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1 in 7 students are taught creationism in school

January 28th, 2011

Evolution

Photo by latvian on Flickr

A recent survey of high school biology teachers shows the majority don’t take a solid stance on evolution with their students.  Fewer than 30 percent of teachers take an adamant pro-evolutionary stance, while the majority hedge on the topic in order to avoid potential conflict.  A full 13% openly teach creationism.

President Obama’s “Sputnik moment” call to inspire a new generation of science students stands in stark contrast to the stifled educations being offered to most of today’s kids.  The argument is often that teaching creationism as science might stunt a student’s biology career, but it shouldn’t prevent producing scads of software engineers and physicists.  But that’s sophistry.  A lot of the innovation space with the rapidly aging populace is in medicine and biology, so there is a need for people who really understand the life sciences.  But moreover, when a child’s early exposure to science of any flavor is basically that a bunch of whackos in lab coats have this nutty idea, but really the way the world works is something else, they learn an inherent distrust of science in general.  Why would a student want to pursue a career using the same fundamental techniques that yielded such “flawed theories” as evolution?  It requires a pretty significant cognitive dissonance to believe that biology, geology, anthropology, cosmology, and several other sciences are fundamentally wrong, but quantum physics is right on the money.

The prevalence of creationism in schools does matter.  Children require inspiration to pursue careers in science and technology. And teachers, especially science teachers, who don’t have enthusiasm for the field or reject the discipline altogether are certainly not being inspirational.

It would be easy but overly simplistic to dismiss this as just a problem in our schools.  The reality is that teachers are human.  They reflect the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the society as a whole.  Considering that repeated studies have shown about 45% of the population in general believe the universe is less than 10,000 years old, science teachers are already well outside the mainstream.  The answers here don’t lie in fixing the schools as much as in fixing society.  Children are not often motivated toward goals their parents openly reject.  When almost half of parents reject science as hooey, it’s not surprising that kids are not flocking to the field.

Industry doesn’t help here either.  While demand for science and tech jobs has picked up a bit, the outsourcing of entry level positions to overseas markets continues to make it challenging for average students to find work after college.  If the U.S. is to grow the next generation of talent, we have to be willing to plant the seeds domestically by hiring fresh grads.

In addition, society doesn’t treat science as credible, cool, or aspirational.  The CSI and Mythbusters television shows have helped make science seem a bit more interesting and mainstream.  But science and tech careers are still things perceived to be pursued largely by those geeky kids who seems inexorably destined for lab coats from birth.  Yet that minority of kids will not be sufficient to fuel a new Apollo program.

If this is truly a Sputnik moment, we need to inspire a big chunk of the “normal” kids to get their geek on.  Teachers are a part of that. Government is a part of that. But unless society as a whole embraces it, it will not succeed.

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Our generation’s Sputnik moment finds few science students ready to answer the call

January 26th, 2011

Sputnik

Sputnik means nothing if we don't go all Apollo on it

President Obama’s State of the Union address last night reminded Americans that our future depends on research and innovation.  The same day that results of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress were released showing that only 21% of graduating high school seniors ranked proficient in science.  Moreover, only 1% ranked at the advanced level, deemed appropriate to pursue science at the college level.  Fourth and eighth graders were also evaluated, and the results were similarly disappointing.

Obama made repeated appeals in his State of the Union speech to the need for a workforce skilled in science and technology:

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the space race. In a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean-energy technology – an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet and create countless new jobs for our people.

We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo projects of our time.

Maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success. But if we want to win the future – if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas – then we also have to win the race to educate our kids.

Over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

These are noble and vital aspirations. Yet the current state of our educational pipeline indicates we may be a decade or more away away from having students prepared to pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) based careers.  Only 1% of our graduates are prepared to go on to study in scientific fields in college.  Fixing that is not merely a matter of funding or focus.  Even with the retooling of educational programs and an Apollo-level political will, it will take years and years to reeducate the current generation of students, or a decade to refill the educational pipeline with students who are properly prepared.

Achieving the economic goals outlined by President Obama are very much contingent on becoming a scientifically competent society.  As he said, “The world has changed.”  The days of toiling on an assembly line are gone.  Jobs that will allow our children to achieve the American dream require STEM skills and knowledge, and the foundation for that has to be laid in our schools.

This is not a path we are on.  And the results of our national school report card indicate it’s also not a path we are remotely prepared to travel.  This leaves us in grave danger of having our Sputnik moment sputter out and stall unless we unite behind this cause as one nation with one purpose, and hold that course for a generation.  Surely, this is a challenge worthy of the American spirit.

