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To Restore Science to Its Rightful Place, We Need to Redefine Elitism

Our Benevolent Seed Overlords ask "What is science's rightful place?" which refers to a line from Obama's inaugural address where he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place." Since ScienceBlogling Jake discussed the importance of basing policy on evidence--as well as correctly recognizing that the method we use to solve problems does not shed much light on whether we should address those problems in the first place--I want to bring up one problem that science faces: it is, to a great extent, elitist. Before all of the TEH SCIENTISMZ R EVUL!!! crowd gets all hot and bothered, what I…

Water fleas, mosquitoes and the elderly

On August 8 - 10, 2005 county mosquito control in Sacramento, California aerially sprayed the pyrethrin pesticides with piperonyl butoxide (PBO) over 85 square miles. On August 20 - 22 they did it again, this time covering 104 square miles. Their objective was to kill adult mosquitoes that carried West Nile Virus after two dozen cases of the disease appeared in area residents. Use of pyrethroids with PBO is common for mosquito adulticiding. There is a general belief the pyrethroids are relatively benign, although there is not much data. The addition of PBO as a knockdown agent has come under…

Mike the Mad Biologist Says... [The Rightful Place Project]

Outdoors and In: Innovations in Education

The world – or at least a large swathe of Israel – was their classroom. An unusual international conference for science teaching experts started out at the Clore Garden of Science, on the Weizmann Institute campus. From there the “nomadic” conference made its way down to Eilat at the southern tip of the country, Jerusalem in the east and points in between. Outdoor Learning Environment conference at the Ramon crater Participating in the first international Outdoor Learning Environment conference were science education researchers from the US, UK, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Portugal,…

Hyper-local climate impact forecast, finally

A study published in Science at the end of June should have found its way onto the front pages and screens of every community newspaper and local news program in the country. But it didn't. At least, not around these parts. Which is a shame, because it's precisely the kind of story we've been waiting for all these years. (Apologies to the spirit of Douglas Adams). I'll do my best to rectify the oversight. In "Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States," a team of researchers led by Solomon Hsiang, who specializes in public policy at the University of California,…

The news from Japan: Protecting health and safety during disasters

by Elizabeth Grossman Even before news of the crisis at the Fukushima and other Japanese nuclear power plants damaged by Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami arrived, raising public health concerns to an alarming level, the scenes of destruction prompted many questions about how public health - and that of first responders - would be protected during immediate rescue efforts, and later as clean up and restoration get underway. The awful loss of life demands much of our attention, but it's also essential to consider future health issues for those working on rescue and recovery. Right now…

Report: After years of cuts and even more proposed, public health faces funding crisis

Public health is in trouble. Last month, President Trump released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. It was more of an outline, really, and didn’t provide many details, but it did call for a nearly 18 percent cut to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and for block granting the budget at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, the White House supports repealing the Affordable Care Act. That repeal would also eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which now accounts for about 12 percent of CDC’s budget and funds critical public health…

Insurance losses under proposed ACA replacement a matter of life and death

As the Republicans push forward their abysmal Affordable Care Act replacement, much of the talk surrounding its impact focuses on insurance numbers and premium hikes. Those things are certainly important. But this is more important: The Republican plan will cause unnecessary suffering and preventable death. How do we know this? Let’s start with the Congressional Budget Office report that scored the Republican replacement plan, titled the American Health Care Act. That report estimates that if the Republican plan is enacted, 14 million more people would be uninsured by 2018 than would have…

Poultry workers suffer while industry uses chemicals to disinfect your chicken

Poultry processing workers and food safety inspectors are being doused with chemicals in the name of food safety. A slew of antimicrobial agents are approved by the USDA to be used on meat and poultry. The chemicals are considered edible for consumers, but no assessments are made by USDA (or other agencies) on the health risks to workers. The problem now has the attention of some Members of Congress. Representatives Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and others sent a letter last week to USDA Secretary Vilsack, HHS Secretary Burwell, and Labor Secretary Perez. They expressed "deep…

