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Calling it like it is [Class M]
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:39:10 -0500Two examples of why blogs are better than mainstream news coverage, when it comes to confronting reality and doing something about it, one from the climate wars, one from the front lines of women's health.
First, Andy Revkin, a former New York Times journalist who still blogs there. He calls out a coal-industry-backed attempt to silence one of the world's leading climatologists as the "Shameful Attack on Free Speech" that it is. By launching a Facebook campaign to convince Pennsylvania State University to cancel a scheduled talk by Michael Mann, the coal interests have indeed shamed themselves.
Andy adds:
Antidemocratic, hateful, and coal-backed smear campaign against a scientist I've sometimes disagreed with but who has every right to state his case at Penn State or anywhere else.
A few hours after Andy's post, the Fb page disappeared. Penn State is sticking to its guns, too. Score one for the good guys.
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Tea Party shenanigans [Class M]
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:25:03 -0500As if you needed another reason to lament the state of American politics:
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities. (New York Times, Feb 3, 2012)
The story ends on what would be a humorous note:
"The Tea Party people say they want nonpolluted air and clean water and everything we promote and support, but they also say it's a communist movement," said Charlotte Moore, a supervisor who voted yes. "I really don't understand what they want."
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Saturn's Super Storm Staggers Skywatchers! [Starts With A Bang]
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:40:27 -0500"More days to come / New places to goIt isn't just Earth, of course, where these great cyclonic storms occur, whipping across the planet and wreaking havoc as they rage above the surface. Most famous, perhaps, is Jupiter, whose great red spot has existed for as long as we've been able to see at the necessary resolution.
I've got to leave / It's time for a show
Here I am / Rock you like a hurricane!" -The Scorpions
But one doesn't often think of Saturn when it comes to devastating storms.
(Image credit: Earth-based telescope, retrieved from SolarSystemQuick.com.)
Saturn, quite famously, is a great gas giant planet, second only in size to Jupiter in our Solar System, and renowned for its spectacular rings. And although Saturn's rings are its most obvious feature, the clearly defined, featureless bands along its different latitudes also stand out.
Unless, that is, you've taken a close look in the last year or so.
(Image credit: Trevor Barry, Broken Hill, Australia.)
That is not a featureless band up there in Saturn's Northern Hemisphere!
Quite to the contrary, this is a virtually planet-wide storm plume, whose core is a 3,000-mile-wide thunderstorm, kicking up beacons of warm air and leaving behind ammonia ice crystals, which we can tell from Cassini's observations in the infrared.
(Image credit: NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona.)
Cassini, the famed Saturn spacecraft that's been orbiting our ringed neighbor for nearly a decade, first spotted this storm in the earliest stages of its infancy, all the way back in early December, 2010. I've highlighted it, below, visible right at Saturn's terminator.
(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)
Unlike storms on Earth, which typically last for days or -- in particularly devastating cases -- a few weeks, this storm on Saturn has set a new record.
Lasting for more than 200 days, this Saturnian tempest rages all the way into August of last year, with the storm's head lasting intact at least into May. This made it the longest-lasting storm of this kind ever seen on Saturn; the first one since 1990 and the longest one since the first one was ever observed, all the way back in 1876!
(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute; click for full-size.)
As you can see, it was so powerful that, from February to April, the storm actually lapped itself, with the head of the storm clearly visible in those images.
What you might not realize is that Cassini was also able to clearly identify the tail of the storm, by looking in the infrared! Below, in false-color, the red-orange methane clouds are topped by a high blue haze signifying the main end of the tail. (The rings also appear in blue as a thin line, as there is no methane there at all!)
(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)
Although this is all that NASA released, Cassini is a bit of a special mission. You see, they have a publicly accessible imaging diary over at Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS).
Want to see how the storm changed from one (Saturnian) day to the next? Taken 11 hours apart, from February 23rd, 2011 to February 24th, you can really see that -- at a scale of 64 miles (104 km) per pixel in the below image -- this giant hurricane is migrating across the face of Saturn at around 100 km/hr!
(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)
And finally, what can Cassini do, at its highest resolution in (nearly) true color, looking at the storm as it traverses its own wake across the planet? Click on the image for full-resolution, but even at its reduced screen resolution... well, see for yourself!
(Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.)
You can follow the entire saga of the Saturn Storm Chronicles' report on last year's record-breaking display over at CICLOPS, but what an amazing view from Cassini!
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Making excuses [Pharyngula]
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:05:15 -0500The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.
Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. Discussions on previously published articles are welcome and I hope that, by fostering discussion and by keeping an open-minded attitude towards new ideas, the journal will spur progress in this little explored, difficult and very exciting area of knowledge.
In particular, the paper "Andrulis, E.D. Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Life 2012, 2, 1-105" was published recently online and is due to appear in Issue 1, Volume 2, 2012 of Life, at the end of March this year [1]. So that our readership has as much information as I can divulge without violating the confidentiality of the review process, what follows is the background of these events. Professor Bassez had previously guest-edited a successful special issue titled "The Origin of Life" in another MDPI journal [2]. Although Professor Bassez [3] had also planned to be the Guest Editor of the special issue "Origin of Life - Feature Papers" for Life [4], she was, for personal reasons, unable to do so. I therefore volunteered to take this responsibility on her behalf and to guest edit this special issue and supervise the editorial procedure for the papers. I made the decision of acceptance based on the peer review reports we received and their recommendation in support of publication. As stated earlier, finding reviewers able to cross discipline boundaries as is often needed for multidisciplinary "origin of life" topics [5] is particularly difficult. The publishing process that MDPI manuscripts go through by our in-house editorial staff members is that they choose reviewers from sources like Chemical Abstracts, PubMed, Web of Science or more recently, from Google Scholar. Very often we also ask the Editorial Board members to review papers or ask those of them who have relevant knowledge and expertise to supply possible reviewer names. We also use the reviewer names suggested by the authors, but we do this with great care, checking the background of each potential reviewer and their publication record, as well as ensuring they have no collaborations with the authors that may be construed as a conflict of interest. I should stress that although we try to encourage bold, innovative science, we reject many submissions. In the case of the Dr. Andrulis's long paper, the two reviewers were both faculty members of reputable universities different than the author's and both went to considerable trouble presenting lengthy review reports. Dr. Andrulis revised his manuscript as requested, and the paper was subsequently published.
Regardless of opinion on specific papers that have been published to date, I sincerely hope that all of our articles, most of which are outstanding, will continue to be read and discussed. Our editorial procedure is under scrutiny by the Editorial Board, who wishes to be more closely involved in the editorial process, and we are striving to further improve our editorial service. We welcome comments on the Dr. Andrulis's paper or any other papers that have been published in Life.
The "interdisciplinary" excuse is bogus. I am not a specialist in the fields discussed, but I could see immediately that Andrulis's paper, and Abel's paper as well, were "off" — to any critical, skeptical thinker their flaws are obvious. Are there any scientists in any field — general physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, for instance — who would read either of those papers and think maybe there's something to them? You'd have to be a fellow crackpot or somebody completely unqualified to evaluate any science papers to fail to see the problems in them.
Also, you don't need someone with great interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to screen out this kind of nonsense. I'm reminded of the comment I read on the Velikovsky affair: someone (it might have been Sagan) noted that the astronomers could see that Velikovsky's cosmic billiard game was bad physics, but gosh, his biblical scholarship sure was impressive; while the Bible scholars were all saying his mythology was all terrible literary scholarship, but golly, he sure seemed to know a lot of physics. Evaluating interdisciplinary work does not mean you cherry pick the most favorable interpretations from those most ignorant of a specific subfield, nor does it mean you split the difference and average the opinions of the subfields together. If one part of the mix is bullshit, you throw out the whole thing.
The fact that they're having trouble finding qualified reviewers for the work they're publishing is also ominous. Shouldn't the editorial board consist of people who are competent in this interdisciplinary field who can screen out the wackier submissions? And shouldn't it be setting off alarm bells when they accept suggestions of reviewers from authors, and those are the only people they can get reviews from? It's a situation ripe for selection by crackpots of crackpot reviewers; you just know that the Abel paper was reviewed by fellow travelers in the Intelligent Design creationism movement, and got no critical evaluation at all.
