Links for 2011-04-27

As someone who blogs about science and occasionally about politics, I am contractually obligated to link to this article. Fortunately, it's also good and interesting.

"I have a lot of complicated misgivings about the implications of this overall approach in its reconsideration of the public sphere, deliberative processes, the act of persuasion, and our models of subjectivity, agency and consciousness. But I have a simpler objection to this particular subset of the bigger paradigm. Namely, that it is not irrational or unreasonable to regard scientific claims which recommend or insist upon particular public policy initiatives with sharply pronounced skepticism across the board. Not because science itself requires a particular form of skepticism (though it does) but because such skepticism is evidence-based, derived from the history of the relationship between policy, the modern state, and science, a history which even non-experts have often viscerally experienced or witnessed."

"Spring Weekend at my current institution, despite having the same name, is on such a different scale as to not even warrant comparison to the behemoth that is UConn's event, but, as I often observe, students on most campuses are similar in some fundamental ways, and I've tried to apply what I learned at UConn to my understanding of this weekend. Some of those lessons are ones that some of my colleagues on other campuses learned long ago, and perhaps offer some insights into why the management, or, even more extreme, the cancellation of these events, is so problematic."