Nuclear Power and Security

Scientific Curmudgeon John Horgan reads calls for more nuclear power and offers a slightly different objection to nuclear power than most people: Five years ago, I might have considered climbing aboard this bandwagon, even though Indian Point has an imperfect safety record, but not any more. In fact, I want to whack the neo-nukers and the Times Magazine for irresponsibly downplaying the immense security risks posed by nuclear power. On September 11, 2001, one of the hijacked jets flew down the Hudson River right past Garrison. A woman I know was gardening that morning outside her house on…

Tuesday's Democratic Primaries: Clinton favored in all polls, but Sanders will win two

Between now and the end of the primary season, I expect Sanders to pick up more delegates than Clinton, in total, by a very small margin. On Tuesday, April 26th, there will be primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. That's 384 pledged delegates at stake. Polls put Clinton ahead in all these states, but not all the polls are current and not all the Clinton leads are strong. Added Note: I noticed some very strong reactions in the comments section from people apparently (but not very clearly) accusing me of making up numbers to make it look like Sanders…

Go home, Arctic, You're Drunk.

If global warming is real, then why is it so cold? We are hearing this question quite often today and it will be asked many times by many people over the next few days as record low temperatures are set in many parts of the United States. Here in Minnesota, for example, we have a good chance of setting a record low daily high beating the previous record of 14 degrees below zero F. We may or may not beat the record daily low but we are going to get close. (Donald trump is probably the most famous person to have gotten this wrong over the last few days.) Global warming is real. The apparent…

March Pieces Of My Mind #1

Joan Crawford representing America on one of the four main doors to the Grand movie theatre in Stockholm. If you block the Autobahn with droves of bananas, is that then ein Obstruktion? Tim Minchin has a huge hit right now in Australia with a song urging a strangely reluctant cardinal to come home from the Vatican and answer some questions about the clergy's crimes against children in the 70s and 80s. Enormous areas in Scandinavia don't seem to have been completely messed up by the inland ice! If we have any Neanderthal sites, then that's where they are. Such an amazing night for…

Alabama Student Senate Does the Right Thing

At the same time that wannabe satrap Gerald Allen has been conspiring to kill free thought with his bill to ban all books and plays that mention homosexuality, the University of Alabama Faculty Senate has passed a resolution calling on restrictions on "hate speech" at that university. This is as good an opportunity as any to point out that threats to free speech do not come exclusively from the right; the left is equally zealous, in many cases, to punish those who speak ill of protected minorities. Nat Hentoff wrote of this phenomenon brilliantly in his book Free Speech for Me, But Not for…

The military industrial complex vs. the planet

Should the U.S. Navy be above the law when it comes to saving the whales? So asks Marc Kaufman of the Washington Post. Good question. One with much broader implications as we head into a future that will almost certainly include mandatory limits on all sorts of now-common but environmentally deleterious practices. The proximate issue is whether the Navy can exempt itself from the provisions of the Endangered Species Act and, more specifically, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, in order to carry out its national security duties. The Navy wants to use active sonar (echolocation to a toothed…

Slippery slopes in space policy

No sign yet that the science-and-religion debate is heating (or, as the Brits say, hotting) up in the public sphere, but a continuing and expanding dialog on the subject in EOS has been brought to my attention. What started as an appeal to include some philosophy in NASA's mission planning has morphed into an exploration of just how cozy scientists should be with those more concerned with matters more spiritual. It all began back in early 2005, when Robert Frodeman, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Texas, wrote an essay (PDF) on "Space Policy and Humanities…

What Would You Say to your Children about the Canadian Government? (My Two Cents)

It's election time again and, as is the norm, we see teachers using the opportunity to talk to their students about things such as Prime Ministers, parliaments, senates, and, well, basically - how this thing we call the "Canadian Government" is meant to work. My own daughter who is in Grade 4 is in such a class, and has been asking me all sorts of questions: the most prevalent of which is "Who is Alice Wong?" Not a surprising question, since her face is fairly ubiquitous in Richmond, BC where I live, being set against the many blue Conservative signs and placards (she is our incumbent MP…

Shooting unarmed suspects: A matter of race?

