... He [Phil Pliat at Slate] also rattles off a list of anti-science Congressmen, all Republicans. Excluded from his list are the 53 Democratic Congressmen and Senators
(compared to only two Republicans) who wrote a letter to the FDA
demanding labels on genetically modified food. This policy position is
in direct opposition to that held by organizations representing
America’s finest scientists and doctors – the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Medical Association (AMA).
Plait also failed to mention the group of Democratic Congressmen who
support a resolution proposing a new hypothesis about global warming:
That climate change will cause an increase in the number of hookers around the globe.
Also AWOL from Plait’s list is Tom Harkin, the quack-loving,
homeopathy-pushing Senator from Iowa who is responsible for helping
legitimize alternative medicine. Such pseudoscientific voodoo has done
more to harm average Americans than any misguided teachings on evolution
or climate change.
Plait goes on to lament how scientific reports were censored in the
“Bad Old Days” of the George W. Bush administration. He conveniently
leaves out that the Obama Administration purposefully withheld information from scientists during the BP oil spill and doctored documents
to make it appear as if scientists agreed with the drilling moratorium
they implemented. And he did not mention that the Obama administration interfered with the FDA’s approval of genetically modified salmon. ...
... Finally, at the end of the article, Plait makes something of a confession:
I know I focus a lot on these attacks coming from the far right—because that’s where the overwhelming majority originate—but in truth they’re coming from all directions, and it’s up to us to do something about it. [Emphasis added]
Wrong. Plait focuses on the far right because he is a partisan. He
ignores the equally massive volume of anti-science garbage coming from
the far left because he sympathizes with that side of the aisle. It is
confirmation bias combined with motivated forgetting. ...
Climate change may be happening more slowly than scientists thought. But the world still needs to deal with it.
IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.
It is not clear why climate change has “plateaued” (see article). It could be because of greater natural variability in the climate, because clouds dampen warming or because of some other little-understood mechanism in the almost infinitely complex climate system. But whatever the reason, some of the really ghastly scenarios—where the planet heated up by 4°C or more this century—are coming to look mercifully unlikely. Does that mean the world no longer has to worry?
No, for two reasons. ...
Here is a graph from the article:
Here is a another chart from The Mail Online showing actual temps versus the forecasted temps based on computer models. The article is written in the publications typical bombastic style but graph is nevertheless helpful:
I'm glad to see reputable publications like the Economist addressing this
development. It is clear to even the most casual observer that a plateau is
happening. To keep behaving as if it isn't there and that people who are drawing
attention to it are sinister does not help the public discourse. In fact,
embracing anomalies that are particularly problematic for a narrative you want
to communicate is key to making winning broad public support. As I've said
before, I don't question scientific thought that human behavior has an impact
on the environment. I do question our ability, to date, to appreciate the
complexity involved or the sensitivity to human behavior. Prudence is an
important value here.
1. The Economisthas an interesting graph showing the captialism has led to greater happiness in member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union countries excluding the three baltic countries.)
There are two ways to define economic mobility: 1) absolute mobility, whether each generation is financially better off than the one before; and 2) relative mobility,
whether you can change your income rank vs. your parents. Most
Americans probably think both measures important. We want to be more
prosperous than mom and dad, but also be able to change our
circumstances and make our dreams come true. ...
... A San Francisco Fed study –
using data tracking families since 1968 — looks at both versions of the
American Dream, finding one healthier than the other. Looking
at absolute mobility, researchers Leila Bengali and Mary Daly find the
United States “highly mobile.” Over the sample period, 67% of US adults
had higher family incomes than their parents, including 83% of those in
the lowest birth quintile, or bottom 20% (versus 54% for children born
into the top quintile, or top 20%.) ...
... It’s true that conservatives’
standard proposals for privatizing Social Security and
voucherizing Medicare would shift risk onto beneficiaries -- but
this plainly isn’t a necessary consequence of the basic
principle. I agree with Konczal that adequate insurance against
economic risk, underwritten by the government, is essential. I
also agree that most conservatives aren’t interested in
providing that guarantee. That’s exactly why liberals ought to
take up the ownership society themselves.
Ownership entails risk, it’s true, but insurance can
minimize it. Ownership also provides control, independence and
self-respect -- things it wouldn’t hurt liberals to be more
interested in. And when it comes to inequality and stagnating
middle incomes, ownership can give wage slaves a stake in the
nation’s economic capital.
Done right, an equity component in government-backed saving
for retirement could be the best idea liberals have had since
the earned-income tax credit (oh, sorry, that started out as a
conservative idea as well). ...
FMRI scans of volunteers' media prefrontal cortexes revealed unique brain activity patterns associated with individual characters or personalities as subjects thought about them.
Researchers already knew humans, animals and plants have evolved in
response to Earth's gravity and they are able to sense it. What we are
still discovering is how the processes occurring within the cells of the
human and plant bodies are affected by the more intense gravity, or
hypergravity, that would be found on a large planet, or the microgravity
that resembles the conditions on a space craft.
According to estimations, engineers expect the the store to generate
around 265,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. Store operation will only
require 200,000 kWh, so perhaps that extra wattage could be pumped back
into the grid or used to power nearby utilities.
When people can browse potential dates online like items in a catalog, geo-locate hook-ups on an exercise bike just seven feet away, arrange a spontaneous group date with the app Grouper or arrange a bevy of blind dates in succession with Crazy Blind Date, it makes me wonder if all this newfound technological convenience has, in fact, made romance that much more elusive. Now, we may be more concerned with what someone isn't rather than what they are. And as that twenty-something entrepreneur reminded me over coffee, services like OkCupid, and even Facebook, sap a lot of the mystique out of those first few dates. So, sure, it may be easier than ever to score a date, but what kind of date will it really be?
Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little
bits – theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon
bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented
way, we ignore it’s divine author’s intention to shape our lives through
its story. All humanity communities live out some story that provides a
context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and
direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it
is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is
shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it
should. Idolatry has twisted the dominant cultural story of the secular
Western world. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the
Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our
lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an
idolatrous culture. Hence the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a
fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally
upright, warmly pious idol worshippers! (p. 12).
I wish someone had taught me basic leadership skills.
“I was well grounded in theology and Bible exegesis, but seminary did
not prepare me for the real world of real people. It would have been
great to have someone walk alongside me before my first church.”
I needed to know a lot more about personal financial issues.
“No one ever told me about minister’s housing, social security,
automobile reimbursement, and the difference between a package and a
salary. I got burned in my first church.”
I wish I had been given advice on how to deal with power groups and power people in the church.
“I got it all wrong in my first two churches. I was fired outright from
the first one and pressured out in the second one. Someone finally and
courageously pointed out how I was messing things up almost from the
moment I began in a new church. I am so thankful that I am in the ninth
year of a happy pastorate in my third church.” ...
1. The United States had its financial bubble. Europe is having one too. Is China next? If it is, it could reshape the global economy and radically reshape Chinese government. Here is an interesting piece about China's real estate bubble.
... I like the idea of a breaking the Industrial Revolution into stages,
but I would define them in more fundamental terms. The first Industrial
Revolution was the harnessing of large-scale man-made power, which began
with the steam engine. The internal combustion engine, electric power,
and other sources of energy are just further refinements of this basic
idea. The second Industrial Revolution would be the development of
interchangeable parts and the assembly line, which made possible
inexpensive mass production with relatively unskilled labor. The Third
Industrial Revolution would not be computers, the Internet, or mobile
phones, because up to now these have not been industrial tools;
they have been used for moving information, not for making things.
Instead, the rise of computers and the Internet is just a warm-up for
the real Third Industrial Revolution, which is the full integration of information technology with industrial production.
The effect of the Third Industrial Revolution will be to collapse the
distance between the design of a product and its physical manufacture,
in much the same way that the Internet has eliminated the distance
between the origination of a new idea and its communication to an
audience. ...
... Eventually all of the creative ferment of the industrial revolution pays
off in a big “whoosh,” but it takes many decades, depending on where
you draw the starting line of course. A look at the early 19th century
is sobering, or should be, for anyone doing fiscal budgeting today. But
it is also optimistic in terms of the larger picture facing humanity
over the longer run.
5. What are the contours of income inequality in the United States? This 40 minute video by Emmanuel Saez offers some important insights.
6. Futurist Ray Kurzweil is a little too sensationalist for my taste but this vid offers interesting food for thought about nanotechnology and the future sports. We will even be able to have meaningful sports competition?
The recovered wealth - most of it from higher stock prices - has been
flowing mainly to richer Americans. By contrast, middle class wealth is
mostly in the form of home equity, which has risen much less.
One of the perpetual challenges in my career as a modeler of
biochemical systems has been the need to balance accuracy with
reliability. This paradox is not as strange as it seems. Typically when
you build a model you include a lot of approximations supposed to make
the modeling process easier; ideally you want a model to be as simple as
possible and contain as few parameters as possible. But this strategy
does not work all the time since sometimes it turns out that in your
drive for simplicity you have left a crucial factor out. So now you
include this crucial factor, only to find that the uncertainties in your
model go through the roof. What’s happening in such unfortunate cases
is that along with including the signal from the previously excluded
factors, you have also inevitably included a large amount of noise. This
noise can typically result from an incomplete knowledge of the factor,
either from calculation or from measurement. Modelers of every stripe
thus have to tread a fine balance between including as much of reality
as possibility as possible and making the model accurate enough for
quantitative explanation and prediction.
It seems that this is exactly the problem that has started bedeviling climate change models. A recent issue of Nature had a very interesting article
on what seems to be a wholly paradoxical feature of models used in
climate science; as the models are becoming increasingly realistic, they
are also becoming less accurate and predictive because of growing
uncertainties. I can only imagine this to be an excruciatingly painful
fact for climate modelers who seem to be facing the equivalent of the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle for their field. It’s an especially
worrisome time to deal with such issues since the modelers need to
include their predictions in the next IPCC report on climate change
which is due to be published this year. ...
