Slashdot Mirror

The submitter got it slightly wrong. First off, Margaret Turnbull's team came up with a list of 17,129 potentially habitable star systems in 2003, and the work she has done since has been to refine that list.

What she announced yesterday were TWO "Top 5" lists. The first list includes the top 5 recommendations for a SETI search:

beta CVn
HD 10307
HD 211415
18 Sco
51 Pegasus

The second list includes the top 5 recommendations for the TPF to examine for Earth-like planets:

epsilon Indi A
epsilon Eridani
omicron2 Eridani
alpha Centauri B
tau Ceti

Why the difference? Well, the second list is of much closer stars, and much more likely to have planets that TPF can find and image. The first list has stars that are a bit farther away, but are, generally speaking, more like our Sun.

And here's a useful link:

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/0218habitab le.shtml

Bruce

It's too bad that the NIH budget was cut this year (effectively below the rate of inflation) by the Whitehouse and further cut by Congress who, while managing to take care of their own salaries before going on vacation, could not work in the NIH budget to their schedule. As a result, many labs here in the US this year have had to slash this years budget by 12-20% which has a dramatic effect on the success of bioscience research such as this suspended animation work.

Look at these budget numbers here.

While I have sympathy for the NIH, their overall budget was only cut by about 1%. Adding in inflation, that's about 4% or so in real dollars. Now, that's sucky, but NIH's budget has doubled over the last 10 years or so, in real dollars, and is around $25B/yr. If a 1% cut makes labs cut their budgets by 12-20%, those labs are either unlucky or poorly run.

By contrast, the NSF, which supports much of the rest of basic science research in the US, has had real $ cuts for the last several years, and has remained largely flat in real $ during the NIH doubling. NSF's total annual budget is about $5B/yr, or, in more interesting units, about three weeks of the Iraq conflict. So, as a physical scientist, forgive me if I don't get tooooo upset about NIH's situation.

The computer programs that predict protein structure from its primary structure are getting better. So there is a way....

Another project with similar aims of establishing prior art as a defence against frivolous patenting in the plant domain is Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Database or (T.E.K.* P.A.D.). (disclaimer I've contributed a large dataset to this database).

I actually decided to look up the number of JDs (juris doctor = Law Degree) compared to Engineering PhDs...

All I could find was 1997:

Engineering Phds: 5980

JDs: 39,331

Source

I don't think we need to worry about anyone overcoming our lawyer production anytime soon. =P

The Slashdot analysis is slapdash. The summary of the AAAS/SIPPI report itself is as follows:

Early in 2005, SIPPI undertook a survey of about 1,100 AAAS members to determine what effects patenting, if any, has had on research conducted by scientists in academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations. Among its results, the survey found that by a suprising 2:1 margin, industry scientists reported having more difficulty in accessing patented technologies than academic scientists. However, this could be the result of the greater volume of intellectual property created by industry, as well as industry's heavy reliance on licensing-a process more sophisticated and time-consuming than the means used in academia for technology transfer.

First, the numbers the original poster used are fabrications. The numbers quoted are not representative of the entire sampled population (1,111), but are percentages of those who answered a specific question. The numbers [n's] from the body of the report have been plugged into the following analysis , which should make this clear. Remember, this was a relatively small sample, but still one of the largest to date on the topic of patents and research) Of the 40% of respondents [n=72 of the 179 of the 1,111 who answered this question] who reported their work had been affected, 58% [n=42] said their work was delayed, 50% [n=36] reported they had to change the research, and 28% [n=20] reported abandoning their research project.

In the detailed sections of the survey, they do indicate that some scientists changed or discontinued research due to IP issues. They also seek IP protection in large numbers - so there is at best a mixed message. For those for whom IP was a disincentive, it is not clear what really lay behind it - lack of sophistication, lack of support from tech transfer offices, a desire to just not hassle with it, the fact that the reseach was more late stage (nearing commercialization) than early (more academic) or what. The IP devil here really is in the details and without that detail an appropriate policy response (other than the sky is falling) cannot be made.

