Politics
gregladen | December 19, 2008Update: Franken is ahead by 249 votes !!!
UPDATE: DONE with the Franken re-entered (some withdrawn) ... now looking at some ballots that were set aside earlier.
UPDATE: ... bam... the canvassing board just threw out consideration of all the duplicate ballots except seven that have some reasonable 'on the face' cases.
UPDATE: The small number of duplicate issue but addressable "on the face" is done.
UPDATE: They are now going through miscellaneous challenges, of which I don't think there are too many. I think for various reasons that this is going to be mainly reductions in Franken's…
catdynamics | December 18, 2008ScienceDebate2008 are reporting that John Holdren is going to be nominated as Presidential Science Adivsor, and Jane Lubchenco for head of NOAA.
This is good news.
John Holdren is a physicist (plasma/fusion physics) with expertise in energy policy, environmental issues and security.
Good combo, and, strangely, my pick, way back when (see comments).
More Holdren info.
Good choice, but Obama is going to need a high up biologist somewhere, since Chu and Holdren are now the top scientists on board and they overlap in expertise.
Jane Lubchenco will be in charge of air and oceans.
Excellent choice…
ddobbs | December 18, 2008As Obama solidifies his teams on science, education, and environment, attention -- and not a little worry from the drug industry -- is turning toward his hunt for a new FDA commissioner. The WSJ Health Blog reports that the FDA Commissioner Coalition, which is heavy with groups financed by the drug industry, appears increasingly concerned that Obama will appoint outspoken critics of drugmakers and the FDA, such as Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steven Nissen or Baltimore health commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, who is heading Obama's FDA assessment team.
While the coalition prominently talks…
ddobbs | December 18, 2008Atop other Obama appointments, this is one I suspect America's scientists will welcome. From the Washington Post:
Report: Holdren to Lead White House Science Policy
By Joel Achenbach
President-elect Obama will announce this weekend that he has selected physicist John Holdren, who has devoted much of his career to energy and environmental research, as his White House science adviser, according to a published report today.
The Obama transition office would not confirm Holdren's selection. Last night, asked by The Post to comment on the science adviser search, Holdren responded by e-mail that…
pharyngula | December 18, 2008No, the Minnesota recount is not over yet, and we still don't know whether Franken or Coleman will be our senator. At last word, Coleman held a 192 vote lead, but thousands of ballots are awaiting a verdict on eligibility from the state Supreme Court. It's the most mind-numbingly tedious process ever, so far.
However, scrutiny of the ballots has revealed one vote for the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Soil and Water Conservation Supervisor, and another for Franken and Lizard People for US Senator. The latter was rejected as an overvote, but the former did also have a vote that counted for Al…
clock | December 18, 2008Listen here to the The December 16, 2008 David E. Barmes Global Health Lecture given by Dr.Harold Varmus:
Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, is President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Dr. Varmus chairs the Scientific Board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health program and leads the Advisory Committee for the Global Health Division. He was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission on Macroeconomics…
j7uy5 | December 18, 2008Saudi
offers $10m for shoes thrown by journo
Iraq: Wednesday, December 17 - 2008 at 09:22
A Saudi man has offered $10m to buy the shoes that Iraqi journalist
Muntadar Al Zaidi hurled at US President George W. Bush, according to a
report carried by Al Arabiya net. Sixty-year-old Hassan Mohammad
Makhafa, from Aseer, south west of Saudi Arabia, said he is ready to
sell all his properties to buy Al Zaidi's shoes, which he described as
a 'medal of freedom' to put them on offer at a public auction.
HT:
href="http://www.juancole.com/2008/12/al-zaidi-injured-pleads-guilty-mosul.html">Juan…
clock | December 17, 2008Michael Pollan will be on NPR's Morning Edition tomorrow:
I'll be on NPR's Morning Edition, talking about the new Secretary of
Agriculture, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack.
What can I say? It's a good day for corn.
Less good for us eaters, perhaps. Perhaps the most disappointing thing
about this morning's press conference is that neither Tom Vilsack nor
President-Elect Obama uttered the words "food" or "eaters." Vilsack
does not have the record of a reformer. He supported the expansion of
CAFO agriculture in Iowa (gutting local control to do it) and is much
loved by the biotech industry, who…
gregladen | December 17, 2008Think back to Florida eight years ago. There is a reasonable argument that Al Gore was duly voted, even via the electoral college, to be President of the United States, but George W. Bush was placed in that office for one and only one reason: The recount process in Florida was transformed into a circus, and the mainstream press in the United States whipped large parts of the populous and many involved in the process into a panic. The delay in determining the winner was going to damage democracy. The free world could not survive any more waiting. It did not matter that the guy running…
clock | December 17, 2008That's interesting:
Croatia currently has over 400,000 users on Facebook and that is more than a 15 percent growth over last month according to our own internal statistics. Facebook tends to be one of the first locations that younger generations turn to for expressing their political frustrations. There is no doubt that Facebook will continue to be a center for political expression.
