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Some Thanksgiving recipes (part 2).

Here are the rest of the recipes for dishes that I'm making for Thanksgiving this year (with the exception of pumpkin pie -- I'm still shopping for a pumpkin pie recipe). I'll mention here (and should have mentioned in the previous post that all the measurements here are U.S. quantities (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc.). Those of you using non-US measuring cups and measuring spoons will want to find a good conversion guide. PEARL ONIONS IN MUSTARD CREAM SAUCE You can trim, peel, and boil fresh small onions, but you can also use a bag of frozen pearl onions. Either way, you want to boil…

Friday Sprog Blogging: a chat about mental illness

Assuming the post title hasn't already scared you away, I wanted to share a conversation I had with the elder Free-Ride offspring about a potentially scary-to-talk-about subject. As you'll see, it went fine. And, as a bonus, there's a cake recipe at the end of the post. Dr. Free-Ride: (trying to get the blue sparkle hair stuff that someone put in elder offspring's hair for "Crazy Hair Day" out of elder offspring's hair) What are you doing there? Elder offspring: I'm making crazy faces in the mirror. Do I look crazy? Dr. Free-Ride: You know, I'm not totally comfortable using the word "…

I get email

I mentioned earlier this week that sometimes I get positive email, and that it actually outnumbers the outright hostile hate mail. But both classes are greatly outnumbered by the most common kind of email I get, the cranks and crazies. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Woolsey, Stephen D Mr CIV USA — a perfectly representative exemplar of the crap clogging my in-box. Yes, he's posting from an army.mil email address, which may account for some of the strange stuff inserted in the text, but not all of it. Skeptic..? (UNCLASSIFIED) Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: FOUO Dear Sir…

Manuscript review and the limits of your expertise.

At his lounge, the Lab Lemming poses an excellent hypothetical question about manuscript review: Suppose you are reviewing a paper. Also assume, that like most papers these days, that it has multiple authors, each of whom applies his expertise to the problem at hand. And finally, assume that you are an expert in some, but not all of the fields used to solve the particular problem being reported in this paper. What do you do if one of the key points in the paper that is not your area of expertise seems fishy. For example, if the paper is on your field area, what if some of the lab results…

Stepping away from silence.

This month, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Dr. Isis are spearheading a blogospheric initiative to call attention to a continuing epidemic of mass rapes in Liberia even six years after the end of its 14 year civil war, and to try to do something about it. Last month, Nicholas Kristof described the situation in the New York Times, touching on the particular case of a 7-year-old rape survivor named Jackie: [S]omehow mass rape survived the end of the war; it has been easier to get men to relinquish their guns than their sense of sexual entitlement. So the security guard at Jackie's school, a man in his…

Candid Engineer on data handling and ethics.

In a recent post, Candid Engineer raised some interesting questions about data and ethics: When I was a graduate student, I studied the effects of many different chemicals on a particular cell type. I usually had anywhere from n=4 to n=9. I would look at the data set as a whole, and throw out the outlying points. For example, if I had 4 data points with the values 4.3, 4.2, 4.4, and 5.5, I would throw out the 5.5. Now that I am older, wiser, and more inclined to believe that I am fully capable of acquiring reproducible data, I am more reluctant to throw away the outlying data points. Unless…

Anesthesiology and addiction.

There's an interesting story on The New Republic website at the moment, "Going Under" by Jason Zengerle, that relates the sad story of a young anesthesiologist's descent into addiction. What I find interesting about it is the larger questions it raises about why this particular anesthesiologist's story is not so unusual. Indeed, the article offers an: Observation: Anesthesiologists seem to suffer from addiction in greater numbers than physicians in other specialties. And, it lays out Three hypotheses as to why this might be so: H1: Anesthesiologists have greater access to the addictive…

Greatest. Movie. Ever.

