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Education Reform Is Slow

Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in question (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Eli Broad, and the Wal-Mart Waltons) sound like feckless idiots, but I can't tell if that's just bad writing. The core of the piece is the finding that the districts these guys put money into haven't…

Meyer Weighs In

It turns out the big Lawrence Krauss/Stephen Meyer debate is two and a half hours long. I've started watching it in installments. So far I've only gotten through Krauss' thirty minute opening presentation. I thought it was decent, though Krauss was overly nasty towards his sparring partner in his opening remarks. I sympathize with the sentiments, but I think he overdid it. I haven't watched Meyer's presentation yet, but it looks like I may not have to, what with the internet all abuzz with people commenting on it. Stephen Meyer himself has now weighed in on the Richard Dawkins comment I…

Thank God for Evolution!

Why me, O Lord, why me? One of the more recent books sent to me is Thank God for Evolution!: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Michael Dowd. I have read it, and I'm feeling biblical. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? Psalm 22:1 I am so not the right person to review this book—it's like asking Satan to review The Secret. The two aren't even on the same wavelength, and the discombobulated reviewer is going to sit there wondering whether this…

Replying to Mynym's Comments on Gay Marriage

Someone using the name "mynym" has left a couple of comments in reply to this post comparing the arguments against gay marriage with the arguments against interracial marriage. Since my response will likely be very long, I thought I'd move it up to its own post. It's an odd set of comments, addressing arguments I did not make and doing so primarily through a series of quotes from others who disagree with me. Let's look at them one by one. "This argument, the so-called Loving analogy (after Loving v. Virginia) has force, but it overlooks a major distinction between miscegenation laws and the…

Dorf on the Constitutionality of ID

And no, I'm not talking about Tim Conway doing a video about evolution and intelligent design. I'm talking about Michael Dorf, professor of law at Columbia, and his latest article at FindLaw. Dorf examines the question of whether teaching ID in public school science classrooms is unconstitutional and concludes that it is. It's an uneven article, with some arguments well reasoned and some poorly reasoned, but obviously I agree with the conclusion. In particular, I think he nails pretty well the question of whether ID is legitimately a scientific theory. Dorf makes two arguments for why ID is…

So-Con Lies About Abstinence-only Education

In response to a report put out by Rep. Henry Waxman that detailed a wide range of innacuracies and falsehoods in many of the abstinence-only curricula being used in states around the country, and being heavily funded by the Bush administration, the so-cons are furiously trying to defend such programs, leaving a trail of bad arguments in their wake. Naturally, the Worldnutdaily is leading the way with this column by our old pal Jerry Falwell. After describing what the report says, he offers the ubiquitous but absurd "he disagrees with me so he is biased" argument: It is important that…

Volokh on StoptheACLU.com

One of the standard arguments we hear from the Hate the ACLU crowd is that the ACLU is that they are "getting rich on taxpayer money" because, in some cases, Federal law allows plaintiffs who sue government agencies successfully to recover their legal fees. It's an argument based primarily on ignorance, of course, because most cases in which the ACLU represents the plaintiffs, the case is handled not by ACLU attorneys but by law firms who work pro bono. In the Dover, PA "intelligent design" case, for example, the ACLU is representing the plaintiffs but the actual legal work is being handled…

Fulfilling the Promises of Freedom

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a passionate advocate for the principles of natural rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But I am also firmly convinced that our nation is far closer to living out those ideals today than at any time in the almost 230 years since that document was written. It has taken the extraordinary sacrifice of many great men and women, an enormous amount of social upheaval and even a civil war to put those principles into action, but it has brought us closer to making the promise of those self-evident truths a reality for a far higher…

An America Safe for Grandmas to Bake Apple Pies for Kittens

Like Jason Kuznicki, I didn't watch Bush's speech last night, but read it this morning. One of the charms of reading the speech in text is that you get to laugh knowing that such an inane speech was interrupted by applause approximately 14,873,994 times (the other advantage is that when you read one of Bush's speeches, as opposed to listening to it, the word "terrorist" has all three syllables in it). It would be absurdly easy to fisk the speech, take it apart claim by claim and show all the oversimplifications, lies by ommission and hypocrisies in it, and one could of course do it just as…

