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Test essay 9: Forces acting on scientists to share and not to share

This is the final in my practice essays before taking the real comps test in the end of July.  I need to correct the record, though. Apparently although all of these questions came from my advisor, he didn't write them all. These were ones proposed by committee members and rejected for inclusion in the exam. (the gap in numbers you see are two essays that didn't go well). This particular question might be by my advisor with an ok from the two STS committee members. I didn't have any STS questions to practice with so he came up with this one - which I think is an excellent question. question:…

The E-Cigarette: A Bad Moon Rising?

I think it was around Christmastime last year, while frantically traipsing through the mall in search of bargains, that an over-eager kiosk salesperson stepped into my path.  Wonderful, I thought.  Another person trying to sell me overpriced hand cream. I tried to go around her, hoping sheâd get the hintâto no avail.  Oddly, instead of launching into a speech about my unhealthy cuticles, she asked me if I was a smoker. And thatâs when I noticed she was selling e-cigarettes:  plastic cigarettes that look almost exactly like the real deal. (They even puff out odorless vapor that looks…

Perennial Plants from Seed

Note: This is a repost from ye olde blogge (which, I am informed by the kind gentleman who is helping me debut it will be back to function by early next week - thank you all for your patience!). Aaron Newton and I are starting up our farm and garden design class today, and we'll be posting a lot of material on growing of all sorts for the next six weeks. I've got a post about winter sowing and stratification coming up next, but thought I would preceed it, since so many people don't realize this, with the observation that you can actually start an astonishing number of woody and herbaceous…

Seven Questions....with Yours Truly

Last week, my SciBling Jason Goldman interviewed me for his blog. The questions were not so much about blogging, journalism, Open Access and PLoS (except a little bit at the end) but more about science - how I got into it, what are my grad school experiences, what I think about doing research on animals, and such stuff. Jason posted the interview here, on his blog, on Friday, and he also let me repost it here on my blog as well, under the fold: Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we're starting a new series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal…

7 Questions with... Bora Zivkovic

Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we're starting a new series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you. I've asked friend, scibling, and trusted advisor Bora Zivkovic (twitter, blog) if he would be our inaugural interviewee. In addition to his extensive blogging here at Scienceblogs, covering…

Old school versus new school in the lab

I was perusing the feeds of my fellow ScienceBloggers the other night when I came across a post by ERV that really resonated with me. In it, she expounds on the benefits of doing things "old school" in the lab, specifically with respect to having hard evidence to defend oneself if ever accused of scientific misconduct. She has a point, but that's not why the post caught my attention. I've actually been struggling with the conflict between "old school" and "new school" recently. You see, I've recently been in the position where I've had to add people to my lab, and in fact the entire staff of…

"Right to try" goes federal, thus far unsuccessfully

It's been nearly two weeks since a new "right to try" bill (AB 1668) passed the California legislature with overwhelming support and was sent to Governor Jerry Brown's desk to be signed. Thus far, he has not signed it, which is good, but neither have I seen a story that he has vetoed it either. In the meantime I learned some more about a federal version of the bill, which I will discuss after a brief recap of why right-to-try is such bad policy, which will lead into a discussion of the federal bill. For those unfamiliar with right-to-try, such bills claim to allow terminally ill (or, in some…

On the Nature of PLoS....

I know that you know that I work for PLoS. So, I know that a lot of you are waiting for me to respond, in some way, to the hatchet-job article by Declan Bucler published in Nature yesterday. Yes, Nature and PLoS are competitors in some sense of the word (though most individual people employed by the two organizations are friendly with each other, and even good personal friends), and this article is a salvo from one side aimed at another. Due to my own conflict of interest, and as PLoS has no intention to in any official way acknowledge the existence of this article (according to the old…

The Tripoli 6 and new scientific evidence: urgent call to the science blogosphere

We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the wider science and human rights organizations…