[Originally posted in November 2006] The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't they justified in shooting? Perhaps, but an important additional question is this: were they predisposed to believe he was armed simply because he was black? Consider this quick movie: Click to play (QuickTime required) It will flash two pictures. One man is armed, the other unarmed. Who do you shoot? I've primed you to think about race, so it…

Shooting unarmed suspects: A matter of race?

The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't they justified in shooting? Perhaps, but an important additional question is this: were they predisposed to believe he was armed simply because he was black? Consider this quick movie: It will flash two pictures. One man is armed, the other unarmed. Who do you shoot? I've primed you to think about race, so it's not really a fair test. If you were a police officer who believed…

Essential reading: Why prior probability is important in considering the results of clinical trials of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine"

I've become known as an advocate for evidence-based medicine (EBM) in the three years since I started this little bit of ego gratification known as Respectful Insolenceâ¢. One thing this exercise has taught me that I might never have learned before (and that I've only reluctantly begun to accept as true) is one huge problem with EBM. Not surprisingly, it has to do with how EBM is used to evaluate so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) therapies, many of which are highly implausible on a scientific basis, to put it exceedingly generously. Consider homeopathy, which on a…

Mike the Mad Biologist Says...

Neuroeconomics and Paternalism

In response to my recent post on governmental regulation and energy conservation, an excellent debate has started in the comments. On the one hand, there is a long list of areas in which governmental regulation has forced corporations into making decisions that are beneficial for society at large: Catalytic converters? Mileage requirents on cars? Unleaded gasoline? Clean water act? Clean air act? Endangered species act? Vaccination requirements for public schools? Building codes? OSHA regulations? Fire codes? Why do we have these things? Were they decided on by consumers? Nope. Nearly every…

Pinker on Lakoff

At last, someone demolishes the bad cognitive science and even worse political science being peddled by George Lakoff. If the Democrats really think that calling income taxes "community dues" or "membership fees" will help them retake the White House, then God help us all, because Rove is going to be pulling the strings for many elections to come. In the new TNR (subscription only), Pinker takes his intellectual axe to Lakoff's theory of "conceptual metaphor," which advises Democrats to package their policies into Orwellian sounding soundbites, so that stupid voters might be tricked into…

“Refinery Town” points the way forward to protect communities and defend rights

Let’s just say there was a working class community – of various skin colors – which was dominated for a century by a giant corporation who ran the town with bought-and-paid-for politicians, and whose operations regularly poisoned the community, threatened the health and safety of its workforce, and periodically blew up, sending thousands to the hospital. How could they even begin to protect the health of their families and community, and exercise their democratic right to a local government that put the needs of the vast majority ahead of corporate profits? The answer to that question can be…

Out of the gate, Bret Stephens punches the hippies, says dumb things

Right in the middle, between the Trump-inspired March for Science, and the Trump-inspired People's Climate March, the New York times managed to come down firmly on the side of climate and science denial, in its editorial pages. This week sees the first NYT installment by the ex Wall Street Journal columnist and author Bret Stephens (also former editor of the The Jerusalem Post). He is a professional contrarian, well known for his denial of the importance and reality of climate change, as well as other right wing positions. I assume the New York Times added Stephens to their stable of…

The antivaccine conspiracy theory narrative: You want it darker?