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100% renewable energy achievable by 2030

January 20th, 2011

Off-shore_Wind_Farm_Turbine

Offshore wind turbine (Photo by Phil Hollman)

The journal Energy Policy has produced a study claiming that by 2030 the entire world could be operating on a combination of wind, solar, geothermal, and wave power.  While achieving this would require a massive retooling of the world’s energy infrastructure, it is all doable with current technology and at a affordable cost.  The study’s authors, Mark Delucchi and Mark Jacobson note that all that would be required is the political will to make this happen.

The plan calls for building of about four million 5 MW wind turbines, 1.7 billion 3 kW roof-mounted solar photovoltaic systems, and around 90,000 300 MW solar power plants.  These would be backed by geothermal and wave generation devices whose power output fluctuates less over the course of the days or seasons.  All the assumptions are based on using technology already in place at this scale somewhere today.

The execution of such a plan over the next two decades would require an “Apollo-level” commitment by successive administrations in the U.S. alone.  China and several European countries are already committed to massive green energy programs.  The global implications of such a shift in energy technology would benefit the climate as well as the economies and foreign policies of countries like the U.S. that have a huge dependence on foreign fossil fuels.

However, given the current depressed economy there is little appetite for infrastructure maintenance, much less the desire to rebuild anything.  It’s also unclear the current government could muster a new generational program given the level of corporate influence and the inherent polarization it operates under.  The long term benefits of such a program are enormous, but the short term investment will likely prove an insurmountable hurdle.

Still, it’s encouraging to know a fossil fuel free future is possible without new inventions.

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Independent analysis debunks false GOP claims about health reform

January 18th, 2011

Obama_healthcare_signature

Obama's signature on the health care reform bill

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a group with a reputation for producing materials that are balanced, authoritative, and accessible to non-specialists, has released a study of the claims central to the debate on repealing health reform that will reopen in the House this week. The short answer is that the CBO analysis is deemed accurate while Republican claims to the contrary are deemed inaccurate.

At issue is the pending bill to repeal “job killing” health care reform, a bill who’s very name contains an accusation.  Rep. Steve King (R-IA), a leading proponent of repeal, says “This is the most important thing we can do, jobs and the economy have to follow through, but we can’t fix this economy unless we first repeal Obama care.”  But is that true?

Much of the rhetoric surrounding this debate has been quite partisan.  Yet a surprising element in this round has been the claim by Speaker Boehner that the CBO analysis of the health care reform act’s financials was merely their “opinion,” and he implied that Democrats had forced CBO to produce misleading figures, saying that “CBO can only provide a score based on the assumptions that were given to them.”  On that count, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says:

  • In fact, over several decades, the House and Senate Budget Committees, along with presidential administrations of both parties, have developed procedures that CBO uses to prepare cost estimates.  In estimating the cost of health reform or its repeal, as with any estimate, CBO uses these longstanding, bipartisan procedures — not assumptions specified by the sponsor of the legislation.  Thus, Speaker Boehner’s charge is flatly incorrect.
  • Up until now, congressional leaders of both parties have acknowledged CBO’s professionalism and recognized its critical role as a neutral arbiter in budget matters.  They have accepted CBO’s cost estimates, even when those estimates have proved inconvenient for their side.  This wholesale attack on, and rejection of, a CBO estimate for a major piece of legislation by the leadership of the House or Senate is unprecedented.

As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.”  A recent USA TODAY/Gallup Poll determined that 83% of the public say it’s extremely or very important for House Republicans to pass legislation that both parties can agree on.  Further, 70% of Democrats say the president should work to pass legislation Democrats and Republicans can agree on, even if it’s not what most Democrats want.

The public wants the government to cooperate together.  But this cannot happen if there is not at least agreement on the basic data related to an issue.  Debate the implications. Debate the ideology. But stop wasting everyone’s time debating the facts.

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What you likely don’t know about Net Neutrality

January 2nd, 2011

Budding Web Surfer

Net Neutrality: keeping the web free for the next generation (Photo by Ilya Haykinson on Flickr)

A recent Rasmussen poll showed that a mere 20% of us are following the debate on Net Neutrality.  Meanwhile 54% are opposed to the FCC making any Net Neutrality regulations, while 21% were in favor.  A likely explanation is that most Americans don’t really understand what Net Neutrality is.

The FCC recently approved a new slate of so-called Net Neutrality rules.  The new rules ensconced a few tenets of Net Neutrality, but also propped open the door for companies to engage in some very non net neutral business models.  The result being that almost everyone wound up unsatisfied by the result.  Still, the vote came down strictly along party lines which bolstered the perception that Net Neutrality is a liberal vs. conservative issue.  Net Neutrality is often positioned as a government takeover or government regulation of the Internet.  It’s not either of those things, nor is it particularly political in a left vs. right sense.  But those perceptions are driving public opinion nonetheless.