While trying to avoid working on my grant yesterday, I was idly flipping channels. I had planned on killing a few minutes while psyching myself up to go back into the Bat Cave that is my office, ignoring a gloriously perfect sunny day with temperatures in the low 80s, to do battle with the grant application again, when I came across it: The greatest movie ever made! The movie is called Fiend Without a Face, a low budget science fiction/horror movie from the 1950s. It's awesome, and I'll tell you why. The monsters are disembodied brains. Yes, this is (mostly) a medical blog, and talking about…

William fooled everyone, but Chris Mooney is taking most of the blame.

... As promised ... Chris Mooney is about to explain to just posted a detailed explanation (which I have not read yet) of his interaction with the famous William the Blogger of YNH, posed as "Tom Johnson." He's posted Part One of an explanation of this infamous maneno, and we await Part II. Earlier, I had made some comments related to this issue (though prior to the posting of Part I) that people got mad at, and I'd like to clarify and expand on them now, prior to Chris's second post, although what Chris posts in his anticipated Part II may bear on this. An oversimplified version of what…

Goldilocks, a Very Cold Winter Night, And a Strange Sense of Empty-ness

So we arrive at the cabin, and something seems amiss. With each new clue uncovered, we are at first disturbed, then aghast, and finally, astonished. None of it made very much sense until we found the note. Wow. The note. The reason we were there at all was to drop off an old refrigerator and to check on things. There are two cabins, one semi-heated for winter, the other closed down, and into the second of these we would haul the fridge, staying for the night in the first. Someone noticed a bag of cans, mostly soda, and some beer bottles, not our brand, sticking out of the snow. Since…

How the Presidential Election may lead to Texas Adopting Creationism as the Official Creed in Public Schools

On one hand, we have the Huckabee factor ... Huckabee's draw on hard right voters in tomorrows primary may lead anti-evolutionists to victory. On the other hand, we have the Obama factor ... Obama's draw on moderate republicans may lead to a cleansing of pernicious liberal elements from the Republican party. Hilary Hylton has an interesting and informative piece in, of all places, Time, about tomorrow's events in Texas. You need to know this. Texas has a state-wide school board. This means that when it comes to textbook adoption, Texas is the largest single customer, and thus,…

The Modes of Natural Selection

There many ways of dividing up and categorizing Natural Selection. For example, there are the Natural Selection, Sexual Selection and Artificial Selection, and then there is the Modes of Selection (Stabilizing, Directional, and Disruptive) trichotomy. We sense that these are good because they are "threes" and "three" is a magic number. Here, I'm focusing on the Mode Trichotomy, and asking that we consider that there are not three, but four modes of Natural Selection. This will cause tremors throughout the Evolutionary Theory community because Four is not a magic number, but so be it. […

Another celebrity anti-vaccine moron: Billy Corgan

Oh, hell. I actually used to like Smashing Pumpkins back in the 1990s. Unfortunately, its leader, Billy Corgan, has just revealed himself to be as medically ignorant as Jenny McCarthy in a recent blog post: If you follow some of the links I have been supplying as of late, you'll notice many are focused on the propaganda build up to our day of reckoning with the Swine Flu virus. I say 'propaganda' because, in my heart, there is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic. merican President Obama has declared a…

Ozone revisionism

Matthew Nisbet's contrarian "Climate Shift" report has been rightly criticised for claiming that green groups outspent opponents of climate action, that the era of false balance in the media was over and for his own falsely balanced coverage. Ted Parson, who wrote the book on protecting the ozone layer corrects another false statement from Nisbet, who wrote: According to climate scientist Mike Hulme and policy expert Roger Pielke Jr., climate change remains misdiagnosed as a conventional pollution problem akin to ozone depletion or acid rain-- environmental threats that were limited in scope…

The Australian's War on Science 42

Christopher Monckton will trouser $20,000 for an Australian Tour with Ian Plimer on backing vocals. To celebrate both The Australian and The Daily Telegraph printed extracts from Monckton's letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd generously offering to brief Rudd about climate science. Monckton always makes lots of errors when he writes about science, but this letter may have broken his previous record for quickest mistake with one in the very first word: His Excellency Mr Kevin Rudd Rudd's correct title is The Hon. Kevin Rudd, MP The editor at The Daily Telegraph didn't notice the mistake…

