Category Archives: Politics

I Object

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U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeks trial on global warming

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.

Chamber officials say it would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

What a bad idea for science.

This doesn’t bring the Scopes trial to my mind, as mentioned in the article — that wasn’t primarily about whether evolution was valid science. This is more like the story of how the Indiana House once unanimously passed a bill to make pi a rational number (3.2; the bill died in the senate). Our legal system doesn’t get to decide what is sound science or not; if it attempts to make such a decision, mother nature won’t care at all and won’t serve any contempt-of-court sentence for disobeying the judge.

The legal system doesn’t argue the same way that science does, which is why this is a common tactic for anti-scientists. Creationists putting Darwinism “on trial” in literature is not uncommon. The absurdity of calling evolution “Darwinism” aside for the moment, these “trials” include appeals to ridicule that might sound convincing to some, because there is much about science that isn’t intuitive. In physics, one could probably convince a lay person that quantum mechanics and relativity are wrong using a legal style of argument, just by pointing out some of the counterintuitive, nonclassical (or non-Galilean) aspects (A single particle goes through both slits? Absurd! Twins can age at different rates? Preposterous!) But QM and relativity are true, regardless of how much they contradict classical experience.

It can’t merely be lining up experts, either, because there is no science so well-established that you can’t find a somebody, somewhere, who has a degree and disagrees with the mainstream. There are physicists who disagree with QM and relativity, just as there are biologists who are creationists (or cdesign proponentsists). The bench isn’t very deep of course (there are more biologists named Steve who agree that evolution is true than all who are touted to disagree), but they are out there. What matters is the empirical evidence, and the people best qualified to tell us this are the scientists who do the kind of work in question, not a judge. True, the judge might/should rule in favor of the scientists in this kind of case, but if he didn’t, that wouldn’t change the fact that smoking causes cancer, evolution is true, photons interfere with themselves, pi is irrational and humans are causing global warming. That’s what the evidence tells us.

Vendor Gifts as Proxy for Economic Recovery

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I buy things for the lab (which may not be a true statement in the near future; we shall see), and some vendors like to thank me for my business by throwing in some item that I didn’t buy but might find useful or enticing. I have gotten t-shirts, beanbags for juggling (or possibly hackey-sack), the ever-useful thumb drive that is 3 generations smaller than what’s on the market (128 MB. Oh, joy), and , of course, office supplies like pens, highlighters and post-it notes emblazoned with the company logo. Often, however, the gift is food of some sort.

I’ve noticed that in the recent tougher economic climate that the companies engaging in this practice had been scaling back or discontinuing their give-away advertising efforts. I’m happy to report that the “lab snacks” assortment we get from one optics vendor, which had been downsized for much of the past year (or at least ours had been), have returned to the full cornucopia. Full recovery can’t be too far down the road.

Doctor Obvious, Come Here … Slowly

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Higher Speed Limits Cost Lives, Researchers Find

“This is a failed policy because it was, in essence, an experiment over 10 years. People assumed that increasing the speed limit would not have an impact,” said Friedman. “We’ve shown that something has happened and it’s quite dramatic.”

Umm, really? People assumed that if you drive faster, with its associated reduction in response times and increase in collision energy, that there would be no effect? I think people wanted the higher speed limit despite the higher risk it entailed, in part because of other safety advances.

Friedman uses the example of the 3,000 people who died in the September 11th terrorist attacks.

“That tragic event has led to a whole foreign policy,” he said. “We estimate that approximately 12,500 people died as a result of a policy to deregulate speed enforcement — four times what happened on September 11th — and yet changing the policy to reduce speed limits may be very difficult.”

What they don’t say is that despite the extra ~1250 deaths per year from the higher speed, overall deaths have fallen, and the rate per vehicle-mile has dropped dramatically over the years. Per mile traveled, you’re about half as likely to die as compared to 1980.

trafficstats

From this NHTSA PDF

The problem with simply presenting a number is that there is no basis for a valid comparison. The apples-to-oranges 9/11 fatalities number is given instead. The graph shows about 15,000 fatalities per year, currently, making this a 9% increase, which discounts the possibility of other influences such as more cars on the road and more miles being traveled, which the fatality rate statistic indicates. (Though that can be influenced by many things as well)

A more meaningful analysis might go something like this. My upcoming vacation will entail me driving perhaps 1,000 miles. I can drive slower if I choose, but I have to consider if saving a half-hour of travel is worth it. Since being on the road for ~8 hours means fatigue comes into play, it might actually be safer to cut down on the travel time. If the fatality rate is 2 per 100 million miles, this means a statistical chance of 0.002%, which is quite small. And we’re talking about increasing this by 10%, to 0.0022%. The sin-by-omission in the article has you focusing on the dramatic large number rather than the overall picture.

Science? Pew!

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Pew Science Knowledge Quiz

To test your knowledge of scientific concepts and recent scientific findings and events, we invite you to take this 12-question science knowledge quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with the 1,005 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions. You’ll also be able to compare your Science IQ with the average scores of men and women; with college graduates as well as those who didn’t attend college; with people who are your age as well as with younger and older Americans.

I got 12/12, but I’d expect anyone with a science degree to do pretty well — this is targeted to a lay audience. And it sets the bar pretty low; numerous bloggers have discussed the poll results and implications. The poll is reasonable, I think, with two exceptions. One is a question that is not so much science as current events, and another is the type which becomes harder to justify when you know more about the topic. Look at the quiz first, though.

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If You Want to Speak Out, Speak Out

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Uncertain Principles: This Is My Job

Somewhere in the last fifty-odd years, though, we’ve picked up the notion that it’s somehow unseemly for Real Scientists to speak to a general audience– that, as “Jon” writes, the only job of a scientist is to hunker down and do research that will be read and used by other scientists. The messy business of dumbing things down for the person on the street is best left to English majors who couldn’t hack calculus.

It’s no coincidence that the public prestige and influence of science has decreased significantly over that period. As scientists have lost interest in communicating science to the public, the public has lost interest in science.

Inventing Money

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Invent, Invent, Invent

Innovation — science and engineering — is the key to a sustainable economy.

Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.

Hey You, Stop Being … so … Unsafe!

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Over at incoherently scattered ponderings, there’s a post on safety at academic labs, which links to an article at Slate about an explosion at a lab which killed a worker, and discusses the difference in safety standards for students vs workers, and academia vs industry.

Why the difference between industry and academe? For one thing, the occupational safety and health laws that protect workers in hazardous jobs apply only to employees, not to undergraduates, graduate students, or research fellows who receive stipends from outside funders. (As a technician, Sheri Sangji was getting wages and a W-2. If she’d been paying tuition instead, Cal/OSHA could not even have investigated her death.)

I had not realized that students aren’t covered, but the disparity between the described situations is not surprising. I’ve spent time in academia (grad school) and worked in national labs (the NanoFabrication facility at Cornell, TRIUMF in Canada), and my current government job is a confluence of being industry/government and a quasi-national-lab (though not formally recognized as such). And I have to concur: lab safety in a university setting is not formally the priority is is in those other places. Academic safety leans far too much on the involvement of the PI, and leaves way too much to chance. A key difference of academia is that students are … students — they are still learning, and one cannot assume that they have the requisite experience to know much about the finer points of safety.

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