Given the spectacularly poor quality of the Andrulis and Abel papers, though, I am most amused by the claim that the editors and reviewers of Life "reject many submissions". I would love to see the papers that they judged worse than Andrulis's and Abel's.
(Also on FtB)
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PopSci Returns as Valued Festival Media Partner! [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0500
Popular Science, one of the leading sources of news in technology, science, gadgets, space, green tech and more, is returning as a key Media Partner with the Festival!
In doing so, PopSci joins a growing list of other top science media leaders who will be serving as Festival sponsors, including Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, MIT's Technology Review, Chemical & Engineering News, School Tube.com, ENGINEERING.com, EE Times and PBS Kids.
PopSci has been a major source of science and technology news since its award-winning magazine Popular Science was founded back in 1872. Its online version, PopSci.com, was launched in 1999, and in 2008 this site was redesigned and upgraded to give viewers even more up-to-the-minute tech news and insightful commentary on new innovations, and even scientific angles on the hottest Hollywood movies and stories.
Returning from its stint as a valued Media Partner in the 2010 Festival, Popular Science, like other key media sponsors in next year's event, will run advertisements pro bono via their respective media outlets which will play a key role in not only giving the Festival heightened visibility on a national and international scale, but also will help the event recruit for new satellite venues and participation in the Expo, contests and other activities.
Published by the Bonnier Magazine Group (which also publishes Science Illustrated), Popular Science is long known for its commitment to journalistic excellence in reporting on the latest in innovation, while giving readers an insightful look into what the future of technology holds.
Says Gregg Hano, Senior Vice President of Bonnier Corporate Sales & Technology Group, "We invest in that vision with our media properties everyday, and supporting the USA Science & Engineering Festival is one more way for us to ensure that the next generation will have the skills, knowledge and interest to deliver on that bright future."
We thank Popular Science and our other Media Partners for their valued participation!
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Placebo effects are "proof" that God exists? [Respectful Insolence]
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0500A couple of weeks ago, I made the observation that there seems to have been a--shall we say?--realignment in one of the central arguments that proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) make. Back in the day (say, a few years ago), such CAM practitioners and apologists used to try very, very hard to argue that their modalities had actual efficacy, that they had actual, measurable effects that made them medicine rather than woo. Never mind that even back then they had been trying for at least a couple of decades to come up with preclinical and clinical evidence that various magical CAM modalities worked, without any appreciable success. Worse for them, it's only gotten worse over the last few years. As I've documented here and elsewhere, the larger and better-designed the scientific study, the more likely it is that a CAM modality will show no efficacy detectably different than placebo effects. When we test a drug or medical device, finding no difference between the treatment arm and placebo arm leads us to conclude that the drug or device (or whatever intervention) does not work; i.e., does not have effects detectably different from nonspecific effects. When CAM practitioners find no difference between the treatment arm and placebo arm, they conclude that their treatment has promise. I love the double standard, don't you?
In any case, as more and more evidence comes in failing to find CAM modalities to be any more efficacious than placebo, the inevitable conclusion is that most of CAM is placebo medicine. Given that placebo effects have not been shown to have any detectable effect on the actual pathophysiology of disease, that they are variable, unreliable, and generally weak, and that invoking them requires deceiving the patient, it is considered at best ethically dubious and at worst completely unethical to treat patients with placeboes. They are not particularly effective, and a practitioner must, in essence, lie to his or her patient. Paternalism, although by no means gone in medicine, is soooo 1950s; it's slowly disappearing, and the disapproval of using placebo medicine is one part of that decline--except in CAM, apparently.
In any case, as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, when faced with more and more evidence that the vast majority of CAM is placebo medicine, what do CAM pracitioners do? Do they do what a science-based practitioner would do, at least eventually, and give it up? Of course not! Instead, they double down and embrace the "placeboness" of their treatments by invoking the "powerful placebo" and claiming that they are "harnessing the power of placebo" to produce "powerful mind-body healing," of course!
I thought I was done with this topic, at least for a while, but then I found a post in--where else?--that wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post by someone named Robert Schiffman, who is apparently a journalist and wants to tell us How the Placebo Effect Proves That God Exists.
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How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Photoshop Contest [Uncertain Principles]
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:58:25 -0500It's now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off-- the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I've got a copy already:
If you would like a copy of your very own, you can either wait until the release, or take part in this shameless publicity stunt: The second-ever Dog Physics Photo Contest!