Some of you might have been wondering just WTF has been going on here on the old blog, given the relative paucity of posts over the last week and the "reruns" from the distant past that I've been posting. I address this question because I realize that not everyone reads the comments and it's quite possible some of you might have missed it, but here in Michigan we had an enormous windstorm last Wednesday that knocked out power to 800,000+ people. Unfortunately, Orac was one of them. True, we did get the power back over the weekend, but then, in a cruel twist of fate, we lot power again on…

Facts Don't Always Backfire: The Estate Tax Edition

I'm loathe to disagree with Digby because I think a variant of the Delong Rules of Krugman also apply to her too. Digby, like others on the intertubes, is very concerned about work by Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifle, and others (covered in this Boston Globe article) which shows that: Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It's this: Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University…

Making the A.I.-Climate connection

Anyone asked to identify the two biggest forces for change in the world today could do worse than choose artificial intelligence and climate change. Both are products of technology whose effects are only beginning to be felt, and the ultimate consequences of both will almost certainly be transformative in every sense of the word. Other than that, there hasn't been much tying them together. Until now. Welcome to Climate City, a label that a group of current and former data analysts and entrepreneurs has applied to Asheville, N.C. It might seem an unlikely spot for revolutionary thinking on…

More Consequences of Undisclosed Science: Pennsylvania Sues Drug Makers

By David Michaels The state of Pennsylvania has filed lawsuits against three drug manufacturers, claiming the firms fraudulently marketed antipsychotic drugs. According to Bloomberg News, the state alleges that Eli Lilly & Co. âhid the risks and exaggerated the benefits of its antipsychotic medication Zyprexa while persuading doctors to prescribe it for unapproved uses.â AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson's Janssen Pharmaceutical are accused of doing the same for other drugs: The defendants cost Pennsylvania's Medicaid and drug assistance for the elderly program millions of dollars for…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Humor Shown To Be Fundamental To Our Success As A Species: First universal theory of humour answers how and why we find things funny. Published June 12, The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour by Alastair Clarke answers the centuries old question of what is humour. Clarke explains how and why we find things funny and identifies the reason humour is common to all human societies, its fundamental role in the evolution of homo sapiens and its continuing importance in the cognitive development of infants. Male Bird At Smithsonian's National Zoo Has Special Reason To Celebrate Father's Day: How…

Could DIY biologists tackle problems with pollutants?

Some of the things that are attracting people to DIY biology are: the idea of doing science with others for fun the possibility of doing something that might be beneficial to society being part of larger movement All of those notions appeal to me and since I've been involved with biotech for many years, I have lots of project ideas. After thinking about the yogurt and melamine detection project, I started to wonder if a DIY project could even have a bigger impact, and say, develop a cheap test for heavy metals like arsenic or lead. In Seattle, it costs between $30 and $50 to test water…

Response to Rowe on Polygamy

Jon Rowe has responded to my post on the polygamy debate that has been going on in the blog neighborhood. He writes: I don't have time to address all the issues, but I must say that I'm a little taken aback by Ed Brayton's dismissive attitude towards my rationale; he doesn't even examine my underlying premise. But it's a premise that needs to be examined. First, let me apologize if I appeared to be merely dismissive of his premise. Jon's thoughts on any subject deserve nothing less than thorough consideration as he always presents challenging and well thought out ideas. That doesn't mean we'…

Why I'll be Skipping Ender's Game

I went through an Orson Scott Card phase while I was in graduate school. I started with his most famous novel, Ender's Game, which I enjoyed immensely. I then proceeded, over the next year or so, to read all of the novels he had written to that point. At that time I didn't know anything about Card as a person, but there were clues in his novels. Though I enjoyed most of his novels, there were a few lemons in the batch as well. Most egregiously, there was an awful piece of dreck called Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The title should have been a giveaway. Then there was…

Carnage in Bonn!

Remember at the end of my last chess post when I wrote: But no need to despair! This is just the feeling out period. I suspect the real match will begin shortly. Oh baby! Was I more right than I knew! Vishy Anand drew first blood in the big chess match today, and did so in fine style. Once again Kramnik opened with his queen pawn, and Anand replied with the Slav. But whereas game one saw Kramnik employ the insomnia-curing Exchange Variation, this time we had the ultra-sharp Meran Variation. After fourteen moves of well-known theory, Anand, playing black, bashed out a novelty: V.…

Links for 2009-10-10

Green Energy Should Trump Politics: Daniel Lyons | Newsweek Daniel Lyons | Techtonic Shifts | Newsweek.com "[L]ook at what [scientists] are up against: a noisy babble of morons and Luddites, the "Drill, baby, drill" crowd, the birthers, and tea-party kooks who have done their best to derail health-care reform and will do the same to any kind of energy policy. [OSTP Director John] Holdren has an undergraduate degree from MIT and a Ph.D. from Stanford; he has won countless awards for his work on nuclear proliferation, climate change, alternative energy, and population growth. But now he must…

Must people die before DSHEA is repealed?