Classic Edition: Making Quarks Out of Nothing at All

This is the second of a set of old posts, dating back to 2003, discussing the business of experimental particle physics. In this installment, I talk about how you get exotic particles by slamming ordinary ones together at high speed. In a previous post, I gave a quick outline of the Standard Model of elementary particles, and how it relates to the recent discovery of a new particle. The best illustration of the process is probably the picture on the Ohio University reference page: A deuterium nucleus (one proton and one neutron) is sitting there, minding its own business, when a photon comes…

Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies

Paul Davies's forthcoming book Cosmic Jackpot is subtitled "Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life," so you know that he's not going after small questions, here. The book is a lengthy and detailed discussion of what he terms the "Goldilocks Enigma," and what others refer to as "fine-tuning"-- basically, how do you account for the fact that the universe allows us to exist? A small change in the values of any of the constants of nature would very likely make it impossible for life as we know it to exist. And yet, here we are-- so how did that happen? Though this book won't be released for a…

Identity and Exclusion

In comments to my review of "The Race for Absolute Zero", I promised to try to write up an explanation of BEC on the blog. A bit of preparatory Googling demonstrates, though, that I already did, in the fall of 2006, talking about identical particles, Pauli Exclusion, and BEC. You might've thought I would remember doing that, given that I have a mind like a steel wossname.... Having spent a bit of time thinking about this in the last day or so, though, I don't really want to waste that effort, so I'll repeat a little of the earlier discussion in a slightly different way, starting with an…

Humans are no longer subject to Natural Selection (A falsehood)

Another look at falsehoods about evolution. We previously addressed the falsehood "Evolution has stopped for humans" and concluded that background change in allele frequency independent of natural selection does not just stop for any viable, continuing population. So, no, saying that "evolution has stopped for humans" is tantamount to saying that "gravity has stopped for my coffee cup" (which is sitting here on my desk minding its own business). But this question is a falsehood at another level. In reality, there are two additional questions that are actually being asked when this…

The Bible as Ethnography ~ 01 ~ Introduction

As a child in Catholic school, and later in public school and being sent off to "release time" religious instruction, I had the opportunity to read most of the Old and New Testaments of the standard bible. Later, in junior high school, I became interested in comparative religion, and read it all again, together with some other texts that are not normally considered part of the Bible. Then all that fell to the wayside as I went off to do different things. repost In graduate school, I was lucky to have Irv DeVore as my primary advisor (eventually ... it did not start out that way). In fact…

Review of SMM Exhibit on Race and Racism

The Science Museum of Minnesota recently developed an exhibit called "Race: Are we so different?" This exhibit is now at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and will be in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, Kalamazoo, Boston and Washington DC between now and June 2011. If you get a chance, go see it. In the meantime, a review of this exhibit has just been published in the current issue of Museum Anthropology, authored by Mischa Penn, Gil Tostevin, and yours truly, Greg Laden. As one of the authors, it is obvious to me that this paper is brilliant! But I…

Science as Sub Culture

The Seed Magazine motto is "Science as Culture." Interesting. I think they are talking about the interaction of culture and science, and about science as a part of the broader culture. But it may also be true that science, or scientists in particular, form something of a subculture (not a perfectly bounded one, of course) that acts differently from the rest of the humans. Randy Olson has sent around an email to the numerous bloggers who simultaneously released reviews of the movie Sizzle (see here for details of the movie, here for an interview with Randy Olson). I've reproduced most of…

O'Reilly and Stein Transcript

I see P.Z. Myers already has the video of Bill O'Reilly's interview with Ben Stein. But just in case you're at work and don't want to get caught watching such filth, I have taken the liberty of providing a transcript below. Read it and weep: O'REILLY: In the unresolved problems segment tonight, how did life begin? Religious people believe a higher power created the universe; secular progressives say all kinds of things, but God is not in the equation. And some believe, those who subscribe to intelligent design; that is a deity created life; are being persecuted in America. Joining us…