A very interesting piece showing the challenges of forecasting the future with mathematical models. I liked this paragraph.
... But the lesson to take away from this dilemma is that crude models
sometimes work better than more realistic ones. My favorite quote about
models comes from the statistician George Box who said that “all models
are wrong, but some are useful”. It is a worthy endeavor to try to make
models more realistic, but it is even more important to make them
useful.
Issue 104 examines the impact of automation on Europe and America and the varying responses of the church to the problems that developed. Topics examined are mission work, the rise of the Social Gospel, the impact of papal pronouncements, the Methodist phenomenon, Christian capitalists, attempts at communal living and much more.
"Despite the tough economy, many of the nation’s largest churches are
thriving, with increased offerings and plans to hire more staff, a new
survey shows.
Just 3 percent of churches with 2,000 or more attendance
surveyed by Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church think tank, said
they were affected “very negatively” by the economy in recent years.
Close to half — 47 percent — said they were affected “somewhat
negatively,” but one-third said they were not affected at all. ..."
... It's not surprising that younger entrepreneurial firms are considered more innovative. After all, they are born from a new idea, and survive by finding creative ways to make that idea commercially viable. Larger, well-rooted companies however have just as much motivation to be innovative — and, as Scott Anthony has argued, they have even more resources to invest in new ventures. So why doesn't innovation thrive in mature organizations? ...
... First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. In contrast, the main job of a start-up is to search for a workable business model, to find the right match between customer needs and what the company can profitably offer. In other words in a start-up, innovation is not just about implementing a creative idea, but rather the search for a way to turn some aspect of that idea into something that customers are willing to pay for. ...
... discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed ...
... Finally, Blank notes that the people who are best suited to search for new business models and conduct iterative experiments usually are not the same managers who succeed at running existing business units. ...
5. A fascinating, if sobering, look at the conflict over islands off the coast of East Asia. Trouble at sea
"President Barack Obama's proposed tilt of U.S. priorities toward the Pacific – and away from the historical link to Europe – represents one of the most encouraging aspects of his foreign policy. Although welcome, we should recognize that this shift comes about three decades too late and that it may miss the rising geopolitical centrality of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The emergence of these longtime historically impoverished backwaters has been largely missed as American policy-makers and businesses are now obsessed with the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, India. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over the past decade has produced six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. Through 2011-15, according to the International Monetary Fund, seven of the fastest-growing countries will be African, and Africa as a whole will surpass the slowing growth rates in Asia, particularly China.
This growth has caused the region's poverty rates, still unacceptably high, to fall from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today. Further growth will likely push poverty levels down further."
8. New Geography also asks, Is the Family Finished? Some interesting thoughts about the impact of declining birthrates in the U.S.
Pew Research Center has compiled key findings from a new analysis of the
nation’s foreign-born population, based on U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011
American Community Survey.
With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are
multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the
U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to
execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a
Latino market perceived to be homogenous?
11. Committee on Economic Development has an interesting piece looking at both the ideological and economic aspects underlying the debate about the minimum wage. Raising the Minimum Wage: “Which Side Are You On?”
"It is an easy call if you are either (a) a strict libertarian or (b) an
enthusiastic advocate of the less fortunate with limited concern about
the scarcity of resources. (If you belong to both of those groups,
there is little advice that I can offer.) However, in between those
poles of opinion, things become rather murky, rather quickly."
... Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.
Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with "theory of mind," or the ability to understand what others might be thinking. ...
... The functional differences did mesh well with political beliefs,
however. The researchers were able to predict a person's political
party by looking at their brain function 82.9 percent of the time. In
comparison, knowing the structure of these regions predicts party
correctly 71 percent of the time, and knowing someone's parents'
political affiliation can tell you theirs 69.5 percent of the time, the
researchers wrote. ...
STERLING, Va. - Perched by a computer monitor wedged between shelves of cough drops and the pharmacy in a bustling Walmart, Mohamed Khader taps out answers to questions such as how often he eats vegetables, whether anyone in his family has diabetes and his age.
He tests his eyesight, weighs himself and checks his blood pressure as a middle-aged couple watches at the blue-and-white SoloHealth station advertising "free health screenings." ...
... As Americans gain coverage under the federal health law, putting increased demand on primary care doctors and spurring interest in cheaper, more convenient care, unmanned kiosks like these may be part of what their manufacturer bills as a "self-service healthcare revolution." ...
Recent developments in the field of nanotechnology might give new
meaning to the phrase “nothing gold can stay.” Atoms and bonds developed
not by Mother Nature, but by scientists, are gaining momentum as the
building blocks for cutting-edge materials.
Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” Chad Mirkin, the
director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for
Nanotechnology, is constructing his very own periodic table. So far Mirkin has built more than 200 distinct crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. ...
Today is the day our advanced technological culture turns to a cute furry rodent in Pennsylvania for a weather forecast. (The only thing a groundhog foretells in my yard is that I'm probably going to need some new landscaping.) Happy Groundhog Day!
"In the course of our strategic planning work with clients, we've
identified the things that make the difference between visions that fall
flat and those that turn on. Here's a no-nonsense summary of those
elements that you can use as a guide when you develop your strategic
plan."
"In this way a conception of subsidiarity “from below” is focused on the location of sovereignty from the “bottom up” rather than on the delegation of authority from the “top down.” We see these variegated approaches to subsidiarity and sovereignty work out in diverse ways in later centuries. It is with these different lenses of subsidiarity “from above” and “from below” that we can better understand the developments of the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity as such and the neo-Calvinist articulation of “sphere sovereignty” in the late nineteenth century and beyond."
"Pally’s essay is framed around the thesis that these evangelicals have “left the right.” But left it for what? What she describes is really another vision of conservatism: church-based charity in lieu of a government safety net; exemptions from government regulation for religious groups; federal funding of religious activities; and persistent sexual puritanism. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’ve left the radical right and are in the process of creating a new religious right, stripped of harsh rhetoric but still undergirded by conservative ideology. Which is a movement worth chronicling, but not, as Pally intimates, as the new saviors of civility in our religiously-inflected politics."
"In the past scientists have warned that up to five per cent of species are at risk of dying-out as a result of climate change, deforestation and development.
But a new analysis by the University of New Zealand found that this figure was five times greater than reality because the number of animals living in the wild in the first place had been over estimated."
10. I've written before that fear is not an effective motivator for long term change. This is particularly true for some climate change and environmental activism. You need to make new behaviors fun and engaging. WWF appears to have taken this strategy to heart. (Hard to go wrong with anthropomorphized critters but maybe they should consider the article immediately above.)
From the time of Charles Darwin science has painted a picture of our earliest ancestor in the image of a chimpanzee. Scientific American editor Katherine Harmon explains how new fossil evidence is redrawing the lines of human evolution.
Actually, I think we already know who our first ancestor was.
12. For the most part (with a few exceptions), when it comes to movies, if you can't tell your story in less than two hours, then I think you didn't edit the movie well. Hollywood would apparently beg to differ. Why Movies Today Are Longer Than Ever Before
"The average of the highest-grossing films from 20 years ago is 118.4 minutes compared to this year's 141.6 minutes."
15. Okay purists, Rule Change Eliminates a Fake Pickoff. Pitchers will no longer be able to fake a throw to third before throwing to another base. Good idea or bad?
... Some scholars, notably philosopher Thomas Nagel, are so unimpressed
with science that they are challenging its fundamental assumptions. In
his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,
Nagel contends that current scientific theories and methods can’t
account for the emergence of life in general and one bipedal,
big-brained species in particular. To solve these problems, Nagel
asserts, science needs “a major conceptual revolution,” as radical as
those precipitated by heliocentrism, evolution and relativity.
Many pundits calling for such a revolution are peddling some sort of
religious agenda, whether Christian or New Age. Nagel is an atheist, who
cannot accept God as a final answer, and yet he echoes some theological
critiques of science. “Physic-chemical reductionism,” he writes, cannot
tell us how matter became animate on Earth more than three billion
years ago; nor can it account for the emergence in our ancestors of
consciousness, reason and morality. ...
... These qualms asides, I recommend Nagel’s book, which serves as a
much-needed counterweight to the smug, know-it-all stance of many modern
scientists. Hawking and Krauss both claim that science has rendered
philosophy obsolete. Actually, now more than ever we need philosophers,
especially skeptics like Socrates, Descartes, Thomas Kuhn and Nagel, who seek to prevent us from becoming trapped in the cave of our beliefs.
Seriously, technological innovation always creates dislocations. Fear of machines replacing humans goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. The economy has always adapted and expect it will again.
Alas, that won't help, as this graph
compiled by statistician Simon Hedlin shows. The total dependency ratio
(children and retirees, compared with those of working age) fell in all
G20/OECD nations bar Germany and Sweden between 1960 and 2010. In the
next fifty years, it will rise in all those nations, bar India and South
Africa. In most nations, the ratio will rise by 40% or more; there are
huge increases in dependency in parts of Asia (China and South Korea)
and in eastern Europe. Britain and America are towards the bottom of the
table, but their problems are big enough.
There are many implications. With more dependents to care for, it is
very hard to imagine how we will pay down our debts. And it is also very
hard to imagine how one can possibly expect government spending to
shrink significantly.
"... BiblioTech, a $1.5 million Bexar County paperless
library will have scores of computer terminals, laptops, tablets, and
e-readers – but not a dog-eared classic or dusty reference book in
sight.
“Think of an Apple store,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who led his county’s bookless library project, told NPR when describing the planned library.
The 4,989-squre-foot, digital-only library, one of the first of its
kind, will feature 100 e-readers available for circulation, 50 e-readers
for children, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops, and 25 tablets for
on-site use. Patrons can check out e-readers for two weeks or load books
onto their own devices.
“A technological evolution is taking place,” Wolff says. “And I think we’re stepping in at the right time.” ..."
