Politics
esiegel | April 7, 2013"Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human." -Albert Ellis
In my experience as a human being, I've seen far too often what evils can come from judging people who are different from you and the groups you identify with. We're all unique creatures, and we all will face many of the same challenges and fears in our lives, as Natalie Merchant reminds us in her rendition of the folk classic,
Poor Wayfaring Stranger.
I don't have the right to speak for anyone other than myself, of course, but I have…
choofnagle | April 6, 2013The Wall Street Journal reported on a battle developing between privacy advocates and internet companies concerning AB 1291, a transparency measure that is in part based upon some of my privacy research:
The industry backlash is against the "Right to Know Act," a bill introduced in February by Bonnie Lowenthal, a Democratic assemblywoman from Long Beach. It would make Internet companies, upon request, share with Californians personal information they have collected—including buying habits, physical location and sexual orientation—and what they have passed on to third parties such as marketing…
esiegel | April 5, 2013"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Universe has been around for a long time: 13.8 billion years, to be precise. As humans, we're relatively young, and our species has only been around for the last couple of hundred thousand years of it. For nearly all of human history, this is what the night skies have looked like.
Image credit: The Milky Way, by Stephane Guisard.
When the Moon isn't out and you're in a place that's…
denialism | April 5, 2013And it may even be more when one considers that there is likely non-overlap between many of these conspiracies. It really is unfortunate that their isn't more social pushback against those that express conspiratorial views. Given both the historical and modern tendency of some conspiracy theories being used direct hate towards one group or another (scratch a 9/11 truther and guess what's underneath), and that they're basically an admission of one's own defective reasoning, why is it socially acceptable to espouse conspiracy theories? They add nothing to discussion, and instead hijack…
denialism | April 1, 2013Crazy ranting about impending socialism/fascism aside, there are legitimate critiques to be made of Obamacare. One policy in particular that raises my ire is penalizing hospitals over performance metrics and penalizing readmissions in particular. The way it works is, patients are admitted to the hospital, treated, and eventually discharged, but a indicator of failure of adequate care is if that patient then bounces back, and is readmitted shortly after their hospitalization:
Under the new federal regulations, hospitals face hefty penalties for readmitting patients they have already treated…
oracknows | March 26, 2013Here we go again.
Every time I think I can get away from this topic for a while, I get sucked back in. Indeed, it seems that hardly a week can go by when I don't find myself pulled inexorably back to this horrible, horrible clinic and what I consider to be the abuses of science and clinical trials that go on there on a daily basis. Whether it be the patients who are offered false hope at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the form of a chemotherapeutic drug known as antineoplastons that, contrary to what it is claimed, is not "non-toxic," "natural," or even particularly…
esiegel | March 22, 2013"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return." -Leonardo da Vinci
It's been a busy week here at Starts With A Bang, and with the two recent big posts -- one on the eve of Planck and one just after the first big data release -- I certainly wasn't planning on writing one today. After all, there are only so many things one can do in a week, and we've certainly learned some unprecedented things about the Universe just over the last couple of days.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration…
jdupuis | March 22, 2013You would think that such apple pie issues as public science, basic research and the free and open exchange of scientific information would be hard to disagree with. You would think that a resolution in the Canadian parliament would to such effect would meet with resounding support, resulting in a unanimous vote, the room resounding with shouted Yays.
You would think that anyone who would vote nay to such a resolution would be a virtual pariah in an open democratic society, a society that values an informed citizenry and evidence-based decision making.
Apparently you would be wrong.…
catdynamics | March 18, 2013Answers on a single sheet double spaced 12 pt font, by monday, please, including figures.
The NASA Advisory Council, subcommittee on Astrophysics, has started a Roadmap Exercise.
The roadmap exercise was called for at the February 2013 meeting.
The roadmap is intended to:
Articulate NASA’s astrophysics vision looking out 30 years
Science-based -> identify key science investigations and challenges for the future
Identify notional missions & technologies needed to enable the science
Developed by a task force of the APS (AstroPhysics Subcommittee)
Include community input, including Town…
drorzel | March 18, 2013We're entering the heart of College Admissions Season-- the offers are out, and students are doing the high-stress decision thing-- which means it's time for the New York Times to begin their annual series of faintly awful reports on the state of academia. And right on cue, there's this weekend's article about poor students who excel in high school not applying to top colleges.
To their credit, this at least isn't another article about how very, very hard it is for kids from affluent Connecticut suburbs to decide between several different elite schools. And as someone who grew up in a less…
illconsidered | March 15, 2013What do they have in common? Apparently some methodologies, uncovered by the hacktivist group Anonymous.