The constant truth here is that Bayh-Dole has worked and technologies are being brought from academic research to the market. Without IP, research efforts would satisfy academic curiosity, but there was no incentive for the investment to develop that research into market able products. The report makes it clear that this is the general rule - academics use the IP system to protect what they have created. Other evidence makes it clear that obtaining this IP protection - as noted - leads to products and services being brought to market.

So, where does this leave us. The AAAS study has brought to light issues we all know about intuitively. That is, that IP issues are complicated and sometimes lead to changes in behavior. But that does not mean that we throw out the systems or discredit it - in particular if the same community that is discomfited by the system also enjoys its benefits. It means that we need to improve the system - patent reform, training, improved tech transfer operations. It also means that certain systemic issues can be addressed in a systemic way. For example, the AAAS has an ongoing program of study on "humanitarian licenses." (http://sippi.aaas.org/hue.shtml#Report).

The effort there is to really understand how intellectual property can be managed to facilitate humanitarian use and applications of technologies - in particular those that arise out of the academic sector. The particular focus in such humanitarian efforts is to promote the use of health and agricultural product innovations by poor and disadvantaged groups, particularly in developing countries. It beggars belief that the same organization - AAAS - can on the one hand be reporting (as Slashdot suggests) that research projects in the United States are being chilled by patent holders while at the same time providing information as to how patents can be managed to further health and agricultural programs in the developing world.

You can see the actual report here .

From the article: "...science as a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena."

Who said that science was only allowed to find NATURAL explanations for observable phenomena? Does this mean that even if the explanation was supernatural, then science, by definition, would not be able to recognize, explore, identify, quantify and describe the explanation?

"I believe in only natural science, therefore I MUST conclude that there are only natural causes for what I see regardless of what the evidence shows. I'm not interested in what my be a true explanation for any given event if it does not fit my definition of natural. This is the only kind of science we will let you learn in school. Anything that considers an explanation other than what we define as natural is not something we will let you read about, hear about or talk about. It would be bad for you to consider any other concept of natural explanation except what we tell you is the correct natural explanation. We are scientists. We know best. We are here to help you."

If there was a designer and evidence of design was all around us, wouldn't science be able to detect it? Wasn't that the whole point of the monolith in 2001? At what point would a natural scientist say, what I'm seeing here is not a product of random chance? From what I'm reading, the answer would be never.

Is it really good science to presuppose a universe without a designer? Is it right that this presupposition is not something that can be questioned? I thought that good science allowed for the questioning of suppositions.

It would be good for kids to talk about these issues in schools. What motivates some to work so hard at censoring these ideas from discussion in classrooms?

Huh?

NASA's budget has been mostly flat, with a slight upward trend, for over 15 years.

Trends in Federal R&D, FY 1990-2006 (DOD, NIH, NSF, DOE, NASA) (pdf).

"The majority of the expenses associated with new drug discovery are actually made in the public sector - by Universities and so forth."

Private R&D spending on pharmaceuticals exceeds public R&D spending. This is actually true for R&D in general ($132 billion federal vs. $190 billion industry), and it's true for pharmaceuticals ($30 billion federal vs. $49 billion industry). For the first 3 figures, see here:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rd06main.htm [chapters 2 & 4]
For the last figure, see here:
http://www.phrma.org/publications/publications//20 05-03-17.1145.pdf
The last is an industry organization, but r&d spending is part of companies' public SEC filings and the figures are in line with the aggregate numbers.

It's a fallacy that public and private pharmaceutical r&d are substitutes. Public r&d tends to focus on basic science while private r&d focuses on specific drug development and testing. Here it is from the horse's mouth:

http://ott.od.nih.gov/Reports/211856ottrept.pdf

The public sector would be just as good at developing drugs as it would be at making cars and televisions (see Union, Soviet).

"these additional resources are a *fraction* of the total increase in drug prices that result from the patents they are awarded"

If patents over-compensate drug companies, then we'd see a lot more entry into the (apparently very lucrative) drug business by new firms until these extra-ordinary returns are competed away. Even with patent protection, lucrative business models attract entry by competitors until excess profits are competed away.

You mean "liberty" as in the right to travel freely, work where you want to, voice your opinion openly on public streets--that sort of thing?