"UCLA's survey of incoming
college freshmen shows fewer identify as liberals and an increasing
number saying the economy significantly affected their college choice."
"In some ways, this shift isn’t as dramatic as it might first appear.
Even though younger evangelicals are increasingly walking away from the
religious right, they are still self-identifying as Republicans (54 percent) more than Democrats (26 percent). Younger
Christians still agree with the religious right on the issues but
reject the movement’s tactics, tone, and narrow focus on social issues."
8. Scientific American: The Liberals' War on Science. How politics distorts science on both ends of the spectrum.
"Surveys show that moderate liberals and conservatives embrace science
roughly equally (varying across domains), which is why scientists like
E. O. Wilson and organizations like the National Center for Science
Education are reaching out to moderates in both parties to rein in the
extremists on evolution and climate change. Pace Barry Goldwater,
extremism in the defense of liberty may not be a vice, but it is in
defense of science, where facts matter more than faith—whether it comes
in a religious or secular form—and where moderation in the pursuit of
truth is a virtue."
A great example of the human impact of math is the financial crisis. Black Scholes, number 17 on this list, is a derivative pricing equation that played a role.
"It’s actually a fairly simple equation, mathematically speaking," Professor Stewart told Business Insider. "What caused trouble was the complexity of the system the mathematics was intended to model."
Numbers have power. In this case, people depended on a theoretical equation too seriously and overreached its assumptions.
Without the equations on this list, we wouldn't have GPS, computers, passenger jets, or countless inventions in between.
What does it mean: You can multiply numbers by adding related numbers.
History: Attributed to Pythagoras, it isn't certain
that he first proved it. The first clear proof came from Euclid, and it
is possible the concept was known 1000 years before Pythoragas by the
Babylonians.
Importance: The equation is at the core of geometry,
links it with algebra, and is the foundation of trigonometry. Without
it, accurate surveying, mapmaking, and navigation would be impossible.
Modern use: Triangulation is used to this day to pinpoint relative location for GPS navigation.
1. I don't know much about Common Good RVA but I like their vision. Christianity Today published a piece featuring them, Why the Rest of Your Week Matters to God
"In general, the church has done a fine job equipping Christians for the "private" areas of their lives: prayer, morality, family life, and so on. However, in general, the church has done a poor job equipping people for the "public" parts of their lives: namely, their work, their vocation. The reality is, most people spend the majority of their time in this latter, "public" area."
2. Can we Survive Technology? Written 57 years ago, Fortune resurrected this article by John von Neumann. The editor's note begins:
Editor's note: Every Sunday, Fortune publishes a favorite story from our magazine archives. This week, to mark our FutureIssue,
we turn to a feature from June 1955 by John von Neumann tackling the
profound questions wrought by radical technical advancement—in von
Neumann's day the atomic bomb and climate change. von Neumann was one of
the twentieth century's greatest and most influential geniuses. The
polymath and patron saint of Game Theory
was instrumental in developing America's nuclear superiority toward the
end of World War II as well as in framing the decades-long Cold War
with the Soviet Union. In his time, von Neumann was said to possess "the world's greatest mind." Here is his characteristically pessimistic look on what the future holds.
It is amazing how much of what he wrote remains true today!
"CONCLUSION: Although "materialists' perceptions that
acquisition brings them happiness appear to have some basis
in reality," that happiness is short-lived, Richins concluded. As such,
"The state of anticipating and desiring a product may be inherently more
pleasurable than
product ownership itself.""
5. One of the most difficult topics to understand in economics is comparative advantage, especially why outsourcing jobs to other countries often is advantageous for both countries. Forbes has a creative piece this week, Is Outsourcing American Jobs Wrong?. However, as the BBC reports American manufacturers come back home, a trend that has been true for a few years now.
"In order to fight that perception and reclaim capitalism and business as
positive words, businesses have to find a purpose beyond just making money. Profit is necessary for business, Mackey said, but it's necessary in the same way that his body has to produce red blood cells. It's needed, but it's not the sole purpose."
"Most business leaders don't understand what makes innovation so different from everything else they do at work -- and they haven't adjusted their behavior to accommodate these differences."
"The science fiction vision of stars flashing by as streaks when spaceships travel faster than light isn't what the scene would actually look like, a team of physics students says.
Instead, the view out the windows of a vehicle traveling through hyperspace would be more like a centralized bright glow, calculations show. ..."
That's all for this week. Like the Kruse Kronicle at Facebook.
There’s no way around it. Money is involved in just about everything.
But just how has money affected history’s great scientific discoveries?
We
may now come closer to an answer, thanks to a new Danish-led research
project, which examines the background of some of the great scientific
discoveries of the past 200 years.
The project is headed by Danish science historian Peter C. Kjærgaard, a professor of evolutionary studies at Aarhus University..
By
digging into the archives, he aims to trace the money path from the
hands of science-minded people to the final research findings.
This
method has enabled him to chart the intricate web of economic,
scientific and political interests that led to the discovery of the
world’s first dinosaur nest in the Gobi Desert in the 1920s.
“We have taken the initial steps towards the first major systematic
historical studies of how money has affected the production of
scientific knowledge,” says Kjærgaard.
“Regardless of where and
when in the history of science we look, we can see that researchers have
always depended on money in their work and personal lives. It sounds
banal, but it’s important to understand that without money we wouldn’t
have the scientific data that we have today.”
The project has so far resulted in four journal articles about the role of money in science. ...
I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.
As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.
So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.
When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.
These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.
This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.
For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes. ...
3. Four Harvard and MIT grads are experimenting with direct aid to the poor. "GiveDirectly, the brainchild of four Harvard and MIT graduate students, is so simple, it's genius. Give poor Kenyan families $1,000 -- and let them do whatever they want with it." Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever?
"... Despite
its reputation as a leftwing utopia, Sweden is now a laboratory for
rightwing radicalism. Over the past 15 years a coalition of liberals and
conservatives has brought in for-profit free schools in education, has
sliced welfare to pay off the deficit and has privatised large parts of
the health service.
Their success is envied by the centre right
in Britain. Despite predictions of doom, Sweden's economy continues to
grow and its pro-business coalition has remained in power since 2006.
The last election was the first time since the war that a centre-right
government had been re-elected after serving a full term.
As the
state has been shrunk, the private sector has moved in. Göran Dahlgren, a
former head civil servant at the Swedish department of health and a
visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, says that "almost all
welfare services are now owned by private equity firms". ..."
"... We
have reached a point in our economy where it is becoming increasingly
clear that businesses are being measured not just for their profit, but
also for their impact. And I’m not just talking about writing a check or
funding a charity; I’m referring to business models for which community
involvement and inspirational brand building are the profit centers.
(Think Warby Parker, TOMS, and startups such as SOMA.) I recently went
to a conference where the founders of a startup posited a powerful idea:
the future of marketing is philanthropy. But I think the even bigger
idea is the future of business is morality. My grandfather saw this
early on.
At a time when the moral framework of America appears
to be fractured – or at the very least confused – businesses are in the
propitious position to espouse cultural standards that can help restore
values that our youth can use to build the next generation of positive
enterprise. In fact, whether businesses succeed in creating and
promoting positive cultures might determine whether they stay in
business at all. The future of business is morality, and the future is
now.
Whether it’s the job of the corporation or not to set the
moral tone for society, the expectation is trending towards companies
setting the right example for others to follow. With the sharp rise in
entrepreneurship, young companies have the opportunity to establish
strong cultures early on and share them with their communities. Money
must have a moral center, and from greater consciousness in business,
greater profit will follow. ..."
"New data show an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teens in the U.S. and Canada over the past two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe."
More people moved out of California in 2011 than moved in, according to the latest report from the U.S. Census Bureau, signaling that the Democrat-run state’s economic woes continue to drive residents away.
Most statisticians attribute California’s net loss of 100,000 people last year to its high cost of living, increased population density and troubling unemployment rate.
The widening middle class in Mexico is also encouraging some immigrants to remain in that country instead of moving to California.
Texas — home to lower taxes, less regulation and what the Manhattan Institute calls a “labor pool with the right skills at the right price” — is one of the most attractive destinations for companies departing from California, according to the Census Bureau. ...
"The country reported 85 executions in 2000 but only 43 in 2012, according to a new report released by the Death Penalty Information Center. Plus, far fewer people are being sentenced to death row in the first place. The year 2000 saw 224 new inmates sentenced to death, while 2012 saw only 78, according to the report."
15. Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had a great piece Why 'If We Can Just Save One Child ...' Is a Bad Argument, referring to a statement President Obama made at Newtown, CT. When we deal with complex topics like gun control, we are always
talking about tradeoffs. For instance, I know how we can save more
than 30,000 lives. The were 32,367 traffic fatalities last
year. Let's set the speed limit to 5 miles per hour. Nearly all those lives would be saved. Should we do this "if we can save just
one more life"? I, like Friedersforf, am not advocating any particular
policy. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of making statements like this, as politicians often do.
"I found that the structural supports of evangelicalism are quivering as a
result of ground-shaking changes in American culture. Strategies that
served evangelicals well just 15 years ago are now self- destructive.
The more that evangelicals attempt to correct course, the more they
splinter their movement. In coming years we will see the old
evangelicalism whimper and wane."
He speaks of an Evangelical "collapse" having happened. That may be a bit premature but I think his articulation of trends is right.
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that
it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do
something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds. …
… The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate
change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about
it. That's up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009. …
“Good
news! People are finally coming around to believing what scientists have been
telling us all along!” I can just hear some folks declaring. Hold that thought
for a moment. The article goes on to say:
…
The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a
little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that
category. …
…
[John] Krosnick [Stanford social psychologist],
who consulted with The Associated Press on the poll questions, said the changes
the poll shows aren't in the hard-core "anti-warming" deniers, but in
the next group, who had serious doubts.