Another vaccine story

There's a report on the wires that scientists at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have developed a DNA vaccine that protects mice against the reconstructed 1918 virus. The paper just appeared online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, also known as "penis" in the trade). At this point the paper is more important for what it reveals about how the mouse immune system protects against this notorious virus than as a demonstration of a vaccine technology for use in people. That is much further down the road.…

Reading Diary: Bold Scientists: Dispatches From The Battle For Honest Science by Michael Riordan

The default mode, politically-speaking, for most scientists seems to be professionally neutral. In other words, most scientists would tend to see their personal political beliefs as more or less completely separate from their work as scientists. Even for politically sensitive topics like climate change, the tendency is to focus on the the best available evidence rather than commenting more directly on the potential policy implications of that evidence. Only by maintaining that politcal neutrality with scientists will be able to maintain their surface veneer of objectivity. If you're too…

Science and the anthrax case: not enough

Not many scientists were convinced the FBI had a solid science case against accused anthrax attacker Dr. Bruce Ivins. So the FBI held a telephone conference call between journalists and their scientific back-up to answer outstanding questions. Some questions were answered by promising the science would be submitted for peer review to the scientific literature but many others remain, some scientific but mostly about how the science fits in to what would have had to have been "evidence beyond a reasonable doubt" in what the FBI says would have been a death penalty case. An Editorial and…

Tar Heel Tavern #84

Wow, it's been a while since I last hosted the Tar Heel Tavern. This will be the first time since Erin took over the reins of this carnival and the first time since I moved my blog here to Seed's ScienceBlogs (please look around and check out my SciBlings while you are here). In the meantime, Erin has performed a nice makeover of the carnival's homepage and archives so go take a look. I am happy to see a number of great entries this week. Still, I added a couple of "Editor's Choices" at the end. Let's start... For the geeks out there, Melissa of Mel's Kitchen has discovered a cookbook…

New science in the Tripoli 6 case: urgent appeal

by Revere and cross-posted at Effect Measure We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the…

Dishonest Dembski:the Universal Probability Bound

Dishonest Dembski:the Universal Probability Bound One of the dishonest things that Dembski frequently does that really bugs me is take bogus arguments, and dress them up using mathematical terminology and verbosity to make them look more credible. An example of this is Dembski's *universal probability bound*. Dembski's definition of the UPB from the [ICSID online encyclopedia][upb-icsid] is: >A degree of improbability below which a specified event of that probability >cannot reasonably be attributed to chance regardless of whatever >probabilitistic resources from the known universe…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Sheep's Sex Determined By Diet Prior To Pregnancy: Maternal diet influences the chances of having male or female offspring. New research has demonstrated that ewes fed a diet enriched with polyunsaturated fats for one month prior to conception have a significantly higher chance of giving birth to male offspring. Fossilized Burrows 245 Million Years Old Suggest Lizard-like Creatures In Antarctica: For the first time paleontologists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods -- any land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages -- in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about…

Why Grandmothers?

tags: researchblogging.org, Seychelles warbler, Acrocephalus sechellensis, birds, evolution, social behavior, helping behavior, grandmothers Seychelles warbler, Acrocephalus sechellensis. Image: J. Komdeur. When talking about evolution, some people have wondered aloud about why grandmothers exist in human society since they clearly are no longer able to reproduce. However, these people are conveniently overlooking the fact that grandmothers perform a valuable service; they help their relatives, often their own children, raise their offspring -- offspring that are genetically related to…

At All Scales, Global Warming Is Real

Large ponderous entities like the IPCC or government agencies like NOAA take forever to make basic statements about climate change, for a variety of reasons. They are going to have to speed up their process or risk losing some relevance. Among the coming problems we anticipate with global warming will be events that have huge, widespread effects and that happen in time scales of weeks or months, or a season, and having a nice governmental report about it two years later isn't going to do anybody any good. So let's see to that problem, please (looking sternly at IPCC and NOAA). But that's…