Surveying Your Spirituality

The other day, in response to a meme, I confessed to being a theist. I seem to have chosen a good time to do this, as many of my (non-theistic) fellow ScienceBloggers are discussing the matter. (Here and here are just a few examples.) I suppose I should explain. Since the holidays are approaching and, whether you are religious or not, there is a surplus of stress about, I'm going to try to keep it on the lighter side. My brother, Tristan, ran across this quiz a few months ago, which attempts to match a person with the nearest spiritual beliefs. I'm usually rather skeptical about web-based…

Defining Bloggers by Medium

Brian's got a great post about Sarah Boxer's editorial in the NY Review of Books the other day, using this quote as a jump off point: Bloggers are golden when they're at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn't the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And…

Anti-science is not a state of mind

Can you be skeptical about GM but believe in climate change? So asks Alice Bell in The Guardian. The answer is of course, "Yes," but you can also be a fundamentalist Christian while believing in evolution and being a great scientist, so being able to hold two things in your brain at the same time is not a useful measure of logical incompatibility. One can be right about one thing and wrong about the other. But let's get to the real issue raised in Bell's piece, the use of the term "anti-science" to describe opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs): When people use the term "anti-…

On Definitions: They Matter

Most of my favorite long-standing discussions with friends and family tend to resolve around definitions. My good friend Paul and I have had hours upon hours of discussion about the nature of the universe - he calls his perception of the order of the universe "god," and I call myself an atheist (interestingly, that picture was taken by Paul), though in practical terms I don't think our beliefs are really that far apart. He says his definition allows him to engage with religious people, I say it just causes confusion. In my first year of graduate school, I used to argue endlessly with my class…

A Tale of Two Health Care Systems

Mike Dunford tells a compelling story today at The Questionable Authority: Yesterday, I took the kids to the doctor for their school physicals. I wouldn't normally subject you to an account of the day-to-day minutia of my personal life, but given the current debate about how we should handle health care in the United States, the details might be of interest. We arrived - without an appointment - at a medical facility that we had not been to before. We did not have medical records with us, and the only paperwork of any kind that we had brought were the forms that needed to be filled out to…

Texas Republicans Suppress Black Student Voters

When I was a student at Texas A&M University and active in politics there, I spent a lot of time on voter registration. Much of this effort was devoted to the community outside of the university, but my primary focus was on students at the university. And, although some people would contend that college students should register to vote from their hometowns, I strongly disagree. At the very least, students should be allowed to choose which location they prefer, but beyond that I believe there's a strong case for students to register at their university location, unless they have a…

Newt Gingrich, An Invented Professor

Photo source, @mjb's Flicr Photostream (Matthew Bradley) Prologue: I have a hypothesis: Newt Gingrich, a provocateur reaching for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, has stated that the "Palestinian people are an invented people" - well, Newt Gingrich, while not an invented person, is an invented Professor. Gingrich's longtime communications aide Rick Tyler described him as "probably the smartest political strategist in the country bar none." That may well be true, but whether coming from loyalty or from a "conservative revenge fantasy" as described by Mr.…

Should religious organisations be granted charitable status?

What is a charity? Ostensibly, it's an organisation dedicated to the public benefit, one that does not seek to make profits, and that does not have political goals. So how the heck does something like the Catholic Church qualify as a charity? In England and Wales, all charitable organisations with an income of more than £5,000 must be registered with the Charities Commission, which acts as a supervisory power. The core rule is that all charities must exist "for the public benefit". There exists a list of 13 purposes that a charity can subscribe to, including advancements of animal…

They don't understand allometry!

I think the engineers are just trying to wind me up, again. Joe Felsenstein tackles a paper published in an applied physics journal that redefines evolution and tries to claim that changes in aircraft design are a good model for evolution. It's a terrible premise, but also, the execution is awful. But permit me a curmudgeonly point: This paper would have been rejected in any evolutionary biology journal. Most of its central citations to biological allometry are to 1980s papers on allometry that failed to take the the phylogeny of the organisms into account. The points plotted in those old…

A Year in Review: Twelve wacky cool studies.