"They don't believe
what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say," Krosnick
said. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they
had been seeing all along." …
The rise in belief in global
warming does not stem from science, but inductive reasoning based on heuristics
… relying on personal experience as evidence of a broader reality. It is possible this
will be the warmest year on record in the United States but more moderate
globally. People in the United States look at their thermometers and see warmer
temperatures. The news shows super-storm Sandy. Therefore, from experience in our
particular context it is reasoned that
there is a global trend.
The irony is that average
global temperatures haven’t changed much for more than a decade. Global hurricanes
and cyclones that make landfall are not more prevalent, as has been predicted. In fact, the last four
years have been quite mild. I’m not making the case that climate change isn’t
happening. Climate models don’t necessarily preclude plateaus in change. Rather
I’m saying that if you are a skeptic, then recent trends should bolster
skeptical interpretations. Yet, because of personal experience, some science
skeptics are extrapolating from their narrow context to global realities. Furthermore,
another survey finds that One
in three Americans see extreme weather as a sign of biblical end times. This
is not good news for science.
But I want to suggest that
there is more to the story than this. Many true believers in climate change
insist that the science is settled on this matter and no further dissent may be
tolerated. Yet, as I have written about earlier, some of these folks are
staunch skeptics about the safety of genetically modified crops and nuclear
power, despite what the scientific community says. (see Why
Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions? and The
Anti-Science Left) The issue is not so much that they are persuaded by
science, as it is that claiming scientific authority for conclusions reached by
other means (heuristics? ideology?) is rhetorically useful. This is not good
news for science either.
Any number of futurists
have written about this challenge. For our entire human history, individual lives were
consumed with challenges that were immediately present to us … like shelter from
the elements and not becoming prey for some animal. But with the recent explosion
in knowledge, technology, and economics, many of the imminent threats we face
have been tamed and the new challenges we face are vastly more complex. Over
reliance on heuristic models and rigid ideological sense-making strategies,
once essential, can become obstacles to good decisions. The challenge for the next several
generations is going to be learning how to develop social institutions that
effectively reflect on and address complex challenges.
Here are the links. BTW, if you haven't already, you can "like" the Kruse Kronicle Facebook page and see daily links in your Facebook feed.
1. When I was a kid, I used to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Saturdays. That was the beginning of my life-long appreciation for big cats. One of the organizations we support is the Turperntine Creek Wildlife Refuge for big cats in Arkansas. Check out this Nat Geo super slo-mo video of a running cheetah. Be sure to go to minute 5:00, and see him from the front. His head barely moves. Just amazing!
7. If you are a man, getting along with the in-laws means you have 20% higher chance of not getting divorced. If you are a woman, getting along well the in-laws makes you 20% more likely to get divorced. Getting Along With The In-Laws Makes Women More Likely To Divorce
"The Supreme Court announced Friday it would review a case testing whether human genes may be patented, in a dispute weighing patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer. A 2009 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed among other things the First Amendment is at stake because the patents are so broad they bar scientists from examining and comparing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes at the center of the dispute. In short, the patents issued more than a decade ago cover any new scientific methods of looking at these human genes that might be developed by others."
I am guessing there are some bioethics questions to consider here as well. ;-)
15. 4.5 billion years of the earth's evolution in as if it happened in 24 hours.
"The Pew Research Center announced Nov. 29 that the U.S.
birth rate fell to its lowest level since at least 1920, when reliable
record-keeping began. That was true—but not news. The National Center
for Health Statistics reported that way back on Oct. 3.
What was
news was Pew’s analysis of the government data, which showed that the
birth rate decline was greatest among immigrant women. “We were the
first to point that out,” Gretchen Livingston, the lead author of Pew’s
report, said in an interview. ..."
... New research shows that Catholics now report the lowest proportion of
"strongly affiliated" followers among major American religious
traditions, while the data indicates that evangelicals are increasingly
devout and committed to their faith.
According to Philip Schwadel, a sociologist at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, in the 1970s there was only a five-point difference
between how strongly Catholics and evangelicals felt about their
religion.
By 2010, he said, that "intensity gap" had grown to around 20 points,
with some 56 percent of evangelicals describing themselves as "strongly
affiliated" with their religion compared with 35 percent of Catholics.
Even mainline Protestants reported a higher level of religious intensity
than Catholics, at 39 percent. ..."
"Indeed, for America’s Amish, much is changing. The Amish are, by one measure, the fastest-growing faith community in the US. Yet as their numbers grow, the land available to support the agrarian lifestyle that underpins their faith is shrinking, gobbled up by the encroachment of exurban mansions and their multidoor garages.
The result is, in some ways, a gradual redefinition of what it means to be Amish. Some in the younger generation are looking for new ways to make a living on smaller and smaller slices of land. Others are looking beyond the Amish heartland of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, seeking more space in states such as Texas, Maine, and Montana."
21. Finally, one of the things I found interesting about the presidential election was Team Romney's seeming confidence they were winning. I think every candidate who is losing often tries to spin things positively until the very end but I had the sense that Team Romney wasn't faking it. They believed they were winning. I think post-election analysis is revealing that was true. From The New RepbulicThe Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He'd Win
The holidays are here again. That means family, and family means listening to insane, ill-informed debates over every subject imaginable. But just because your relatives are old and probably a little crazy doesn’t mean everything they say is nonsense. When it comes to some of that old down-home folksy wisdom, for example, they’re actually right.
1. You Can Predict the Weather From Joint Pain ...
2. Chicken Soup Can Help a Cold ...
3. Sleep On It and Decide Tomorrow ...
4. Animals Know When Danger is Coming ...
5. Don’t Swallow Your Gum ...
6. Eating Bananas Will Make You Have a Baby Boy ...
The International Agency for Research on Cancer is renowned for producing assessments of carcinogens. But it appears that some of the agency’s evaluations may overstate the risks, for reasons that tell us a great deal about the science and politics of risk assessment.
It is a paradox that, in spite of dramatic increases in life
expectancy and improvements in health in the developed world over recent
decades, as a society we are obsessively preoccupied with the specter
of hazards lurking in our environment and consumer products.
Many factors have contributed to this ever-increasing climate of
fear, including the success of the environmental movement; a deep-seated
distrust of industry; the public’s insatiable appetite for stories
related to health, which the media duly cater to; and – not least – the
striking expansion of the fields of epidemiology and environmental
health sciences and their burgeoning literature. ...
... One has to ask what “possibly carcinogenic” means, if extensive
evidence in humans and animals points to no threat. A major problem with
the IARC process is that it makes it almost impossible to assign an
agent to category 4 – probably not carcinogenic. Of the roughly one
thousand agents evaluated by the agency exactly one is in this category.
A second problem with the IARC process — one that reinforces the
classification problem — is that some of the working groups convened to
assess a particular agent have included scientists who have carried out
studies on the agent under evaluation. It is fanciful to think that
scientists who have a vital stake in a particular question can evaluate
the evidence, including their own studies, dispassionately.
Finally, IARC reaches its assessments by consensus. But this can mean
that those who are more forceful and persuasive may influence the group
decision-making process. In addition, consensus implies a philosophic
stance which has nothing to do with science.
All three of these flaws came together in IARC’s assessment of cell phones:
undue emphasis on a small number of positive epidemiologic studies from
a single group, when the much larger body of studies indicated no
elevated risk; the improper influence of an activist researcher (the
lead author of the anomalous positive studies) on the deliberations of
the working group; and, finally, a tilt toward the “precautionary
principle.”
The precautionary principle states that, if there is uncertainty
regarding the effects of exposure to an agent, the burden of proof that
exposure does not cause harm falls on those who utilize the agent. While
this formulation may sound reasonable, in actuality it has nothing to
contribute to the assessment of risks. First, there are always
uncertainties, and it is not possible to prove the absence of risk.
Furthermore, in practice invocation of the precautionary principle
focuses attention solely on the possibility of harm, often ignoring
information about the dose to which people are exposed, avoiding
consideration of benefits of the agent in question and whether safer
substitutes are available, and giving greater weight to studies that
appear to indicate a hazard, even when these studies may be of poorer
quality.
For all its self-justifying claims, the precautionary principle seeks to
deny a central fact – there is no way to avoid risk in life – all we
can do is to try to use available knowledge to distinguish between
large, well-established risks; those that are probable; and those that
available evidence suggests are trivial or non-existent. ...
Geoffrey C. Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology.
3. "British people - and many others across the world - have been brought up on the idea of three square meals a day as a normal eating pattern, but it wasn't always that way." Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?
7. "It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay." Jose Mujica: The world's 'poorest' president
8. You may have heard that there was a presidential election last week. Here is a map showing how the counties voted, with red being the most intensely Republican and blue being the most Democrat. (Source: The Real Reason Cities Lean Democratic)
9. Speaking of the election, there has been a lot written about how the GOP will need to change if they want to win national elections. As a right-leaning guy, I thought this article in Slate, The New Grand Old Party, and this one by Bobby Jindal, How Republicans can win future elections, were among the best.
13. Nanotechnology just keeps getting more amazing. "The latest invention from Stanford University’s Department of Electrical
Engineering sounds like something a superhero would have. A
self-repairing plastic-metal material has been developed by a team of
professors, researchers and graduate students." New Self-Repairing Material Invented at Stanford
15. Speaking of 3D-Printing, how big a deal is it? "Chris Anderson has exited one of the top jobs in publishing -
Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine - to pursue the life of an
entrepreneur, making a big bet that 3D printers represent a massive new
phase of the industrial revolution." Chris Anderson: Why I left Wired - 3D Printing Will Be Bigger Than The Web
"A
flash mob (or flashmob) is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a
place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time,
then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and
artistic expression. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications,
social media, or viral emails." [Wikipedia accessed 11.12.12]
How do you define a church?"
Tiny nanoparticles are a huge part of our lives, for better or for worse.