The question is, what is Net Neutrality, independent of any specific proposed policy or rules?  At its core, Net Neutrality is simply freedom of the Internet.  It is a belief that Internet network access is a public resource that should not favor any content over any other.  That as a user of the Internet, you should be entitled to access any site or service with the same pricing and speed from the provider of that connection.

This means that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) cannot charge you more for using Yahoo! than Google.  It cannot provide speedy access to Netflix while throttling Hulu.  It cannot make it prohibitively expensive to do online banking with Citibank, while providing bargains for banking with Chase.  It cannot prohibit you from accessing The Drudge Report because it doesn’t like its political views.  As far as the network is concerned, traffic is traffic, and no preferential treatment shall be given.

The talk of government regulation of the Internet is not really accurate.  It sounds as if the government would be regulating content.  Instead, Net Neutrality proposes that the government regulate ISPs to insure they do not regulate the content of the Internet.  Net Neutrality is about insuring freedom for consumers and making sure ISPs don’t take that away.

Analogies have been made to the power company charging you more to run a TV than a washing machine, or giving you a discount for running Maytag appliances.  Rather, you pay for the kWHs you use, rather than whether you burn them using your PS/3 or your dishwasher.   Net Neutrality is simply ensuring that same agnosticism applies to your ISP.

In fairness, most ISPs have not yet tried to implement service structures that would not be net neutral.  However, there have been a few trial balloons floated, so there is justifiable reason for consumers to be concerned.  This is the primary motivation for trying to get Net Neutrality rules into effect now, before ISPs change to content biased business models.  It wil be much more difficult and much more disruptive to companies to force them to change after the fact rather than putting rules in place up front.

Viewed another way, Net Neutrality is like the Second Amendment, albeit for Internet rights rather than gun rights.  Your right to access the Internet content of your choice shall not be infringed.  This sort of basic freedom should appeal to card-carrying ACLU members as much as Tea Partiers.

So why does anyone oppose Net Neutrality?  Profit.  Being an ISP is a profitable business.  Demand is increasing while costs are decreasing, meaning that profit margins continue to rise.  A fast Internet connection is becoming a near must-have for households.  It’s like a car or a TV.  Most families would not chose to live without it.  So while ISPs are making good money with today’s net neutral business models, they fully recognize there are opportunities to make even more money by shifting to less content neutral pricing.

But wait, shouldn’t the free market sort all this out?  As a consumer, why would you opt for a restrictive ISP over a more open one?  The reason being that the vast majority of America lacks any serious market competition in the ISP space.  Only 4% of the market is served by 3 or more ISPs, while 78% is served by 2 ISPs.  If free markets were operating in the ISP space, you would not expect America to rank 28th in global speed of Internet connections while having comparatively more expensive ISP service.   The markets should have sorted that out by now as well.

The bottom line being that government rules enforcing that ISPs honor Net Neutrality wouldn’t be required if instead government required that ISPs unbundle their services and sell wholesale network access to small ISPs such that true competition existed in the market.  Either method works, and many other countries have successfully implemented the unbundling regulations.  However, American ISPs are understandably opposed to either option, and both options require some level of government intervention.  The alternative is that we simply have to trust that ISPs will be good citizens and not place profit motives over the interests of their customers—and history suggests that the customers rarely end up on the good end of that bargain.

Net Neutrality is not about restricting the Internet or your ability to post or access content on it.  On the contrary, its only goal is to ensure your continued ability to surf without restrictions or penalties.  While some government rules do impose constraints, Net Neutrality is one of those that promotes and ensures freedom.  What could be more American than that?

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Cantor’s YouCut program invites public to judge merit of NSF programs

December 18th, 2010

Mad Scientist

Science looks so much easier on TV (Photo by Stephen Edmonds on Flickr)

House Majority Leader-Elect Eric Cantor wants you to know he’s serious about cutting the deficit.  That’s why he’s initiated the YouCut website where ordinary folks can make recommendations for cutting wasteful government spending.

The principle is simple.  Each week a different target will be put up on the website and informed citizens can submit their opinions on government largess.  After all, “The American People” clearly know best how to spend every dime.

This week’s target is the National Science Foundation (NSF).  In a video at the top of the site, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb) admits that NSF funds some good stuff, and that 150 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to people who have received NSF grants since 1950.  But he contends there’s lots of silly stuff there as well.  One of the examples he cites is a grant to study on-field contributions of soccer players, which arguably sounds funny when explained in those terms.