The Wisdom of a Crowded Individuals

A lot of people have read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. In the book, he gives an example of a group of people forced to estimate the weight of a cow. (This was actually an experiment that geneticist Franics Galton attempted.) When you do this, you find that the accuracy of the average response from the group is much greater than the accuracy of each individual estimate. This is the so-called wisdom of crowds. The assumption with experiments like this is that each individual will make the best guess they can and this guess will be stable over time -- minus any new information…

ResearchBlogging.org: Successes and ... er ... opportunities for improvement

Less than a week after its official launch, ResearchBlogging.org now has 78 active, registered users. We're already bigger than ScienceBlogs.com! Of course, many of our users are ScienceBloggers -- these projects can definitely work together. We can also get much bigger. Over 200 bloggers have used our icon, and we need to get them signed up for the new aggregation site. There's the potential to enroll literally hundreds more bloggers from all parts of the research community -- not just scientists. All in all the launch has gone amazingly smoothly. As far as I know, the site never went down,…

Reading graphs: How we do it, and what it tells us about making better ones

Take a look at this graph showing population distribution by county in a fictional U.S. state: How do you read such a graph? Is this the ideal way to depict this sort of information? If you wanted to know which part of the state was most populous, how would you go about figuring it out? Researchers have developed conflicting models to explain how it's done. One model suggests that people reading this kind of graph must cycle between the different parts in order to understand it. This makes some sense: to answer our question about population, you'd have to look back and forth between the…

Do people's memories about their life history follow a predictable pattern?

What you remember about your life is almost certainly not accurate. Adults have very few memories before age five, and there is a systematic bias to the memories most people have for the rest of their lives. We are more likely to remember details about positive events like marriage and having children than we are to remember negative events like hospital stays or the death of a loved one. Many studies have found that people appear to remember much more from their teens and 20s than the rest of their lives. A fifty-year-old might remember more about her 20s than her 30s, even though the events…

New project: The Ethics of Vaccines

Since I've found myself drawn into blogging about vaccines and the antivaccination movement so much, I was interested to learn of a new project dedicated to discussing the ethical issues involved with vaccination being launched at the University of Pennsylvania: The Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine announced the beginning of an 18 month project to examine the field of vaccine development and use. Plans call for providing an ethical framework to help guide researchers, pharmaceutical companies, public-health agencies, health-care providers, and…

Links for 4-3-2009

Scads of stuff I don't have time to blog adequately... Johns Hopkins Provost Kristina Johnson was nominated by President Obama to be under secretary of the Department of Energy in mid-March. From the email press release: She is a distinguished researcher, best known for pioneering work -- with widespread scientific and commercial application -- in the field of "smart pixel arrays." Last year, she was awarded the John Fritz Medal, widely considered the highest award in engineering and previously given to Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Westinghouse and Orville Wright. She is an…

An HIV/AIDS "skeptic" questions my honesty and decency...

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 21, 2005 and is the first of a two-part discussion of what has come to be known as the Al-Bayati Report. Part 2…

Giant club-winged pigeons and ninja ibises: clubs, spurs, spikes and claws on the hands of birds (part III)

Time to finish one of those long-running series of Tet Zoo articles: at last, the long-awaited, much anticipated third and final instalment in the series on the clubs, spurs, spikes and claws present on the hands of numerous neornithine bird species. If you haven't done so already, do check out the previous parts here (on hand claws in general, and carpal spurs and knobs in waterfowl) and here (on carpal spurs in charadriiforms). Those previous instalments looked at claws (widely present in modern birds: far from unique to the Hoatzin Opisthocomus hoazin) and at keratin-sheathed bony knobs…

Freeing the flu sequences: one step forward

The journal Science has just published an important letter from veterinary pathologist Dr. Ilaria Capua of the Istituto Zooprofilattico delle Venezie and her colleagues in national veterinary laboratories in the UK, Australia and the US pledging to deposit avian influenza gene sequences into the publicly available online depository, GenBank, as soon as they are determined. This is an important breakthrough in a controversy that roiled the world of flu virologists for almost a year (see posts here, here, here and here). But there is still some way to go. Capua was among the first scientists to…