Last time around, we did a LOLEmmy contest for a bound galley proof of the first book. This time, I'm giving away a signed copy of the finished book, so we'll go for something a little trickier: I've picked three pictures from my Flickr set of dog photos, showing Emmy sitting, play-bowing, and moping. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to crop her out of one of those three, and edit her into some other scene. Like this:
The best photoshopped picture of Emmy wins a signed copy of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Rules and conditions below the fold:
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Thursday Eratosthenes Blogging: Measuring Latitude and Longitude with a Sundial [Uncertain Principles]
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:00:03 -0500As I keep saying in various posts, I'm teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with Rhett at Dot Physics. We've been trying to do this literally for months, but the weather wouldn't cooperate. Until this past weekend, when we finally managed to make measurements that allow us to do some cutting-edge science. For 200 BC, anyway...
So, what did we do? Well, we each made a sundial, and shot time-lapse video of it using a webcam. Here's mine-- note the Lego gnomon, graciously donated to science by SteelyKid (whose attempts to help with "Daddy's 'spermint" weren't enough to earn a co-author credit, but do rate this acknowledgement):
The too-bright first few frames are because I forgot to adjust the exposure initially, and the greying out at the end is because some thick clouds rolled in. This was shot in our back yard in Niskayuna, and simultaneously (in some frame of reference, anyway), Rhett was taking video of his own sundial, in Hammond, LA. I took both videos, and ran them through Tracker video to measure the position of the end of the shadow for each frame, and produced the following results:
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Poor Mitt [Casaubon's Book]
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:57:59 -0500Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about the very poor. Add in the fact that Mitt demonstrably cares only about his hair, campaign donors (not a lot of them among the very poor) and getting elected, and this isn't exactly news.
GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very poor because there are social safety nets that take care of them.
"I'm in this race because I care about Americans," Romney told CNN's Soledad O'Brien this morning after his resounding victory in Florida on Tuesday. "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it."
"I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I'll continue to take that message across the nation."
Ultimately, Mitt is pretty safe in saying this, because he's playing on a whole host of American presumptions about poor people that are generally shared - even by many poor people. First of all, that the poor constitute only a tiny percentage of people, while 95% of us are "middle class." In America, everyone is middle class - it is one of our cultural precepts. There is lower middle class, which for the most part could be more accurately described as "poor' or "poorish" and upper middle class (better known as "richish" or actually rich), but very few people who will willingly call themselves rich or poor. This is, of course, factually ridiculous, but it is part of our national mythos.
The second assumption is that the very poor people are doing pretty well. You can see this on evidence any time any news story about social welfare appears, whereupon one is deluged with commenters about people on food stamps driving Jaguars and how unfair it is that some people get to live with these awesome safety nets while others have to work for a living. This is because one of America's best tricks is setting the poorish against the poor, and setting up the very poor as the enemy. What we like to believe is that poor people are those whose moral failings are the primary reason for their being in poverty. In fact, their moral failings (which exist) tend to be mostly the same moral failings of ordinary Americans, only exacerbated by a lack of support and many things that other people take for granted.
Mitt seems to believe what most Americans believe, which is that those on social welfare programs are doing just awesome, while the real victims are middle class Americans. This is a pretty funny idea, but it isn't just Mitt's. The notion that lower and middle class Americans are struggling more than the truly poor is not an uncommon one by people who look on social welfare programs with hostility. If there's anything really different about his assumptions it is the very funny classing of the desperately poor with the extremely rich as having a lot in common.
Let's take a look at some of Mitt'e assumption, though. First, how many people are actually poor in the US? The number is just around 40 millon at this point, not the 2-5 percent at the top and bottom that Mitt seems to think, but around 15% of the US population (relative poverty is greater, but I'm using the US census figures).
More than half of all Americans will spend at least a year in poverty during their adult life times. Almost a quarter of those people that Mitt just said he didn't give a crap about are children. Another ten percent are senior citizens. Let us note for the record that Mitt just disavowed interest in just under 10 million children and four million elders. Just mentioning it, since kids and senior citizens get a lot of attention during an election year. But they aren't the right kind of kids or seniors.