On Mentoring

I forget who pointed me to the Tenure She Wrote piece on mentoring, but it's something I've been turning over for a couple of weeks now. Probably because I became aware of it right around the time my two summer students started work last week. It keeps colliding with other conversations as well, though, so I may as well get a thinking-out-loud post out of the whole thing. I told my summer students even before they started, back when they were just writing proposals to do summer research with me, that I'm going to be very hands-off with the whole business. This is at least partly a matter of…

Religion at the AAAS Meeting

Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers (here and here respectively) have taken note of a session at the upcoming AAAS Annual Meeting entitled: Evangelicals, Science, and Policy: Toward a Constructive Engagement. They object to this intrusion of religion into a science meeting. In the comments to their posts, Nick Matzke has been gamely trying to defend the session. These sorts of discussions always remind me of the paleontology conference I attended in 2009. I reported on it here and here. The conference featured two sessions of interest. I was there to participate in a panel discussion on…

How to examine the evolution of proteins

In my previous post, I described the misguided approach Gauger and Axe have taken to criticizing evolution, and one of the peculiarities of their criticism is that they cited another paper by a paper by Carroll, Ortlund, and Thornton which traced (successfully) the evolutionary history of a class of proteins. Big mistake. As I pointed out, one of the failings of the Gauger/Axe approach is that they're asking how one protein evolved into a cousin protein, without considering the ancestral history …they make the error of trying to argue that an extant protein couldn't have directly evolved into…

Too many women physicians are ruining medicine

Okay, some people are smoking some bad dope. Whilst helping the PharmKid get down to the car for school this morning, I came upon PharmGirl, MD, in a rage while sitting in front of her laptop. The object of her vitriol was a 17 April article in BusinessWeek entitled, "Are There Too Many Women Doctors?: As an MD shortage looms, female physicians and their flexible hours are taking some of the blame." The article derives from a point/counterpoint pair of essays in the 5 April issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal) entitled, "Are there too many female medical graduates?" ("Yes" position, "No"…

Global heating: 2 questions; 2 answers

The first question is: how bad are things, really? The second: if things are as bad as the authors of two recent books on climate change say they are, are we capable of doing anything about it? I've just finished The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock and Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning by George Monbiot. Both authors are familiar to British readers. Both care deeply about the natural world, and both are very worried about where things are headed. Each book comes to similar conclusions -- (1) very bad and (2) yes, but only if we're very…

A burst of DNA duplication in the ancestor of humans, chimps and gorillas

This is the sixth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial. Physically, we are incredibly different from our ape cousins but genetically, it's a different story. We famously share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Our proteins are virtually identical and our chromosomes have more or less the same structure. At the level of the nucleotide (the "letters" that build strands of DNA), little has happened during ape evolution. These letters have been changing at a considerably slower rate than in our relatives than in other…

The hazards of overstating the climate crisis

Let's just make one thing clear: I believe anthropogenic climate change constitutes the most serious public policy challenge of our time, second only in the history of civilization to global thermonuclear warfare. It's hard to overstate the danger of business as usual when it comes to our fossil-fuel emissions. If, as a growing number of climatologists believe, we are headed for a world that is 4 °C warmer than pre-industrial norms by the latter half of this century, then averting that scenario should be at the top of everyone's priority list. Still, it is still possible to exaggerate the…

Gay/Lesbian "Reparative" Therapy Persists

From time to time, we hear of faux psychotherapy interventions that are intended to convert persons from homosexuality to heterosexuality.  Mostly, the publicity has centered on pseudomoralistic interventions that clearly have a religious agenda as opposed to a health-enhancing agenda.  As such these interventions cannot be classified as therapy. However, a recent survey has shown that there still is a small minority of therapists who will, in some circumstances, attempt to have their clients convert from homosexuality to heterosexuality.  The results were published in the open-access…

