Politics
awild | December 9, 2009In reading various web reactions to news that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained nearly 1 million dollars for ant research at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, it seems there's a lot of confusion about how something like ant behavior winds up getting a stimulus check. Here's an explanation.
Our starting point is the observation that stimulus has to be fast to be effective. The obvious problem is that we all know how fast goverment usually acts, and if the government were to put out a call for stimulus proposals with a full process of review and…
catdynamics | December 9, 2009There has been a lot of chatter about the e-mail cracked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (not to be confused with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the UK Met Office in Exeter).
I would like to post abou it, but, I really can't comment.
Since PSU is involved in the issue and there is an ongoing inquiry into the issue, I can not comment: there is a slightest possibility anything I say could be considered in some sense official from PSU; or, prejudicial to the inquiry; or, biased, as I have some connection to some of the people involved…
illconsidered | December 9, 2009The Guardian has run a front page editorial on the Copenhagen summit along with 56 papers in 20 languages.
I read it at Real Climate who "takes no formal position" on its statements. I suppose it is to avoid the acusation of being political...
Well, I have rarely read an editorial I agree with more. And I say that with the utmost formality!
It was released under Creative Commons license, so I will reproduce it here in its entirety:
Copenhagen climate change conference: Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step…
emjohnson | December 9, 2009Executive Director of the South Center Martin Khor and Journalist Naomi Klein are interviewed in Copenhagen:
Martin Khor: I think that the US has a positive role to play in the climate negotiations, which it has yet to play, by allowing those countries who are in the Kyoto Protocol--and that's all the developed countries except the US--to remain there and to take their commitments there and to take high commitments there to reduce their emissions by at least 40 percent. . .
Now, the reverse is happening, as we have seen in the Danish text, that those developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol…
pharyngula | December 9, 2009Cecil Bothwell was elected to the city council of Asheville, NC. Cecil Bothwell is an atheist. Now some kooks want to deny Cecil Bothwell his seat on the council because the North Carolina constitution forbids atheists from taking public office.
Amazing. I know that several states have these laws on their books, but I thought they all avoided enforcing them, since they're clearly unconstitutional. In this case, it's one crazy right-winger, H.K. Edgerton, who wants to impose the law to selectively block someone he doesn't seem to like. We know he's crazy because he's threatening the city and……
drorzel | December 9, 2009Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a very good post about schools that appear to "beat the odds", getting good results with populations that don't typically do well in school. It does an excellent job of laying out the problems with the vast majority of attempts to determine which schools are "beating the odds," let alone what methods are best to use for this. It turns out to be a lot harder to measure than most people think-- I was particularly struck by this bit:
It gets worse, thanks to my colleague Doug Harris, in his paper, “High flying schools, student disadvantage, and the logic of…
oracknows | December 9, 2009A while back I wrote about really rethinking how we screen for breast cancer using mammography. Basically, the USPSTF, an independent panel of physicians and health experts that makes nonbinding recommendations for the government on various health issues, reevaluated the evidence for routine screening mammography and concluded that for women at normal risk for breast cancer, mammography before age 50 should not be recommended routinely and should be ordered on an individualized basis, and that routine formalized breast self-examination (BSE) should also not be routinely recommended. In…
grrlscientist | December 8, 2009tags: Women: Know Your Limits!, entertainment, comedy, satire, funny, fucking hilarious, BBC Worldwide, Harry Enfield, streaming video
This video is a clip is part of my research. Since I have been invited to some social events in Germany, I thought I'd brush up on my etiquette. This is especially important since the only social events I've attended in my adult life were watching sporting events on TV whilst drinking beer in a pub somewhere (astonishingly, I even managed to offend NYCers by making publicly known to my beer swilling colleagues my opinion about the Yankees -- an original…
emjohnson | December 8, 2009Kyoto would be replaced with a protocol run by the World Bank, says Guardian.Photograph: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images
[updated below - Update II - Update III (Thurs.)]
The Guardian newspaper last night published a leaked draft of a climate agreement entitled only Draft 271109 but known as the "Danish Text" by UN delegates in Copenhagen. The revelation has driven a wedge between rich and poor nations as the draft proposal makes significant changes to the Kyoto Protocol and would place undue pressure on developing nations who had little to no role in the climate crisis to begin with.
As…
catdynamics | December 8, 2009there is an amusing rumour on the resonaances blog about cold dark matter
The CDMS experiment is a Cold Dark Matter Search experiment, looking for nuclear recoil in lab detectors, due to scattering of weakly interacting massive particles with normal matter.
[hmm, link is to UC site for CDMS - the Stanford CDMS website is password protected, don't know if that is usual - I have some recollection of linking to CDMS at Stanford in the
past with no problems.]