The actual study is a wee bit more complex than that.  It does involve a study of how soccer players are ranked in effectiveness in contributing to the team goal, but this is primarily a study within a field called complex systems.  The goal of this field of study is to be able to model systems where lots of independent contributors have both individual motivations and team goals.  Being able to model relatively simple systems like a soccer game might one day lead to the ability to model and predict military tactics, stock markets, or ecosystems.  Does it still seem so trivial and irrelevant?

The problem is, the vast majority of visitors to Cantor’s site haven’t the slightest clue about any of this.  Most of the grant proposals listed on the referenced site have names like “Integrated investigation of inertial particle pair dynamics in turbulence”, and “Shear thickening and defect formation in chemical mechanical polishing slurries”. This is even abstruse stuff to scientists not working in those fields. This is why the NSF has a vigorous review process where proposals are evaluated by experts in the domain of the proposal and are judged not only on their intellectual merits, but on the broader impact such research might have in the specific field.

It passes from arrogance to sheer folly to think that the average, or even above average, voter or Congressman is in a position to make an informed choice here. It would be like disassembling your car on the front lawn and then asking your neighbors to identify the non-essential bits. The government still controls the NSF funding and the process by which programs get approved. But once set up, this is a case where the execution of the process is beyond most citizens.  You wouldn’t hold direct votes on military tactics or monetary policy.  NSF funding isn’t different.  There are just some decisions that require specific expertise.

It’s important to put this in context.  The proposed NSF funding for 2011 is $7.424B.  This money is allocated to over 10,000 programs amounting to an average of just over a half-million dollars each.  The total is less than half of 1% of the projected $1.3T deficit, so even eliminating the entire NSF (which no one is proposing) doesn’t put a dent in the debt.  Eliminating a few million dollars of programs is simply noise, and is wasting time relative to the structural debt problem the USA faces. Cantor voted just this past week for adding an additional $858B to the deficit with the tax cut bill.  So his credibility for being a deficit hawk is already badly tarnished. Him taking a few whacks at the lab coat clad is nothing more that posturing.

New technologies breed new products, new cures, and new markets.  That’s new jobs and new hope for America as a 21st Century economic power.  But none of that happens without fundamental science research.  On TV, science is often the product of a lone genius on a intellectual weekend bender.  Real science is tedious, collaborative, and just damn hard.  And without public funding, much of that research will not occur.  Granted, not all paths yield results.  That’s the nature of the game.  Do NSF projects get funded that turn out to be dead-ends or silly endeavors?  Sure.  But those are the exceptions and not the rules.  No process prevents everything from falling through the cracks.  But there’s no evidence to suggest the NSF process is broken.

In the meantime, unless you feel qualified to weigh the merits of “Shear Transformational Zones in Amorphous Granular Packings” against the need for “Engineering magnetorheological fluids by controlling nonmagnetic particle interactions”, maybe we should just let the experts do their jobs and focus on the real problems Congress might actually solve.

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Government plays Whac-a-Mole with Wikileaks

December 3rd, 2010

Whac-a-Mole

You can't keep a good mole down (Photo by Robert Dobalina on Flickr)

In the ongoing debacle over the release of State Department cables, the government is yet again demonstrating they really have no idea how the Internet works.  Apparently, Sen. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens really was the technical wizard in Washington.

While the government’s embarrassment over the publication of the documents is certainly understandable, it’s response is anything but.  There have been repeated calls by politicians and pundits to prosecute Wikileaks and/or it’s founder Julian Assange.  Sen. Diana Feinstein wants to prosecute on charges of espionage.  (That’s at least plausible as opposed to calls from the likes of Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee that this is somehow treason or terrorism.)  Yet, everyone seems to keep overlooking that all Wikileaks did was publish the documents.  They didn’t steal them.  They didn’t aid or abet the theft.  They may have been the first to publish, but the desire to prosecute them stems from a woefully misguided notion that if Wikileaks hadn’t done what they did, these documents never would have seen the light of day.  That’s sheer sophistry. In a day and age where everyone can publish anything on the Internet, someone somewhere would have put these documents online.  PFC Bradly Manning, awaiting trial for stealing the documents, could have found any number of willing publishers, hackers, or tech-savvy malcontents to publish his booty, or even uploaded them himself.  Wikileaks may have been the vehicle, but they weren’t the cause.

Further, if publishing alone constitutes a crime, then at this point shouldn’t the NY Times, CNN, and practically every other news organization on the planet be in trouble?  They’ve all republished bits and pieces of the stolen information.

