Politics
bcohen | March 4, 2009Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4
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Part 2 with Christopher Henke, discussing his book Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Now I can get back to the interpretive framework and your own concepts when understanding your empirical evidence. "Repair" is a guiding framework for you here, a way of approaching, understanding, and explaining your research findings. So what do you mean, repair?
CH: We use the term repair in everyday life to describe the process of fixing things---sociologists use repair as a…
catdynamics | March 3, 2009Sheril over at the Intersection commits a fallacy.
Worse than that, she undermines the rationale for all science in the progress.
In a post over at the Intersection, Sheril makes a variation on an old argument - the "why spend money on space when there is so much that needs doing here on Earth".
Or, specifically: "All I'm saying is, just perhaps--for the time being--we might be better off spending the kind of figures currently invested in large scale BIG 'what if?' projects on more proximate concerns...
My exuberance over the possibility of an eventual planetary census is tempered as this…
catdynamics | March 3, 2009If the US assumes liability for Credit Default Swaps issued by financial institutions, its potential exposure is many times its gross domestic product.
If the US does not take on this liability it risks annihilation of the modern financial system.
The only solution is to seize both sides.
Seriously.
I mean it
Ok, Credit Default Swaps, crudely are bond insurance - give someone a loan, and you can get insurance against the borrower defaulting (it gets more complicated, since there can be payments invoked when other triggers short of default activate, but those are refinements).
Very sensible,…
pontiff | March 3, 2009The NSF has put up a "recovery" page for the stimulus bill: http://www.nsf.gov/recovery. Interestingly it appears that there is an link to an rss feed for "weekly reports." These appear to be excel files of the spending done by the NSF under the stimulus act as of that week (so far nada has been spent.)
Cool, now we can set up a betting pool for spending amounts as of a given date :)
clock | March 3, 2009John Conyers and Open Access:
Pushed by scientists everywhere, the NIH and other government agencies were increasingly exploring this obviously better model for spreading knowledge. Proprietary publishers, however, didn't like it. And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they've adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition -- they've gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don't like. If H.R. 801 is passed, the government can't even experiment with supporting publishing models that assure that the people who have paid for the research can actually…
gregladen | March 3, 2009Seriously! The Franken team is now entering the 'defense' phase of the absurd Election Challenge launched by Norman Coleman, who lost the election for Senate to Al Franken but who refuses to give up his seat.
If everybody who reads this blog sends five dollars to Al, they'll have enough to ... well, to make some photocopies or something. But every little bit helps!!!!!!!
Rumors are, as you know, that the Coleman Campaign is out fund raising. We've got to help Al.
clock | March 3, 2009Under the fold:
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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Harold Varmus
Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin
Political HumorJoke of the Day
drorzel | March 3, 2009Back before things went pear-shaped this weekend, Jonathan Zasloff had a good post about why "clean coal" is important:
I think it's terrific that the Coen Brothers are making funny, effective ads against relying on "clean coal" as part of the US energy program. But I worry that the clean energy community is really missing the boat here.
Clean coal research and development is absolutely crucial in fighting climate change not for us, but for India and China. India has the fourth largest reserves of coal in the world -- most of it very dirty, with high ash content. It currently imports 70%…
cmooney | March 3, 2009The Washington Post (the news part) reports that the man who is now one of my senators, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, has placed a hold on the nominations of John Holdren and Jane Lubchencho, and won't allow them to be voted on. Reportedly, "Menendez is using the holds as leverage to get Senate leaders' attention for a matter related to Cuba rather than questioning the nominees' credentials."
What a complete outrage. These nominees need to work on climate change, science advising, and much else; they have no role in Cuba policy. Obama named them back in December--they should be in their…
oracknows | March 3, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Senator Tom Harkin's (D-IA) little woo-fest in the Senate's Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which he called Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation. I and a lot of the rest of the medical blogosphere (such as PalMD, Val Jones, and Tufted Titmouse) shook our heads in disbelief and disgust at Harkin's statement (video here) about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM):
One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has…
bcohen | March 3, 2009The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (MIT Press, 2008), with its author Christopher Henke. Henke is an assistant professor of sociology at Colgate University, an STS scholar, and a contributor to Colgate's environmental studies program.
Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power, says its publisher, "explores the ways that science helped build the Salinas Valley and California's broader farm industry." In doing so, Henke provides an account of "how agricultural scientists and…
gregladen | March 3, 2009Norm Coleman had to pay a $7,500 fine yesterday for failure to disclose important evidence in the 26 day long Franken-Coleman Senatorial Election Challenge Trial. The plaintiff, Coleman, also claimed in a written statement to the court that since the number of illegal votes cast in this election exceeds the narrow margin of difference between the two candidates (which has Franken as the winner), the election needs to be set aside. However, Coleman has failed to show that any votes were actually cast illegally, or to make any compelling legal argument that this extraordinary request be…
catdynamics | March 2, 2009so, as you may have heard, AIG, the insurance giant "lost" $61 billion and change this last quarter...
welll, I found it, I think,
but I can't be sure, since it could be someone else's $60 billion, I mean one big pile of used $20s looks much like another;
anyway, the US taxpayers are going to cover AIG on this one,
so "finders keepers", eh?
and the tens of trillions in Credit Default Swaps that the major ex-investment banks are carrying on their balance sheets
they're also mine,
well most of them,
I think Goldman Sachs got some too
it was such a deal, I mean the odds were ridiculously good
I…
oracknows | March 2, 2009The Tufted Titmouse explains in a spot-on parody of Senator Harkin's statement to his Senate panel.
I'm tellin' ya, "integrative" reporting is the wave of the future, just like "integrative" medicine.
clock | March 2, 2009A Hurdle for Health Reform: Patients and Their Doctors:
Dr. Harold Varmus, the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a former director of the National Institutes of Health, said increasing public access to the findings of medical research would be important for health care reform to succeed.
"One obvious goal is getting information out to health care practitioners about effectiveness experiments," said Dr. Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning cancer biologist and the author of the new book "The Art and Politics of Science" (Norton). "This is going to be crucial, because…
clock | March 2, 2009Senator Tom Harkin luvz him some alternative medicine. And he hates when the studies demonstrate those things don't work, so he tries to push them into the Obama Administration's health care plan by force. Read Orac, PalMD and PZ for details (and for info what you can do). This administration is supposed to be reality-based - let's make sure the wackos don't change that....
amillikan | March 2, 2009Following President Obama's address to Congress Tuesday, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal delivered a speech on behalf of the Republican National Committee that criticized a government spending bill, claiming it was "larded with wasteful spending" because it allotted $140 million for "something called 'volcano monitoring.' " But with 65 active volcanoes in the United States alone and the well-documented consequences of what happens when natural disaster potentials are not taken seriously, several ScienceBloggers are calling out Jindal and the idea that volcano monitoring isn't a good use of…
pharyngula | March 2, 2009Democratic Senator Tom Harkin is the pol who pushed a major "alternative medicine" proposal through congress that led to the formation of the NCCAM, a hotbed of government-sponsored quackery. He now regrets the effort, but for all the wrong reasons. It's hard to imagine a more damning statement that reveals an utter ignorance of how science should work than this one:
Sen. Tom Harkin, the proud father of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that NCCAM had disappointed him by disproving too many alternative therapies.
"One of the…
ddobbs | March 2, 2009Over at Healthcare ZDNet, a site new to me, Dana Blankenhorn says
The Obama strategy for achieving health reform is now clear.
Get the money first. This changes the terms of the debate, from what will it cost to how do we do things more efficiently?
He's got a point, but it seems to me he's only half right -- or a bit less -- for the push to establish comparative effectiveness data based on (the establishment of) electronic health records also does much to answer how to do things efficiently. That data will help identify where expensive procedures and drugs bring benefit and where they don't…