Politics
clock | December 18, 2007The League of Conservation Voters has issued a comparison of all the Presidential candidates of both parties on the topic of conservation and global warming. Look at the Chart and watch the Video. Then decide.
gregladen | December 18, 2007You will recall this story about a woman raped in Saudi Arabia and convicted of her crime of being a victim.
There is an update.
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has pardoned the victim of a gang-rape whose sentencing to 200 lashes caused an international outcry, a Saudi newspaper said on Monday.
The victim's husband welcomed the news, but said he had not been informed officially of the pardon decree.
"I'm happy and my wife is happy and it will of course help lift some of her psychological and social suffering," he told Reuters. "We thank the king for his generous attention and fatherly spirit…
hrynyshyn | December 18, 2007The latest news in what the journos are calling the "isotope crisis" reminds us why, even for the biggest supporters of Science Debate 2008, there's something more important than a scientifically literate president.
While I'm still in favor of the science blogosphere's new Mission: Impossible ;;;;; convincing even a handful of presidential contenders to publicly exchange their thoughts on matters of science and technology ;;;;; there is much to recommend the argument that choosing a candidate of integrity trumps the need to find someone who understands the laws of thermodynamics.
When the…
clock | December 18, 2007To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to:
- correct my factual errors
- call me on my BS
- tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask
- if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so.
Here is the fifth one, so…
oracknows | December 18, 2007Several months ago, i wrote quite a few posts about a new anticancer drug that had not yet passed through clinical trials but had demonstrated efficacy against tumors in rat models of cancer. The drug, called dichloroacetate (DCA), is a small molecule that targeted a phenomenon common in cancer cells known as the Warburg effect. Because DCA is a small molecule that is relatively easy to synthesize, the misguided news stories proclaiming it the "cure" for cancer that big pharma wouldn't fund because it was not patentable spawned a cottage industry of charlatans who used the Internet to sell…
j7uy5 | December 18, 2007In February 2005, a bunch of smart people met to eat Chinese
food and talk about a new way to make money. This included
Greg Lippman, a trader at Deutsche Bank; Rajiv Kamilla, a trader at
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. with a background in nuclear physics;
and Todd Kushman, who led a contingent from Bear
Stearns Cos. There were about 50 people at the meeting.
What did they discuss? The design of a new financial product:
securities based upon subprime mortgages. As reported at
href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601170&refer=special_report&sid=aA6YC1xKUoek"
rel="tag">…
gregladen | December 17, 2007A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth.
3,000 experts, including several renown US scientists, jointly won the award with former US vice president Al Gore for their work to raise awareness about the disastrous consequences of global warming.
In mid-November the IPCC adopted a landmark report stating that the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal."
Retreating glaciers and loss of snow in Alpine regions, thinning…
gregladen | December 17, 2007Wikileaks busts Gitmo propaganda team
The US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has been caught conducting covert propaganda attacks on the internet. The attacks, exposed this week in a report by the government transparency group Wikileaks, include deleting detainee ID numbers from Wikipedia last month, the systematic posting of unattributed "self praise" comments on news organization web sites in response to negative press, boosting pro-Guantanamo stories on the internet news site Digg and even modifying Fidel Castro's encyclopedia article to describe the Cuban president as "an admitted…
pontiff | December 17, 2007News from Computing Research Policy Blog that the new omnibus appropriations bill will totally hammer the NSF and NIST. Effectively, factoring in some accounting and inflation, both budgets will be shrunk. So much for the America Competes Initiative. I've appropriately updated the probability that I will be employed in the next few years.
oracknows | December 17, 2007Would it have looked something like this?
And how would Thomas Jefferson have countered?
(Hat tip to Spinning Clio.)
grrlscientist | December 17, 2007tags: science, public policy, politics, federal funding, research, reality-based government, 2008 American presidential elections, ScienceDebate2008
I was disappointed, but not really surprised, when three Republican presidential candidates -- Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo and Sam Brownback (who has since dropped out) -- declared that they do not "believe in" the theory of evolution (in my opinion, the correct phrasing should have been "do you accept the theory of evolution?" rather than using the misleading and incorrect phrase believe in, which implies blind faith rather than scientifically…
voltagegate | December 17, 2007
There's been a big windfarm project in the works for Shaffer Mountain in PA, which has met with some of the strongest resistance in the area, including an entire resistance organized by a gentleman named Jack Buchan, a resident of the area. From what I've seen, Buchan and other members of Sensible Wind Solutions, a local group, has been a constant thorn in Gamesa's side, publishing giant full page ads opposing the project in local newspapers (more or less like this).
The latest transgression is a supposed suppression of data obtained by Gamesa on the land designated for development. Two…
drorzel | December 17, 2007Chris Mooney posted a couple of things last week-- one article at ScienceProgress and one blog post-- talking about the supposed shortage of scientists in the "pipeline." Following an Urban Insitute study, he says that there's really no shortage of scientists being trained, but rather a shortage of jobs for those scientists. Coming as he does from the policy/ journalism side of things, he brings the article to a ringing conclusion:
The numbers presented by the Urban Institute lead to an uncontestable conclusion: Some young scientists aren't going to be working in purely scientific positions.…
tqa | December 17, 2007
One of the first pieces of legislation on the United States Senate's agenda for today will be the revision of the FISA wiretapping bill. The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is planning to move forward a bill that would retroactively grant immunity to the telecommunications companies who allegedly assisted the government by illegally handing over the phone records of millions of Americans. The "get out of jail free" provision in question is favored by the White House and Republicans, but opposed by many Democrats.
In bringing the bill to the floor, Reid is disregarding longstanding…
clock | December 17, 2007To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to:
- correct my factual errors
- call me on my BS
- tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask
- if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so.
Here is the fourth one, so…
gregladen | December 17, 2007The Cost of twenty years of Reagan and Bushes has been very high. In about 1991, I wrote an article for a monthly newspaper in which I summarized the available data for Global Warming, and was very easily able to conclude that it was a real phenomenon with consequences already felt in a number of areas, a reasonably well understood mechanism, and a tangible set of solutions to work on. In 1997, the Kyoto protocol was signed on to by a number of nations (the US not included because of congressional Republican opposition). This month, in Bali, a re-run of something like Kyoto happened, and…
pharyngula | December 16, 2007At least ten.
Personally, I find that an unctuous purveyor of holier-than-thou morality's failures as a parent damning…although his son's amorality wouldn't be such a problem if Huckabee hadn't tried to cover it up.
clock | December 16, 2007To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to:
- correct my factual errors
- call me on my BS
- tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask
- if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so.
Here is the third one, so…
gregladen | December 15, 2007I am amazed at the giddiness amongst Christian Fundamentalists that has fomented from the mere utterance of a holiday greeting by Richard Dawkins. The counter-insurgents in the War on Christmas ... the Red White and Blue, squeaky-faced smirking shits that call themselves commentators or preachers are creaming in their jeans. But they are also stepping over the line, and I'm calling them on it.
I do not really know or care what Richard Dawkins thinks, or said, about Christmas. I do know what I think and how my multi-canonical family celebrates the holidays, and I certainly know a…
clock | December 15, 2007To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to:
- correct my factual errors
- call me on my BS
- tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask
- if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so.
Here is the second one, so…