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) allows herbal and non-herbal supplements to be sold in the US without demonstration of effectiveness or safety. Despite recent improvements in Good Manufacturing Practices required of supplement manufacturers, these products still pose significant risks to the population simply because the hands of regulatory authorities are tied - products cannot be removed from the market until there is evidence for lack of safety, meaning that consumers must first be harmed before FDA is authorized to intervene. After cautions a couple weeks…

Framing Science or Dumbing it Down

Fellow SciBloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet have a short essay in this week's Science that says scientists need to adopt the "framing" strategy that right-wing propagandists have been so successful with over the past couple of decades -- if science is ever to trump the neo-conservative claptrap that infects global warming and evolution debates, among other important public policy issues. It's generating a lot of attention in these parts of the blogosphere and throughout the scientific community, I expect. Subscribers can read the whole thing but the publicly accessible one-line summary is…

Spookfish eye uses mirrors instead of a lens

In the twilit waters of the deep ocean, beneath about 1000m of water, swims the brownsnout spookfish (Dolichopteryx longipes). Like many other deep-sea fish, the spookfish is adapted to make the most of what little light penetrates to these depths, but it does so with some of the strangest eyes in the animal kingdom. For a start, each eye is split into two connected parts, so the animal looks like it actually has four. One half points upwards and gives the spookfish a view of the ocean above. The other points downwards into the abyss below and it's this half that makes the spookfish unique.…

Neurological "Personhood"

Ronald Bailey at Reason reviews an interesting article in the American Journal of Bioethics by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein and the responses to it. Farah and Heberlein argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists in the human brain, it is so prone to being fooled by clearly non-person objects that it suggests that no reasonable standard for personhood can exist. Many commenters took issue with that argument. Money quote: Farah and Heberlein contend that the personhood brain network evolved because as an intensely social species, our ancestors' survival was…

Silence is the enemy: addressing the causes.

Yesterday, in my first post about the Silence is the Enemy campaign, I wrote: Addressing rape directly. From the point of view of ethics, you'd think this would be a very short discussion. It is wrong to commit sexual violence. It is wrong to act out your frustration or your sense of entitlement or your need to feel that there is something in your life that is within your control on the body of another human being. It is wrong to treat a woman or a child (or another man) as less than fully human. Anyone who would argue otherwise could only be a moral monster. Or thoroughly steeped in a…

What Can We Learn from Cockroaches of the Sea?

In my Topics in Marine Science class that I teach at Western Washington University, we spend a week on marine mammals and a portion of that time talking about whaling. We discuss the use of whale oil for illuminants, the 1930s as the Whaling Olympic era, the devastation of certain whale populations, and the formation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). We examine the shift in values as a world that was largely pro-whaling became largely anti-whaling and how science (e.g., the discovery of whale song) and conservation (e.g., Greenpeace) played a role in that ethical shift. I ask…

Shamans in the hospital---barbarians at the gate?

As my readers know, I take a very hard line on alternative medicine, not because I just don't like it, but because it harms, both actively with dangerous treatments, and passively by keeping people from effective science-based treatments. So what am I to think about a hospital in California that is now allowing Hmong shamans to perform healing rituals on patients? There is a long history of religious and quasi-religious beliefs interfering with good health care. This interference comes in many forms. "Mainstream" Religions Religion obviously has a strong influence on people's health…

