Experts
mikethemadbiologist | June 25, 2010Ian Welsh, in "The bloody obviousness of most good predictions", describes how many people simply can't bring themselves to state the obvious:
The Prof, a wonderful teacher who went by Dr. Anderson, and to whose door I once tacked a list of 15 intellectual disagreements, asked the class a simple question.
"How many of you treat men and women exactly the same? Put up your hands if you do."
Everyone's hands went up. Everyone except mine, that is.
She then asked how many people didn't treat men and women the same.
I put up my hand.
I spent the next 15 minutes being villified by my classmates,…
mikethemadbiologist | June 12, 2010Ezra Klein makes a great catch:
Obama has also called in some of the many scientists on the federal payroll, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Chu at one point pushed the unusual idea of using gamma rays to peer into the blowout preventer to determine if its valves were closed, a technique he experimented with in graduate school while studying radioactive decay.
The suggestion at first elicited snickering and "Incredible Hulk" jokes. Then they tried it, and it worked. "They weren't hot on his ideas," a senior White House official said of BP's initial…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2010I've had serious doubts all along about the anthrax investigation, but the latest turn raises even more questions about the government's case. According to former co-worker of Ivins' and former USAMRIID microbacteriologist Henry Heine, the science doesn't seem to support Ivins' guilt (italics mine):
Heine told the panel that the most common way of growing bacteria at USAMRIID is in flasks. Based on the number of envelopes mailed out (eight to 10), the concentration of spores in the powder (10 to the 12th power spores per gram) and the number of grams of anthrax per envelope (1 to 2 grams),…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2009ScienceBlogling PalMD does a good job of eviscerating the false claims of expertise by woo practioner 'Dr.' Patricia Fitzgerald and the rest of the witch doctors over at The Huffington Post, so I thankfully don't have to (so many fucking morons, so little Mad Biologist...). But PalMD neglected to mention one thing about 'Dr.' Patricia Fitzgerald:
She is the "Wellness" editor of The Huffington Post.
That's right: a full-blown woomeister is the equivalent of The Huffington Post's medicine and health section. Is she an M.D.? Nope. Is she a Pharm.D.? Uh-uh. Maybe a Ph.D.? Guess what? No…
mikethemadbiologist | April 20, 2009Julian Sanchez, writing about global warming, makes an excellent point about how denialists are able to be so successful (italics original; boldtype mine):
Come to think of it, there's a certain class of rhetoric I'm going to call the "one way hash" argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of "fingerprint" for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It's really…
mikethemadbiologist | April 9, 2009There's been a lot of discussion over Obama economic advisor Larry Summers' economic ties to Wall Street (7.2 million such ties in 2008 alone). What I don't get is why Obama sees the need to keep him around.
Yes, Summers is an asshole. He was an asshole at Harvard, and I don't see why he would have changed. Yes, he's a corrupt asshole, but we already knew he was getting paid millions by a hedge fund. But what I don't get why Obama considers him to be essential. Consider these speaking fees:
GIANT BAILOUT SECTOR
Goldman Sachs: $202,500 (two speeches)
Citigroup: $99,000 (two speeches)
JP…
mikethemadbiologist | April 6, 2009There's increasing trouble brewing for Obama economic advisor Larry Summers. In 2008, while everyone knew he would play a big role in either Clinton's or Obama's administration, he pulled down $5.2 million from a hedge fund--for working one day a week. But you see, we have it all wrong (italics mine):
Mr. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president who is now the chief economic adviser to President Obama, earned nearly $5.2 million in just the last of his two years at one of the world's largest funds, according to financial records released Friday by the White House.…
mikethemadbiologist | January 27, 2009Our 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…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2009http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/node/15061
http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2009/01/bonos_welcome_to_the_pun…
I had to laugh when, by way of ScienceBlogling Joseph, I read Daniel Drezner's snarky description of Bono's first outing as a NY Times op-editorialist. But leaving high-quality snark aside, I think Bono's inclusion highlights a problem with most regular op-ed columnists: the dearth of analysts.
I'll get to Bono in a moment, but op-ed pages are usually populated by journalists--that is, ex-reporters--and not people with analytical training (I realize that the last few years of…
mikethemadbiologist | January 1, 2009And do we want to? Maybe it could help formally include non-publishing activities in a scientist's evaluation?