How well are safety nets doing for these folks? Well, we know that despite those safety nets, the ones that the Republicans do their best to hammer Barack Obama with (despite the fact that the dramatic rise in food stamp usage began under George W. Bush), 11 percent of American households were food insecure in the course of a year. This means that even though the largest percentage of people in history are on food support programs, we still have a significant number of people who don't know where their next meal is coming from a lot of the time. Again, it would be worth noting that a lot of those people are kids.
What about other measures? Well, we know that infant mortality rates in poor areas are a scandal. We know that in a number of poor counties around the America lifespans are actually declining, and that the poor endure more stress, having higher rates of suicide, depression, homicide and disability due to untreated medical conditions - yup. those poor people are doin' just awesome - practically as good as their counterparts like Mitt, the incredibly rich.
What's disturbing about this is that it reinforces an absolutely insane set of beliefs that people really do hold - that an upper-middle class person struggling to manage private school tuition is actually really hurting, while the desperately poor are protected by social welfare programs. Unfortunately, this belief isn't limited to the American right - it is reinforced by the language of the Occupy movement, which speaks of the "99%" as though they are uniformly oppressed by the ultra-rich 1%. This isn't the intent of Occupy, of course, which is vastly more concerned about poverty than Mitt is, but the rhetoric being used builds on the assumption that we're all basically part of one group, the (vast) middle class except for a few people, and that there is a great deal of commonality between the moderately rich and the very poor.
That simply isn't the case. While the 1% have more money than the 2 and 3%, all of them are doing just fine - what the rhetoric does is make sure that the people you are opposing are never you, always someone else. By building on language of classlessness that America loves so much, we elide differences just as much on the left as the right. That's not to say that under the sound bites the Occupy Movement hasn't a had a lot of good things to say about class and poverty - but that the sound bites are the things that other people hear best and remember longest.
Income disparity and poverty have become part of the national discourse in a way that owes enormously to both the Occupy Movement and the traditional poor-bashing that goes with an election year. That's a positive thing - but the language that we use to talk about poverty, class and equity falls short of what is needed and that's a problem on all sides.
It is easy to pillory sleazy, ignorant Mitt Romney for his inaccuracy and inequity - actually what really should be news about this is the unpublicized part of this. What's actually shocking is Mitt's statement that if safety nets are inadequate he'll fix them, a statement almost unheard of by a Republican. What he doesn't know about poverty and class aren't really news, unfortunately, because they represent what America doesn't know and doesn't want to talk about.
In a society where energy and resource decline has clear economic results - more poverty, more volatilty, more uncertainty and a winding down of the growth economy, those people that Mitt doesn't care about will get greater in number - indeed, have been growing greater in number. As long as we use language and misconception to conceal them, however, they can grow and grow and still be marginalized until the day that they decline to be marginalized any more, and everyone looks up, startled, that the very poor are so many and so angry and so familiar to us.
Sharon
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Fresh Meat, Fresh Data [Page 3.14]
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:03:22 -0800Posted to the homepage on January 20, 2012
On Aetiology, Tara C. Smith shares the results of her latest study into methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. She and her team "looked at not only conventional meats, but also 'alternative' meat products" labeled "raised without antibiotics" or "raised without antibiotic growth promotants." Smith writes, "In our previous paper, we found MRSA on 1.2% of 165 meat samples. In the current study, we found a higher prevalence—6.6% of 395 samples were contaminated with MRSA." She believes the current, higher number more accurately reflects the prevalence of MRSA in pork, due to a new sampling method (and not a rise in contamination). Overall, the study "didn't find a statistically significant difference in MRSA prevalence on conventional versus alternative pork products," and of the several strains isolated, "76.9% were resistant to two or more antibiotics and 38.5% were resistant to three or more antibiotics tested." In short, make sure to cook your ham. Meanwhile, on Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel explains how to visually present the kind of numerical data gathered in the MRSA study. Orzel asks, "Are you just comparing two numbers? Looking at how some property changes over time? Trying to characterize a distribution of numbers?" There's a graphic for every scenario.
- MRSA in pork products: does the "antibiotic-free" label make a difference? on Aetiology
- How to Present Scientific Data on Uncertain Principles
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