big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Who knows what will come out of it, but for those of you concerned about taxpayer-funded knowledge being locked up by private journals, now is your chance to comment in a way where (hopefully) the government will pay attention.
Rules For Federally Funded Research
Is it for us or not for us? And if not, why not?
“We Project a $242 Billion Surplus for Medicare by 2020. Not a Deficit.”
People are living longer and are retaining their ability to be productive members of society – they are able to work, pay taxes, consume goods and go on vacation.
But a lot of projections by the government of the future work force are not accounting for improved health and productivity of older Americans. People will be paying into government programs, such as Medicare, for a longer time while simultaneously delaying the point where they need to draw on those programs.
Mike Hanlon discussing a Foam Car:
If we’re going to have a more enlightened society for the good of all, maybe should we rethink our relationship with motorized transport?
The burden of road traffic injury is increasing dramatically each year in real terms.
The people who are getting killed are the most active, the young, the most productive members of our society, and the resultant mass misery from a global road death toll of 1.2 million human beings a year is worth contemplating.
The devastation of the news that a breadwinner won’t be bringing home the bread, that a child you’ve nurtured and loved to adulthood is dead or critically injured, that a brother or mother or father has been permanently incapacitated – we’ve only mentioned death until now, but there are another 50 million people seriously injured on roads every year…
The cost in societal terms is inestimable. How do we reconcile that the automobile wreaks such a massive toll and so little has been achieved in reducing it?
So polite.
To overcome the challenge of whole blood detection, the researchers developed a novel device that acts as a filter, in this case catching the biomarkers for prostate and breast cancer on the order of picograms per milliliter, while washing away the rest of the blood.
This is the equivalent of being able to detect the concentration of a single grain of salt dissolved in a large swimming pool.
tip: Blood is filtered on a chip to detect cancer and other disease.
How Reagan and the Republicans bought popularity:
bellyaching along the way from plankton to pulsar
Gary Jones:
One of the reasons that heretics intrigue me is that the debilitating effects of staying inside the canon make one vulnerable to catastrophic failure as well as ordinary embarrassment: it makes one provincial. As an antidote I study weird science, the historical views of distant cultures and other alternative (contra-factual) histories including those found in speculative fiction. It ain’t necessarily so.
Still, one must resist every temptation to conclude that the search has been a success and that knowledge has at last been gained. Everything one knows is still wrong.
I find this comforting in an odd way. I never arrive but I wasn’t going anywhere in any event, I’m just out for a stroll.
another link
Paul Volker rolling:
Financial services in the United States had increased its share of value added from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent, but he asked: “Is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”
…the Fed’s support of the financial market and financial institutions made it appear that it favored some markets and some firms over others, and that has been a problem. But I don’t think the Fed had a lot of choice.
It lacked the authority to dismantle large financial institutions outside the traditional banking system, it lacked the plans to do so even if it had the authority, and the fact that regulators allowed these institutions to become such a threat to the economy if they failed meant the Fed had to intervene.
That’s why, going forward, three things need to happen. Regulators need to reduce the threat these banks pose, they need to have plans ready if a threat develops anyway, and legislators need to give regulators the authority to take control of troubled institutions outside the traditional banking system.
But I have to admit that “the dysfunction of the political system” makes me wary of what will happen once the legislative process begins. Things could get worse rather than better, and reducing the independence of the Fed is but one of many ways that could happen. Even so, the need for reform of the financial sector is sufficiently strong to justify taking that chance.
Banking will never be boring. Banking is a risky business. They are going to have plenty of activity. They can do underwriting. They can do securitization. They can do a lot of lending. They can do merger and acquisition advice. They can do investment management. These are all client activities. What I don’t want them doing is piling on top of that risky capital market business. That also leads to conflicts of interest.
What complicates this situation, as compared to the ordinary garden variety recession, is that we have this financial collapse on top of an economic disequilibrium. Too much consumption and too little investment, too many imports and too few exports.
We have not been on a sustainable economic track and that has to be changed.
