Policy and Politics
tfk | August 2, 2010T. Ryan Gregory asks this important question: Who is a scientist? It's a followup to a post titled: "Graduate students are not professional scientists. Discuss," which â briefly â argued that grad students are scientists in training, not yet scientists-full-stop. In the later post, he explains:
Here are the criteria I threw out off-handedly for the purpose of discussing the NYT story about science blogs [this one -Josh]:
- Does scientific research for a living,
- Publishes research in peer-reviewed journals,
- Is funded by granting agencies to do it,
- Does not just write about it, or…
tfk | August 1, 2010Deepwater Horizon Alarm Intentionally Disabled:
Testifying before a federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Transocean employee Michael Williams said that an alarm designed to warn the crew if combustible gases were in danger of igniting was deliberately disabled. â¦
Williams also told the panel that the computers used to control drilling operations on the rig froze regularly, resulting in blank blue screens, a phenomenon he said he and fellow employees ominously labeled, "the blue screen of death."
Seriously, Microsoft is not to be trusted.
tfk | July 27, 2010Disco. president Bruce Chapman wonders:
It is not clear why the number of academic freedom cases seem to be increasing. Is it because the iron hand of ideological conformity is squeezing professors more tightly? Or is it because more subjects of attack are fighting back in court?
Or is it because he's making numbers up from thin air? Might it be not clear that the number of academic freedom cases is increasing? Could Chapman's staff be ginning up meritless claims of academic freedom violations so he has things to blog about?
tfk | July 26, 2010An interesting new article today at the Skeptic's Dictionary, explaining the backfire effect. Several recent papers have found that information contradicting people's initial beliefs can actually increase their acceptance of those beliefs. This is true in political contexts and in religious context. In one example, people given false information about a Supreme Court nominee (which played to their biases) wound up retaining their heightened negative views of the nominee after having the negative claims refuted.
Skeptic's Dictionary author Robert Carroll concludes:
The backfire effect…
tfk | July 25, 2010
I spent the last few days at the 5th Netroots Nation, in Las Vegas. As always, the conference has been a whirlwind of political geekery and good, clean fun. This year featured a video address by the President, and Q&A sessions with the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate, not to mention two panels on the use of snark in politics.
My obligations here finished early. I'd been involved with three panel submissions, of which two were approved: one about politicized sciences and the other on politicized education. My colleague Steve Newton took over on the latter…
tfk | July 20, 2010Calitics has the story about that whooping cough epidemic:
With whooping cough now at epidemic levels, it's becoming clear that one of the primary culprits is the idiotic trend over the last 10 years of parents, mostly affluent whites, opting out of vaccination out of a baseless fear that the vaccines are unsafe.
tfk | July 19, 2010In February, at the AAAS meetings in San Diego, Stephen Schneider gave a gangbuster talk about climate change denial. Schneider was energetic, feisty, and absolutely right about the challenges faced by scientists trying to talk to the media. NCSE's Genie Scott, a fellow panelist, came away deeply impressed, and she knows more than most about giving a good presentation on how scientists should react to science denial. Little wonder, since Schneider has been at the heart of research on global warming since the early 1970s, and has recognized for just as long that the science is not enough…
tfk | July 19, 2010Sensuous Curmudgeon and PZ are both having fun poking through the background of Kansas gubernatorial candidate Joan Heffington. Heffington forthrightly calls for creationism to be taught in public schools, and pledged to demand advocates offer a âbiblical and constitutional reason exist for the passage of any new law." Yeesh.
PZ responds to this development:
Quick, somebody reassure me that she's a fringe candidate without a prayer of getting into office. Please. It's Monday, the day is painful enough.
Yes, she's a fringe candidate without a prayer of getting into public office. But that's…
tfk | July 17, 2010Shorter PZ Myers: Backlash? Harming the cause? Where?:
Simplicity is preferable to science.
Let us accept, arguendo that this post is poorly written. So what? Does that mean it's wrong? When did PZ Myers â the scourge of framing â come to defend the notion that science discussions are best evaluated based on their presentation rather than their content?
Jason's post was simpler because he skipped over obvious complications to the story he was trying to tell, along the way ignoring well-known sources of bias, skipping basic steps in polls interpretation, cherrypicking a cutoff for the data…
tfk | July 16, 2010The back and forth here in comments and at Jason Rosenhouse's blog has been interesting and stimulating in the last few days. The question of how the rise of New Atheism will or has changed public attitudes towards evolution, towards religion, and towards atheism/atheists are all important questions that have extracted gallons of ink from a lot of bloggers and book authors. But to date, I know of no attempts to measure those effects scientifically. This is odd, since all the advocates on all sides are heavily invested in science as a way of knowing about the world.
