Politics
drorzel | March 24, 2009One of the NCAA pools I'm in has a copy of Obama's bracket entered, and the last I checked, I'm a couple of games up on him. This means I'm as qualified as anyone else to offer a plan to fix the financial crisis, and I have just the plan we need.
On the question of the AIG bonuses, I'm pretty much in agreement with the people who say that it's not worth making too much fuss over less than a tenth of a percent of the total bailout funding they're received. Passing laws to punish specific individuals is a lousy precedent, and it's not worth corrupting our principles for such a pittance. Let the…
oracknows | March 24, 2009About a month and a half ago, I happened to be fortunate enough to be able to swing the time to attend a symposium in which Brian Deer (whom anyone reading this blog lately is well familiar with) spoke. It was an opportune time, coming as it did around the time when he had just published his new blockbuster story about how Andrew Wakefield, architect of the MMR vaccine scare in the U.K., had apparently falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that started it all. The symposium was entitled Science, the Media and Responsibility for Child Health: Lessons Learned from the MMR Vaccine,…
catdynamics | March 23, 2009What if, Geithner is a Good Guy, who has a Real Secret Plan which the bailout is intended to effect, and which will do enormous public good?
I mean, we can hope, right?
That he is not just another Goldman Sachs frontman who has confused What is Good for Goldman being in the US or World Interest?
Right?
Brad deLong defends the Geithner plan to relieve the banks of their pile of crap
ok, so lets take the first assumption for granted: that a patient investor, not beholden to next quarter's cash flow or mark-to-market capitalization accounting, really can pick up systematically undervalued…
gregladen | March 23, 2009So, my friend Phil was in the Air Force up near Grand forks (where the flooding is happening now). He told me today they use to use a super tall radio tower to spot weather, and this tower was something like 70 miles away. So it was in sight, but almost unbelievably so.
Similarly, there is an end in sight for the Minnesota Senate Recount...
The end has to happen at some point, of course, because these things only seem to go on forever. Here is what is supposed to happen:
1) The state judicial panel that is now in deliberation will make a couple of decisions regarding what to do about…
jrosenhouse | March 23, 2009Distressing news from Florida:
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences announced its plans to cut 10% from its budget. It targeted three departments: Communication Sciences and Disorders; Religion; and Geology. These three departments will take a far larger cut than 10% in order to 'preserve' the integrity of other departments. In an era of 'green technology', environmental awareness, the need for natural resource management, global climate change and the need to preserve access to freshwater, the thought of decimating a Geology Department borders on insanity. This is especially true…
jlynch | March 23, 2009The Dawkins @ Oklahoma debacle continues. As Greg Lukianoff correctly notes:
Think about it: If every time a student or faculty member invited, say, Rick Warren to speak on campus, they knew they would be subjected to a thorough and time-consuming investigation by state officials, you can all but guarantee that schools across the country would think twice before inviting Rick Warren. This would be a great way for state legislatures to chill speech they dislike without ever having to find the speaker guilty of a single thing. Talk about your un-American activities.
Given the fact the…
pharyngula | March 23, 2009It's been confirmed: members of the Oklahoma legislature are investigating the suspicious circumstances of Richard Dawkins' lecture. After all, what possible excuse could UO have for inviting a known rabblerouser who doesn't happen to believe in gods? Other than his reputation as a world-famous scientist, writer, and speaker, of course.
Sure enough, I just received confirmation today in a letter from the Open Records Office at the University of Oklahoma. The letter confirms that on the day of Dawkins' speech, Oklahoma State Representative Rebecca Hamilton requested substantial information…
sa smith | March 23, 2009Is this is what Creationists mean when they put forth 'Academic Freedom' legislation?