But those changes don’t come overnight, they don’t come in a quarter, they don’t come in a year. You can begin them but that is a process that takes time. If we don’t make that adjustment and if we again pump up consumption, we will just walk into another crisis.
What should I say? … We have not yet achieved self-reinforcing recovery. We are heavily dependent upon government support so far. We are on a government support system, both in the financial markets and in the economy.
Dave Pollard: How to save the world.
“I think you have to feel secure before you can feel anything else.”
Another major Cabinet-level policy shift.
Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior:
“We’ve already done a U-turn from the place where the previous administration was taking the country with respect to climate change and energy.”
In addition to the 2,500 square kilometers that Interior is evaluating for solar power potential, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab estimates that wind farms off the east coast could ultimately produce 1,000 gigawatts of power.
“That’s more power from wind alone than is needed to power the entire electrical needs of the US.”
He called for generating at least 20 percent of U.S. power from such wind resources by 2030—following in Denmark’s footsteps—and noted that 5,300 megawatts of new renewable energy projects, including geothermal, refitted hydropower, solar and wind (on- and offshore), are currently being evaluated by his department for public lands, along with the transmission corridors to go with them.
Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too.
We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol.
We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus.
An obituary does not propose a solution.
The list of heads of state that will be arriving to COP-15 on Wednesday is pretty impressive. Rudd, Netanyahu, Chavez, Kirschner, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Mubarak, Kibaki, Arroyo, Yudhoyono, more controversial figures such as Mugabe and Ahmadinejad and on and on to over 100.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke urged the 192 nations who sent representatives to the UN Climate Change Conference to
Locke said unparalleled economic growth occurred in the 20th Century because of two factors:
Both of those factors, he said, belong to history.
“Those days are over.
“What’s required is nothing less than completely redesigning the way we produce and consume energy….
“We’re talking about creating an entirely new model of economic growth.
“The world has spent a century investing in petroleum infrastructure, Locke said: refineries, pipelines, stations. That creates vested interests in keeping things just the way they are.
Notes Jeff Mcmahon, Locke urged nations to stop catering to ‘vested interests’.
“Kids have always cared about privacy, it’s just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions.
“Kids don’t have the kind of privacy that we assume they do. As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space – it’s private because we have control over it. The thing is, for young people it’s not a private space – they have no control. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house.
“As a result the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control.”
“For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness.
“We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts.
“We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.”
HA!
Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one’s life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one’s own hot saline blood. — J A Baker
Probably not true. Destructive hormones and a’ that.
Bill O’Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?
Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I’m not saying that that has to be me.
This week, the British medical journal BMJ published a multi-part investigation that confirms that the scientific evidence just isn’t there to show that Tamiflu prevents serious complications, hospitalization, or death in people that have the flu.
The BMJ goes further to suggest that Roche, the Swiss company that manufactures and markets Tamiflu, may have misled governments and physicians.
test post
fixing FTP fail
The American Petroleum Institute wants you afraid. [pdf pamphlet]
The American Petroleum Institute is talking to you, America.
But API failed.
iStockphoto titled the original “Group of happy business people standing together against white background”. tip to Jon Taplin
These numbers are not faraway politics but get-up-in-the-morning industry.
Tuesday’s report from Exxon-Mobil, New Outlook for Energy: A View to 2030.
Energy demand to be about 35 percent higher in 2030 than it was in 2005.
Energy demand requires “trillions of dollars of investment and a commitment to innovation“.
He’s not arguing the science, just noticing arrogance and stupidity.
Grasping at Straws by Ed:
From my perspective the most prominent downside to the Climategate ‘nontroversy’ is the fact that every jackass internet commenter and talk radio lemming in the world will resort even more rapidly to “LOL we all know the ‘data’ on global warming is FAAKE!”
What is more interesting to me, though, is the broader public reaction to this ‘news’.
No amount of evidence or argumentation can convince Americans to think twice about starting a war, that universal access to health insurance will actually cost less in the long run, or that cutting taxes will not solve all their problems. Yet these same people are ready to believe at the drop of a hat that climate change is a hoax, an elaborate global conspiracy, based on out-of-context quotes extracted from emails among four inconsequential scientists.
