Archive for October, 2008

On Being an “Assistant to the President”

October 19th, 2008

Posted by: admin

There are many certainties in current discussions and analysis of American science and technology policy.  Here are three off the top of my head.

  • As Dan Sarewitz has often noted, there is a obsessive focus on the the budget to the exclusion of much else.  It’s often about doubling the budget of some particular agency, and most problems could somehow be solved just through funding increases.
  • The Office of Technology Assessment apparently was most of what was good and wholesome about science and technology advice in this country and must be reconstituted post-haste.
  • The President’s science advisor must receive the title of Assistant to the President that it held in the past, to right the disrespect shown to science and technology.

I have problems with all three, but would like to spend this post calling shenanigans on the third item.

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Science Progress and “Progressive Science Policy”

October 18th, 2008

Posted by: admin

Science Progress, a science-oriented website hosted by the Center for American Progress, recently noted its first year of operation.  As the title and sponsor suggest, Science Progress approaches science from a progressive (liberal) perspective.  The science reporting is strong, with former Washington Post science writer Rick Weiss on staff, and Chris Mooney contributing an occasional column.

Two contributors, Mooney and Jonathan Moreno, post in commemoration of the anniversary.  One notion that Moreno focuses on in his post – progressive science policy – caught my eye and I wanted to make an important point about it.

Moreno frames progressive science policy in such a way that it might seem no right-thinking American could object.  That’s always a cause for concern.

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Second Life for Darwin’s Finches

October 17th, 2008

Posted by: admin

Having taught an online-only course for undergraduates, I say with some personal experience that higher education has not effectively embraced information technology as much as it could, particularly where teaching is concerned.  Which is why I’m encouraged by what I read in The Chronicle of Higher Education about an effort to reconstruct the Galapagos Islands – where Darwin’s work with finches was critical to the formation of evolutionary theory – in Second Life.  Now, Second Life may be behind the cool curve where online interaction is concerned, but it is still a useful tool to create spaces in a way that social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace don’t emphasize.

In connection with the 2009 sesquicentennial of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the University of Cincinnati is reconstructing the islands, and augmenting the ability to retrace Darwin’s steps with audio and video material shot during field trips to the Islands.  Additionally, information kiosks on the Galapagos will be created in in Second Life.  Additional details (and images) can be found in the EDUCAUSE Review article two of the participating faculty wrote on the project.  The project will continue through the 2009-2010 academic year.

What projects like this do is open up the ways in which educational topics can be communicated.  Not only can people outside of the university access the material without travelling to Ohio, but this allows for biology to be presented to students in completely new ways.  The biggest policy question would be how to encourage such activity.  This is not easily addressed at the federal level, aside from encouraging grants and other support for creating new educational materials and/or research work.  The area for big work will be in university policy.  This will be particularly difficult for at least two reasons.  First, while the usual inhabitants may not be conservative, universities are very conservative – slow to change.  Second, the rewards system (tenure first among the rewards) will need to change in order for faculty to be encouraged to do this kind of work.  While being slow to change denotes a certain measure of stability, the corresponding reluctance to engage the new can be frustrating.

Skepticism’s Permanence – A Political Reality

October 16th, 2008

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Rather than a stodgy old field with a few loose ends to tie up, climate science is increasingly looking like a Rube Goldberg device. Lucia Liljegren, of Argonne National Lab and expert brownie chef, continues her thoughtful, patient, and nuanced exploration of scientific issues related to comparing global surface temperatures in observations and models.

