purepedantry | February 17, 2009Economic historian, Gregory Clark, details why times have changed for academic economists:
The current recession has revealed the weaknesses in the structures of modern capitalism. But it also revealed as useless the mathematical contortions of academic economics. There is no totemic power. This for two reasons:
(1) Almost no-one predicted the world wide downtown. Academic economists were confident that episodes like the Great Depression had been confined to the dust bins of history. There was indeed much recent debate about the sources of "The Great Moderation" in modern economies, the…
purepedantry | February 17, 2009Submarines collide:
In a freak accident, two submarines carrying nuclear missiles, one French and the other British, collided while submerged on operational patrols in the Atlantic early this month, the British and French defense ministries said Monday.
Both vessels returned damaged but otherwise safe to their home ports, with the 250 crew members aboard uninjured and with "no compromise to nuclear safety," the defense ministries said in terse statements that appeared to have been agreed upon by the nations. The reference appeared to cover the nuclear reactors that power the submarines and…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009The Geithner Treasury plan for rescuing the banking system (more here) is getting panned on both sides of the aisle for being excessively vague.
Megan McArdle:
Tim Geithner reveals that the Treasury has a plan to fix the problems in our broken capital markets by . . . er . . . fixing them.
...
The Wall Street Journal adds that "critical details of the plan remained unanswered, despite the weeks of planning leading up to Tuesday's announcement." Plan? That's not a plan, it's a fervent wish.
Paul Krugman:
An old joke from my younger days: What do you get when you cross a Godfather with a…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009SEA (again) has the details of the result of the House and Senate conference bill for economic stimulus. Here are the parts related to science:
Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering - which spurs discovery and innovation.
Provides $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which funds research in such areas as climate science, biofuels, high-energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy sciences - areas crucial to our energy future.
Provides $400 million for the Advanced Research Project…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009A trio of Federal judges have ruled against three separate plaintiffs who alleged that vaccines caused their child's autism:
These three decisions, each looking into a different theory as to how vaccines might have injured the children, are expected to guide the outcomes of all those claims.
The judges ruled that the families seeking compensation had not shown that their children's autism was brought on by the presence of thimerosal, a mercury vaccine preservative, by the weakened measles virus used in the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, or by a combination of the two.
For example, in a case…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009I don't have much to say about the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. I have always accepted the notion of evolution as a precondition to all other understanding in biology. Without evolution, all the patterns and apparent unity in life is rendered into incomprehensible gibberish.
Darwin did much to facilitate our understanding of evolution, but he did not do it alone and much has happened since his death.
All that I would recommend on this anniversary is that you read (or reread) evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky's 1973 essay "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the…
purepedantry | February 12, 2009To celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Darwin's birth, the NYTimes has a video of singing Darwin scholar, Richard Milner. Check it out.
purepedantry | February 12, 2009Alzheimer's research is an ongoing field. Although we know a lot more than we used to, we still don't entirely understand why the accumulation of proteins in Alzheimer's disease kills neurons or renders them non-functional. One intriguing part of the explanation may be offered by Varvel et al. who show that the active proteins in Alzheimer's disease (more on this in a second) cause neurons to re-enter the cell cycle in a mouse model of the disease.
Introduction
I have variously described Alzheimer's -- and other neurodegenerative diseases -- as a disease of molecular crud. The pathological…
purepedantry | February 10, 2009Check out this hysterical rant by Conan about Boron misreporting (below the fold).
Hat-tip: Wired Science
purepedantry | February 10, 2009Head over to BBC News to see some cool and extremely rare footage of Narwhals during migration.
purepedantry | February 9, 2009There was a case like Terry Schiavo's in Italy that is triggering a genuine constitutional crisis.
Eluana Englaro, who had been on a feeding tube in a persistent vegetative state, for 17 years passed away last night after her father ordered her feeding tube removed. But this was not before Silvio Berlusconi attempted to pass an emergency law banning the removal. The law triggered a crisis because the Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano refused to sign it arguing that it was unconstitutional.
Englaro's passing may not be the end of the issue, however. Berlusconi and his party seem to…
purepedantry | February 9, 2009From CNN:
Of the 800 Americans surveyed from Feb. 7-8, 48% said the plan would help "some," and 16% said they felt the stimulus bill would help the economy "a lot." Only 16% said the bill would not help at all, and another 20% said it would not help much.
But 55% of respondents said that even the less expensive Senate plan would cost too much in spending and tax cuts, according to the survey. In addition, 30% think it's just the right amount of money and 13% said the government needs to spend even more.
In other news, the American people issued this statement to cakes everywhere: "we would…
purepedantry | February 9, 2009Long, long ago on a website far, far away (OK, 2006 on Blogcritics.org) before I joined ScienceBlogs, I used to do weekly or biweekly roundups of science, health and tech in the news.
In these I would make no attempt whatsoever to interpret or even accurately represent the articles involved. Sometimes they were even funny.
Funny or not, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed writing them, so I think I am going to bring them back.
So here is your Science Roundup for February 9th, 2009.
Soon WiFi will be available on airlines, but not everyone is pleased with the convenience:
But the…
purepedantry | February 8, 2009Check out this video by reason.tv below the fold.
If you find it hard to achieve and maintain growth, maybe Stimulis is right for you.
purepedantry | February 7, 2009Over at SEA they have a point-by-point description of the Senate economic stimulus bill. Obviously what is actually passed will be sorted out in conference committee but here is what is included about science:
Science:
National Science Foundation (NSF) Research: $1.2 billion total for NSF including: $1 billion to help America compete globally; $150 million for scientific infrastructure; and $50 million for competitive grants to improve the quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA): $1.3 billion total…
purepedantry | February 6, 2009David Goldston, writing in Nature, echoes a point I have been trying to make about the science provisions of the economic stimulus package. He lists some reasons why scientists should be wary of getting our funding this way:
First, being included in the stimulus measure could turn science spending into a political football. In general, federal support for science is something pretty much everyone in both parties agrees should be maximized, even if they haven't always followed through by providing the cash. The fight over the stimulus bill could erode that consensus, creating problems for the…
purepedantry | February 6, 2009This guy has clearly not read about the broken window fallacy:
Times were so tough for window repairman Timothy Carl Klenke, police say, that he decided to take proactive measures: He armed himself with a slingshot and began cruising around the city, shattering at least five windows and car windshields as he went.
"The statements he gave to officers led them to believe he was out to drum up business and was prepared to go out and do some more damage," Redlands police spokesman Carl Baker said Tuesday.
Witnesses reported seeing Klenke, 50, driving around in his Honda in the areas where the…
kcontreary | February 6, 2009Robert Barro is interviewed in The Atlantic about his views of the stimulus plan (see also a recent WSJ piece here). All in all, he is not a fan:
The Atlantic: And I take it from the Wall Street Journal piece you wrote last week... well, the piece is just specifically about measuring multipliers, but I take it that you are fairly skeptical in general that fiscal policy will boost aggregate demand.
Robert Barro: Right. There's a big difference between tax rate changes and things that look just like throwing money at people. Tax break changes have actual incentive effects. And we have some…
purepedantry | February 4, 2009
Imagine the size of the mice it would eat:
Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake's vertebrae suggest it weighed 1140 kg (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 metres (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip. A report describing the find appears in this week's Nature.
Drs Jason Head and David Polly carried out much of the quantitative work behind the discovery whilst working in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London; they identified the position of the fossil vertebrae which made a size estimate possible. Now based at the University…