During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
If you're not a researcher, you probably don't use Mendeley a lot, I don't have an account there even though I have written lots of pieces about their stuff. But it's popular among researchers and in the early days of Science 2.0, when I had the Science 2.0 name itself reserved for a collaboration tool, I always assumed we would buy something like Mendeley or something like Mendeley would buy us, depending on who got biggest first. Other than a few emails with the CEO when he had something interesting to share, I have no involvement with the company.
The Environmental Protection Agency has always been a political beast - it is political appointees accountable to whatever administration is in power, not the electorate. President Richard Nixon created it, that should tell you something.
For an administration that promised to 'restore science to its rightful place' and that is run by a man who calls himself 'scientist in chief' there is sure a lot of anti-science activity going on.
Food so cheap that poor people can be fat is a miracle only dreamed about by philosophers ad economists throughout history. It was previously believed that the labor force needed to produce enough food would outstrip the food they could produce, something like how trying to exceed the speed of light adds too much mass.
Alzheimer's research is always big news. The reason is simple: people are living longer and they also want to be living better. While progress in general health issues for seniors marches on, the brain remains trickier stuff. Instead of less Alzheimer's than in the past, we have more, thanks to better diagnosis and greater longevity. Once you reach a certain age, you are almost certain to have someone in your family with it.
Since today is a celebration of St. Patrick, the religious figure who 'drove the snakes out of Ireland' (meaning Paganism), a whole lot of people got drunk last night. Yeah, Protestants getting drunk the night before before a Catholic religious festival makes as much sense as anything else about St. Patrick's Day. In addition, kids in California get something magical in their shoes, which puzzles me too. I never heard of that when I was a kid but the rural area I grew up in was a delightful mix of people descended from residents of Scotland and Eastern Europe so there weren't a lot of magical pots of gold lying around - if an Irishman came along asking about our shoes the reply was going to be sent at muzzle velocity.
Being Pope may mean good things in the afterlife but here on Earth, it doesn't count for a lot on the Internet. On the day Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis, over 600 domain names were registered by cybersquatters. They must be evangelicals.
Even mistaken names like Francis I were taken.
So Popefrancis.org is not available to the Roman Pontiff, along with most of the country-specific domains, like popefrancis.fr. Even popefrancisi.com was scooped by someone.
Oddly, at the time of this writing, his Argentina country-specific domain was still available - so if you want to grab Popefrancis.ar.com, you still can. Look for domain company GoDaddy to have scantily-clad nuns stripping in the enclave advertising that one real soon.
Can you buy leadership?If you talk to people trying to convince the government to give them more money, the answer is 'yes', even among scientists who know better. Since the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider, Americans have been shy about Big Physics - politicians don't trust the projections science makes on if projects can be completed at all, much less on time and on budget. And no one has minded not having Big Physics locally except American physicists, who would rather large colliders be closer to home.
Environmental activists make money telling us all how terrible things are; climate scientists appreciate the help promoting their data, we do have a bit of a train wreck coming at us emissions-wise, but climate scientists also know there is a risk of backlash if there are too many hyperbolic claims, and that 'green fatigue' will set in if every change in temperature and every storm is attributed to global warming. That's why even the IPCC, no wallflower when it comes to using media talking points, wishes media would not attribute local weather to climate change.
As American culture becomes more polarized, with various constituencies aligning themselves on left-right graphs, religious groups are not going to win with a subset of people, even among rational scientists who should be immune from motivated reasoning. If the Catholic church wants to hold a conference on stem cells but doesn't include the controversial and, to-date, wildly overhyped human embryonic stem cell research among its discussions of adult and induced pluripotent stem cell breakthroughs, it's all yelling about Galileo and bans and general political theater on blogs only read by people who need a new shot of confirmation bias.
Because I signed a petition asking for increased open access of studies, I got an email from White House Science Czar Dr. John Holdren today - don't get excited, after all of the mean things I have said about him he is not suddenly writing me personally, it was a mass email - saying they had 'listened' and were making some changes, a letter we all knew was coming.It reads, in part:
Legislation to restrict guns is a lot like legislation to restrict abortion - it's a tough sell at the federal level because of that pesky Constitution so it requires a friendly court and and a lot of lawyers. States, of course, can do it more easily. Some states have ways to restrict abortions and some states have ways to restrict guns.Gun restriction proponents like Vice-President Joe Biden would probably like to restrict abortions too. America is the only civilized country that still allows late-term abortions on demand, but abortion doctors don't rush into schools and go on an abortion spree so score one for abortion fans.