Sure enough, I just received confirmation today in a letter from the Open Records Office at the University of Oklahoma. The letter confirms that on the day of Dawkins' speech, Oklahoma State Representative Rebecca Hamilton requested substantial information relating to the speech from Vice President for Governmental Relations Danny Hilliard. Representative Hamilton's exhaustive request included demands for all e-mails and correspondence relating to the speech; a list of all money paid to Dawkins and the…
amillikan | March 22, 2009Jane Lubchenco and John Holdren were confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate Thursday night after being stalled since March 3, when their nominations were blocked by anonymous holds in the Senate for unrelated reasons. Lubchenco will serve as the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and John Holdren will take on the role of Science Adviser to President Obama. Throughout the ordeal, ScienceBlogger Mike Dunford was unrelenting in his efforts to bring this issue to the public's attention, contacting Capitol Hill to investigate the situation, reporting his…
jrosenhouse | March 22, 2009Paul Krugman is disturbingly convincing about the merits of Obama bank bailout plan:
But it's immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating -- deliberately! -- the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be…
revere | March 22, 2009Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has the ultimate explainer/blamer on the banking meltdown. It ain't pretty and it spares nobody. Nobody:
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of…
pharyngula | March 22, 2009One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we're also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation's infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It's an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides…
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2009There are a lot of folk who think they have a handle on how to communicate science to the general public, and a lot of folk, mostly scientists, who think nobody else does. But I was reading Carl Zimmer's twittering today, about Rebecca Skoot getting a column gig for a new magazine devoted to issues of interest to women, Double X. It hit me that science journalism is not dying, it is having to adapt to a new business model.
Traditional media made its money from advertising and sales. It used a broadcast model of publishing - a single source (the printing presses or the transmitters) to many…
tlambert | March 21, 2009Glenn Reynolds declares that a private listserv run by Ezra Klein is a "scandal". Which is interesting, because I first ran into Glenn Reynolds on a private listserv run by Eugene Volokh. The members included pro-gun law professors like Reynolds, an NRA staffer and at least one journalist. I do not consider Volokh's listserv to be a scandal.
Volokh converted it to a public listserv in 2003 and traffic dropped significantly after that, though that might be a coincidence.
laelaps | March 21, 2009
The Capitol building, photographed around 7:30 AM.
An earlier attempt at the same photo, taken while crossing the street.
evolvingthoughts | March 20, 2009I am rather old fashioned, which is unsurprising since most of what I read dates from before the invention of the transistor. But I think that one can disagree with someone else without needing to call him an idiot:
This is exactly why idiots like Matthew Nisbet, who continually call for reining in of harsh criticism of religiously motivated solecisms, are floridly misguided. People can bitch about "New Atheism" all they want or they can raise their chins off their chests and actually look around at the world. The best possible way to combat atrocities of all kinds is to drag their…
catdynamics | March 20, 2009the root cause of the failure of AIG FP is that they were off by an order of magnitude as to what the risk was they were betting against
"The Seed Of Ruin Is Planted
- That year, JP Morgan approached AIG, proposing that, for a fee, AIG insure JP Morgan's complex corporate debt, in case of default. According to computer models devised by Gary Gorton, a Yale Business Professor and consultant to the unit, there was a 99.85 percent chance that AIGFP would never have to pay out on these deals. Essentially, this would happen only if the economy went into a full-blown depression, in which case, the…
catdynamics | March 20, 2009here is something that ought to keep you awake screaming in terror
From St Louis Fed (pdf)
click to embiggen
Aargh!
h/t CR
ddobbs | March 20, 2009A few weeks ago, Matt Stevens, the National Guard captain and medic who served in Iraq and whom I mentioned in my Scientific American article, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap, wrote me an email about the social unease he often encountered when he showed any behavior that might remind people he had served in Iraq -- a greater seriousness, an impatience with petty concerns or inefficiency, or even just talking about the place.
I have begun to think of military PTSD as to some extent a civilian problem rather than a soldier problem. To expand slightly here; civilians/politicians send soldiers…
illconsidered | March 20, 2009James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt yesterday put up a really interesting examination of the Copenhagen Conference's efforts to deal with just what is the "safety limit" for global warming. I won't add much accept to lament the fact that "as much as possible as soon as possible" is too vague for public policy goals.
Because really, that is the only correct answer to the question politicians want scientists to answer: how much do we need to reduce CO2 emissions?
Have a read.