topical group about the winners of the best student paper awards: We are pleased to announce the Best Student Paper awards for the 2009 APS March Meeting. For the best experimental paper, the winner is Eric Lucero, UCSB for his paper J17.1, "High fidelity gates in Josephson phase qubits". For the best theoretical paper, the winner is Lev Bishop, Yale University for his paper V17.9, "Towards proving non-classicality with a 3-qubit GHZ state in circuit QED". Congratulations to the future Doctors Lucero and Bishop!

Teaching Happiness...

...is finding a homework stuck to my door, with duck tape, along with the note "Gone to Mt. Baker" (Mt. Baker is a local ski area.) Actually this reminds me of a policy I've always wanted to try: require every student to NOT attend class at least a few times a term. The idea being that it is actually beneficial to at least try to teach yourself the material without guidance from the teacher. Many students probably can learn on their own, but never try, because they equate doing well with attendance. Nudging these students towards that realization, I think, might actually be a good thing…

Don't let me down, Philadelphians

You know I'm coming to the big city in less than two weeks, right? I'll be at the Anti-Superstition Bash on Friday, May 13, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM at the Corinthian Yacht Club, in Essington, PA. You know you want to go, if for nothing else for the snooty thrill of being able to tell your friends you have an engagement at the Yacht Club to attend that evening. I'll do my best to dispel any bad luck you might be experiencing right now, replacing it instead with chance events.

A New Species of Genius

The folks behind the Macarthur genius grant chose wisely this week when they gave one to Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Rieseberg does fascinating work on the origin of new species (that little subject). Specifically, he's shown how new plant species emerge from hybrids. When two species of plants form a hybrid, it doesn't necessarily become a sterile dead end. In fact, hybridization is an important source of entirely new species. Rieseberg does his work mainly on sunflowers, and so whenever I walk past a charming row of them, I think of the weird inter-…

Focusing Attention on the Health Impacts of Climate Change

The Trust for America's Health and the Pew Environment Group released a report yesterday focusing attention on the public health impacts of climate change. The report is the latest in a series of expert statements on the subject. The most significant finding is that only 5 U.S. states have engaged in planning related to the public health consequences of climate change. Research I am currently working on with Edward Maibach and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation examines how to effectively engage Americans on the health consequences of climate change. We expect that studies from…

Framing Science Goes to Venice, Italy

Tonight I board a plane for Venice, Italy where I will be presenting as part of an expert workshop on science communication, sponsored by the EU, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, observa Science in Society, and the University of Trent. Some of the top European researchers in the field will be at the workshop, so I hope to be able to report on innovative ideas and themes from the two day event. And for those that read Italian, I have an op-ed appearing in tomorrow's edition of La Stampa, focusing on new directions in science communication. More on that to come.

Friday Cephalopod: Live! From Iowa!

Uh-oh. It turns out that Iowa is even more remote from the ocean than Minnesota (we at least have a great lake connecting us to the Atlantic, sorta), and it's darned hard to find an Iowa-Cephalopod connection. Except, of course, that once upon a time the great inland sea stretched up this way, and mighty ammonoids would have been swimming about my hotel room. Oh, well, in honor of our absent shelled cephalopods, here's a nautilus. It's going to take an awful lot of global warming and some major geological activity to submerge Iowa again, you know.

Magnetic fields: so pretty I feel like crying

Science scout twitter feed Seriously pretty (from Semiconductor Films)... As well, I'm of the opinion that a visualization like this really provides a great perspective on the awesomeness of magnets specifically and on physics generally. I'm not sure why it's so effective. I don't think I would be so gushing, if we were viewing a straight up computer animation. Maybe it has something to do with its Roger Rabbit effect, whereby parts of the footage are "real" whereas others are computer generated. All in all, the effect seems to make the images more grounded and therefore all the more…

Ways Darwin Could Jump the Shark

I've got a humour piece at McSweeney's today in celebration of Darwin's 200th. Here's a snippet: Joins the Ice Capades: Darwin is hired for small part in a Lion King-themed ice show. Takes skating lessons and practices hard. Soon nails both the triple axel and the triple lutz. Is fired from the show when he tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs. My favourite bit is actually the part about losing his mind, and you can read the rest at McSweeney's and maybe (if you're so inclined) try to come up with a few yourself in the comments below.

Water water everywhere. Great children's book image on the subject of water.

This is great. And this is also an image that seems appropriate when choosing to speak about water as a resource generally - it might, for instance, be a good prelude to discussions like this. Anyway, I'm generally pretty enamored with Satoshi Kitamura's work and I've spoken about him before. This particular image comes from a great little book called Captain Toby, where a little boy in his house gets caught in a wind storm and then with the house swaying, starts to dream about his house being a boat, being caught in the ocean, and even at one point, duking it out with a giant squid.…

Scientific Analysis Simplifies A Housewife's Work

Somehow I couldn't help thinking of the study below when reading the recent article on a scientific study of sarcasm. As with that (sarcastic?) study, this one also considered ways to understand humanity with scientific analysis. As published in Life magazine in 1946, let's call it the optics of housewifery. The title of this post was the title of their article. Please comment away. Yes, as facetiously as you'd like. (as found in Caroline Jones, "Talking Pictures: Clement Greenberg's Pollock," in L. Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Science and Art [Zone Books, 2004…

Synthetica: A New Continent of Plastics

"On this broad but synthetic continent of plastics, the countries march right out of the natural world - that wild area of firs and rubber plantations, upper left - into the illimitable world of the molecule. It's a world boxed only by the cardinal points of the chemical compass - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen." This is from Fortune, 1940 (I found it here and here.) Click on the map for a larger view to find that Rayon "is a plastic island off the Cellulose coast, with a glittering night life." No doubt. Better snatch up a beachside condo before the mortgage rates get even worse. (…

Definition of Irony: Plagiarism Edition

From NPR this morning: Students at the University of Texas at San Antonio were determined to uphold standards at their school. They wrote an honor code that discouraged both cheating and plagiarizing. But they weren't going to waste a lot of time writing the darn thing themselves. The wording of a draft of the honor code appears to match the honor code at Brigham Young University. The student in charge of the project says the lack of a proper citation was just an oversight. Whoops. Not saying it was intentional, but if you are going to write something on plagiarism, make sure to use…

Bush approval reaches a new low.

Bush’s approval rating is now down to 28%, the lowest of his tenure as POTUS, and a drop of 62% from his high in September 2001. As Gallup notes, both Bush Sr and Jr went through 60% drops in their approval during their tenure. It must be genetic, I guess. Strangely (or maybe not) approval among Republicans is at 66% (versus 24% for independents and 6% for Democrats). That’s some mighty strong Kool-Aid there. The lowest ever for a President was 22% (for Truman in February 1952). If the economy continues to tank, I think we can expect that Bush will "reach" that mark.