“Everything, when miniaturized to the sub-100-nanometer scale, has new
properties, regardless of what it is,” says Chad Mirkin, professor of
chemistry (and materials science, engineering, medicine, biomedical
engineering and chemical and biological engineering) at Northwestern
University. This is what makes nanoparticles the materials of the
future. They have strange chemical and physical properties compared to
their larger-particle kin. The thing that matters about nanoparticles is
their scale.
Nanoscale materials are used in everything from sunscreen to
chemical catalysts to antibacterial agents--from the mundane to the
lifesaving. “I spilled wine at a Christmas party once, and I was
terrified. Red wine on a white carpet. And it wipes right up,” Mirkin
recalled. “The reason is the nano-particulate used to coat the carpet
keeps that material from absorbing into the carpet and staining the
carpet.”
On a more sophisticated side, researchers are developing nanoscale
assays used to screen for cancer, infection and even genes. Gold
nanoparticles that have been doped with DNA can be used to detect
bacteria in a person’s bloodstream, determining whether a patient has
infection and what kind. Or they can be used to detect changes in a
person’s immune system that reflect the presence of cancer. Nano-flares
can measure the genetic content of cells, and light up--or flare--when
they detect a specific cell of a doctor’s choosing, maybe cancer, stem
cells or even the reaction to a small molecule used in a new drug. ...
View the slideshow. Here are the seven examples:
Nanoparticle-Filled Ink Conducts Electricity Cancer Detectors Nano-Absorption Fighting Cancer At The Source Gene Therapy and Drug Delivery Protective Coating For Your Skin Nanomaterials In The Food Supply
A polemical new book, Science Left Behind, argues persuasively that there is less than meets the eye in self-righteous claims by Democrats that they represent the “pro-science party.” Jon Entine, Director of the Genetic Literacy Project, reports:
The debate over which political party, Democrat or Republican, is more
faithful to science has been a hot button topic since the 1990s. ...
... A slew of books and articles
from left-leaning science writers—which means most of the science
journalism establishment—has elevated the popular narrative that
Democrats adhere faithfully to the inspiration of Newton, Galileo, Bacon
and Darwin while Republicans look more to ethereal authorities for
their application of the scientific method.
But now, Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, co-authors of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left,
make a nuanced and convincing counter argument: Ludditism is not a
partisan issue. In fact, on many of the most critical issues of our
time, the “progressive” perspective is often rooted in out-dated,
anti-empirical, junk science paradigms that threaten innovation—and are
beginning to unnerve the most scientifically minded thinkers on the
left. ...
... The central thesis of Science Left Behind—that the left’s
view of science has drifted decisively from empiricism into ideology—has
now emerged as a genuine debate within the left community. This
contentiousness became very public over the past month as “progressives”
debated the merits of California Proposition 37, which would have
mandated labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms.
For the political left, suspicion of biotechnology in general and
more specifically the rejection of genetically modified crops as
environmentally hazardous and GM foods as health hazards are now
canonical. Almost every major activist environmental NGO supported Prop
37. But their contention that biotech crops and foods posted unusual
environmental or health hazards is not based on science. In fact,
fanning fears about biotech crops and foods has become a scandalous
leftwing obsession. It’s an anti-science mindset, argues Keith Kloor, a
frequent contributor to the Washington Post-owned, liberal online magazine Slate:
“[F]earsare stoked by prominent environmental
groups, supposed food-safety watchdogs, and influential food columnists;
that dodgy science is laundered by well-respected scholars and
propaganda is treated credulously by legendary journalists; and that
progressive media outlets, which often decry the scurrilous rhetoric
that warps the climate debate, serve up a comparable agitprop when it
comes to GMOs,” Kloors wrote. “In short, I’ve learned that the
emotionally charged, politicized discourse on GMOs is mired in the kind
of fever swamps that have polluted climate science beyond recognition.”
This soft conspiracy, promoted by mainstream Democrats, infects a
broad array of science issues and highlights the religious-like iconic
beliefs of the left (as Kloor has noted): Nature is sacred, big business
is dangerous and corrupt, technology can cause more problems than it
helps solve, the world is on the verge of an eco-apocalypse, and we need
more precaution, regulation and legislation. I call it enviro-romanticism, a criticism documented in distressing detail in Science Left Behind. ...
... As George Monbiot, one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent
environmental writers recently concluded when discussing the left’s
contradictory and increasingly anti-environmental energy policy, “[T]he
environmental movement to which I belong has done more harm to the
planet’s living systems than climate change deniers have ever achieved.”
We could all benefit from the emergence of what I call “science
independents”—those who base their views on data and evidence rather
than partisan leanings and litmus tests. ...
I think the challenge is that all of us tend to latch on to science that confirms our experience and ideology. We are dismissive when it doesn't. We need better models for incorporating science into discussions in the public square.
After 30 years of debate, scientists believe they've discovered the
trigger for the last great freeze of the Earth, some 12,900 years ago.
They say they've established that the flood waters from the melting
of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet flowed northwest into the Arctic
first, weakening ocean thermohaline circulation and cooling global climate.
If instead it had flowed east into the St Lawrence River valley,
they say, Earth's climate would have remained relatively unchanged.
"This episode was the last time the Earth underwent a major cooling,
so understanding exactly what caused it is very important for
understanding how our modern-day climate might change in the future,"
says University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientist Alan Condron. ...
... "Our results are particularly relevant for how we model the melting of
the Greenland and Antarctic Ice sheets now and in the future. It is
apparent from our results that climate scientists
are artificially introducing fresh water into their models over large
parts of the ocean that freshwater would never have reached," says
Condron. ...
On issues ranging from genetically modified crops to nuclear power, environmentalists are increasingly refusing to listen to scientific arguments that challenge standard green positions. This approach risks weakening the environmental movement and empowering climate contrarians.
From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
to James Hansen’s modern-day tales of climate apocalypse,
environmentalists have long looked to good science and good scientists
and embraced their findings. Often we have had to run hard to keep up
with the crescendo of warnings coming out of academia about the perils
facing the world. A generation ago, biologist Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and systems analysts Dennis and Donella Meadows’ The Limits to Growth
shocked us with their stark visions of where the world was headed. No
wide-eyed greenie had predicted the opening of an ozone hole before the
pipe-smoking boffins of the British Antarctic Survey spotted it when
looking skyward back in 1985. On issues ranging from ocean acidification
and tipping points in the Arctic to the dangers of nanotechnology, the
scientists have always gotten there first — and the environmentalists
have followed.
And yet, recently, the environment movement seems to have been turning
up on the wrong side of the scientific argument. We have been making
claims that simply do not stand up. We are accused of being
anti-science — and not without reason. A few, even close friends, have
begun to compare this casual contempt for science with the tactics of
climate contrarians.
That should hurt.
Three current issues suggest that the risks of myopic adherence to
ideology over rational debate are real: genetically modified (GM) crops,
nuclear power, and shale gas development. The conventional green
position is that we should be opposed to all three. Yet the voices of
those with genuine environmental credentials, but who take a different
view, are being drowned out by sometimes abusive and irrational
argument. ...
The environmental movement is a diverse coalition of people. You can't make
a blanket statement about any movement this large. There are two significant
groups that make up this coalition that I expect explain this inconsistency
between embracing science on some things and not on others.
First, I think there is a segment that is simply anti-technological,
anti-21st Century living. They have a natural aversion to much of 21st Century
existence and want to return to a far less technological (read
"natural") existence. That climate science (and the frequently
attached moralism about the evils of consumerism) would dovetail with their
ideology of bucolic bliss is a welcomed happenstance. It gives legitimization
to their cause against those who embrace the modern socio-economic order. GM crops
and nuclear power do just the opposite. These would enable the current despised
structures to continue and grow. Thus, their embrace of climate change science
has little to do with a rigorous understanding and commitment to science.
Second, there is another segment that sees economic freedom as unjust and destructive
and wants more centralized control over the global economy. Climate science can
be effectively be used to support that vision. The case is made that our
current competing economies are leading us to global catastrophe. Political and
economic freedom need to be curtailed on a global scale by centralized
authorities who will rationally manage world affairs. GM crops and nuclear
power offer the opportunity to adapt to current challenges without a
significant reordering of the world order. Once again, the commitment is not so
much to science as it is to using science as debate tool to achieve an
ideological end.
I'm not saying that these are by any means the only two groups backing
environmental measures. I am saying that these are two groups that do have
meaningful influence on what happens within the environmental movement.
An author who makes a case in book length form, similar to what Fred Pearce
is making here, is Seymour Garte in Where
We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet. He is another
scientist who is fully persuaded about anthropogenic global warming. He is optimistic
about solutions but sees the anti-science, anti-technology, crowd as a real
problem.
(Reuters) - Scientists have come up with a test for the virus that causes AIDS that is ten times more sensitive and a fraction of the cost of existing methods, offering the promise of better diagnosis and treatment in the developing world.
The test uses nanotechnology to give a result that can be seen with the naked eye by turning a sample red or blue, according to research from scientists at Imperial College in London published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
"Our approach affords for improved sensitivity,
does not require sophisticated instrumentation and it is ten times
cheaper," Molly Stevens, who led the research, told Reuters. ...
... The test could also be reconfigured to detect
other diseases, such as sepsis, Leishmaniasis, Tuberculosis and malaria,
Stevens said.
Testing is not only crucial in picking up the HIV virus early but also for monitoring the effectiveness of treatments. ...
The new sensor works by testing serum, a clear
watery fluid derived from blood samples, in a disposable container for
the presence of an HIV biomarker called p24.
If
p24 is present, even in minute concentrations, it causes the tiny gold
nanoparticles to clump together in an irregular pattern that turns the
solution blue. A negative result separates them into ball shapes that
generate a red color. ...
Six Italian scientists were sentenced to six years in prison last week for not giving the public sufficient warning of the L'Aquila earthquake. The CNN video is included below. The scientists are appealing the decision but the fact that this case occurred at all is sparking debate about science and public policy.
