Politics
jlynch | April 3, 2008Apparently 81% of respondents to a recent NYT/CBS survey feel "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track" for this country - up from 69% last year and 35% in 2003. Only 4% said the country is better off than five years ago (what the hell are these nimrods smoking?).
According to The Times, only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest number since late 1992, when the recession that began in the summer of 1990 had already been over for more than a year.
Of course, Poppy Bush was in charge then. It’s worth remembering what Bush jr…
tsmith | April 3, 2008Early this week, grant application; yesterday and today, IRB and IACUC for another project. But once again, fellow Sbers are keeping me busy reading about stories I'd like to be writing on; see yet again Mike on E. coli O157:H7--everything old is new again; Ed on a new study showing yet again how amazing bacteria are; and DrugMonkey discussing heroin addiction as a family legacy, and notes that this sad story again shows that Narcan saves lives.
drorzel | April 3, 2008Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family's money. Drawing on new data from the Department of Education, the authors show that this is all too real:
The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores…
pontiff | April 3, 2008Oh no: do the Christian creationists know that by taking down Darwin they might inadvertently aid Eastern religions? Witness: the Bhaktivedanta Institute Newsletter. Personally I want a grunge match between the Discovery Institute and the Bhaktivedanta Institute to see who can out pseudoscience each other. "No my psychogenetic fallacy definitely trumps your silly fallacy of division!"
Among many gems in this newsletter, I particularly like their statement of purpose:
Modern science has generally been directed toward investigating the material world, excluding consideration of the conscious…
drorzel | April 3, 2008I really had intended for Tuesday's dog pictures to be my only comment on the recent framing debacle (well, Monday's expertise post was an oblique commentary on it, but nobody got that, which you can tell because the comments were civil and intelligent and interesting to read). But Chris Mooney is making a good-faith effort to clear things up with his current series, including an effort to define common ground, and he's getting absolutely pounded, for no good reason.
I think Chris and Matt Nisbet have made some tactical errors in making their case to ScienceBlogs, chief among them forgetting…
drorzel | April 3, 2008Kevin Drum points to a report comparing international education systems from McKinsey and Company management consultants. The report (9.5 MB PDF) does double duty: it serves as a useful and important contribution to the study of education reform, and also as a case study in how to use PowerPoint to generate documents that are well nigh unreadable-- it's tarted up with so many pointless graphics that it makes even FoxIt run annoyingly slow.
Kevin's got the key conclusions, though: if you want better schools, you need better teachers, and if you want better teachers, you need to make education…
evolvingthoughts | April 2, 2008
Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable attempts to get to the heart of the matter: here, here and here.
In a book that I really liked– The Science of Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen refer to teaching as "lying to children". The reason is that teachers can only teach what children are ready to receive. So they get cartoon versions of science and other topics, which are then refined…
oracknows | April 2, 2008So there I was last night, in the Twilight Zone between wakefulness and sleep, Late Night With David Letterman on the television, blaring in the background. I was vaguely aware that John McCain was Letterman's guest for the evening and that they were chatting back and forth, Letterman asking the usual rather inane questions that entertainment-oriented talk show hosts often ask politicians and Presidential candidates when they have them on their shows and McCain was winding up to hit the softball questions out of the park.
Then I heard it, in the middle of a commentary about how the…
j7uy5 | April 2, 2008From Think Progress:
href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/01/cheney-swore-off-moderate-campaign-promises-a-month-after-2000-election/"
rel="bookmark"
title="Permanent link to 'Cheney swore off ‘moderate’ campaign promises a month after 2000 election.'">Cheney
swore off ‘moderate’ campaign promises a month
after 2000 election.
class="storyexpander">
In
his new book, former Rhode Island Republican senator Lincoln Chafee
reveals that even before President Bush was sworn into office after the
2000 elections, Cheney had
href="http://www.rollcall.com/issues/53_112/hill_bookshelf/…
clock | April 1, 2008There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of intense mental focus are required, including the scientific research labs. Here is a recent article in New York Times:
So far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors' urine. And if there are illicit…
clock | March 31, 2008Words of wisdom (via):
The internet isn't a decoration on contemporary society, it's a challenge to it. A society that has an internet is a different kind of society than a society that doesn't.
I agree. And people, regardless of chronological age, appear to separate along "generational" lines, with the word "generation" really meaning how much they grok the immenseness of the societal change. It changes everything: politics, economics, media, science, environment, public health, business.... The "old" generation thinks of the Internet as yet another place to put their traditional…
clock | March 30, 2008SEA will train scientists to run for office:
SEA is holding a workshop to train scientists to run for office on May 10th at Georgetown University. If you are a scientist or engineer and have been considering running for office or working on an election campaign, then join us for a crash course on how it's done. Below is a video for the workshop featuring Congressman and former physicist Vern Ehlers.
Hat-tip.
revere | March 30, 2008Homeland security is a priority for the Bush administration. I know that because they keep telling us. We have to take off our shoes and take out our identification getting on and off planes. Not just any identification, either. Official stuff. And crossing borders -- any borders, even the border from Canada -- now requires a passport. A passport! Perhaps one of the most highly prized and secure of all official forms of identification, too, now embedded with electronic chips. Even blank passports are expensive, and we are charged for them -- $100, up from $60 ten years ago. Which makes…
jlynch | March 29, 2008Matt Nisbet has coughed up yet another post on PZ and framing. It begins:
You don’t have to be a social scientist to recognize that the distribution of opinion among people who comment at Scienceblogs is very different from the perspective found among the wider science community and even among leaders in the atheist movement.
As I pointed out:
This is a little data-free, now isn’t it? No information on views "among the wider science community" and a link to a single comment by D.J. Grothe (who may or may nor be a leader "in the atheist movement"). As I said before, the issue here is not…
pontiff | March 29, 2008If you really really want to get yourself pissed off about the tyrannical despotic anti-democratic junta that current runs the United States, I highly recommend this week's edition of This American Life (free in about a weeks time, or try here to find a local show time. Hint local shows elsewhere allow you to listen to it over the intertubes.) Dude, shows like that make we want to get all DoI on Bush and company.
clock | March 28, 2008I have announced before my support for my friend and blogger Jay Ovittore in his race to unseat the Republican Congressman Howard Coble. But before he can get there, he first needs to defeat the establishment Democrats in the primaries, still not easy for a true Progressive here in North Carolina.
The last day of this month is the day when the money is counted and you know that these numbers have a big effect on the way press reports on races (since they have no knowledge of the issues, or spine to report them, they use campaign finances as a proxy for who is "winning") which then become a…
gregladen | March 27, 2008Old books can be wonderful sources of information, ideas, and even inspiration. I collect them and sometimes even read them. Reading a 100 year old book in your field of interest is a challenge and can be a rewarding experience.
It is a challenge because it is dangerous. I worry that I might accidentally learn something that is no longer true. What if I remember it at some later time, like at a cocktail party or while giving a lecture, but don't remember the source: "... As is well known, flies spontaneously generate from certain forms of mud ..."
Repost from gregladen.com ... apropos…