CDMSI ran for several years, and reported upper bounds on WIMP masses and cross-sections, and CDMSII has been running for a while now with…
razib | December 8, 2009I post some data analysis over at my other weblog. For example, today I looked at the relationship between food stamp usage and unemployment. The Census makes a lot of county-level data available, though it's often slapdash and disorganized. But using R I've constructed many data sets including most American counties. I don't post here much because I concentrate more on science in this space, and the 500 pixel width means that integrating scatter plots into a post seamlessly is pretty much impossible.
But since readers of this weblog are much more liberal than over at GNXP Classic, I thought…
awild | December 8, 2009The Republican Party speaks:
GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted âpure wasteâ in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year, including money for fossil research in Argentina, puppet shows and to protect cruise ships from terrorist attacks...
What does the Republican Party consider wasteful? Science, apparently:
Half a million dollars went to Arizona State University to study the genetic makeup of ants to determine distinctive roles in ant colonies; $450,000 went to the University of Arizona to study the division of labor in ant colonies.
âI had no idea that so much expertise concerning…
emjohnson | December 8, 2009
(updated below)
Media Matters is reporting that on December 4th Fox News manipulated the evidence from a poll to suggest that 94% of the US population thinks that scientists falsified evidence to support their beliefs about climate change. As can be seen, however, their numbers added up to 120%.
What happened? Well, here's the Rasmussen poll Fox & Friends cited. They asked respondents: "In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?" According to the poll, 35 percent thought it very likely,…
emjohnson | December 8, 2009There has been much ado about the hundreds of pages of stolen e-mails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. The reality of course is that this is about creating a wedge by those who are opposed to the regulations necessary to circumvent climate change and is not about the scientific realities. This strategy has been understood for nearly a decade and has even been acknowledged by those involved.
As The New York Times reported in 2003:
Most scientists believe that [global] warming is caused largely by manmade pollutants that require strict regulation. Mr. Luntz [a…
oracknows | December 8, 2009My irony meter exploded in a near-nuclear conflagration, leaving nothing but a sputtering, molten puff of plasma when I was referred to this gem from Kim Stagliano over at Age of Autism directed at the enemy of all anti-vaccine pseudoscience, that Dark Lord of Vaccination (to anti-vaccine loons) himself, Paul Offit:
You'll blame the "anti-vaxxers" for the public refusal of this vaccine. Spare me. We are a cap gun compared to your nuclear bomb when it comes to the media. We're ragtag colonials hiding behind trees as you Red Coats march in military precision with fine weapons. How much money…
drorzel | December 8, 2009... walk into a bar. No, wait, that's not what I want...
In the interval before this morning's Mike and Mike show became the Tiger Woods Scandal Hour, they were talking about Tim Donaghy and his allegations about the NBA, which basically amount to the league being just a few steps up from the WWE. Mike Greenberg in particular kept blasting these rumors as completely outlandish because the sort of game-fixing Donaghy alleges would be blatantly illegal, and if it was exposed, people would go to jail. "These are wealthy and powerful people," he said, more or less, "You're crazy if you think they…
emjohnson | December 8, 2009What do the following countries have in common?
Bahrain, Burma, China, Iran, Libya, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan
If your answer is that they're some of the most corrupt, authoritarian nations in the world you'd be correct. If you associated them with significant human rights abuses, you would also be spot on. If you learned that they also reject the international convention that bans landmines, chances are you would not be surprised. Joining them, however, is none other than the United States.
In a recent press conference, State…
oracknows | December 7, 2009
...the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, thus finally sucking the United States into the conflagration that had been raging for two years in Europe and even longer in Asia.
Stories like this one from the AP remind us that the generation who fought and died to defeat Nazi-ism and Japan's imperialism is very old and won't be with us much longer. Ed Johann, the subject of the story, was a 17-year-old apprentice seaman on that fateful Sunday morning. He is going back for the first time since the attack because at age 86 he may not have many more chances:
For years, Johann said he wouldn't go to…
terrasig | December 7, 2009
An article by Paul Davidson in this morning's USA Today reminded me of another reason why we need health care reform in the United States, or at least a move away from employment-linked health coverage: temporary employees may soon comprise 25% of the national workforce.
An encouraging jobs report Friday underscored the growing prominence of temporary workers who some experts predict could constitute up to a quarter of the workforce in a few years.
A big reason employers shed a far-less-than-expected 11,000 jobs last month is that temporary staffing agencies found slots for 52,000…
j7uy5 | December 7, 2009I wrote about this before, a couple of times, most thoroughly
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2008/06/national_infrastructure_protec.php">here.
I was reminded of this topic when I saw that the American Society of
Civil Engineers (ASCE) have updated their
href="http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/">Report Card on
America's Infrastructure.
In 2008, I compared the positions of the two Presidential candidates,
regarding advocacy for infrastructure improvements. Obama was
better. So I was somewhat hopeful that we would see some pretty
big changes, after he won the…