Ethan Siegel at The Atlantic offers some thoughts on the challenges we face. We frequently make our estimates about the future based on repetitive experiences from the past:
This is a fabulous example of a pre-scientific prediction!
I’ve taken information from very, very similar situations that I’ve
experienced before, I know — looking back — how those previous
situations turned out, and so I can infer how this current situation is
likely to turn out. This is something we do all the time in our lives,
and something we’ve done frequently throughout history. The phrase Red Sky at Night, Sailor’s Delight
didn’t come about because we understood the science behind the next
day’s weather and the properties of the atmosphere the night before, it
came about because when we observed phenomenon A (the red sky at night),
it was very often followed by phenomenon B (good sailing weather the
next day).
We use this all the time in our lives ...
Science is different:
Sometimes, this type of pre-scientific prediction is the best we can do. If we can make this into a truly scientific prediction,
we stand to do much better, but it’s a much more difficult task. A
truly scientific prediction requires the following three things:
that the scientific theory that governs your phenomenon is completely understood,
the conditions that will affect the possible outcome(s) are known and understood in their entirety, and
that you have enough computing power to figure out what the outcome is going to be.
In addition, because measurements are imperfect (and sometimes physical laws aren’t 100% predictive), you are also going to have a quantifiable uncertainty associated with your scientific prediction.
So, depending on the topic, scientists' ability to offer meaningful guidance to the public will vary. But if we are to translate science into meaningful action, we also need at least three other elements present in society:
We can speak intelligently about what the outcome will be in terms of probabilities and uncertainties, but this also requires a few things that are far from given:
Scientists who can communicate these results clearly and effectively,
A media / government that can understand that information, make
reasonable and effective policies based on that information, and
communicate these results to the populace, and
A populace that’s scientifically literate enough to understand
what’s communicated to them and act in accordance with those
recommendations.
This ought to be one of the main goals of science, as it’s one of the most important services that science can perform for a society.
Toward the end of his essay he writes:
You do the world a disservice when you scapegoat scientists
for a disaster they could not predict and an incompetent government
official they could not control. We now live in a world where we jail scientists for failing to clean up the government’s miscommunication about a disaster they could not predict, while we simultaneously accuse them of fear-mongering for the impending disasters that good science does predict.
If you want to know what’s going to happen in the future with any sort of accuracy, you need science.
It’s the only thing that’s ever worked, and the more we do it, the
better we get at it. This means we need to make the world safe for
scientists to do science, we need to treat the science being done with
the respect it deserves, and we need to improve and encourage
communication between scientists and the public.
Anthony Giddens wrote about these challenges in Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. Increasingly, our challenges are far more complex than our time-honored heuristic decision-making models can handle. In the face of an impending disaster (Giddens uses the Mad Cow epidemic as an example), if scientists don't warn strongly enough, then they could be vilified like the recently convicted Italian scientists were. If they warn too strongly and nothing happens, or if their strong warnings lead to actions that prevent a disaster, then scientists can be labeled scaremongers ... the bad thing they predicted didn't happen.
There is no easy solution to the dilemma. I think one other element should be added to the discussion. It probably falls under Siegel's comments about scientists communicating clearly. Many of the problems we face require buy-in by the masses. As soon as scientists become to tightly connected with a particular political agenda they risk having scientific information collapsed into a partisan football to be kicked around rather than science becoming a guiding light to shape policy. Scientists should be very slow to connect scientific information to political agendas and resist being taken captive for political ends.
What to do you think about the Italian court decision? What challenges do you see for science as it relates to public policy?
Each week I spend considerable time scanning headlines as I look for stories to blog about at the Kruse Kronicle. I clip them into an Evernote Notebook and usually twice a day I select one or two to link and discuss. A number of interesting stories never make it on to the blog.
So this week I'm beginning what I hope will be a regular Saturday feature. Each Saturday I will post links I did not use the previous week. For now I will call it "Saturday Links." Happy clicking!
3. Icon of the American Libertarian movement, Murray Rothbard, once asked, "Why won't the left acknowledge the difference between deserving poor and
undeserving poor. Why support the feckless, lazy & irresponsible?" Chris Dillow gives a libertarian response affirming the need to Support the undeserving poor.
"I can easily imagine my graph in a Julian Simon or Steven Pinker chapter
on human progress and the decline in violence. Even though I have no
philosophical objection to the death penalty, it's hard not to interpret
this 400-year pattern as a strong sign of human betterment."
NEW YORK (AP) -- Scientists in Oregon
have created embryos with genes from one man and two women, using a
provocative technique that could someday be used to prevent babies from
inheriting certain rare incurable diseases.
The researchers at Oregon Health &
Sciences University said they are not using the embryos to produce
children, and it is not clear when or even if this technique will be put
to use. But it has already stirred a debate over its risks and ethics
in Britain, where scientists did similar work a few years ago.
The British
experiments, reported in 2008, led to headlines about the possibility
someday of babies with three parents. But that's an overstatement. The
DNA from the second woman amounts to less than 1 percent of the embryo's
genes, and it isn't the sort that makes a child look like Mom or Dad.
The procedure is simply a way of replacing some defective genes that
sabotage the normal workings of cells.
The
British government is asking for public comment on the technology before
it decides whether to allow its use in the future. One concern it cites
is whether such DNA alteration could be an early step down a slippery
slope toward "designer babies" - ordering up, say, a petite, blue-eyed
girl or tall, dark-haired boy. ...
So what are the ethical implications here? Any thoughts?
Many have been inspired by Star Trek to become scientists, and some are starting to make its gadgetry a reality.
Destination Star Trek London has kicked off at the ExCeL exhibition centre,
and I'm willing to bet that among those heading down for a weekend of
pointy-eared fun, there'll be a high proportion of scientists and
engineers.
Many have been inspired by Star Trek to take up a career in science, technology or engineering.
I think the franchise deserves more respect as a science popularisation
medium – how many other prime-time TV shows would allow their
characters to toss out phrases like "I performed a Fourier analysis on
the harmonics, Captain"?
Since its inception in 1966, Star Trek
has familiarised us with the lingo and applications of science. At
least, that was the case for me. I felt pretty disenfranchised from
science at school: it wasn't until I discovered science fiction that I
realised I could understand "difficult" technical concepts.
Since
the show began, many of us have become more tech-savvy than we could
possibly have imagined at school. More than that, we're now seeing
emergent technology here on Earth that was once little more than a Star
Trek scriptwriter's dream. To get you in the mood for this weekend's
festivities, here's a roundup of some of the best Star Trek-inspired
technology.
Replicators - ... Three-dimensional printers have been on the open market commercially for most of the 21st century. ...
Transporters - Earlier this year, Nature reported that photons had been teleported 89 miles, between La Palma and Tenerife. OK, it wasn't exactly transportation ...
Bioneural circuitry - ... And in February of this year, the Scripps Research Institute published details of a DNA-based biological computer based on an original design by Alan Turing. ...
Nanites - ... They've constructed a set of nanorobots, with inbuilt chemical sensors, that can silence genes within cancerous cells. ...
Androids - Japanese scientists have created some remarkably human-looking androids,
though they wouldn't beat Data in a game of three-dimensional chess. ...
Of course, we all ready have personal communication devices. But as someone recently pointed out, while we all have communication devices, we don't see people in Star Trek constantly looking down at them and running into things. ;-) Warp drive would be pretty cool. Any other Trekkie devices that you want to see?
Various groups of scientists have recently created thyroid cells in the lab, grown a new ear in the skin a woman's own arm, and won a Nobel Prize for figuring out how to reprogram cells so that they can turn into a variety of cell types.
In the future, there may be no limit to the kinds of organs and body parts that can be created from scratch.
One hope is to make donor organs obsolete, or at least far less
necessary, eliminating long waiting lists for transplants. By using a
patient's own cells, the new wave of regenerative medicine also
circumvents ethical arguments and reduces the chance that recipients
will reject their new parts.
"We now have the ability for the first time to create a virtually
unlimited supply of all the cell types and building blocks we need to
make what we want to make," said stem cell researcher Robert Lanza,
chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology, a biotechnology
company in Marlborough, Mass. "Now we just have to put it all together." ...
PRAGUE – Campaigners on important but complex issues, annoyed by the
length of time required for public deliberations, often react by
exaggerating their claims, hoping to force a single solution to the
forefront of public debate. But, however well intentioned, scaring the
public into a predetermined solution often backfires: when people
eventually realize that they have been misled, they lose confidence and
interest.
Last month, there were two examples of this in a single week. On
September 19, the French researcher Gilles-Eric Séralini attempted to
fuel public opposition to genetically modified foods by showing the public
how GM corn, with and without the pesticide Roundup, caused huge tumors
and early death in 200 rats that had consumed it over two years. ...
Lomborg highlights the throughly bogus nature of the study and it funding and notes:
Moreover, Séralini’s results contradict the latest meta-study
of 24 long-term studies (up to two years and five generations), which
found that the data do “not suggest any health hazards” and display “no
statistically significant differences” between GM and conventional food.
Why is this important?
This debacle matters because many GM crops provide tangible benefits for
people and the environment. They enable farmers to produce higher
yields with fewer inputs (such as pesticides), so that more food can be
produced from existing farmland. That, in turn, implies less human encroachment into natural ecosystems,
enabling greater biodiversity. But, of course, Séralini’s pictures of
cancer-addled rats munching GM corn have instead been burned into the
public imagination.
Then there was a climate change report:
The Séralini fiasco was only a
week old when, on September 26, the Climate Vulnerability Forum, a
group of countries led by Bangladesh, launched the second edition of its
Global Vulnerability Monitor.
Headlines about the launch were truly alarming: Over the next 18 years,
global warming would kill 100 million people and cost the economy
upwards of $6.7 trillion annually.
