Politics
drorzel | July 24, 2014This Alberto Cairo piece on "data journalism" has been kicking around for a while, and it's taken me a while to pin down what bugs me about it. I think my problem with it ultimately has to do with the first two section headers in which he identifies problems with FiveThirtyEight and Vox:
1. Data and explanatory journalism cannot be done on the cheap.
2. Data and explanatory journalism cannot be produced in a rush.
The implication here is that "data and explanatory journalism" is necessarily a weighty and complicated thing, something extremely Serious to be approached only with great care.…
gregladen | July 22, 2014[Updated: Letter to the Editor, Worthington Daily Globe.]
This is a followup on my earlier post (see "How do you say “Surprise” in Norwegian? The word is “Entenza.” I am not making that up" also reposted here) on Matt Entenza’s bid for the DFL (Democratic Party) Primary candidacy for Minnesota State Auditor.
Entenza claims he is from Greater Minnesota, and thus, would do a better job representing the interests of Greater Minnesotans. This implies that highly acclaimed sitting State Auditor and candidate for re-election Rebecca Otto is not doing well in this area. In fact, she is doing very…
gregladen | July 15, 2014How do you say “Surprise” in Norwegian? The word is “Entenza.” I am not making that up.*
DFL activists and party leaders were both surprised and annoyed when perennial candidate Matt Entenza filed at the very last moment to run for Minnesota State Auditor against sitting Auditor Rebecca Otto in this year’s primary. He claimed he would fight corporate giveaways at the local level and scrutinize spending on education, addressing the state’s achievement gap. Also, he would be nice to out-state local governments and not favor the Metro, because he was born out-state. Entenza has a habit of…
oracknows | July 14, 2014
There’s a point I feel that I have have to make briefly as I begin this post. Basically, this might look familiar, but given that I was at TAM Wednesday through Sunday, I didn’t have time to produce two separate posts, and this is important enough to be distributed as widely as possible. In any event, as I started writing this, I was on a miserably crowded, hot, stinky flight winging my way home from TAM (nothing like being stuck in coach on the tarmac in the middle of the desert before taking off—the sweat never quite goes away even after the plane cools down). This puts me in the perfect…
catdynamics | July 13, 2014There was an interesting article in the Chronicle a few weeks ago:
The Soul of the Research University by Nicholas Lemann.
Lemann provides a very interesting discussion of the contradiction between the academic ideal of the research university and the political perspective of the vocational school of further education, including some healthy historical perspective on the development of the concept in the US.
"Underlying all of this is the fundamental problem of the country’s having adopted two noncongruent ideals of higher education.
... most of the stakeholders that provide resources to…
gregladen | July 10, 2014Islamic distain for Islamic extremism
Muslim people in the Middle East are getting fed up with Islamic extremism. This is indicated by a new poll from the Pew Research Center. Nigerians, regardless of religion, dislike Boko Haram. Ninety-two percent of Lebanese are concerned about extremism in their country (that's the highest number in the poll) up from 81 percent last year.
Majorities in most of the nations polled are concerned about extremism. And in most Middle Eastern countries, concern about extremism has increased in the past year.
In Lebanon, which shares a long border with…
oracknows | July 8, 2014Over the years I’ve been studying science versus pseudoscience, medicine vs. quackery, reason versus crankery, I’ve noticed one thing. The cranks, pseudoscientists, and quacks of the world have a hard time dealing with legitimate criticism. Now, I know I sometimes get a bit—shall we say?—frisky with my criticisms. OK, obnoxious. I have, however, mellowed considerably since the dawn of this blog, as any reading of posts from the early days (or even not-so-early days) will confirm. Sure, I do occasionally still reach back into that reservoir of the “Insolence” that got me started, but I’d never…
drorzel | July 7, 2014Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach's article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week in the physics blogosphere, a pair of interviews with a BICEP2 researcher and a prominent skeptic. This, in turn, led to a lot of very predictable criticism of the BICEP2 team for over-hyping their results, and a bunch of social-media handwringing about how the…
oracknows | July 3, 2014Our regularly scheduled post will go live later this morning. In the meantime, this is a public service announcement...with GUITAR! (Oh, wait.)
As you recall, last week, the FDA inexplicably decided to lift the partial clinical hold on Stanislaw Burzynski's bogus clinical trials of antineoplastons, which he's used since the 1990s as a pretext to charge huge sums of money for "case management fees" to patients for a treatment whose efficacy he has never demonstrated. Yesterday, the Center for Inquiry laid in, and has sent a letter to legislators:
“We are frankly stunned to hear that the…
gregladen | June 30, 2014The Constitutional Accountability Center has released it's annual report The Corporate Court.
...Let’s begin with the numbers. This Term, the Chamber was involved in 17 cases overall—directly representing one of its member companies in Canning, litigating as a party in UARG, and filing amicus briefs in 15 other cases. The Chamber’s 17 cases represent just under a quarter of the total cases set down for argument this Term.