But that horse has left the barn.  The documents have already been dumped to the web.  In response, Sen. Joe Lieberman has been pressuring hosting sites like Amazon who were acting as one of several worldwide servers hosting the Wikileaks website.  Amazon has since relented and taken the content off of their servers.  The company Tableau Software was providing analysis and visualzations of the Wikileaks data dump.  They too have been persuaded to take down their content.  None of these moves have been more than annoyances.  Wikileaks data is spread across servers all over the international web at this point.  There’s no useful way to scrub it all off.

Earlier today, the government pressured the US based DNS provider for Wikileaks to disable the wikileaks.org domain name.  This made it difficult to find the website for several minutes until the direct IP addresses of the servers were posted widely.  Within 6 hours, the site emerged with the new Swiss domain name wikileaks.ch.

The net, by its very nature, is highly connected, highly redundant, and not under any one country or company’s control.  Ask any starlet who’s tried to get her nude pictures down off the web.  You can try and whack every site they pop up on, but ultimately you just draw more and more attention to the pictures and insure they will haunt you forever.  This is no different.  The State Department cables have been cached, copied, and spidered countless times by servers and users all over the world.  You can even go here to download your own copy of the Wikileaks website so you too can put it online, or just have a look about.

As Sally told Harry all those years ago, “You can’t take it back…  Because it’s already out there.”

Anyone who’s played the arcade game Whac-a-Mole can tell you, playing makes a lot of noise and tends to draw a crowd of onlookers anxious to see you make a fool of yourself.  At this point, all the government can do is stop drawing attention by whacking the little critters.  It just encourages them.  Eventually, it will blow over.

Oh, and they might want to upgrade their security procedures to prevent any Lady Gaga CDs from getting into secure areas.

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Shimkus on the genesis of global warming

November 23rd, 2010

New Orleans Flood

Don't sweat the coming flood, there'll be fresh veggies in Greenland

Illinois Republican John Shimkus is vying to be the head of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce when the new Congress convenes in 2011.  This committee is one of the oldest in existence, and plays a central role in the formulation of energy policy.  It would also be the genesis of any carbon or climate based legislation.

I’m sorry, did I say genesis?  No, a Shimkus led Energy and Commerce Committee would be the genesis of no such thing.  Why?  Because of Genesis, as in the Book of.  Shimkus recently quoted Genesis 8:22 on the House floor, “As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.”  He cites the passage as proof that we needn’t worry about this whole silly global warming thing because God says He won’t let us destroy the planet.  It’ll be over when He says it’s over, and not before.  (Charles Jaco, of KTVI in St.Louis covers the story in a video clip.)

Yet Shimkus doesn’t stop there.  He explains that the notion of puny little mankind impacting something like the global climate is strictly arrogance on our part.  Sure, the climate’s changing, but we didn’t do it, can’t stop it, and frankly should just embrace it—go with the flow, so to speak.  He goes on to tout the upside to global warming.  Sure, New Orleans and NYC will be underwater, but hey, vegetable gardens in Greenland!

Where was this line of reasoning during the cold war?  We’d have saved billions of dollars and countless man-years of worry and angst if only we’d realized global nuclear annihilation would be prevented by God instead of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).  And think of all the money wasted on smokestack scrubbers to abate the northeast’s acid rain in the 70′s.  If only we’d have been patient, God would have set it right for us.

God’s fine with us being irresponsible.  He kind of expects it.  After that whole Eve and the snake debacle He learned that having given us free will meant he was going to spend eternity chasing us around with a galactic size roll of supernaturally absorbent Bounty towels to clean up our messes.  So, you know… no worries.

Maybe Shimkus is fully aware he’s using the bible as a lever to carry out the objectives of the big oil lobby.  Maybe he’s dumber than a starving polar bear who walks 1000 miles to hug a man in his driveway and fails to think, “(sniff, sniff) Hmmm… smells like lunch.”  Either way, let’s not put this guy in charge.

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Mythbusting popular science

November 12th, 2010

Mythbusters

Are they helping or hurting science? (Photo by Roger Jones on Wikimedia)

Science has an image problem in this country.  In everyday culture, it’s gone from being an arcane art to being a popularity contest.  It’s commonplace to see surveys asking people on the street if they believe in evolution or if they believe in global warming—as if somehow science was subject to democratic majorities.

The danger is that much of what people believe about science is shaped by the media.  Yet the media is motivated by attracting eyeballs more than conveying the nuances of a topic.  Hence, an interesting bit of research by a scientists at Cornell gets turned into the headline:

Scientist proves that humans are psychic

All of which would be fascinating, except that’s not really what happened.  The study shows a data correlation that could be explained by people having precognitive abilities, but may have other explanations.  After all, science is about understanding why and how something happens, not just that it does.  Otherwise a scientist might observe the data correlation that supermarkets are more crowded on Saturdays, then conclude that clearly people are more hungry on the weekend and call it a “proof.”  Fortunately, science goes a bit deeper than that.  The burden for calling something a scientific proof is actually pretty darn high.  But most people don’t really know that.  They don’t really understand the scientific process.