These
public messages were highly misleading – and clearly intended to shock
and disturb. The vast majority of deaths discussed in the report did not
actually result from global warming. Outdoor air pollution – caused by
fossil-fuel combustion, not by global warming – contributed to 30% of
all deaths cited in the study. And 60% of the total deaths reflect the
burning of biomass (such as animal dung and crop residues) for cooking
and heating, which has no relation to either fossil fuels or global
warming.
In
total, the study exaggerated more than 12-fold the number of deaths
that could possibly be attributed to climate change, and it more than
quadrupled the potential economic costs, simply to grab attention. ...
He goes on:
Likewise, overcoming the
burden of indoor air pollution will happen only when people can use
kerosene, propane, and grid-based electricity. If the Global Vulnerability Monitor’s
recommendation to cut back on fossil fuels were taken seriously, the
result would be slower economic growth and continued reliance on dung,
cardboard, and other low-grade fuels, thereby prolonging the suffering
that results from indoor air pollution.
New Zealand researchers have genetically engineered a cow to produce milk free of the protein that causes allergies in children.
The milk could also prove to be healthier than normal milk as it
contains higher levels of the protein casein, which would result in
higher calcium levels and improved cheese yields from the milk.
The development targets the 2 per cent to 3 per cent of infants in
the developed world who are allergic to cows' milk proteins - used in
the production of baby formulas - in the first year of life.
The researchers add that the success of their approach suggests it may also be used to alter other traits in livestock. ...
The gulf in outlook between atheists and adherents of the
monotheistic religions is profound. We are fortunate to live under a
constitutional system and a code of manners that by and large keep it
from disturbing the social peace; usually the parties ignore each other.
But sometimes the conflict surfaces and heats up into a public debate.
The present is such a time.
One of the things atheists tend to
believe is that modern science is on their side, whereas theism is in
conflict with science: that, for example, belief in miracles is
inconsistent with the scientific conception of natural law; faith as a
basis of belief is inconsistent with the scientific conception of
knowledge; belief that God created man in his own image is inconsistent
with scientific explanations provided by the theory of evolution. In his
absorbing new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin
Plantinga, a distinguished analytic philosopher known for his
contributions to metaphysics and theory of knowledge as well as to the
philosophy of religion, turns this alleged opposition on its head. His
overall claim is that “there is superficial conflict but deep concord
between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep
conflict between science and naturalism.” By naturalism he means the
view that the world describable by the natural sciences is all that
exists, and that there is no such person as God, or anything like God. ...
... The animated infographic displays wind flowing over America, measured
between one and 30 miles per hour. It uses data from the National
Digital Forecast Database, which is updated hourly. One can appreciate
the northerly midwestern gales, and dramatically see Hurricane Isaac
threatening New Orleans.
The Viégas and Wattenberg team have distinguished
themselves by combining fascinating data with brilliant design to tell
stories that cannot be so easily told in any other way. Among Mr
Wattenberg's celebrated visualisations is one of his earliest, a "map of the market"
(at the side), which colorfully tracked the daily rise and fall of
share prices by degree, direction, sector and firm, scaled by market
capitalisation—all in a single glance. ...
You have to go to the link above to see the interactive map. I blew me away! ;-)
One thing I noticed as I looked at the map was how it
compares with red vs. blue state breakdowns. Red states are supposed to be
anti-science Republicans while blue states are supposed to fully embrace it.
Yet red states like Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, and Louisiana get B grades while
Hawaii, Illinois, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts get Ds. Interesting.
A bioengineer and geneticist
at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of
data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the
previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.
The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri,
basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of
binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter,
strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the
bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).
To
read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you
were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases
back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a
19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so
a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into
usable data using the addresses. ...
... Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.
Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months — it just isn’t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge — every book, uttered word, and funny cat video — can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, though… well, it might just be possible to record everything (hello, police state!) ...
(CNN) -- A private spacecraft docked with the International Space Station on Friday, a milestone in a new era of commercial space flight.
The docking happened just before 10 a.m., almost two hours later than planned. A radar system aboard the unmanned SpaceX Dragon that measures distance to the station had picked up a different part of the space station, meaning it could not dock properly, NASA said. ...
... The launch is an important step for NASA and the United States, which currently has no means of independently reaching space. NASA relies on the Russian space agency to ferry U.S. astronauts to orbit.
The first attempt to launch Falcon 9 was halted Saturday when a flight computer detected high pressure in an engine combustion chamber. Workers replaced the valve Saturday, SpaceX said.
The company plans 11 more flights to the space station.
One of a handful of private companies receiving funds from NASA to develop a space taxi system, SpaceX hopes the experience with the cargo flights will help the company reach its goal of carrying astronauts aboard the Dragon.
The company is developing a heavy-lift rocket with twice the cargo capability of the space shuttle, and also dreams of building a spacecraft that could carry a crew to Mars. ...
When the price of a tourist flight gets below about one year's salary, I'm buying a ticket! ;-)
HONOLULU (AP) — Hollywood icon James Cameron has made it to Earth's deepest point.
The director of "Titanic," ''Avatar" and other films used a specially designed submarine to dive nearly seven miles, completing his journey a little before 8 a.m. Monday local time, according to Stephanie Montgomery of the National Geographic Society.
He plans to spend about six hours exploring and filming the Mariana Trench, about 200 miles southwest of the Pacific island of Guam.
"All systems OK," were Cameron's first words upon reaching the bottom, according to a statement. His arrival at a depth of 35,756 feet came early Sunday evening on the U.S. East Coast, after a descent that took more than two hours.
The scale of the trench is hard to grasp — it's 120 times larger than the Grand Canyon and more than a mile deeper than Mount Everest is tall. ...
Combining gemcitabine with MRK003, an experimental drug, triggers a chain of events leading to pancreatic cancer cell death, researchers from Cambridge reported in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The researchers explained that when the two drugs are combined, the effect of each one is multiplied, thus intensifying the destruction of pancreatic cancer cells.
Professor David Tuveson, from the Cambridge Research Institute, UK, and team demonstrated in animal studies that MRK003, an experimental medication, when combined with chemotherapy medication gemcitabine, set off a domino effect which ultimately destroyed the malignant cells.
The drug combo is being used in a human study, a clinical trial, which is being managed by Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust, together with Cancer Research UK's Drug Development Office. ...
MRK003 is a gamma secretase inhibitor. It inhibits, or blocks a crucial cell signaling pathway in both pancreatic cancer cells and the cells in the lining of blood vessels that supply the tumor with vital nourishment (endothelial cells).
The researchers found that when MRK003 is added to gemcitabine, the chemotherapy drug's ability to destroy tumors was significantly enhanced. Gemcitabine is a nucleoside analog, which is marketed as Gemzar by Eli Lilly. Gemcitabine is commonly used in pancreatic cancer therapy, as well as non-small cell lung cancer, bladder cancer and breast cancer. ...
... Pancreatic cancer is the 5th most deadly cancer in the UK, with about 8,000 people being diagnosed with the cancer each year. Only 1 in 5 pancreatic cancer patients usually survive a year after their diagnosis, however, the numbers have more than doubled in survivors since the 1970's. ...
Buried beneath a coal mine in Mongolia, scientists have discovered a 'Pompeii-like' forest, 300 million years old, buried by volcanic ash.
Because volcanic ash covered a large expanse of forest over the course of only a few days, plants were preserved as they fell, in many cases in the exact locations where they grew.
"It's marvelously preserved," says University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn.
"We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves attached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting." The researchers also found some smaller trees with leaves, branches, trunk and cones intact, preserved in their entirety.
Because local coal mining has uncovered large tracts of rock, the researchers were able to examine a total of 1,000 square meters of the ash layer, spread between three different sites nearby.
The team has dated the ash layer to around 298 million years ago, the beginning of the Permian period. ...
GIVEN journalists’ penchant for sticking the suffix “gate” onto anything they think smells of conspiracy, a public-relations consultant might have suggested a different name. But ResearchGate, a small firm based in Berlin, is immune to such trivia. It is ambitious, too—aiming to do for the academic world what Mark Zuckerberg did for the world in general, by creating a social network for scientists. And it is successful. About 1.4m researchers have signed up already, and that number is growing by 50,000 a month. ...
... To make things more efficient and interdisciplinary, ResearchGate wants to help the academic world to grow more connective tissue, as Ijad Madisch, one of the firm’s founders, puts it. As on Facebook, users create a profile page with biographical information, list their interests and research skills, and join groups. They can see what others with similar interests are up to and post comments. They can also upload their papers and create invitation-only workgroups. ...
... At the moment, most of those users are in their 20s. Their favourite activity is to ask each other questions about practical research problems, from DNA-sequencing techniques to statistical tricks. They are also busy reading each other’s papers: more than 10m have been uploaded. (Most scientific journals now allow authors to post their work on “personal web pages”, which includes profile pages on social networks, according to Dr Madisch.)
The service certainly saves these young researchers trial and error, and therefore time and money. They will probably also like a new feature ResearchGate is planning to introduce in April: a feedback system which lets users rate each other’s contributions. This would allow them to build a reputation other than by publishing papers.
Scientists whose reputations are established may be more hesitant, though, and not just because they are set in their ways. Science is not only about collaboration but also about competition. ...
... Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, "What does the Bible say about that?" And then informed by "what the Bible says," they are ready to make a "biblical" judgment.
This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about "human origins." It isn't. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.
Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.
Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch -- an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about "the beginning," however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question "Where do humans come from?" They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious -- and often political -- beliefs of the people of their own time.
Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.
Likewise, Israel's story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to so such a thing is simply wrongheaded.
Reading the biblical story against its ancient backdrop is hardly a news flash, and most evangelical biblical scholars easily concede the point. But for some reason this piece of information has not filtered down to where it is needed most: into the mainstream evangelical consciousness. Once it does, evangelicals will see for themselves that dragging the Adam and Eve story into the evolution discussion is as misguided as using the stories of Israel's monarchy to rank the Republican presidential nominees.
