Category Archives: Politics

And the Check's in the Mail

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Trust me, I’m a scientist.

Merton’s description of this community value is a bit more subtle. He notes that disinterestedness is different from altruism, and that scientists needn’t be saints.

The best way to understand disinterestedness might be to think of how a scientist working within her tribe is different from an expert out in the world dealing with laypeople. The expert, knowing more than the layperson, could exploit the layperson’s ignorance or his tendency to trust the judgment of the expert. The expert, in other words, could put one over on the layperson for her own benefit. This is how snake oil gets sold.

The scientist working within the tribe of science can expect no such advantage. Thus, trying to put one over on other scientists is a strategy that shouldn’t get you far.

There’s a bit on hucksterism, and there’s actually a double-whammy here. Not only do you have people willing to misrepresent the science to prey on people unable to distinguish the quantum snake oil from shinola, but in the advertising game Janet mentions they will use anecdotal evidence — they won’t say the gizmo cures your ailment, they will have someone tell you how they used the gizmo and their ailment cleared up. They invite you to draw a conclusion that they won’t state, knowing that most people aren’t scientifically literate to know that it’s intellectual entrapment (inviting a correlation/causation and/or post hoc ergo propter hoc error).

Journalists and politicians are complicit in this game as well, in different ways. When journalists, in their quest for balance, interview scientists on the opposite side of a claim, they give the appearance of a divide that often isn’t there. And there always seems to be some person with credentials — an expert — who will take a contrary position. This leaves us open to people using science in reverse: using ideology to decide what the right answer is for their story or for government policy, and the going out and finding an expert who will support that position.

What the Heck is it, Edgar?

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What is public science, and why do you need it?

Here’s the truth: the NIH has funded research that led to 130 Nobel Prizes, and recently funded research that led to the first cancer vaccine. Here are some highlights from the research they funded in 2010 alone. And the NSF has sponsored research that led to 180 Nobel Prizes. Over the past few years, NSF has contributed to research that has made major strides in health, energy efficiency, and exploration. The NSF funded one of the very first web browsers in the 1990s, and is currently funding the development of next-generation robotics. NSF and its sister science agencies are investing in technologies that could one day transform the world.

To sell this idea, I think you have to paint people who are against science funding as being against progress. It’s important to note that it takes time for research advances to work their way into commercial products or otherwise be useful. To pick an example from my area of work, Norman Ramsey won (half of) the Nobel Prize in 1989 “for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks” but the invention was based on microwave/radar work in WWII and the paper on the topic came out in 1950. And yet the technology that it enabled, atomic clocks, became the basis for worldwide timekeeping in 1967. Among other things, atomic clocks enable high-speed communication and GPS. Industries that make billions of dollars a year, but it took decades for the various technologies to come together, mature and be applied. Choking off funding for research puts at risk future discovery that could have the same level of impact. We may not feel it immediately, but it will affect us eventually.

It's Sports-Science Analogy Time, Again

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Jon Huntsman, the lone voice of scientific sanity in the US Republican Presidential race

It’s like trying to explain the behaviour of football players without acknowledging the existence of a game of football. Why are these strange people running around after a sphere and kicking it to each other? What is the significance of the rectangular white box at the end? Why don’t they use their hands? Sure, we could posit some “laws” of “Association Football”, but that’s just a theory!

Similar to something I observed a while back. The difference here is that it’s in application to people who are vying to be leaders of a country, and to me it’s scary to think that the list is almost exclusively comprised of people who put ideology first, force the facts to fit and toss out anything that doesn’t.

The Bad Astronomer mentions this in reference to Rick Perry’s baffling “Galileo got outvoted for a spell” remark: Republican candidates, global warming, evolution, and reality. Galileo vs the church was not two scientific schools of thought duking it out, it was the suppression of science by holders of an ideological truth. Which is what is going on here, except that Perry got it exactly backwards.

Update: if you don’t want sports* analogies, here’s another.

Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don’t have a clue what it’s actually about.

*Though I’m sure there’s an xkcd cartoon where sex is a sport, and it does fulfill many of the basic requirements: physical activity, somebody possibly winning (I finished first. And you, not at all**) and I will never be mistaken for a professional practitioner.

** Which is why you shouldn’t keep score

Wait For It…

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It may have happened already, but if not, it’s just a matter of time before some jackass complains about how Irene was overhyped* because the damage/devastation was not as bad as it was feared. Which completely ignores that getting people to properly prepare is a huge part of minimizing the damage.

*I know Ron Paul has called for the elimination of FEMA, but that’s pre-existing jackassitude.

Aftermath

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Really it’s afterquake; I’m not sure how much math will be here. But anyway, a few more comments on what happened, just because.