In the first post of a series (and what I hope will one day appear in the peer reviewed literature), Lucia applies a number of statistical tests from a recent paper by Santer et al. (written to refute the nefarious skeptical authors of Douglass et al., please find links at Lucia’s place) to the global mean surface temperature (GMST) record. What she finds is quite interesting (and indeed you should read her full post), specifically the tests that Santer et al. apply to tropospheric temperature trends, when applied to the global trends lead one to a conclusion that:

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The Role of Risk Models in the Financial Crisis

October 16th, 2008

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

That’s the title of my new column for Bridges, which you can find here, and here is an excerpt:

In our 2000 book on the role of geophysical predictions in decision making (Prediction, Science, Decision Making, and the Future of Nature, Island Press, 2000) we developed a set of guidelines indicating when to rely on predictions in decision making. The criteria are met when (1) predictive skill is known, (2) decision makers have experience in understanding and using the predictions, (3) the feedback loop between use of the prediction and evaluation of that use is relatively short (such that it can feed back into future decisions), (4) there are limited alternatives to relying on prediction, and (5) the outcomes of decisions based on predictions are highly constrained (in other words, the magnitude of the consequences of decision error is limited).

In the current financial crisis, it appears that each of these guidelines was violated . . .

Read it here, and as usual the entire issue is worth your time.

Would You Like Some Science With Your Movie?

October 16th, 2008

Posted by: admin

While the National Academies is focused on advising the federal government, it is free to support other activities and advise other groups.  Part of their work includes their journal (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) a science museum, located around the corner from one of their buildings in Washington, D.C.  Public engagement and public communication of science are taken serious at the Academies.

Their science outreach has recently expanded to include the Science and Entertainment Exchange (hat tip, Framing Science), what appears to be a clearinghouse between scientists and the entertainment industry to make it easier from producers, writers and directors to connect with people to inform the science portrayed in their work.  It will launch with an afternoon event in Los Angeles next month, hosted by Seth McFarlane, with science notables including Rodney Brooks, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lisa Randall and J. Craig Ventner participating.

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Climate Policy Lessons from Around the World

October 16th, 2008

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Policy analysis is not laboratory science.  But fortunately, the real world is full of “experiments” that while not conducted in the controlled conditions that researchers like, nevertheless provide much useful knowledge.  On climate policy, this week Canada and the EU provide some interesting lessons for understanding global climate policy focused on decarbonization.  The main lesson, which seems inescapable  is the following– policies that lead to increased costs of energy are politically doomed.  Here is some of the reporting from Canada and the EU:

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Economic Scarcity in Academic Publishing?

October 15th, 2008

Posted by: admin

Thanks to The Economist, I read yesterday about a paper in PLOS Medicine that suggests there are analogues between academic publishing and economic scarcity.  Yes, I am arguably burying the lede of the Economist article – that the paper explains why most scientific research is wrong – but I think the more interesting dilemma is the notion that scarce space in the top-drawer journals (usually considered as Science, Nature and Cell) artificially inflates the value of that work.

The problem comes from the selectivity of the journals.  Much like selective colleges, these journals reject most of what is submitted to them.  The assumption is that what is left must be top quality work.  However, selectivity does not necessarily equal quality.  The authors argue that the constraints of scientific publishing have artificially restricted the amount of space in top-flight journals to the point that not all high-quality work could be published in a timely fashion.  You may have noticed this is a not-so-subtle argument for open access publishing models that have significantly reduced costs and the ability to publish much more quality research.

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EU Division Over Climate Policy

October 15th, 2008

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

The EUObserver reports that Europe remains deadlocked over climate policy:

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Today is Open Access Day

October 14th, 2008

Posted by: admin

This is the first Open Access Day, an effort sponsored by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and Students for FreeCulture.  The goal of the day is to encourage Open Access – where the internet is used to encourage the unrestricted dissemination of research results to all.

Open Access has been gaining steam over the last several years, where journals have emerged based on a free distribution model (articles are paid for by the authors, not subscriptions), and governments are encouraging more research availability (the National Institutes of Health now requires depositing funded research results into a publicly available database).  This parallels trends to make university curricula more open (MIT’s OpenCourseWare has spread MIT course notes around the world), and other printed material more available (Google’s Book Project perhaps the most noted example).

In a number of these efforts we are talking about free research as in free speech, not free beer.  The shifts in business models that are required will be hard for publishers and organizations that rely on journals for a good chunk of their income (many disciplinary societies fall in this group), and that can explain at least some of the resistance to open access.

Learn more about Open Access Day and the open access movement at the links above, and have a great day.