Or do you mean it in a more defined sense, like freedom of the press, right to due process, right to bear arms--that sort of thing?

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of countries out there with similar, or worse restrictions than the U.S. But let's not kid ourselves and think ANY country is truly free, or above cracking down on the internet if it has the power.

-Eric

First, as I mentioned in another post, the increases in funding are barely above the level of inflation. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Bush administration isn't in direct control of those budgets. They can't cut funding as much as they would like to, but they've tried. Thankfully, congress is a little more sane. If you're actually interested in looking at this more in depth, here's an interesting link. The thing that kills me is that NASA, the only big "science" branch of the government that IS a waste of money, is going to see their funding increase, but only for manned space exploration, which has little scientific value.

AMENDMENT A: Congress shall pass no law exceeding in length this Constitution.

In essence, this is a rule against unrelated amendments. Unrelated amendments prevent debating an idea on its merits. They are also the main method of passing pork. I suggest word count as the mechanism because it replaces the subjective arguments over what is or is not 'related' with an objective metric.

If forced to vote on their laws 10000* or so words at a time, legislators would have a much harder time explaining their voting records to their constituents. To be sure, one can pack more than one subject into 10000 words, but there are practical limits.

--
*The bare Constitution is ~4600 words and the Amendments add another ~6000 words. This length is selected because (1) it's a manageable size and (2) because the laws of today can't claim to be important enough to merit more words than were needed to design the whole system of government. By constrast, the omnibus budget bill passed in Nov 2004 was 3000 pages long and weighed 14 pounds.

As part as my undergratuate engineering coursework, we had to take a Professional Ethics class. During that time, I spent 4 weeks going over the Challenger disaster with a fine-tooth comb. It absolutely disgusted me.

By and large, the engineers did their jobs to the best of their ability. They were aware of the O-ring problems, having been warned by the manufacturer and they knew the O-rings had never been tested or launched at the low temperatures that day. They repeatedly voiced their concerns to management. They even refused to sign off on the launch.

The management, on the other hand, didn't take any of it as a serious problem. Of the group directly involved with the launch, only one had a technical background, and he caved almost immediately from the pressure of the majority. The managers were under political pressure to make the launch a go, and that was their only concern.

An engineer by the name of Boisjoly blew the whistle* on what happened knowing full well that by doing so, he would probably ruin his career. No one hires whistleblowers. Otherwise, we might have heard a very different story.

What was the point I was going to make... Ah. Management never seems to have much use for professional ethics, too little understanding of what they are managing, and always seem to think their MBAs are advanced degrees that somehow trump a "lowly" B.S. in Engineering.

I think one of my old professors summed it up best.

Engineers:
The A students go into teaching/academia
The B students get most of the jobs.
The C students go into / switch to management.

*he was later awarded the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the AAAS for doing everything in his power at the time to halt the launch and exemplifying professional behavior

Once a planet with life and industry is located, you then simply start scanning frequencies for non-random signals. At this point, Earth fails the test and they move on*.

Heh. Actually, an interesting paper on the topic was published in Science back in January 1978. You probably need a subscription to read it. The title is "Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth" by W.T.Sullivan III, S.Brown, C.Wetherill. Maybe I should nab a copy of the paper and put it online somewhere ...

To summarize, they considered the radio signal of Earth as it would appear to a remote radio astronomer listening in at various latitudes. They assumed that no content could be decoded; only the radio spectrum was measurable. The idea was that the aliens had technology roughly comparable to our own, and could record our signal over time, and analyze it. They calculated that the spectrum of several hundred of our broadcast stations could be reliably measured out to at least 25 light years, and 250 light years for the military radar.

Their conclusions were interesting. For example, the usual doppler effects, plus knowing the size and mass of the sun, gave the Earth's orbit and the fact that we have a large satellite.

But the fun part is based on the fact that our strong radio signals (military radar and commercial television) are strongly directional, with most of the energy going out horizontally. So the remote astronomers would receive mostly signal from the Earth's limb. Broadcasts use narrow frequencies, so a particular station would appear in the spectrum very briefly and fade. 12 hours later, most of them would reappear, slightly doppler shifted up or down. Then 24 hours later (23:56 actually), the original frequency would appear. They now know our rotation period, and from the amount of the doppler shift, the planet's radius can be calculated. This will depend on the station's latitude, of course, and the max is the actual radius of the planet.