An event such as this allows for an evaluation of systems and protocols that you have in place. You can do simulations, but quite often you aren’t willing to invite any real risk in an exercise — the stress on the system isn’t real. So sure, you can time how long it takes for a response to happen in a test or know that a backup system is present, but under real conditions things fall apart quickly. You have different traffic patterns because of fallen trees and traffic lights that are out of commission. That backup system didn’t engage because of an overlooked problem, and you never actually tried it out because you didn’t want any downtime. At best you can find things that worked but would work even better or be useful in that situation, but never noticed because you weren’t in that situation. Hey, you know what? We need an emergency light here! Or, this system status data would really be useful to have in real-time. So there are flaws and potential improvements that only come to light under actual stress.

It took me more than an hour to get home, when it usually takes me less than 30 minutes. The district DOT people closed off Rock Creek Parkway to southbound traffic, which they normally do at 3:45 PM, but they did it at 2:30 and forced a bunch of Virginia-bound drivers into the downtown area to find another bridge. Bad call, IMO. Surprises are bad — I think you want to keep routines as constant as possible. Disruptions to routine usually makes things worse. Crossing the Potomac requires a bridge or tunnel, and shutting off a main route to one of them is one reason traffic was so heavy. There are more options for getting into Maryland.

I’m not at liberty to discuss the operations response at work, but I’ll put it this way: I’m sure the press would not have been shy about pointing out problems had they arisen. If I had not been caught up in the response, I probably would have appreciated this more in real-time: I work with a bunch of professionals. People who do what they need to do, without being told — checking on systems, making sure a backup has kicked in if there’s a problem with the primary, and then diagnosing what that problem is when they find one. And I cannot fathom why there are those in elected positions who think it’s worthwhile to put pressure on these people, essentially inviting them to leave government service, by under-compensating them so that they would have to be replaced by less capable people. This attitude filters down either by diffusion or by direct pressure. If you continue along that path you’ll be left with people who are senior enough that staying is still worthwhile since they are heavily vested in the retirement program and marginally competent junior people who can’t get better jobs in the private sector. When the senior people retire, the system will crumble. Maybe that’s what people are looking for, as an excuse to privatize or disband more of government, but I think it’s a bad idea.

It became apparent that there are government people working in fairly critical positions whose primary means of communication is a cell phone. The cell phone system froze for a period of time after the quake, isolating these people. This is where the argument about how “the market” will provide a solution just fails. Even with whatever FCC requirements exist, the system collapsed. It wasn’t a matter of one carrier reaching saturation, to be fixed by switching providers. What if this had been more serious? Would the rationale that lives were lost because the market does not value the extra capacity really hold up? Government regulations are an absolute requirement in cases where the players cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. The mantra that less regulation is always better is sheer idiocy. We already have too many wingnuts thinking that e.g. the EPA should be emasculated. As a citizen I don’t see the upside of more air, water and land pollution. Ultimately it’s cheaper to prevent it than clean it up. We don’t need fewer people inspecting our food or maintaining our roads. We don’t need softer building codes.

One more thing, about the mockery from the west-coasters: payback is a bitch. Yes, many people overreacted, because they are not used to earthquakes, and you stay calm because you go through it. But because they are common, you build for them. There are a lot of old buildings — i.e. structurally questionable — in DC. Not so much in LA, or especially San Francisco, because all of the really old buildings burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp during some previous earthquake. How much of SF construction dates back before 1906? A 5.9 earthquake here is not to be compared to a 5.9 there. Here, it’s the biggest earthquake we’ve had in more than 100 years. You want a real comparison? What would be the LA reaction to a hard freeze? The city has only seen a temperature as low as 29ºF in the last 80 years — that’s the record low. Do you think maybe you’d scurry about in a bit of a panic if that were to happen again, worrying about bursting pipes and dead plants, because you aren’t built for that sort of thing? DC may not handle snow very well (not many really big cities do), but we get freezing weather quite a bit. It’s not a problem. I’ll keep a snarkball in the freezer, ready to throw at you, in case this ever happens.

The Reach of Outreach

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Uncertain Principles: The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves

People are generally in favor of outreach activities, of course, but in the same diffuse way that the general public is in favor of tax increases. If you ask them whether they’re in favor of outreach to the general public, they’ll say yes, but pressed to support it in a concrete way, they’ll find reasons not to.

Obama's Goodfellas Moment

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(Sorry, foul-mouthed politics spleen-vent time. No physics here)

There’s a scene in Goodfellas where Sonny, the sniveling restaurant owner, partners up with Paul Cicero, the mob boss, to give him leverage to deal with Tommy, one of Paulie’s underlings. Sonny thinks his troubles are over. Henry, in a voiceover, explains how this is really an asymmetric arrangement:

Now the guy’s got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.

So obviously Obama is Sonny here, having negotiated his way into a bad deal, right? No. What I hope for — what I want — is that Obama is Paulie. For some time the GOP has been maintaining that what’s been standing in between us and prosperity are low taxes for people with large incomes and the removal of “uncertainty” from the business world: Don’t raise taxes on the job creators! Give us a visit from the confidence fairy! Well, the deals have been made. Obama can now ask, “Where are my jobs?”