Brain Activation during Hypothesis Generation

The scientific process is composed of generating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses through experiment. Yet we don't know a whole lot about how about hypothesis generation happens on the level of the brain. Recognizing that I am dealing with a loaded term -- scientists have strong opinions on the meaning of the term hypothesis -- I would like to talk about a study that looked hypothesis generation in the brain. Kwon et al. used fMRI to look at the brain activation associated with hypothesis generation (as opposed to being just told a hypothesis), with and without training. Before…

At Science, Four Letters on Framing and Our Reply

Science has published four letters in response to our framing article along with a fifth letter as our reply. As it turns out, I know two of the correspondents fairly well. Earle Holland, the author of the first letter, is assistant VP for Research Communications at The Ohio State University, where I served on the faculty for three years before moving to American University and Washington, DC. During my time at Ohio State, Earle attended a Dean's Lecture on framing that I gave to the College of Biological Sciences. We also discussed the nature of science communication several times. He…

The Final Adventures of the Blind Locksmith

On Thursday I wrote about a new paper reporting the reconstruction of a 450-million year old hormone receptor, and experiments indicating how it evolved into two receptors found in living vertebrates such as ourselves. On Friday I took a look at the initial response to the paper from intelligent design advocates at the Discovery Insitute. They claim that there exist biological systems that show "irreducible complexity," which could not possibly have evolved. In response to the new research, intelligent design advocates claimed that hormones and their receptors do not actually make the cut as…

The Digital Resolution of the Mind: Discrete Precision in Working Memory

Does the resolution or precision of human memory change with its available capacity? In other words, can you remember fewer items with greater precision than you can remember more items? Contradicting intuition, a new paper from yesterday's issue of Nature shows that all items are stored in memory with equal resolution, regardless of the number of items stored. Authors Zhang & Luck first showed that subjects are equally accurate in reporting the color of a memorized item regardless of the number of other items being maintained in memory. Specifically, when subjects were asked to…

Animal Testing Statistics and Perspectives

In light of the recent discussion on animal testing and animal rights I thought a few additional points would be valuable. It is a fact that animal testing leads to some necessary medical advances that save lives. Anyone who would say differently doesn't have the slightest clue what they're talking about and should be dismissed out of hand. The question is an issue of how many, especially given the ethical concerns. It is also a fact that the vast majority of animal testing serves more peripheral goals, categorized as applied studies that include cosmetic, chemical and pharmaceutical…

Deconstructing Social Darwinism, Part III

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 In Quentin Skinner's celebrated history The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he writes that: If the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice. In Part II of this series I highlighted how a common objection to the political theory of social Darwinism is that it was a misapplication of Darwin's science to already existing ideas. A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the…

Life at the SETI Institute: Celebrating Science!

SETI Institute Engages the Public and Celebrates ScienceClick on images for larger view The cosmos can be mysteriously alluring to all -- from the young in age to the young at heart. In particular, space science and astrobiology fill us with wonder, amazement and awe -- but the scientists who work in these intriguing fields may seem intimidating to the non-scientist. At the SETI Institute, we open our doors on an annual basis and invite the public to celebrate science with us at our Mountain View, California, headquarters in what is always an energizing and informative interactive science…

Coming sort of soon to a bookstore near you: "The Orchid and the Dandelion"

I'm happy to announce that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publisher of many a fine book over the decades, will be publishing "The Orchid and the Dandelion" (working title), in which I'll explore further the emerging "orchid-dandelion hypothesis" I wrote about in my recent Atlantic story. (In brief, that hypothesis -- a simple but deeply transformative amendment of current views -- hoids that many 'risk genes' for behavior and mental problems magnify not just maladaptive responses to bad environments but advantageous responses to good environments. That is, these "risk genes" confer not just…

Going, going, gone: This wind needs no weatherman.

my fiddle, trying to get atop a Beethoven Trio __________________________________________________________________ The last month or so I've been pondering what to photograph, as I walk around town, to convey the disturbing wierdness of the weather we've had these last months in Vermont. I live in Montpelier, which is the nation's smallest state capital and generally one of its coldest. (Also the only one without a MacDonald's). It's should be damn cold here by now -- it should have been cold weeks ago -- but we've had four months of autumn. Too many ways to count it. Take your pick: ⢅

Climate Change - what's worse than the heat?