Quackery, fraud, and irresponsible practice

There is no clear definition of "quackery". Stephen Barrett, founder of Quackwatch, discusses the slippery nature of the definition and the issues of intent and competence. Defining quackery of necessity involves some subjective judgment, but there are objective parameters we can apply. If someone is hyping a medical practice without adequate scientific evidence and is profiting from it, they are a quack. Quackery differs from "fraud", which is a legal concept. In my state health care fraud is defined as: Intentional deception or misrepresentation made by a person with the knowledge…

Inequality and the Perception of Fairness

David Leonhardt has an excellent column on the squeezed middle class. He notes that while inequality is increasing, the other common complaint - that the income of middle class workers is now more volatile - is not supported by government statistics. There has been no great risk shift, at least when you look at income. As Leonhardt notes, accurately diagnosing the problem is a necessary part of coming up with a solution: There is now a big push in both Washington and state capitals to come up with policies that can alleviate middle-class anxiety. That's all for the good. In fact, it is…

March 15th Democratic Primary Results: What does it mean?

I'm starting this post before any primary results are in, and I'll add the outcome of the primaries below, where I will also compare the results to my predictions and discuss what I think this means for the overall process of the Democratic primaries. But first, I wanted to get some thoughts down to contextualize my thinking on this. I'll publish this post now, at mid-day Tuesday, so look for an update late Tuesday night, or early Wednesday. I like Hillary Clinton, and I often think that her presidency would be better than a Sanders presidency, with an inaugural in 2017. This is based on…

Surprise! John Oliver's vaccine segment has given antivaxers a sad.

I know that a lot of you like John Oliver and watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver , and I do too. In particular, I love how he devotes 20 minute segments of his show to intelligent long form comedy about all sorts of issues, including scientific and medical issues, including issues that I never would have thought I was interested in. Indeed, there are lots of times when he covers news stories better than the news media. So when he did a segment on vaccines last night—and a segment that was longer than his usual major segments—you know I would be incredibly interested. Here's a video of…

Erika Is A Remnant: UPDATED

Saturday Mid Day UPDATE: Erika is now an ex-tropical storm. A real hurricane has an eye. Erika is a cartoon dead eye (see graphic above). When the Hurricane Prediction Center woke up this morning, they found Erika, ripped asunder by the rugged terrain of Hispaniola, to have "... degenerated into a trough of low pressure." The latest update from the NWS says, "this will be the last advisory on this system by the National Hurricane Center unless regeneration occurs." Which gives me an idea. If Erika, this year's Atlantic "E" storm, does regenerate into a named storm, it should take the…

Pharmacists, emergency contraception, and the responsibilities of a profession

As someone who has been associated with colleges of pharmacy as student or professor for 25 years, I feel compelled to weigh in on the debate raging in the US between a pharmacist's right of conscientious objection to filling certain prescriptions and their responsibilities as a licensed health professional of the state. I originally intended this discussion to target the emergency contraceptive, Plan B. However, today's post by Tara about a pharmacist refusing to fill a Vicodin prescription for a relative after breast surgery reminds me of the slippery slope we face in permitting health…

Superbrains will not come out of a test tube

Stephen Hsu thinks super intelligent humans are coming. He thinks this because he's very impressed with genetic engineering (he's a physicist), and believes that the way to make people more intelligent is to adjust their genes, and therefore, more gene tweaking will lead to more intelligent people, inevitably. And not just intelligent, but super-intelligent, with IQs about 1000, even though he has no idea what that means, or for that matter, even though no one really knows what an IQ of 100 means. We're going to figure out all the genes that are involved in intelligence, and then we'll just…

Antivaxers on Twitter: Fake news and Twitter bots

Two years ago, I wrote about a study that demonstrated how the antivaccine movement had learned to use Twitter to amplify their antiscience message. At the time, I noted how in 2014, when the whole "CDC whistleblower" conspiracy theory was first hatched, antivaxers were so bad at Twitter, so obvious, so naive. The Tweeted inane claims at government officials, scientists, legislators, and whoever else might have influence on vaccine policy, using hashtags like #CDCwhistleblower and #hearmewell. (These hashtags are still in use, but much less active.) However they did get better, to the point…

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