In no particular order... 1) Being a south paw promotes survival from attacks (well at least in crabs). It seems that The left-handed advantage is realized when snails interact with predators of opposite handedness. Some predatory crabs are "righties" -- and have a specialized tooth on their right claw that acts like a can opener to crack and peel the snail shells. "The 'sinistral advantage,' or advantage to being left-handed, is that it would be like using a can opener backwards for the crab to crack and peel the snail shell," Does something like this apply to humans? We're still…

New players in sequencing debut at AGBT

The main theme of this year's Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting should come as no surprise to regular readers: sequencing. Generating as many bases of DNA sequence as quickly, cheaply and accurately as possible is the goal of the moment, and the number of companies jostling to achieve that goal is growing rapidly. The meeting saw impressive performances from established players in the field, especially Illumina: their new HiSeq 2000 instrument seems to have dug in as the platform of choice for generating vast amounts of high-quality short-read data. Life Technologies seem to…

The Refusers: Proving Orac's corollary to Poe's Law

Over the last week or so, I've been a bit--shall we say?--dismissive of claims by anti-vaccinationists when they insist that, really, truly, honestly, they aren't "anti-vaccine," usually with a wounded, indignant, self-righteous tone. Either that, or they make like the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail by demanding the surrender of the public health community, even as limb after limb of their claims have been lopped off by the sword of science, all the while not even realizing how risible it is to demand respect for their views after they have been totally discredited…

Avatar, The Movie, Reviewed

Short form: Good movie. I think the following review does not have any significant plot spoilers. For me, in retrospect, the movie started before it started with a long multi-part tear-jerking recruiting ad for the U.S. National Guard, followed by a tribute to the troops in Iraq sponsored by Walmarts. Why was that part of the movie? I'll tell you in a minute. The premise of Avatar is this: In the year 2154 or so, Earthling-Americans have started to mine the hard to get and rare mineral Hardtogetium (or something like that) and an indigenous population is in the way. There are…

Basics: Gastrulation, invertebrate style

The article about gastrulation from the other day was dreadfully vertebrate-centric, so let me correct that with a little addendum that mentions a few invertebrate patterns of gastrulation—and you'll see that the story hasn't changed. Remember, this is the definition of gastrulation that I explained with some vertebrate examples: The process in animal embryos in which endoderm and mesoderm move from the outer surface of the embryo to the inside, where they give rise to internal organs. I described frogs and birds and mammals the other day, so lets take a look at sea urchins and fruit flies…

I'm assuming many conservatives are embarrassed by Conservapedia

At least, I hope so. The "conservapedia" is supposed to be an alternative to Wikipedia that removes the biases—although one would think the creators would be clever enough to realize that even the name announces that Conservapedia is planning to openly embrace a particular political bias. Unfortunately, that bias seems to be more towards stupidity than anything else. In fact, reading through it leads me to wonder if it isn't actually a parody site. Some people are getting the same impression of Overwhelming Evidence, the Intelligent Design site that was set up to cater to the teen crowd, but…

Summer school for woo

Imagine you're a medical student in a dreaded "allopathic" medical school other than Georgetown. Imagine further that you're finding the grind of learning science- and evidence-based medicine a bit tiresome. After all, there's so much to learn: principles of biochemistry, physiology, anatomy (and not with acupuncture points), and neuroscience. You're reading multiple chapters a night, staying up all night cramming your mind full of minutiae of various signaling pathways and eponyms for anatomic structures. All those facts, all that evidence, it's all so...hard! It's all so soulless. Where's…

Counting cycles

I picked up a little buzz about Google software engineers planning to rework the guts of some major open-source software to make it run faster. Since it wasn't software I use, I didn't read enough to remember what software, but it brought up memories... Walking to school in the snow, 3 miles, uphill, both ways No, this isn't going to be one of those posts. I only wish we'd had the kind of raw processing power in my early years (decades?) as a systems analyst/programmer that we take for granted now. Most people today spend more time on what needs to be done, and that's as it should be. This is…

Why Faith and Science?