First, let’s look at the words causing all the pant-shitting. This juicy quote has redneck America reaching for its revolver:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
The “decline” in question is not in temperature – it refers to measurements of tree rings. I have no idea what that means, but it seems worth noting that this is explicitly not referring to temperature. That’s kinda relevant. As for the word “trick,” among my circle of social scientists that term is commonly used to describe statistical techniques, especially techniques one poorly understands. But for all I know, these “tricks” and tree ring measurements could actually contradict the global warming hypothesis. I am not exactly qualified to draw conclusions about this data. That doesn’t stop most people.
Second, there is this gem:
“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
Half of the editorial board of the journal in question resigned in protest of the decision to publish a global warming denialist article, about which Climate Research itself stated: “(The paper’s findings) cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. We should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication.” Hmm.
An editor also claimed that global warming denialists “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.” In other words, this is a shit journal, a grease trap that catches all of the detritus from the real journals in the field. Every academic discipline has a few and they are routinely denigrated as we see in this email – especially if it is known for blatantly ideology-driven editorial practices.
Third, we have:
“The other paper by MM is just garbage. […] I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Folks, welcome to academia. Seriously.
This has always happened and happens today in every field with a peer-review process. Academics are elitist, catty little bitches. Find me a field – I beg you, any field – where this scenario does not play out.
Smith doesn’t like Wong’s work (no doubt over some petty, irrelevant methodological issue) so Smith calls Davis and Martinez and all three collude to reject Wong’s paper from the conference, journal, seminar, or whatever. Being able to identify the petty assholes, narcissists, and would-be gatekeepers is half of being a successful academic…and dealing with their neuroses is the other. Whoever MM is, he/she has challenged the consensus in the field and his/her colleagues, all of whom are ready to defend their decades of published work to the death. Not exactly man bites dog in terms of newsworthiness.
Not terribly impressive evidence of a vast global warming conspiracy.
So why are people so eager to buy it? Because Westerners, and car-centric Americans in particular, are desperate to avoid having to alter their behavior.
Like a terminal cancer patient who chooses to believe in ridiculous miracle cures offered in spam emails, the average American intuitively understands that fossil fuels and habitat destruction must be having some kind of impact on the planet. Warming, cooling, whatever – all that burning coal and hazardous chemicals dumped into rivers have to be doing something. But the problem either seems too large to confront, a situation highly conducive to denialism, or this ‘evidence’ of a hoax is the excuse people need to morally justify driving an empty Durango to the office every day.
These emails are spectacularly unspectacular.
It undermines the credibility of about four scientists at a university no one in the US has ever heard of. It specifically does not undermine the entire body of climate research.
There is no evidence of a hoax, no conspiracy to fabricate data, and no directives from the cabal of liberal professors and militant vegans who control the entire planet in the minds of paranoid Glenn Beck fans. Yet I’d be willing to bet that a majority of Americans will decide that the emails are in fact evidence of all of that and more.
What was that line from the X-Files? Not “The truth is out there.” The other one: “I want to believe.”
The former US Federal Reserve chairman told an audience that included some of the world’s most senior financiers that their industry’s “single most important” contribution in the last 25 years has been automatic telling machines, which he said had at least proved “useful”.
Echoing FSA chairman Lord Turner’s comments that banks are “socially useless”, Mr Volcker told delegates who had been discussing how to rebuild the financial system to “wake up”. He said credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations had taken the economy “right to the brink of disaster” and added that the economy had grown at “greater rates of speed” during the 1960s without such products.
When one stunned audience member suggested that Mr Volcker did not really mean bond markets and securitizations had contributed “nothing at all”, he replied: “You can innovate as much as you like, but do it within a structure that doesn’t put the whole economy at risk.”
He said he agreed with George Soros, the billionaire investor, who said investment banks must stick to serving clients and “proprietary trading should be pushed out of investment banks and to hedge funds where they belong…If you fail, fail. I’m not going to help you. Your stock is gone, creditors are at risk, but no one else is affected.”