Details can be found in an interesting, if dense, article at The Nation, which describes how Anonymous revealed dealings the Chamber of Commerce was having with a Cyber Security firm that did not limit itself to defensive measures.
Attorneys for the Chamber were caught negotiating for a contract to launch a cyber campaign using practically identical methods to those attributed to the Chinese, which reportedly could be used to cripple vital infrastructure and plunder trade secrets from…
drorzel | March 15, 2013On Twitter and blogs, we're having another round of complaints about sensationalism and hype in science stories-- Matthew Francis and Gabrielle Rabinowitz are the latest to cross my social media feeds. I've also seen some stories recently (that I'm too lazy to dig up) complaining about the latest Higgs Boson stuff, and I'm sure if you wait ten minutes there'll be a biologist upset about something in Science this week.
The basic form of this is nothing particularly new: the argument is that by representing incremental improvements in science as Revolutionary! Developments! the media are…
gregladen | March 14, 2013The Republican dominated Minnesota Legislature got almost nothing done over the last two years that they were in power. But they did manage to put two boneheaded constitutional amendments on the ballot for last November, one to restrict voting rights in a way that Republicans would have a better chance of winning, the other making it unconstitutional for same sex couples to marry. Same sex marriage was already illegal in the state, but the GOP saw the handwriting on the wall and knew that this legal restriction would not last, so they imposed the amendment on us.
Both of those amendments…
catdynamics | March 8, 2013The Dark Matter Crisis Continues
Pavel and Marcel give the back story of what happened at scilog and the social media mud flinging over MOND and other alternate conjectures for modified gravity.
Also on the fb "Astronomers" group
"The Dark Matter Crisis" will have a guest blog entry tomorrow on the science issue.
It really is true that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and reroutes...
The guest post on CMD vs MOND by Scott Dodelson is up at the Dark Matter Crisis blog (see comment below)
illconsidered | March 8, 2013Headline of the week from NPR. It is worth noting that even if the Republican representative has now apologized for his remarks and admitted they were stupid either because he realizes it or because he has to, he has not changed his position on a special tax on bicycles.
(h/t willard)
sa smith | March 6, 2013This year, we have had some educational moments in HIV/AIDS treatment.
1. A paper Ive been meaning to blog about demonstrated that the sooner an HIV+ individual starts antiretroviral therapy, the better. Ideally, <4 months after infection:
Enhanced CD4+ T-Cell Recovery with Earlier HIV-1 Antiretroviral Therapy
2. A baby might have successfully cleared HIV-1 infection after immediate treatment with antiretrovirals (and possibly other unknown factors at this point).
We might have jack squat for an HIV-1 vaccine, but we have made great strides in HIV/AIDS treatment by the development of…
drorzel | March 6, 2013There was a lot of re-sharing yesterday of an article about the "Finkbeiner Test" to be applied to profiles of women scientists. This is analogous to the "Bechdel Test" in pop culture, which asks "Do two women talk to each other about something other than a man?", only because we're scientists, it's more complicated, hitting seven points:
To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention
The fact that she’s a woman
Her husband’s job
Her child care arrangements
How she nurtures her underlings
How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
How she’s such a role model for other…
drorzel | March 4, 2013In rapid succession yesterday, Twitter threw me two how-to-behave-online links that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The first was a widely re-shared essay titled You Are Boring:
You listen to the same five podcasts and read the same seven blogs as all your pals. You stay up late on Twitter making hashtagged jokes about the event that everyone has decided will be the event about which everyone jokes today. You love to send withering @ messages to people like Rush Limbaugh—of course, those notes are not meant for their ostensible recipients, but for your friends, who will chuckle and retweet…
jdupuis | March 2, 2013(This post supersedes the previous post listing items related to the Aaron Swartz story. That post was from January 20, 2013.)
A few comments.
Aaron Swartz's story has had a huge impact, it has reverberated far and wide not just through the interlinking worlds of technology and online activism but far into the mainstream. The library world has been no exception, with quite a few of the items below being from our world.
How has the library world reacted? If anything, I would hope that we have been challenged to examine our core values very carefully, to reflect deeply about how we make…
drorzel | February 28, 2013Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post about an NPR story is so good that there aren't enough +1 buttons on the entire Internet for it.
The NPR piece is about eating and exercise habits, and the way families struggle to do what they know they ought to:
More than half of children ate or drank something during the "crunch time" window that can lead to unhealthy weight gain, as perceived by their parents. And more than a quarter of…