In the run-up to this year's Faith and Science panel at the 2010 World Science Festival, there was some concern expressed (here and here) about our sponsors' influence on programming. In light of such criticism, we thought it would be a good time to reiterate the Festival's absolute editorial independence, as addressed last year by World Science Festival co-founders, Brian Greene and Tracy Day, in response to similar concerns: The World Science Festival produces programs according to the strictest standards of editorial integrity. It goes without saying—but for clarity’s sake we shall say…

What else does Dr. Kaiser have to offer?

The other day I told you about a doctor promoting a dietary supplement for the treatment of HIV, despite the lack of any significant data to support his claims. If there's anything medical bloggers have found over the years is that woo rarely walks alone. In my post I expressed some incredulity at the fact that Kaiser promotes himself as an internist and HIV expert despite any of the usual formal education required for these designations. Examination of his website reveals that he is also an expert in "longevity", cancer, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease, and intestinal parasites.…

If the only tool you have is a hammer....

Summary: Lott and Hassett have not analyzed their data correctly---it actually shows no evidence that headlines are biased against Republicans. (My previous posts are here and here.) The essence of Lott and Hassett's case that newspapers are biased against Republicans is given in their presentation: "In the case of unemployment, 44 percent of the headlines under the Clinton administration were positive while that same number was only 23 percent under Bush II. By comparison, the average unemployment rates were fairly similar, 5.2 percent under Clinton s eight years and 5.5…

Newsweek panders to the deluded again

I've got to wonder who is responsible for this nonsense, and how it gets past the staff at Newsweek. Every once in a while, they've just got to put up a garish cover story touting the reality of Christian doctrine, and invariably, the whole story is garbage. This time around, the claim is proof of life after death, in Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. This time, we have a real-live doctor who has worked at many prestigious institutions, as we are reminded several times in the story, whose brain was shut down and who then recites an elaborate fantasy of visiting heaven…

Historical and observational science

Dealing with various creationists, you quickly begin to recognize the different popular flavors out there. The Intelligent Design creationists believe in argument from pseudoscientific assertion; "No natural process can produce complex specified information, other than Design," they will thunder at you, and point to books by people with Ph.D.s and try to tell you they are scientific. They aren't. Their central premise is false, and trivially so. Followers of Eric Hovind I find are the most repellently ignorant of the bunch. They love that presuppositional apologetics wankery: presuppose god…

Amazing Women's 10,000 Meters

Spoiler alert: If you don't want to know anything about the Olympic Women's 10,000 meter final just yet, stop now. The race was amazing on several fronts, but before I go any further, it will be broadcast on NBC tonight at 10:45 PM. I just finished watching the race on CBC. I can't give a lot of comment on the race for reasons I'll explain in a moment, but the winner and second place runner finished under 30 minutes; Ethiopia's Tirunesh Dibaba in 29:54.66 and Turkey's Elvan Abeylegesse in 29:56.34. Both were under the old Olympic record (Ethiopia's Derartu Tulu's 30:17.49 in 2000) although…

Work-Life Balance 1: Women, The Media Totally Support You!

Work-life balance: people have been talking about it. Wait, that's not right. Women have been talking about it. And have been talked at about it, by some people. Doc Free-Ride has a good round-up of a most recent skirmish of opinions on the topic in the sciencey blogosphere. If you have not been following this, please do give Doc Free-Ride's post a read. Where to begin? Science Careers says all you married ladies with kids should hire housekeepers. And get over it already, will you? Last year, when Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,…

Tiny Shiny Keys and Gendered Language

Yesterday I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR and caught this very intriguing segment, Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong. Would you describe a bridge as fragile, elegant, beautiful, peaceful, slender, pretty? Or as strong, dangerous, long, sturdy, big, towering? Lera Boroditsky, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford University, found that it depends - for native German and Spanish speakers, on whether your native tongue assigns a feminine or masculine gender to the noun bridge. Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German -- die brucke -- is a feminine noun…

Early voting begins today

Kansans can go to their county clerks' offices today through noon on the Monday before the election and cast an early ballot. Then you don't have to worry about whether you can make it to the polls on election day. You can still register to vote until the 23rd. Before you head out to vote, be sure you know who your candidates are for state Legislature. The entire House is up for election, and electing candidates who will stand by the state's commitment to fund schools adequately, to roll back the maintenance backlog at the college and university level of the state educational system. Be…

Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics in the Bible?