S&P downgrades us? Fuck you, pay me.

Stock market tanks? Fuck you, pay me.

Repubs try any kind of distraction? Fuck you, pay me.

Other excuses? Fuck you, pay me.

That’s what I want. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. Anyone paying attention to recent events will know that the democrats absolutely suck ass at controlling the message and explaining what they’re doing and intend to do. Nobody believes them anyway. There is little history to indicate that anyone is going to grow a spine and start calling the republicans out for boning 98% of us.

Several people have done a careful analysis of the debt deal and shown it’s not as horrible as the media have reported it. That Hillary would not have been treated any better and because the tea party was willing to trash the economy even worse. That Obama got about the best deal he could have because he was the only adult in the room. There’s faint hope that this is some rope-a-dope and he’ll eventually come out swinging. None of that matters. Politics is perception, and as long as the message is that Obama caved and the dems lost, that what people will come to know. The media are complicit, because they will not challenge lies and spin from the right and force people to deal in facts. The dems have to control the message, loudly and forcefully, and they aren’t doing it.

If there’s a strategy being employed, I don’t see it. Cooperating when your opponent continually stabs you in the back is a losing proposition from basic game theory. If the democrats are going to rely on voters knowing that the republicans are the worse alternative, then they have already forgotten the lesson of 2010: there is an option to not voting republican, and that is to stay home. It’s a horrible option, but it’s what happens when the leaders don’t step up and lead. The left didn’t do nearly enough to energize the voters that elected them in 2008; Obama had accomplishments before the midterm, but the democrats were too meek in proclaiming them. By not controlling the message, voters were allowed to focus on what didn’t happen, got disheartened and too many switched or stayed home on election day.

That can’t be allowed to happen again. The republicans have already shown us what their plans are for the country, and it’s ugly. Obama needs to win office again, and because congress has been an obstacle, we need a better one. To get there, this wishy-washy nonsense has got to stop. The republicans aren’t interested in cooperation, so there’s no point in pretending any longer. Denounce the people who are causing the difficulties and tell us how you are going to fix the problems. Cite chapter and verse of how the right has been an obstacle instead of thanking them for superficial cooperation. How they have not proposed any jobs legislation. How their political feet-dragging has encumbered us all. If you have to, fire your speechwriters. The right has been very good at scapegoating and laying blame for everything. They’ve been too successful at it — loudly pretending to hate socialism but loving government subsidies and ending regulation that socializes the cost of clean air and water, pretending to hate the elite while enabling the rich and powerful to have their way with the rest of us. It’s time to pound on the table and say enough is enough.

This Might Be a Job for … Me!

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Label Puzzler: Original Recipe AND New Flavor?

[W]hile the box is closed, the ice cream inside exists in a quantum superposition of states in which it is both “original recipe” and “new flavor,” and only when the box is opened and the ice cream observed does the wave function collapse into either an “original” or “new” state. Alternatively, the two states would decohere and two new universes would form, in one of which you are eating original-recipe ice cream and in the other a parallel You is enjoying the new flavor. (I don’t think there’s any scenario in which a cat spontaneously forms. Please!)
…
Please let me know if you are interested in serving as an expert witness for a possible quantum-physics defense to consumer-law claims involving allegedly self-contradictory labels.

I’ll do this one pro bono. A new flavor has to be the original recipe. No quantum mechanics involved. People think of original recipe as meaning a throwback (especially since the New Coke debacle), but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s only a contradiction if you know it’s not redundant. No label superposition. It would be neat to have entangled flavors, though, like one half-gallon of chocolate and one of vanilla, but you don’t know which is which until you open one of the containers.

Monkey © Monkey D'oh!

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You may have read about photographer David Slater, and the tale of some monkey taking a self-potrait with a camera he left unattended. Techdirt wondered who owned the copyright. Monkey Business: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency?

Technically, in most cases, whoever makes the actual work gets the copyright. That is, if you hand your camera to a stranger to take your photo, technically that stranger holds the copyright on the photo, though no one ever enforces this.

I pointed out the work-for-hire loophole in a tweet, but seriously doubt the macaque was in anyone’s employ. It gets better, though, because Techdirt got a takedown request, and inquired about the reason, given the questionable copyright claim.

Monkeys Don’t Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos

[W]e stand by our original analysis. We do not believe Caters News Agency has a legitimate copyright interest in the photo, and the company is in no position to issue a takedown of the images. Furthermore, even if it does turn out, through some convoluted process, that Caters does have a legitimate copyright interest in the photo, we believe that our use falls squarely into the classical confines of fair use under US copyright law. Thus, we have no plans to remove the photos or make any changes, barring Caters providing us with a sound basis for doing so.