When I first read this PLoS Computational Biology article, "I Am Not a Scientist, I Am a Number", I was ready to beat down on its ass. After all, how seriously can you take something like this which describes a "Scholar Factor":
I'm surprised there's no arcsine transformation in there (I said I wouldn't beat the crap out of it, not give it hugs and kisses). By way of further explanation (if you really want it):
H Factor is as it is now--the number of papers cited more than H…
mikethemadbiologist | December 26, 2008So, if you go on the teevee machine and tell people that investment banks should be allowed to pay out dividends, and you're simply an economics professor, we should probably take the claim at face value. But what if you have tens of thousands of shares as compensation for being a board member? Oops:
I did some more checking, and Tyson has received over a million dollars in cash and stock options combined from Morgan Stanley. As I've noted before, you can't be a stateman and a salesman.
mikethemadbiologist | March 18, 2008While criticizing someone who does not understand the difference between artificial and natural selection--something I've successfully communicated to high school students and undergraduates--is like picking on the slow kid, his repeated nitpicking of ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford's post about the topic is illustrative of how creationists, whether they be young earth or intelligent design, operate.
Instead of dealing with Orac's or my response, Egnor quibbles with Mike over exactly what he meant. It's trolling, masquerading as intellectual discussion (and I had the same style of idiocy show…
mikethemadbiologist | November 6, 2007In commenting on a post by SA Smith that rebuts (quite well) Behe's latest ID creationist idiocy, tristero writes (bold original; italics mine):
But reading Smith's post on HIV evolution, I have to confess I can't for the life of me understand it. Ms Smith, I promise I'll spend some more time on it later and try to puzzle it out; I like that kind of a challenge (and please don't bother rewriting it for civilians, you've got better things to do!). But the tactic Behe is employing worries me, because it is so cynical, and dangerously effective.
Essentially, id creationists are slowly trying to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 31, 2007I have a week off, so I've been going to the gym in the morning later than usual. I'm still recovering from the near-lobotomization of morning radio, so I wasn't prepared for a report on the "superbug" on Fox's The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet--think of it as a cheap knockoff of Regis and Kelly. Since the sound wasn't turned on for the television, I should have just left it alone, but no, I had to check out the video on the interwubs when I came home.
First, anyone who says that evolutionary biologists suck at communicating should watch this bozo. It's a classic example of how not to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 28, 2007...doesn't invalidate the person making the prediction. Nouriel Roubini, who correctly predicted that the housing market would crater in 2007 has decided to make his critics eat crow (yes, there's some dense economics here, but wait until the end--there's a point to this madness):
Indeed a year ago when this scholar - and a few other experts such as Bob Shiller and others - argued that the biggest housing bubble in US history would end up in the worst housing bust and recession in 50 years and that home prices would fall by 20% those views were considered as coming from the moon. When…
mikethemadbiologist | August 28, 2007...and why most scientists oppose the Bush administration. In a post about hurricane Katrina, Rick Perlstein writes (bold original, italics mine):
I recently had an instructive moment with a colleague here at Campaign for America's Future. We've been discussing a series of texts for a redesign of the site meant to introduce the various themes of The Big Con. In one box, he'd placed various consequences of conservative government. In another, he'd placed descriptions various fundamentals of conservative philosophy. He'd placed "cronyism" in the first box. I gently corrected him, moving it to…
mikethemadbiologist | August 1, 2007Robert Farley takes on two of the major proponents of the Unified Theory of the Surge, Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack:
O'Hanlon and Pollack insist that this is "a war that we just might win" without pausing to indicate what "victory" means in this context; at best, it seems, we could hope for some temporary stability. They seem to define stability as a reduction of civilian casualty rates by "roughly a third since the surge began". I've written before about the nonsensical efforts of surge advocates to claim success by pointing to Iraqi government casualty figures; no one believes that…
mikethemadbiologist | July 16, 2007Matt Bai doesn't get that. In the NY Times Magazine, Bai writes (italics mine):
The emergence of the Internet age has been accompanied, in general, by a steady devaluing of expertise. A generation ago, you went to the doctor to find out about the pain in your knee; now you go to WebMD, diagnose it yourself and tell him what medicines you want. People used to trust stockbrokers and insurance agents; now they buy and sell at E*Trade and compare policies online. American voters who once looked to newspaper columnists for guidance on politics now blog their own idle punditry. Suddenly,…
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2007Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but something Huntington Willard said in that science blogging article published in Cell about how senior scientists have been trained to communicate science got me thinking.
Modern biology (the article was in the biology journal Cell) has made tremendous breakthroughs in the last half century. Yet we have not been that successful in communicating those results to the public. After all, Thursday night, three out of ten Republican candidates for president were not embarrassed to admit that they did not 'believe' in evolution. In fact, it might have…
mikethemadbiologist | April 10, 2007I've mentioned the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) before. Today, I'll be attending the NARMS public hearing which is going to discuss four questions:
1) Why, on this night
1) Are there inherent biases in the sampling strategies employed in NARMS? If so, how can they be improved to ensure that the data and interpretation are scientifically sound given current resources?
2) Are there epidemiological and/or microbiological research studies that would better serve the goals of NARMS and the regulatory work of FDA?
3) Are current plans for data harmonization and…