Science has been popularized by television shows like Mythbusters where the cool side of applied science usually involves blowing something up.  While this has been a great boon for making science more accessible, it also does a disservice by creating the perception that a couple of guys in a well stocked warehouse can scientifically prove something given a few hours and an ample supply of duct tape.  While these experiments are great entertainment, they are not scientifically accepted proofs.  And this is a distinction lost on many of the viewers.

This issue is not particularly limited to the field of science.  Politics often has similar situations such as when popular polls are held asking how to fix the economy, as if the economy will yield to a majority vote.  Perhaps the better question is, why are we so keen to take complicated fields, boil them to their essence, and then claim mastery of the discipline?

Part of this problem is based on our slide into the populist ideal where everyone is thought capable of everything.  The notion that the only thing distinguishing me from a corporate CEO, a concert pianist, or a Nobel laureate is just that I haven’t yet chosen to apply my considerable talents to that field yet.  It’s not that hard, there’s nothing special about people who do that.  I could be President.  I could be a climate scientist.  I could be a rock star.  I just haven’t chosen to be.  We’ve drunk the Kool-Aid we give our young children in an effort to encourage them and give them self-esteem, and somehow it’s convinced us that nothing is very complicated or outside our grasp.

Maybe the world really is an abstruse place.  Maybe experts really do add value.  And while it’s great that you’re interested, maybe following along in the news doesn’t quite give your opinion on the matter quite the same weight as professionals working in the field.

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Wegmans Brand Math

November 10th, 2010

WegmansIn mathematics, addition is subject to the Commutative Law.  That is, if 2+3=5 then we may also say 3+2=5… unless you work at the local Wegmans grocery store.

I was in the cashier’s line behind a matronly woman whose order the young girl at the register was finishing up.  The girl announced. “That will be $104.62 today.”  The woman thumbed through her wallet and extracted a $50 bill and three crisp $20s, which she handed to the cashier.

The girl promptly started counting the money out, announcing her total as she went.  “50, 70, 90, 100,” she said.  Upon completion, she turned to the woman and  reminded her of the total.  The woman smiled sweetly at the young lass and suggested that perhaps she could count it out again.  Once more the girl confidently said, “50, 70, 90, 100.”  This time she ended with, “You’re still short $4.62.”

The woman was maintaining her composure, but looked as if she really wanted to grab the sweet thing by her pigtails and say something that started with, “LISTEN MISSY!”  To her credit, she instead asked the girl how much the three $20s were worth.

Fanning the bills in her hand the cashier said, “$60.”

“And how much is 60 plus 50,” the patient woman softly inquired?

You could almost see the wheels of the poor young girl’s mind grind to a halt as the pain of this dawning contradiction came across her.  With renewed determination, she grasped the short stack of bills and began counting aloud again.  “50, 70, 90, 100.”

In an effort to be helpful, I offered that perhaps she should start counting with the $20s.  The girl’s face brightened momentarily, and she flipped the stack and started counting yet again.  “20, 40, 60, 110.”  She looked positively delighted with herself while the poor woman in line just imperceptibly shook her head.

The cashier now looked at me and asked, “So why doesn’t it work when I do it the other way?”

I offered, somewhat less helpfully, “I guess it’s just one of those math mysteries no one understands.”  An explanation the young girl seemed quite satisfied with as she finally began to count change.  However, the matronly woman lowered her head and gave me a look over her glasses that was oddly reminiscent of my high school geometry teacher who also took it upon herself to make it clear to me that I was not nearly as amusing as I imagined.

Not wishing to push my luck, I paid for my order with a credit card.

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GOP promises a return to the dark days of science

October 26th, 2010

phrenology-head (by DoubleM2 on Flickr)

Phrenology Head (Photo by DoubleM2 on Flickr)

Next week, voters are widely expected to give the House back to Republicans.  There’s also a reasonable chance the Senate will change hands as well.  One of the areas that will suffer the most if and when this happens is science and technology.

It’s not just that science based programs and research funding will be cut. Those programs were slashed dramatically under the Bush Administration, and the weak economy has not allowed Obama to restore many of them.  Rather, it is the country as a whole that will suffer.

Under President Bush, science was repeatedly purged, censored, twisted, and manipulated to back politically motivated objectives.  Scientists were fired or defunded for not reaching conclusions that were ideologically aligned with the administration.  Science was not seen as a quest for objective understanding and technological progress, but at a means to a pre-defined end.  It’s no wonder scientists hailed the election of Barack Obama who promised that scientific thought and research would play a crucial role in his government.