Over a period of a year, a collection of the broadcast stations can be collected, and when they are detected gives their longitude. We know latitudes from the doppler shifts. So we have a rough map of the broadcast stations. One thing that stands out in this map is that the planet has two kinds of surfaces, and almost all the stations are on the smaller of these. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, we infer that it's a world with liquid water. The fixed positions of the stations (determined over several years) tells us that the stations are on land, which is roughly 1/4 of the planet's surface; the other surface is ocean. The stations are clustered strongly on the boundary, so the planet's advanced species is a land animal that likes to live near ocean shores.

To quote a summary paragraph:

After several years of careful monitoring of the intensity and frequency variations of several hundred stations, the observer could deduce (i) the complete orbit of the earth; (ii) the existence of station broadcast schedules influenced by the sun; (iii) the presence of an ionosphere and perhaps even a troposphere; (iv) the size, rotation rate, and axis of rotation of the earth; (v) a complete map of the stations; (vi) the mass and distance of the moon; (vii) the size of the radiating antennas; and (viii) various cultural inferences concerning our civilization.

It's an interesting read. I wonder if anyone has done a similar study since then? Google finds 21 matches for the article's title, but they all seem to be bibliographic references. It could be interesting to dig into some of the matches and see what else turns up.

It also explains why the atmospheric muons are there in the first place - all the other particles get stopped in the atmosphere.

At ground level muons are about the only thing you can use for this purpose because the other particles you mentioned (protons, neutrons, and electrons) do not have appreciable penetrating energy because they are all interaction products. Neutrinos, as you alluded to, interact so weakly that they are both too tough to detect, and for the same reason they wouldn't make very good probe particles. Ground-level muons are routinely used to calibrate cosmic ray detectors, except for the neutrino detectors which are located deep underground to get away from atmospheric muons.

By the way, muons have been used as probes before. The most fameous example was searching for hidden chambers in the Great Pyramid of Chefren. Apparently they're still doing it today.

Real scientific results are reported in scientific venues like professional conferences and peer-reviewed journals.

You mean, this might be a real scientific result if it were, say, an article called Learned Predictions of Error Likelihood in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Science Magazine, a peer-reviewed journal? (No, that link won't take you directly to the article - you have to buy access or join the American Association for the Advancement of Science to get access.)

I don't feel like digging up this material again just to argue with you

I definitely don't need you to do it..
As i posted in a correction, the link I attached to the word 'proof' was wrong. The actual proof is here.

To sum it up: this is the members page as it is now, and this is what it was (it's stored in a cache site). The faces of the members were obviously edited (compare the eyes, especially. Arguably, they did it in order not to use the face of some actual people). This pretty much proves that the whole website is a fake.

OTOH, I totally agree that the anti-evolution movement is a reality (sadly). It's enough to look at what happens in some schools, as the CEO of the AAAS (the association that publishes Science) is denouncing.

--
Requiem for the FUD

Not really true.

The ban (in place since 1995) was pushed through as a rider on an appropriation bill by the GOP. NIH sought help from HHS on how the ban applied; in 1999, HHS responded that research on stem cells can be funded by NIH (public funds) so long as the stem cells themselves were produced via private funds. In short, so long as government funds weren't used for the first step, any ethical research could be conducted. Government funds *were* going into research on these cells, just not at the creation stage.

However, under the Bush guidelines, this is changed. If the stem cells are not part of the original "64" lines (not really 64 lines, but that's beside the point), no government funding can go into research involving them. So, apart from the fact that it doesn't change the fact that government funds couldn't be used for the creation of stem cell lines, it bans research on any line that hasn't already been created - in short, making it a more restrictive policy, not less.

Here's some details about the history of the lines and their current status:

AAAS Policy Brief: Stem Cell Research

It also explains why there is animal contamination.