Evangelicals tend to focus on how to protect the Bible against the attacks of evolution. The real challenge before them is to reorient their expectation of what the story of Adam and Eve is actually prepared to deliver. ...
I love Enns ... even if he is a diehard Yankee fan. (Just shows that even great minds have been corupted by sin. ;-) )
(Reuters) - The great white shark is lurking in cyberspace, in the form of an iPhone application launched this week that allows users to track a dozen of the predators as they roam around the Pacific Ocean.
The California-based Marine Conservation Science Institute launched the app, which the nonprofit describes as the first shark tracker of its kind, to raise funds for its research. ...
... The application, launched at iTunes on Wednesday, cost nearly $100,000 to produce, he said. Included in that budget was video content and a game for children to learn about great whites.
The institute has tagged more than 20 great white sharks, but the batteries on some of the tags expired, Domeier said. The iPhone application allows users to follow the migration of a dozen sharks the institute is still following, he said ...
Frontiers in Systems of Neuroscience: Topological isomorphisms of human brain and financial market networks
[Emphasis mine]
Although metaphorical and conceptual connections between the human brain and the financial markets have often been drawn, rigorous physical or mathematical underpinnings of this analogy remain largely unexplored. Here, we apply a statistical and graph theoretic approach to the study of two datasets – the time series of 90 stocks from the New York stock exchange over a 3-year period, and the fMRI-derived time series acquired from 90 brain regions over the course of a 10-min-long functional MRI scan of resting brain function in healthy volunteers. Despite the many obvious substantive differences between these two datasets, graphical analysis demonstrated striking commonalities in terms of global network topological properties. Both the human brain and the market networks were non-random, small-world, modular, hierarchical systems with fat-tailed degree distributions indicating the presence of highly connected hubs. These properties could not be trivially explained by the univariate time series statistics of stock price returns. This degree of topological isomorphism suggests that brains and markets can be regarded broadly as members of the same family of networks. The two systems, however, were not topologically identical. The financial market was more efficient and more modular – more highly optimized for information processing – than the brain networks; but also less robust to systemic disintegration as a result of hub deletion. We conclude that the conceptual connections between brains and markets are not merely metaphorical; rather these two information processing systems can be rigorously compared in the same mathematical language and turn out often to share important topological properties in common to some degree. There will be interesting scientific arbitrage opportunities in further work at the graph-theoretically mediated interface between systems neuroscience and the statistical physics of financial markets.
Teaching creationism in public schools has consistently been ruled unconstitutional in federal courts, but according to a national survey of more than 900 public high school biology teachers, it continues to flourish in the nation’s classrooms.
Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.
That leaves what the authors call “the cautious 60 percent,” who avoid controversy by endorsing neither evolution nor its unscientific alternatives. In various ways, they compromise.
The survey, published in the Jan. 28 issue of Science, found that some avoid intellectual commitment by explaining that they teach evolution only because state examinations require it, and that students do not need to “believe” in it. Others treat evolution as if it applied only on a molecular level, avoiding any discussion of the evolution of species. And a large number claim that students are free to choose evolution or creationism based on their own beliefs. ...
In contradiction to most cosmologists’ opinions, two scientists have found evidence that the universe may have existed for ever.
WHAT happened before the beginning of time is—by definition, it might be thought—metaphysics. At least one physicist, though, thinks there is nothing meta about the question at all. Roger Penrose, of Oxford University, believes that the Big Bang in which the visible universe began was not actually the beginning of everything. It was merely the latest example of a series of such bangs that renew reality when it is getting tired out. More importantly, he thinks that the pre-Big Bang past has left an imprint on the present that can be detected and analysed, and that he and a colleague in Armenia have found it.
The imprint in question is in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This is a bath of radiation that fills the whole universe. It was frozen in its present form some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, and thus carries information about what the early universe was like. The CMB is almost, but not quite, uniform, and the known irregularities in it are thought to mark the seeds from which galaxies—and therefore stars and planets—grew.
Dr Penrose, though, predicts another form of irregularity—great circles in the sky where the microwave background is slightly more uniform than it should be. These, if they exist, would be fossil traces of black holes from the pre-Big Bang version of reality. And in a paper just published in arXiv.org, an online database, he claims they do indeed exist. ...
Half a century ago the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow bemoaned the estrangement of what he termed the “two cultures” in modern society — the literary and the scientific. These days, there is some reason to celebrate better communication between these domains, if only because of the increasingly visible salience of scientific ideas. Still a gap remains, and so I’d like here to take an oblique look at a few lesser-known contrasts and divisions between subdomains of the two cultures, specifically those between stories and statistics.
I’ll begin by noting that the notions of probability and statistics are not alien to storytelling. From the earliest of recorded histories there were glimmerings of these concepts, which were reflected in everyday words and stories. Consider the notions of central tendency — average, median, mode, to name a few. They most certainly grew out of workaday activities and led to words such as (in English) “usual,” “typical.” “customary,” “most,” “standard,” “expected,” “normal,” “ordinary,” “medium,” “commonplace,” “so-so,” and so on. The same is true about the notions of statistical variation — standard deviation, variance, and the like. Words such as “unusual,” “peculiar,” “strange,” “original,” “extreme,” “special,” “unlike,” “deviant,” “dissimilar” and “different” come to mind. It is hard to imagine even prehistoric humans not possessing some sort of rudimentary idea of the typical or of the unusual. Any situation or entity — storms, animals, rocks — that recurred again and again would, it seems, lead naturally to these notions. These and other fundamentally scientific concepts have in one way or another been embedded in the very idea of what a story is — an event distinctive enough to merit retelling — from cave paintings to “Gilgamesh” to “The Canterbury Tales,” onward.
The idea of probability itself is present in such words as “chance,” “likelihood,” “fate,” “odds,” “gods,” “fortune,” “luck,” “happenstance,” “random,” and many others. A mere acceptance of the idea of alternative possibilities almost entails some notion of probability, since some alternatives will be come to be judged more likely than others. Likewise, the idea of sampling is implicit in words like “instance,” “case,” “example,” “cross-section,” “specimen” and “swatch,” and that of correlation is reflected in “connection,” “relation,” “linkage,” “conjunction,” “dependence” and the ever too ready “cause.” Even hypothesis testing and Bayesian analysis possess linguistic echoes in common phrases and ideas that are an integral part of human cognition and storytelling. With regard to informal statistics we’re a bit like Moliere’s character who was shocked to find that he’d been speaking prose his whole life.
Despite the naturalness of these notions, however, there is a tension between stories and statistics, and one under-appreciated contrast between them is simply the mindset with which we approach them. ...
... As might be expected, the Cato Institute has some sensible words on the subject of NASA: here, here, and here. If you don’t want to believe these guys, see what Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University, has said about manned space flight: “The moon landings were an important impetus to technology but you have to ask the question, what is the case for sending people back into space? I think that the practical case gets weaker and weaker with every advance in robotics and miniaturisation. It’s hard to see any particular reason or purpose in going back to the moon or indeed sending people into space at all.”
Fortunately, President Obama has been eminently sensible on the moon, having already scrapped the moon landing project that had been in the works for some time. Indeed, the announcement of this decision provided what might be my favorite – and most refreshing – quotation from our 44th President: ”Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.” I just wish he had scrapped most of the NASA missions, turned over what could be justified on national defense/public goods grounds to the Department of Defense and other agencies, and sold whatever was left over to private industry. Now that would be change I could believe in!
But of course this just illustrates that Obama lies. We all know we've never been to the moon. It was all broadcast from a soundstage in Burbank, CA. How can you trust a guy who wasn't born in the U.S. <***Big grin with tongue firmly in cheek.***>
Over at Don’t Stop Believing,
Mike Wittmer makes an observation and asks a question that I hope we
don’t find the answer to anytime soon, though such hopes are often
disappointed.
He draws our attention to a recent issue of a science and Christianity journal:
This month’s issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (published by the American Scientific Affiliation)
is devoted to this question, and three of its four essays conclude
that we must dramatically revise the Christian faith in light of
genetic research. Specifically, the authors claim that the human genome
project has demonstrated that humans not only evolved from lower life
forms but that we came on the scene by the thousands rather than from
an original, historical Adam.
Yes, this would elicit a collective yawn from the outside world. But
here’s where things start to get interesting in our evangelical
Christian world:
Two of the contributors are Bible and Theology professors at Calvin College, Daniel Harlow and John Schneider, so I immediately wondered how their views mesh with their positions at
this denominational school. Schneider concedes that his Christian
Reformed Church “prohibits ‘espousal of theories that posit the reality
of evolutionary forebears of human beings’ as ‘ruled out by Scripture
and the Reformed confessions,’ yet oddly does not intend this
prohibition to ‘limit further investigation and discussion on this
topic’” (209)…
Kirk concludes:
... And, if we insist that the world as scientists know it is incompatible with the Christian faith, our children will believe us!
And, when they go to college, they will learn beyond a shadow of a
doubt why Christianity must be abandoned. As with certain views of the
Bible, we have to learn how to hold on loosely (not to the story of God
or the gospel, but our traditional understandings of how these impact
other issues) or else seal the fate of future generations.
Two new species of horned dinosaurs from the vanished continent of Laramidia – now western North American – are creating a buzz.
The creatures' arrangement of horns are unique among the broader
group of dinosaurs they belong to, a group that includes animals such as
Triceratops.
Moreover, the find appears to lends support to a
contentious notion that dinosaurs were quite provincial on Laramidia.
The same broad groups of large dinosaurs were present along the
north-south reach of the narrow continent, but the species within each
broad group differed north and south.
This contrasts with the
appearance of large animals in the fossil record from more-recent times.
During the last ice age, for example, one could hop into a hypothetical
Land Rover, drive from the east coast to the west coast, marvel at the
mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths along the way, and each is "pretty
much the same species from the Atlantic coast to the La Brea tar pits,"
says Thomas Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland
in College Park. ...
" takes a close look at some of the most important equations of all time.
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