When the issue of creationism raises its ugly head (either in the form of young earth creationism, intelligent design, or another variant) it usually involves the first chapters of the book of Genesis, specifically the special creation of humans and the Noachian Deluge. There's much more in Genesis than stories involving forbidden fruit and boat construction, however, and one story in particular is interesting when considered in the light of the history of the "evolution idea." Most of you will be familiar with the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, most famously championed…

Book Review: Evolution by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu

There are plenty of glossy, coffee table books out there, but while many are filled with beautiful photography very few offer anything of value in the text. Evolution by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu (text) and Patrick Gries (photography) is a striking exception, however, the informative prose wonderfully framing some of the best black and white photography that I've seen. There is something strangely alluring about skeletons; they are not only the functional architecture of the bodies of vertebrates, but also have a strange aesthetic charm, hundreds of millions of years of evolution creating…

Morality, Psychopaths and Emotions

On Monday, I posted about some recent imaging work documenting the way the brain distinguishes between "personal" and "impersonal" moral dilemmas. Now comes a new Nature paper from a medley of researchers documenting how damage to a single brain region - the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPO) - erases this fundamental distinction. Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported yesterday. In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to…

CD Players in space and rotations of a rigid body

I saw this video on several places. It shows an astronaut playing with a CD player. I wish I were an astronaut. I would probably not stop throwing up though. It would still be worth it. You can only throw up so much right? (I know the answer to this question). Anyway, this is a really cool demo. Look at the first CD player that is on. When the guy taps it, it doesn't rotate but rather it wobbles. This is a rather difficult concept, but I am going to try to give a reasonable explanation. I will start with angular momentum. Angular momentum is sort of like momentum (linear momentum…

Teach your child to ride a bike

For many people, it is the time of the year to put the bikes away. I live in Louisiana, so now is the time to get the bikes out (too hot in the summer). Learning to ride a bike is a curious thing. Most parents use training wheels to get kids started. I do not think this is the best strategy. In this post, I will focus on teaching bike riding skillz. If you are looking for the physics of bike riding, there are some good links: David Jones - "The stability of the bicycle" (pdf)This is a great article. The key aspect is that this guy modified a bike in unique ways to see if it was still "…

The Near Miss

Mo over at Neurophilosophy has an excellent summary of a new paper on near misses and addictive gambling: Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to near miss gambling outcomes in much the same way it does to as winning. In moderate gamblers, both types of outcome activate the reward circuitry, and although near miss events are experienced to be somewhat less rewarding than wins, they nevertheless increase the desire and motivation to gamble. For games involving skill, near misses indicate an…

Prozac

Sharon Begley has an excellent Newsweek cover story on the rise and fall of anti-depressant medications, or how a class of drugs that were once hailed as medical miracles are now seen as barely better than placebos: In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, Kirsch and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants--not the 75 percent he had calculated from…

Lying and Creativity

Via Vaughan Bell, comes this wonderful essay by Tom Stafford on confabulation and creativity: In those patients with frontal damage who do confabulate, however, the brain injury makes them rely on their internal memories--their thoughts and wishes--rather than true memories. This is of course dysfunctional, but it is also creative in some of the ways that make improvisation so funny: producing an odd mix of the mundane and impossible. When a patient who claims to be 20 years old is asked why she looks about 50, she replies that she was pushed into a ditch by her brothers and landed on her…

Federal money comes with strings.

Yesterday I blogged a bit about how the rollback of NIH research funding may impact scientists at research universities. In light of those comments, here's another news item worth your attention. The Boston Globe reports that Yale University may be in some amount of trouble for accepting lots of federal research funds but then not accounting for its use in ways that satisfied the funders: Federal authorities are investigating how Yale accounts for millions of dollars in government research grants, school officials said Monday. Yale received three subpoenas last week from the U.S. Department…