The federal ban is basically federal government research dollars shouldn't go towards research into the non-approved stem cell lines. The National Science Foundation has a chart that shows how much federal money is spent in the US by year, compared with a study by AAAS on R&D funding by state. 2002 totals come in at $84.9 billion by federal and $88.3 billion by states, in 2002 dollars. So, money could very well come from the state levels of governments, where the states that approve of the process can push their own money towards their goals... One could argue that that is the preferred path, to reduce the dependence on federal government, but I digress.

The core issue for most people is "should the government fund projects that I am morally opposed to?" It's a tricky argument, one used for and against the National Endowment of the Arts for years... Whether its Maplethorpe (S&M photos), Ofili's Madonna (elephant dung on the Virgin Mary), or any other controvercial art, these are just personal expressions of speech ... while it may offend, noone is harmed at the end of the day.

But when it comes to embryonic research, there are people that believe that the fetus is viable from the moment of conception, and that the process of extracting the cells is in effect "killing" a potential human. For them, it ranks as an abortion. Whether or not you believe that a life is being taken, many religious people do, and thus they want the practice to stop.

I would also counter that we are arguing two slightly different points. We both agree that there are two tracks that are available for research, embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Your argument appears to be that the government should not abandon the embryonic path simply because a minority are opposed to it on (their) ethical grounds, that there are many sick people who can benefit from the results of this research. My argument is that the government should be pushing its resources towards adult stem cell research, given that both technologies are on equal footing with this one being free of any stigma, and at the end of the day they are benefitting just as many people.

Personally, I'm about 50% against / 50% for embryonic stem cell research, but 100% towards adult stem cell research. I'm discouraged (yet not surprised) that there are just as many discoveries being made every day in adult stem cells (with more successes), yet the uninformed public only hears that embryonic stem cells are the only method.

I agree that the government should stop legislating moral statements, but then the constitutionalist in me also thinks that the government has no business putting any limits on first amdendment activity anywhere... This does not mean Freedom From Religion, that means Freedom Of Religion (like it reads), that the government needs to stop telling people that they cannot bring their symbols into schools and work, that the schools need to teach an objectively balanced education (as opposed to atheist) when it comes to religion. But that's an issue for another day.

I was suprised by this article actually:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/caprev04.htm

Earlier in the year many scientists who analyzed Bush's proposed budget expected him to cut areas of research by 8% while increasing DOD funding in an effort in balance the budget. It seems by these charts that we have actually increased funding. Most of which goes into DoD and Homeland security, but suprisingly even NSF, NIH had some increases. Not enough to really compensate for the amount of underpaid post-docs/graduate students who get tired of the rat race and dog-eat-dog world of academia and leave, but modest nonetheless.

Former House Science Committee Chairman Bob Walker will represent the Bush campaign. Walker, chairman of Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates, has been described as "perhaps the best political and policy strategist and tactician in Washington." Speaking on behalf of the Kerry-Edwards campaign will be physicist Henry Kelly, formerly the assistant director for technology of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is currently president of the Federation of American Scientists.

[unable to resist bait, it must be a trap but...] You may be right that putting out a news release before you have any other visible material is a bad move but unless you are one of those dolts who suspect anyone with a GPA>3.5 is a pinko bedwetter and you press your hands over your ears unless your hearing the reassuring words of Cheney or Rice, you would certainly be aware that this administration has been eating the seed corn, so to speak, as far as funding basic research. Just go to the details on your president's science spending as reported by the largest and most respected non government body of scientists in the US. You don't even have to read the whole of each article, just read the link/headlines in the right hand column...the only "science" for which Bush hasn't cut back funding is DOD programs. There are DOZENS of "just a few people that doesn't like Bush" science organizations and stories. Are you not looking or do you just wish not to see? If you hear to many of his speechings you can begin to sound as him.

If you want to read a bit more on the history of stem cell research, try here

Also important is the fine detail preserved in the fossils, down to 30 micrometers.

I used to work for AAAS, the publishers of Science Magazine. Science is the premier and oldest peer reviewed general science journal (about 150 years). One of my projects was working on their Manuscript tracking system, including making the submission process electronic through Submit To Science.