Part of the problem is…
tfk | July 15, 2010â¦hypothesis testing!
To recap, Jason Rosenhouse, who I love like a brother, put up a post using a poll from VCU and data from Gallup polling to address a hypothesis about "New Atheists," a hypothesis he attributes broadly to the critics of "New Atheism." He's since clarified (in a comment pledging not to reply further here, alas) that he was thinking of a comment by Michael Ruse that New Atheists have been "a bloody disaster," with Jason add: "it is hard to find a critic of the NA's who has not" claimed "the NA's are hurting the cause of good science education."
He proposed to test this…
tfk | July 14, 2010Attention conservation notice: 3000 words about how smart people who ought to know better are reading way too much into a poll.
Last May, NCSE reported on a poll on evolution conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University. The results were, to my eye, in line with most of the other polling out there, so I never wrote about it here, other than a passing mention in a post about my WaPo review of Elaine Howard Ecklund's Science vs. Religion.
Anyway, a month and a half later, Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse have discovered the poll, and each has found different questions in the poll that they…
tfk | July 14, 2010
I saw war criminal John Yoo as I was heading to the gym this morning. Lacking proper equipment, I did not effect a citizen's arrest, but I did give him a stern glare. He's surprisingly tall.
tfk | July 14, 2010Over the weekend, the skeptics gathered at James Randi's annual The Amazing Meeting, or TAM. By all accounts, it was a great show. Probably the most buzz came from a talk by Phil Plait, which became known as the "don't be a dick" speech, because, well, he argued that skeptics will be most effective when they aren't dicks.
As I wasn't there, I couldn't comment on the speech, but twitter exploded over it. A surprising number of PZ Myers' fans seemed to think Plait was talking about PZ, though PZ wasn't mentioned. Interesting, that PZ's supporters either think he's a dick, or think other…
tfk | July 14, 2010Joel Mathis is upset with the National Review. The conservative journal responds to last week's ruling against the federal Defense of Marriage Act, an act that blocks legal recognition of legal marriages between same-sex couples, by arguing:
If heterosexual coupling did not regularly produce children there would be no reason for the institution of marriage to exist, let alone for governments to recognize it.
As Joel notes, this is a pretty silly basis for opposing gay marriage.
What a depressingly -- implausibly -- narrow view of marriage.
No doubt, children are a common byproduct of…
tfk | July 13, 2010In the comments on my previous post, there's an important update from George Soule, a communications director at the Carnegie Foundation, and I updated the post to reflect his clarifications.
In chatting with him, he had a useful explanation of how the science standards process differs from that which applied to the Common Core standards in English language arts and in mathematics. Forty-eight governors have committed to using those standards, which are well on their way to final adoption. He's allowed me to quote part of his reply:
The conceptual science framework effort is proceeding very…
tfk | July 12, 2010A draft of the Standards Framework for national science standards, funded by the Carnegie Foundation and sponsored by the National Governors Association and the US Chamber of Commerce (among others), has been published. The National Research Council drafted the framework, and is seeking comment until August 2, and I'll have more to say as I work through the draft. Forty-eight states (excluding Texas and Alaska) have agreed to use English Language Arts and Mathematics standards produced through a similar process, and many people see these standards as natural additions to that national…
tfk | July 9, 2010Pepsi's Chief Scientific Officer addresses #Sbfail:
Earlier this week, PepsiCoâs blog, Food Frontiers, was added to ScienceBlogs.com so we could begin open discussions about the role science can play in finding solutions to global nutrition challenges.
Mmmm, sorta. The blog was indeed added (then deleted), but a more accurate phrasing would be, "PepsiCo's bought ad space masquerading as a blog on ScienceBlogs.com." This is different from the path most blogs take in order to be added to Sb, and the failure to make this distinction is unfortunate, and would have been more unfortunate if this…
tfk | July 8, 2010On New Year's Eve, 2009, Oscar Grant and his friends were taking BART back from the San Francisco celebrations to their homes in the East Bay. They were raucous at minimum, and reportedly started a fight on the train. Police pulled them off the train because of their behavior, and planned to arrest them. Grant struggled during his arrest, and two officers pinned him down while trying to cuff him. One officer, Johannes Mehserle, drew his service pistol and shot Grant once in the back, killing him.
The shooting was caught on a cell phone video camera, which amplified the shooting's impact…
tfk | July 8, 2010Shorter Senator David Vitter:
What has abortion got to do with women?
After reporters asked why Vitter assigned a women's issues portfolio to an aide who had been charged with domestic violence after threatening his girlfriend with a knife. Vitter told the reporters: "he handled issues including abortion issues, including several other issues, but not women's affairs."