**A post about Climate Change as a part of Blog Action Day 2009**When people talk about climate change, they, more often than not, talk about global warming. Yes, the effects of increased temperature will be diverse and generally bad for most creatures on Earth, including us. But the most dramatic effect of climate change won't be due to the heat - it will be due to ocean acidification. I might seem biased (being a marine biologist and all), but trust me, the addition of carbon dioxide to the ocean and its subsequent effects will be far worse in the long run than a change in temperature. Not…

We'll get brain-uploading about the time we get teleportation

There's an interesting conversation in the New York Times: a neuroscientist, Kenneth D. Miller, argues that brain uploading ain't gonna happen. I agree with him, only in part because of the argument from complexity he gives. Much of the current hope of reconstructing a functioning brain rests on connectomics: the ambition to construct a complete wiring diagram, or “connectome,” of all the synaptic connections between neurons in the mammalian brain. Unfortunately connectomics, while an important part of basic research, falls far short of the goal of reconstructing a mind, in two ways. First,…

Revisiting resveratrol for aging

Earlier this week during Chris Mooney's NC visit, I noted two articles in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times on reports of caloric restriction (CR) and the possibility that some drugs might replicate the health benefits of CR. The coincidence seemed quite odd, so I suspected that some major scientific publication was in the hopper. Indeed, as revealed by Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle, the red wine antioxidant resveratrol has now been shown to increase lifespan in mice in a paper reported in this week's issue of Nature (btw, vote for Shelley here to receive a $5000 student blogger…

Elephants, Mice, Red Flags, Bulls, and Science

Henry Gee and I have been talking, on our blogs, about how the public views science, and what can be done to change that. That's hardly a new topic for scientists. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen or heard the topic discussed. It's a water cooler conversation topic at universities and government labs. It gets raised on email lists, discussion boards, and blogs. It's featured in journal editorials, at seminars, and at conferences. There's a widespread consensus that we could, should, and must do a better job of talking to the general public. On this issue, the consensus is…

Myth 5: Darwin thought evolution relied on accidents and chance

This myth says a lot about the default views of western thinking, rather like the issue of teleology. One of the constant and incessant complaints made against Darwin by theists in particular, is that he introduced chance and purposelessness into our worldview. I don't believe in such entities as worldviews, but leave that for now: did he introduce chance, and if so, does it imply a general lack of purpose in the world? Here are some classic examples of that complaint. From Is Darwin Right? Or, The Origin of Man in 1877, William Denton wrote: ... it has been said that those who advocate…

Aristotle on the mayfly

A paper I recently saw in EMBO Reports made the following assertion: Ancient Greek philosophers laid the groundwork for the scientific tradition of critical inquiry, but they nevertheless missed out on one aspect important to modern science. Many philosophers obtained their results through a tradition of contemplation and thought rather than experimental procedure, which, not surprisingly, led to errors. Aristotle’s belief that the brain is a cooling organ for the blood was definitely not based on anything that scientists today would consider scientific evidence. He also thought that in…

Is Christianity healthy?

In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment: Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to sell you, but because I can learn from the past and make inferences, and so can you. Jim Goetz, who I find to be a balanced and sensible sort of Christian, asked in the comments for some backing to this apparently outrageous claim. It's a fair cop, so here is my argument... As someone who does not believe in moral absolutes, and yet wants to ground moral claims in the real…

Hunters and the Hunted

A Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Outside of the trash-grubbing black bears I occasionally come across when driving to hikes in northern New Jersey, I never encounter large predators near my home. The imposing carnivores which once roamed the "garden state" were extirpated long ago. This is a very unusual thing. For the majority of the past six million years or so hominins have lived alongside, and have regularly been hunted by, an array of large carnivorous animals, but humans have not been entirely helpless. Rather than a one-…