Promising Embryonic Stem Cell News

This new paper from Stem Cells is a wonderful example of the potential of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to treat diseases like Type I diabetes. The reason type I diabetes is such an obvious target for hESC therapy get a little complicated, but I'll walk you guys through this paper, and recent results in islet cell transplantation to give you an idea why this result is very promising. Type I diabetes results from the destruction of the pancreatic islet cells, or specifically the beta cells in the islets which are responsible for insulin production in response to rising blood sugar. As a…

New study on obesity genetics

An interesting new paper has come out recently, reviving discussion of the effects of "nature" versus "nurture" in the development of obesity. Certainly everyone knows someone--or perhaps, is that someone, who can sit down and finish off an entire pizza without gaining an ounce, while others of us tend to gain weight just from looking at food. How much of our weight is due to our eating and exercise habits, and what's due to our genetics? Anyone who even browses the health section of their local paper or online news source (or really, anyone who's not been living in a cave for much of the…

The Time for Mars is Now

By Dr. Adrian Brown Planetary physicist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs When most people look at photos of the Martian landscape, they see the kind of dry topography that, while attractive, shows only that at first glance Mars resembles many of the desert areas of Earth. By analyzing spectroscopic data gathered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, however, SETI Institute planetary scientist Dr. Adrian Brown sees clues to where liquid water might once have puddled and pooled on the Red Planet, and possibly spawned life. Adrian is…

From Farm to Table: A new model for growing food fairly and safely

By Elizabeth Grossman “If we could get growers to comply with the law, that would revolutionize agriculture in this country,” said United Farm Workers (UFW) national vice president Erik Nicholson  explaining the circumstances that led to the creation of the Equitable Food Initiative. As Nicholson describes it, despite Americans’ intense interest in food and concern for their families’ health, most don’t think much – if at all – about the people who grow, pick and bring this food to market. And while most people not closely involved with agriculture assume that food is grown here under fair…

Gee, Let's Definitely Protect Kids Without Families from Getting One

As Arizona ramps up its attempt to win national "America's stupidest laws" competition (hotly contested, admittedly) by prioritizing heterosexual married couples over gay people and singles for adoption, there's a lovely story about two gay fathers and their 12 children adopted from foster care: These are all your kids? Oh, my gosh. Their poor mother. Where is she? I have to congratulate her." "I am their mother - and their father," Steven said. Then, reaching out to shake her hand, he introduced himself, and then Roger, and each of the kids as they loaded into two cars and buckled in. The…

Blogging groups and ethics

The latest Cites & Insights (v10i11) is out and in it Walt Crawford explores some of the recent developments in the blogging landscape in a section called The Zeitgeist: Blogging Groups and Ethics. It's a very good overview and analysis of what's going on both in the science and librarian blogospheres. It's well worth checking out. Some highlights: Blogging Groups and Ethics Do you blame Roy Tennant when the Annoyed Librarian writes posts that undermine librarianship and libraries? I'm guessing you don't. Whoever the Library Journal incarnation of the Annoyed Librarian might or might…

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Okay, I'm back. Did I miss anything? England ended up being a lot of fun, though it didn't start out that way. For reasons I won't try to explain here, Dominic and I took different flights. His landed early. Mine was two hours late. We had flown through the night, so it was now early Monday morning. We quickly discovered that virtually every piece of information we had about getting from Heathrow Airport to the conference site (that would be the University of Reading) was incorrect or incomplete in some way. Step one was to catch a bus from Heathrow to Reading. This was accomplished…

Is iStockphoto ruining the insect photo business?