Science has a greater-than 80% rejection rate, because there are only so many pages in the magazine. Many people are frustrated that they've been rejected five and six times (they have about 20 years of author submission history online), but with a general science journal you have to pick the best of the best astronony and biology and signal transduction papers to print.

The review process is laborious, it involves a lot of people, but it works pretty much flawlessly. Certain aspects have evolved over time, but frankly the people who get published thing the process works and it's great, the people who don't are the ones who grouss. There are constant arguments (almost every week) about what concessions can and cannot be done without risk to watering the quality of the journal down.

Science is published by a nonprofit association called AAAS. In order to receive Science, you must become a member of AAAS; the magazine is a member benefit.

AAAS has all kinds of activities for promoting science, education, and freedom around the world. So in addition to getting the journal, you also provide support for these activities. The revenue and the high-profile provided by the journal are crucial to the association's well-being and effectiveness.

I just wanted to point that out. I'd also like to say that while I'm no expert, I think that peer review ain't cheap. Journals are not "high profit" enterprises. Cut back on the editing and the journal's quality and creditable will certainly suffer.

One last thing: Science at least makes a lot of material freely available online six months after its initial publication.

Contact: Nancy Ross-Flanigan rossflan umich edu
734-647-1853
University of Michigan

From football conferences to food webs: U-M researcher uncovers patterns in complicated networks

SEATTLE---The world is full of complicated networks that scientists would like to better understand---human social systems, for example, or food webs in nature. But discerning patterns of organization in such vast, complex systems is no easy task.

"The structure of those networks can tell you quite a lot about how the systems work, but they're far too big to analyze by just putting dots on a piece of paper and drawing lines to connect them," said Mark Newman, an assistant professor of physics and complex systems at the University of Michigan.

One challenge in making sense of a large network is finding clumps---or communities---of members that have something in common, such as Web pages that are all about the same topic, people that socialize together or animals that eat the same kind of food. Newman and collaborator Michelle Girvan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have developed a new method for finding communities that reveals a lot about the structure of large, complex networks. Newman will discuss the method and its applications Feb. 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle.

"The way most people have approached the problem is to look for the clumps themselves---to look for things that are joined together strongly," said Newman. "We decided to approach it from the other end," by searching out and then eliminating the links that join clumps together. "When we remove those from the network, what we're left with is the clumps."

The researchers tested their method on several networks for which the structure was already known---college football conferences, for example. In college football, teams in the same conference face off more frequently than teams in different conferences. When inter-conference games do occur, they're more likely to be between teams that are geographically close together than between teams that are far apart. Plugging in information on frequency of games between pairs of teams in the 2000 regular season, Newman and Girvan tested their method to see if it could correctly sort the colleges into conferences. "There were a few cases where it made mistakes, but it got well over 90 percent of them right," said Newman. "It gave us the structure we were expecting, so that was encouraging."

Newman and Girvan---and other researchers who've learned about their work---have gone on to apply the technique to systems where the structure is not as well understood, looking at everything from networks of Spanish language web logs to communities of early jazz musicians to a food web of marine organisms living in Chesapeake Bay.

"Networks and other systems that we study are becoming increasingly large and complicated these days," said Newman. "New methods like this help us to make sense of what we see and to understand better how things work."

For more information:
Mark Newman
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Santa Fe Institute

The cause of the black out was a horribly managed electrical grid that can barely keep up with the current demand.

Any major failure in the system can cause a cascading failure of the entire section of the grid. That is a horrible design.

The grid in the North East US is supplied by horribly inefficient and antiquated power lines that were struggling to keep up thirty years ago. That they are still in use today is an outright crime.

Unfortunately the real cause of the black out is not ever going to be patched and another blackout is as inevitable as this last one was.

this huge $44Trillion debt that is going to bite us in the ass in the next few years especially with these tax cuts,

The Federal Gov't budget was $2.1 Trillion for 2002. The tax cuts are $35 Billion/yr.

In comparison $75 Billion/yr goes to family farmers who have been obsolete for 40 years now, $344 Billion for defense, $460 Billion for Social Security and $850 Billion for welfare programs.

Here is a good graph showing national debt as % of gdp. We are not any worse off then we were in the '90s or the '60s.