Svetlana Gladkova suggests that the primary reason he was arrested was not simply that he created the Facebook group but that, "he is actually the president of one of the local branches of the youth of SDP (social…
gregladen | December 17, 2008Moments ago, the Minnesota State Canvassing Board has completed the review of several hundred challenges produced during the process of recounting the November 5th ballots in the US Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. The next stage will be to review the Coleman challenges, of which there are approximately double the number as Franken challenges. While it is possible that the Canvassing board will begin looking at Coleman challenges today, word has it that they are going to knock off a half hour early after a brief discussion of some other issues. The original plan to finish…
illconsidered | December 17, 2008How's this for jaw dropping, mind-boggling, unintentional irony?
Question to the Bush administration at this year's UN climate change talks:
If you look back over the course of the last few years, is there anything you would have done differently or is there anything you wished had happened but didn't happen?
Answer:
I wish first that Russia had made its mind up sooner as to whether it was going to join Kyoto or not.
Read the particulars here. (No it won't make anymore sense)
oracknows | December 17, 2008I had always suspected that this is what was really going on:
Actually, it would have been a lot more fun if this had been what really happened.
drorzel | December 17, 2008Steve Hsu has a nice post on teaching, following up on the Malcolm Gladwell piece that everyone is talking about. Steve took the time to track down the Brookings Institute report mentioned in the piece, and highlights two graphs:
The top figure shows that certification has no impact on teaching effectiveness. The second shows that effectiveness measured in the years 1 and 2 is predictive of effectiveness in the subsequent year. In this case effectiveness is defined by the average change in percentile ranking of students in the teacher's class. Good teachers help their students to improve…
gregladen | December 17, 2008"There must have been some magic in clean coal technology; for when they looked for pollutants there was nearly none to see"
Huh?
Do you know "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me!"? If not, discover it. NPR, weekends. But go to the gym and work out your core body first because otherwise you might hurt yourself laughing.
Anyway, one of the routines they do is to describe three (or four?) unbelievable stories ... items in the news ... all but one of which is in fact not true. The contestant (oh, did I mention that this is a sort of game show?) has to determine which of the unbelievable store is is…
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2008The title is the title of a nice essay at Crikey. I especially like this:
Bernadette McMenamin of ChildWise, you've crossed the line, defaming everyone who’s protested the government’s plans. "Most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect, advocating child p-rnography," you said. How dare you!
Ms McMenamin, to really stop child abuse we need to spend our resources efficiently. Let's run through it one more time. And let's skip those hysterical, made-up "statistics" you still peddle. Child abuse is bad enough without heading into your…
evolvingthoughts | December 16, 2008The Bradley Report [Here] is proposing, among other things, that [Australian] students have vouchers to attend the university they want to, rather than making the university the funding recipient directly. Two things stand out to me. One is that this makes higher learning a marketable commodity, in which the desires of the consumers determines what is most important intellectually. So if everyone wants to be a business manager, accountant or surfing doctor, that is what we should fund? There's no important cultural legacy to be supported? If not, why does the government support art? Surely…
tqa | December 16, 2008
Discussing responsibility at a Chicago school:
"You know, if they do their business, if they've got some poop -- you got to make sure that you're not just leaving it there," Obama said.
I don't suppose there's any way we could take up a collection to get that chiseled into the walls at the Capitol, is there? Preferably over the presiding officer's chair in each chamber.
gregladen | December 16, 2008)Updated) According to several different sources of information, it appears that when the challenged ballots are figured into the current Minnesota Senate Seat Recount, Candidate Al Franken will move ahead of incumbent Senator Norm Coleman by somewhere between eight and twelve votes. This is significantly different than I had expected. I had predicted that Franken would move ahead by one vote because, well, that would be really funny.
Both sides of the race have withdrawn the vast majority of challenged ballots. Secretary of state Ritchie delayed the start of the canvassing board's meeting…
pharyngula | December 16, 2008Lots of people complained that throwing shoes at the president was an act of violence, and therefore beyond the pale of what should be allowed. I think they're wrong, that it's a harmless expression of naked contempt, and that there ought to be more contempt expressed towards this president, but let's compromise. No throwing shoes. How about politely handing them to him?
The Rude Pundit had a brilliant and obvious idea.
This morning, the Rude Pundit decided to honor the efforts of Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi shoe-tosser, by taking out a raggedy old pair of sneakers, putting them in a…