To be honest, I don't really care about the answer to this question. But read this Kristof NY Times column, and see if you're convinced of the answer. It's time to practice your critical thinking skills - questions you should ask about the claims presented in this column are exactly the sorts of questions you should ask when you read a press report about any statistics-based study, especially medical research.

Here is the basic result Kristof is talking about:

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

A friend was telling me the other day about a class he plans on taking on the philosophy of science. When I hear philosophy of science, I immediately think Richard Feynman. Feynman was, of course, not a philosopher, but a scientist par excellence. His lectures are filled with insights like these:

There is always the possibility of proving any definite [well-defined] theory wrong; but notice that we can never proce it right. Suppose that you invent a good guess, calculate the consequences, and discover every time that the consequences you have calculated agree with experiment. The theory is then right? No, it is simple not proved wrong. In the future you could compute a wider range of consequences, there could be a wider range of experiments, and you might then discover that the thing is wrong... We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong.

Continuing today's theme of science and the Obama administration...

Physicist John Holdren will be Obama's science advisor. I was hoping we'd finally get a biologist in that position, but his expertise on energy and climate issues will be timely.

A marine biologist at Oregon State University, Jane Lubchenco has been tapped to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Both of these people are past AAAS presidents.

Larry Summers says that R&D spending should not be part of an economic stimulus package, contrary to what many scientists were probably hoping for.

Summers actually has a good point. The rationale for current ideas about a fiscal stimulus package is that government deficit spending is helpful during times when monetary policy isn't getting traction, but such spending has to be followed by a commitment to deficit reduction during better times. So now we spend like it's 1943, but when things pick up we need to cut back.

Can science journalism get any more embarrassingly bad?

"Real-time gene monitoring developed" says a headline over at physorg.com. The piece starts off with an insane hook that makes no sense whatsoever:

With GeneVision, military commanders could compare gene expression in victorious and defeated troops. Retailers could track genes related to craving as shoppers moved about a store. "The Bachelor" would enjoy yet one more secret advantage over his love-struck dates.

I can relate to Olivia Judson's experience with the digitization of science journals:

On the good side, instead of hauling dusty volumes off shelves and standing over the photocopier, I sit comfortably in my office, downloading papers from journal Web sites.

On the bad side, this has produced informational bedlam.

The journal articles arrive with file names like 456330a.pdf or sd-article121.pdf. Keeping track of what these are, what I have, where I’ve put them, which other papers are related to them — hopeless...