All told, the Chamber racked up a record of 11 wins and 5 losses—or a 69% winning percentage. (One of its cases—Mt. Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action—…
drorzel | June 27, 2014I'm not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let's talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story about the food stamp cookbook and the latter with a magazine story about Clay County, KY, spinning off a statistical study of the hardest places to live in the US.
The Vox piece is mostly on poverty in general, and how there's more to the bad diets of poor people than just lack of money--…
oracknows | June 25, 2014It's hard for me to believe that it's been almost three years since I first started taking an interest in the Houston cancer doctor and Polish expat Stanislaw Burzynski. Three long years, but that's less than one-twelfth the time that Burzynski has been actually been administering an unproven cancer treatment known as antineoplastons (ANPs), a drug that has not been FDA-approved, to patients, which he began doing in 1977. Yes, back when Burzynski got started administering ANPs to patients, I was just entering high school, the Internet as we know it did not exist yet, just a much smaller…
oracknows | June 18, 2014One of the benefits of blogging is that it's broadened my horizons. Although the vast majority of what I write about happens in my very own country, the United States, nonetheless I frequently learn about things happening in many other countries, some that I wouldn't necessarily pay a lot of attention to. But when something happens in a country, not matter how far away, that interests me, sometimes it'll interest me enough to write about it. This is particularly true when it's a story about how other countries deal with the pseudoscientific bunch of quackery that comprise most of the…
drorzel | June 12, 2014A bunch of people were talking about this Nature Jobs article on the GRE this morning while I was proctoring the final for my intro E&M class, which provided a nice distraction. I posted a bunch of comments about it to Twitter, but as that's awfully ephemeral, I figured I might as well collect them here. Which, purely coincidentally, also provides a nice way to put off grading this big stack of exam papers...
Anyway, the thrust of the article is that the GRE is a bad thing to be using as an admissions criterion for graduate school in science and engineering, because it has large…
esiegel | June 4, 2014“There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program — your tax-dollar will go further.” -Wernher von Braun
Over the past 100 years, we've gone from looking out at a Universe whose very nature -- the stars, nebulae, and even the planets -- were virtually unknown to us. And because of the investment we've made as an entire world in the endeavor of science, it's almost breathtaking to realize how far we've come.
Image credit: ESA/C. Carreau, edits by me, via http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2013/03/Planck_history_of_Unive….
But the big question -- the one no one…
oracknows | June 4, 2014Not surprisingly, being a guy who leans mildly left, I like The Daily Show. Jon Stewart and his writers are incredibly adept at skewering all manner of bovine excrement, be it political, scientific, or otherwise. In particular, the way Stewart and company skewered the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) for its promotion of the chemical industry. Indeed, Samantha Bee, who did the infamous Little Crop of Horrors segment that mocked ACSH for its defense of pesticides über alles and its criticism of Michelle Obama's healthy eating initiative.
Another Daily Show segment by Samantha Bee…
jdupuis | June 4, 2014There are two very strong competing emotions at work here in this post: delight versus depression.
Depression that the government-funded research landscape here in Canada can sink so low that the premier freshwater research facility likely in the world is reduced to putting its hand out and asking for spare change just to fund its core research program.
But there's also a kind of delight in acknowledging that we've reached a place in the evolution of open public science that regular people like you and I can participate directly in making sure important research happens and continues to…
catdynamics | June 2, 2014yet again I trip across a snarky tweet about a distinguished scientist using comic sans
or some other whimsical and easily read on a screen unprofessional and unserious design choice in a presentation
these theological wars are becoming as bad as PC/Mac or emacs/vi flame wars of yore
anyone care to summarise, rationally, and briefly, why serif or sans matters?
Please avoid references to unrepeatable badly controlled A/B studies, and opinion polls of helvetica-phobic graphics designers.
catdynamics | May 27, 2014Not entirely coincidentally the general topic of misogyny, microaggression and harassment was featured on the Women in Astronomy blog recently:
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Defining the Problem
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Survival of the Clueless
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: The Serial Harasser's Playbook
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Power to Speak Up
Fed Up with Sexual Harassment
Harassment from Student
Here are some other useful reads:
Do Women Have an Advantage in Faculty Searches?
Truth Against Humanity - Starstryder
catdynamics | May 15, 2014Senior Review is out:
summary - Swift #1, then NuStar.
K2 gets partial funding. Spitzer is terminated.
Panel recommends not cutting off the bottom but balancing fields.
NASA Response to the 2014 Senior Review for Astrophysics Operating Missions - Final Version for Release (5.16.14) - this is an edited update of the NASA response that was on the website on the 15th of May. It is tagged as Final version and for release, so I guess it is now official.
Final Report Astro 2014 Senior Review Panel (pdf)
NASA Response to 2014 Senior Review for Operating Missions FINAL (pdf)
NASA used the…