Another creationist list of lies

It's always amusing to see creationists try to explain why Charles Darwin was wrong, especially when they make up lists of reasons "Darwin's theory of evolution does not hold up to scientific scrutiny." These are always people who wouldn't know what scientific scrutiny was if it knocked them immobile with a carefully measured dose of Conus snail toxin, strapped them to an operating table, and pumped high-intensity Science directly into their brains with a laser. As I often wish I could do. Anyway, some ignorant jebus-lover hacked together a list of 10 "mistakes" that Darwin made. Strangely,…

EU court to Britain: your national DNA database violates human rights

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that retaining DNA samples from innocent individuals in a national law enforcement databank violates human rights. The ruling is a direct blow to Britain's DNA databank, which holds samples and data for 7% of its citizens (4.5 million people, including children and crime victims). In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, police are authorized to collect and hold samples from citizens arrested for any recordable offense, whether or not the offense leads to formal charges or conviction, and hold them for the lifetime of the…

Bringing baby to a conference

I'm back...and semi-dug out. Minnow and I survived the conference, though not unscathed. There was an unfortunate incident in which Minnow tumbled off the hotel bed and ended up with a carpet imprint on her forehead. But otherwise, it was a successful conference. That said, I don't recommend bringing a nine-month old to a conference alone. Here's how it went and what I learned: On our flight to Conference City, Minnow and I were jammed into a middle seat. She wiggled, she made faces at the other passengers, she spilled my water, she banged on the tray table, and mercifully, she slept for 1/3…

This Just In: Monkeys Not Mozart Fans

Over the years I'd heard that, lurking in the basements of psychology departments at various universities throughout the world, there are psychologists studying music cognition, but until the publication of a special issue of the journal Cognition, I hadn't really paid any attention to them. That issue (especially Ray Jackendoff's "The capacity for music: What is it, and what's special about it?") got me interested in the topic, though, not so much because it can tell us much about cognition in general, but because the experiments are usually pretty cool. So, I've been on the lookout for…

Freud as Literature; Freud as Science

In a response to my defense of Freud, Jonah Lehrer states that, with Harold Bloom (ewww!), he sees Freud as "one of the great artists of the 20th century." In my view, how we read Freud today -- as literature, philosophy, or science -- is largely a matter of choice, as is the case for most early psychologists. We don't even need to pick just one. I myself tend to see his work as both philosophy and science, though not as literature. In this post, I'm going to briefly make the case for my own perception of him, as a way of extending my defense of his work as relevant to psychology today. Two…

Basic Concepts: Selection of Antidepressants, pt. 1

Many ScienceBloggers, and some science bloggers, are writing posts about basic concepts.  I thought that was a good idea, but could not think of one that would be interesting and that I felt like writing about and that I was particularly well-suited to write. Psychiatry is not a basic science.  It is a medical practice that is derived from several basic sciences: psychology, pharmacology, physiology, anatomy, epidemiology, and so forth.  So this is not really a basic concept, in the sense of explaining something fundamental about nature.  Rather, it explains something that is fundamental in…

Women, scientists, and ordinary human beings.

So, at the end of the PSA I was so sick that I took to my overpriced hotel bed, forgoing interesting papers and the prospect of catching up with geographically dispersed friends in my field who I can only count on seeing every two years at the PSA. I managed to get myself back home and then needed another eight days to return to a "functional" baseline. Checking in with the internets again, I feel like maybe I was in a coma for six months. In particular, I was totally sidelined when Isis the Scientist issued her manifesto and when Zuska weighed in on the various reactions to Isis and her…

Ethical considerations in encouraging conservation.

After what has felt to me like a cooler than usual April and beginning of May, we seem finally to be changing seasons here. (OK, changing seasons with a vengeance -- apparently our temperatures yesterday were record highs.) Of course, in this part of California, we have two seasons: the green season and the gold season (which some insist on calling the brown season). The winter, and the winter rains, are over. Now it's time for things to dry out. This, as Michael O'Hare notes, means that water districts are trying to work out what to do about anticipated water shortages. He writes: The…