Yet the going into the mid-term election, the GOP continues to promise that they will return the country to the dark days of science where profit and religious doctrine will hold sway and data can stay in the back room with the geeks.

This is seen most clearly in the denial of anthropogenic global warming.  While 92% of climate scientists find the data supporting man-made warming credible, exactly 0% of current or prospective Republican Senators or Congressmen do.  As a result, they’ve vowed to not only kill any sort of carbon based energy policy, but have promised to hog-tie the EPA so they will be unable to regulate carbon dioxide under existing laws despite the Supreme Court ruling that not only is it legal for them to do that, it is their obligation.  This position is not motivated by science, but rather by profit for the existing industries.

Republicans have promised to block any attempts at net neutrality regulations despite evidence that such policies would foster innovation and spur development of new technology based industries.  The reason being that such regulations might erode profits for existing business models.  Something the current corporate titans don’t want to have to deal with.

The GOP has more recently come out against funding development of rare earth minerals outside of China.  This despite the dependence of high tech devices and projects on such minerals.  The danger being that China currently produces 97% of the world’s supply of rare earths, and has strongly indicated that it will hold them hostage should countries such as ours demand currency adjustments or changes meant to create a fairer trade balance between China and the rest of the world.  In this case, the motive for stalling the initiative is purely political, as it thwarts a potential accomplishment the Democrats might claim.

In addition, the Republicans have their unfounded morality based opposition to stem cell research.  And further still, the desire to teach our children that science is only useful when it doesn’t lead you to uncomfortable conclusions like evolution or the big bang.

This is not a condemnation of conservatives.  By definition, conservatives are disposed to preserve the existing condition.  They are the natural political brake assuring that choices are made carefully and cautiously.  But the current GOP position is not really conservative at all.  They want to take us backwards.  Back to the dark ages of reason where superstition reigned.

Many on both sides of the aisle pine for the time when the economy ran strong, the middle class flourished, and the US was an unquestioned superpower on the world stage.  All those things are directly attributable to this country being the science and technology powerhouse on the planet. Those days are behind us… and the Republicans seem intent on keeping it that way.

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Mission (only sorta) Accomplished: oil resurfaces in Gulf

October 24th, 2010

Deepwater Horizon Response

Controlled burn of spilled oil in the Gulf (Photo by Deepwater Horizon Response on Flickr)

Remember all that oil in the Gulf from the Deepwater Horizon disaster that seemed to magically disappear in July?  It’s baaaack.

There was great suspicion that the missing oil would resurface at some point.  After all, 200 million barrels of oil just doesn’t get magically reabsorbed by nature. Yet only three days ago, the Coast Guard declared there was little recoverable oil left on the water and only trace amounts of dispersant detectable.  It’s then more than a little embarrassing that on Friday, Louisiana fishing boats spotted miles-long strings of weathered oil floating toward fragile marshes on the coast of Mississippi.  Perhaps ironically, the Coast Guard is being dispatched to evaluate the situation.

Still, the visible oil spill lull was enough to get the media spotlight off the cleanup effort.  It was also enough for President Obama to announce earlier this month that he was lifting the moratorium on deepwater drilling.

While new safety regulations are in place for companies seeking permits to drill, there is concern that the new rules amount to little more than a promise to actually enforce the rules that were already in place—this time for sure.  It’s hardly a coincidence this announcement comes just weeks before the mid-term elections, and Democrats will now be able to take credit for putting some 10,000 people back to work in the Gulf region.

It’s hard to imagine events unfolding this way if oil had been constantly washing up on pristine beaches and the media was continuing to relentlessly cover it.  But we live in a time a ridiculously short attention spans.  Nature conspired to allow the media to head to the next news cycle, so this happing is barely registering on the radar.  After all, Lindsay Lohan is back in rehab.

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Fed rethinks cadmium limits, leaves foxes guarding the hen house

October 20th, 2010

Cadmium

Sample of Cadmium metal

The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission has now ruled that 12 million “Shrek” glasses pulled by McDonald’s last spring because of cadmium levels exceeding federal limits are now okay.  This change didn’t happen because the glasses were improperly tested, but rather because the allowable limits for cadmium have been tripled.

Further, the CPSC has said they will not insist on mandatory limits.  Instead, they are making recommendations they hope will be adopted by a private-sector group, which includes representatives of the jewelry industry and consumer advocates.  The federal agency has said they were obligated to let a legitimate voluntary standards process unfold.