The rise of microstock photography has many established photographers wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth over how microstock companies are destroying the business. What is microstock? It is a relatively new internet-based business model that licenses existing images for scandalously low prices. Traditionally, images are licensed through highly selective stock agencies for amounts in the hundreds of dollars or so, but microstock turns everything upside-down, moving images for just pennies each. Microstock companies aren't choosy about the images they peddle, as they need vast…

A lapse of judgment at the CBC: A climate change denier goes unchallenged

A few weeks ago the nightly hour-long documentary series on CBC Radio, "Ideas," allowed Canadian climate change pseudoskeptic Larry Solomon an entire hour to make his case against the science of anthropogenic global warming. The producers offered not a single challenge to any of Solomon's arguments, despite the fact that practically every point he made on the science of the subject was either false or grossly misrepresented the science. Solomon is a "respected" enviromentalist. But he has decided climate change isn't as big a threat as just about the entire climatology community fears it to…

Does the lottery help or harm the vulnerable? Plus, a cool story.

When I was a kid, my father was notorious for two sayings, both of which came out when one of us kids wanted something we were told we couldn't have. The first saying was "life ain't fair," and I guess comparing your toy box to your best friend's is as good a way to learn that one as any. The second line was, "when I win the lottery." "When I win the lottery I'll work less and travel more." "When I win the lottery your mother and I will buy a condo in the mountains." "When I win the lottery you can have all the Barbie dolls you want." Now, my father is by no means a regular player, but…

The Cuban anti-obesity program -or- a theory of the Inverted U of obesity rates

Castro's Cuba has seen a precipitous drop in obesity rates and in the deaths associated with cardiovascular risk: Cuba's economic crisis of 1989-2000 resulted in reduced energy intake, increased physical activity, and sustained population-wide weight loss. The authors evaluated the possible association of these factors with mortality trends. Data on per capita daily energy intake, physical activity, weight loss, and smoking were systematically retrieved from national and local surveys. National vital statistics from 1980-2005 were used to assess trends in mortality from diabetes, coronary…

Minnesota al Qaeda Attack Thwarted by Patriot ... or maybe not

Americans revel in violence. We have an excuse for almost any kind of violent or oppressive act. When a young boy poking around, on a dare, in what he thought was an abandoned house was shot dead by my neighbor last year, the boy was vilified as a threat and the trigger happy crazy guy lauded as a hero, by my other neighbors. Why would that be? Earlier this week, an event happened in a nearby town that helps us to understand the sorry state our culture has attained. During a high school basketball game between local teams Shakopee and Prior Lake, a "fan" ran onto the basketball court…

Birds in the News 141

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter A Marsh Wren, Cistothorus palustris, gathers cattail material for its nest along the shore of Lost Lake in North Central Washington just 10 miles south of the Canadian Border. Image: Jeff Larsen, Writer/Photographer [larger view]. View more images by this photographer. Birds in Science News Now here's a fascinating research paper that I've been trying to get my hands on: The chicks of a species of Australian cuckoo can adjust their call in order to fool other species into rearing them, despite never having heard…

The Anti-Consumerist Gift Files: The Gift for the One Who Has Everything...Except Water During a Storm

Ok, Christmas is getting close, so is Kwanzaa and you are already late with your Chanukah presents. You've got one more present to buy, and it is for someone really tough. Something wonderful. Or something they don't have - which might be a challenge. What should you get them? How about a manual well pump? No, I realize it isn't a cashmere sweater, but hey, you can live your whole life without cashmere, but water...well, that's a bigger issue. And if your loved one is on a well, the chances are good that the next time there's an extended power outage, he or she is going to be out of…

Denialist comments---a brief analysis

My recent post on a local "holistic" doctor brought a number of considered and interesting comments (all of whom are quite polite and patient, even when I disagree with them). Some of the issues deserve fleshing out. Heart disease is a major killer. Hypertension is one of the strongest risk factors for heart disease. In some people, salt contributes to hypertension, and reduction of salt intake reduces bad outcomes. In people with congestive heart failure, salt-restriction is crucial. The statement of this idea led to some interesting objections, with a good helping of goalpost-shifting…