In other words, the private sector is being asked to do the right thing and police itself.  The CPSC has said that it would impose mandatory limits if the industry did not self-regulate, but it would seem that in light of the recent financial meltdown and the BP oil spill that private industry shouldn’t be readily trusted to sacrifice profit in the name of public safety.  Too often, by the time we become aware that the self-regulation has failed, we already have a full-blown disaster on our hands.

Yet even the new voluntary guidelines are concerning.  The new level of 0.1 micrograms/kilogram of body weight/day is in line with recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the threshold below which no health effects are expected—provided the exposure lasts less than one year.  Back in January, the CPSC announced the first ever recall of jewelry when excessive cadmium was found in Chinese made and Disney branded children’s items being sold through Wal-Mart.  Under the new less stringent guidelines, many of these metal trinkets will remain on the market.  And most kids will find the bling appealing for more than a year of their lives.

Cadmium is an extremely toxic metal that accumulates in the body for years.  At even very low doses, the toxin causes kidney damage and brittle bones.  It can be ingested as well as inhaled.  Cadmium in children’s jewelry is particularly insidious because of the tendency of kids to put the trinkets in their mouths where small amounts of the metal may be swallowed.  It has recently become a problem entirely because a federal ban on lead in children’s jewelry posed a problem for Chinese manufacturers, who inexplicably then switched to the even more toxic cadmium as a substitute.

Jewelers like cadmium because it has heft as well as being malleable, shiny, cheap, and can be worked at low heat levels.  But there’s nothing about jewelry making that requires cadmium, and what can’t be emphasized enough… it is highly toxic.  There’s simply no good reason to allow more than naturally occurring traces of it to be in jewelry (or glassware for that matter).  It should be subject to the same sorts of regulations and restrictions as lead.

We wouldn’t allow Gatorade to sweeten their drinks with antifreeze, even in small amounts.  Why would we take a chance by allowing cadmium to be added to things we give our kids?  The CPSC needs to rethink this again.  They exist to protect the safety of consumers, not the profits of industry.

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Obama hosts science fair at White House

October 18th, 2010

Obama

Photo by Mark Wilson at Getty

Hooray science!  That’s the message coming out of the White House today where President Barack Obama kicked off a week-long science fair at noon by announcing winners in a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions.  Obama said, “If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.”

Obama also announced steps his administration, in conjunction with leading companies, are taking to advance STEM education.  The focus is on expanding the tools of invention so that more students can directly be the “makers of things.”  The steps include placing 3D printers in 1000 schools and an initiative by Autodesk to make new easy-to-use design tools freely available to students.

The President has long been an advocate for science and technology as essential to the country’s prosperity and success.  His science adviser, Dr. John Holdren, even has pictures in his office of the President peering through telescopes, examining solar panels, and honoring scientists and engineers.  And last October, the President held Astronomy Night at the White House where more than 20 telescopes were set up on the White House lawn and focused on various objects the invited students could observe.  This is a refreshing change from the relatively science hostile Bush administration.

Certainly not least, Obama also announced he would be appearing on the December 8, 2010 episode of Discovery Channel’s MythBusters.  The show has been instrumental in making science fun and accessible to the general public, despite its incessant warnings to not try this it home.  For one night, at least, the President will be the envy of geeks everywhere.

Hooray science, indeed.

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Evolution, elections, and the limits of faith

September 28th, 2010

Evolution

Photo by latvian on Flickr

It probably doesn’t seem like whether or not a candidate accepts evolution is very relevant to the job they’ll do in office. After all, the vast majority of politicians have no opportunity to directly impact or even influence the field of biology.  Although, in many cases, it is used as a litmus test of sorts by bible literalists to determine if a candidate is a true believer.

During the 2008 Republican debate at the Reagan Library, all 10 candidates were asked if they believed in evolution.  Three indicated they did not.  More recently, Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell was quoted as saying evolution was a myth.  And Sarah Palin states in “Going Rogue” that she doesn’t believe in evolution.  Clearly, some politicians see this position as playing to a certain group of voters.

However, there is a larger concern about someone with a staunch position against evolution.  That person is basically saying they are immune to data and reason.  Evolution has 200 years of scientific data and research behind it.  The politicians discounting it as fiction are not doing so because they’ve studied all the information and have come to the conclusion the theory doesn’t hold water.  Rather, they are faced with the situation that significant data are contrary to their ideology or worldview, and so they are dismissing the data.

This is not simply a matter of placing religion as paramount.  This is a matter of once this person has taken a position, there is no reasoning with them.  They will not be swayed.  Some may see this as a sign of strength, but after eight long years of George Bush’s damn the data, stay the course policies, we should all be very wary of anyone who remotely thinks they already have the answers, and who won’t be truly open to rational arguments from the other side.

Evolution is not a question of faith.  It’s a question of rationality… and we need more of that in politics.

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