Recent Reading: Unusual Fantasy Settings

All the way back in 2001, I got started on the whole blog thing by beginning a book log. That's long since fallen by the wayside, but every now and then, I do read stuff that I feel a need to write something about, and, hey, the tagline up at the top of the page does promise pop culture to go with the physics... I've actually been on a pretty good roll with fantasy novels over the last few months, hitting a bunch of books that I've really enjoyed, without any real duds. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the first of these, Django Wexler's The Thousand Names. This got good reviews, but it…

Welcome to the Police State

I was going to put this on my facebook page, but it seemed worthy of a higher status. As it were. We live in a police state, here in America, in the same way one gives oneself a particular religion or non-religious label. Unless you are a priest, a habitually repentant sinner, or like me, a habitually annoyed atheist, you usually aren't anything. Someone can't look at you and pick out your belief system. It is in the background lurking around doing nothing, ignored and all but forgotten most of the time. But when needed out comes the book (The Bible, The Origin, whatever). Our police…

Kermit Roosevelt on Roberts

Kermit Roosevelt, who teaches con law at UPenn, has an interesting article at American Prospect about the John Roberts hearings. He points out, correctly, that the arguments for why a nominee cannot be specific about a case that may come before them on the court don't withstand scrutiny: What these remarks suggest is that Roberts will not be a wrecking ball, not a conservative out to change the tenor of the Court. That would have been a safe bet anyway; even aggressive conservatives like the young William Rehnquist tend to grow more moderate after assuming the chief justice's chair. We have…

Judith Curry advocates for a climate change "Team B"

Still back at Keith Kloor's place, Judith Curry seems determined to dig in to her position that governments and the IPCC and consensus minded science bloggers need to take the climate skeptics more seriously. Personally I think she completely misses the boat, because most of these folks have in fact been soundly debunked, or at the very least thouroughly addressed in purely scientific manners. We are talking about Climate Audit and Watts Up With That, these are her candidates. As well as having had their more serious contentions seriously looked at, these sites bury any potentially…

Peer review and science.

Chad Orzel takes a commenter to task for fetishizing peer review: Saying that only peer-reviewed articles (or peer-reviewable articles) count as science only reinforces the already pervasive notion that science is something beyond the reach of "normal" people. In essence, it's saying that only scientists can do science, and that science is the exclusive province of geeks and nerds. That attitude is, I think, actively harmful to our society. It's part of why we have a hard time getting students to study math and science, and finding people to teach math and science. We shouldn't be…

Pity the poor UK homeopath...

...because, via Skeptico and DC's Improbably Science, I've learned something that could only warm the coldest cockles of my evil scientific and skeptical heart. It's something that tells us that, maybe, just maybe, what we bloggers do in favor of evidence-based medicine may actually be having an effect. British homeopath Manish Bhatia, Director of hpathy.com, has sent out a frantic e-mail bemoaning how those poor, poor homeopaths are having trouble making a living, going so far as to say that homeopathy is "bleeding to death" (great analogy, given that homeopathy is a lot like the medieval…

Transgenic Silk

Silk is an amazing biomaterial, cultivated and prized for more than 5,000 years. The silk threads that we weave into our shiny fabrics are actually enormous protein crystals produced by insects. This industrial silk that you can buy at the mall is made by silkworms, which use the silk to form the cocoon that protects them as they transform into moths. Many other species of insect also produce silk proteins to protect themselves or their eggs, get around, or catch their prey, but none in such enormous quantity in such easy to harvest packages as the silkworm. Silks from different species are…

Mike Adams, blustering scoundrel

We all know about Mike Adams, notorious quack, conspiracy theorist, quantum dork, and raving nutball around here, right? If nothing else, you must have enjoyed Orac's regular deconstruction of his nonsense. Jon Entine has published a profile of Mike Adams in Forbes magazine that distills all the lunacy down to a relatively concise summary. For instance, it documents his recent public obsessions. Adam’s latest crusade: the world’s governments are covering up the fact that the doomed Malaysian Airlines jetliner was pirated safely to a desert hideaway by Iranian hijackers, and is now being…