The 2003 Senate Energy Bill (enter S.14 into "bill number") thomas.loc.gov offers loan guarantees for the construction of 7 new nuclear reactors in the US, as well as a new $1.1Billion nuclear plant in Idaho to produce hydrogen. If these are steps you want taken, you should write a letter to your Senators telling them how much your vote depends on their support of this bill.

Or pick up a news magazine that targets intelligentsia like the Economist . Just recently, I picked up an issue with remarkably good coverage of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the organization that publishes Science. In the science section of that issue was a remarkably lucid description of photonic-crystal optical fiber and how it works, and there was also excellent coverage of competing theories in evolutionary biology and of work being done with adaptive optics to study the human eye, IIRC. Of course, the journalism in the Economist tends to be head and shoulders above most other newspapers and news magazines, so maybe it's not so much a problem of bad science journalism as it is a problem with bad journalism.

I almost find myself remembering these things...

...reminds me of this article last week at CNN: Researchers: It's easy to plant false memories

This article mentions two separate research projects that examine the power of emotional belief.

One example:

"Other research, of people who believed they were abducted by space aliens, shows that even false memories can be as intensely felt as those of real-life victims of war and other violence.

The research demonstrates that police interrogators and people investigating sexual-abuse allegations must be careful not to plant suggestions into their subjects, said University of California-Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. She presented preliminary results of recent false memory experiments Sunday at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Loftus said some people may be so suggestible that they could be convinced they were responsible for crimes they didn't commit. In interviews, "much of what goes on -- unwittingly -- is contamination," she said..."

The official AAAS release, including a list of signatories, is here.

See this

Personally, it looks to me like there are 2 very different sides of the story to this.

On one hand you have the "Pro-Life" advocates saying that you can't justify the research since it might play a part in the death of an unborn embryo. You can read a few of those types of articles here and here to get a feel for that side of the story.

On the flip side the AAAS has a very compelling document here in PDF format. Also CAMR has a nice little diddy about their stance here.

Bush and the Senate seem to have made their stance on the matter known as well...so enjoy!

There is alot of discussion, and alot remains to be seen, but I thought I'd toss out some links to help everyone form their own opinion on the matter.

the "confirmation of results" & peer review point I was making had to do with crypto and offsite backup software more than with statistical software. When we're talking about crypto or storing someone else's data, it's super important to be transparent. Re: stats, well, one of my slides pointed out that up 'til now, I've always hacked numbers & graphs in Stata, which is proprietary (though most of the really good stuff is published freely, but that's another matter). We should use R, but for cost & "who controls the license" reasons as much as (if not more) than verifiability.

While we're on the verifiability point, human rights data organization techniques tend to be pretty complicated, and it helps to be able to use free software. While distributing the data (via XML) may or may not be useful, it is very important to open the data specifications. I think that means opening SQL scripts, too, and all the database software (in our current mix, the backend is postgres, the front end is Java). That's coming in about a month.

But human rights folks are pretty underfunded, and the "free as in beer" part of open source and free software is a big help, too.

slashdotters might be interested in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Article 15(b), which states that everyone has the right "To enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This is a real, live, human right.

But the real bottom line to human rights and free software has to do with power. Our core rights -- to freedom of speech and free association -- are increasingly exercised in electronic media. Who controls the online world? Can any contractual obligation resulting from a license abridge your human rights? IMHO, these questions make software a human rights concern.

-- PB.

I will note that you are the only one in this conversation who is making ad hominem attacks on other Slashdot readers and moderators. Rather ironic, isn't it? You've been listening to Rush Limbaugh too much. You need to listen to NPR and you will find that liberals don't normally resort to the name-calling, defamation, and slander that is all too prominent on conservative radio programs.
I've not attacked anyone's character, only learned from history. Try posting something that indicates you don't gobble up Global Warming and see what happens. I don't listen to talk radio or make generalizations about talk radio shows' content.

And there are Republicans who are pro-choice, but it does not mean that, broadly speaking, the Republican party does not take the opposite stance.
True, but not particularly relevant.

I've spent a lot of time in California and, despite the view that you have apparently gotten from watching too much Access Hollywood, the majority of people in California are not in the entertainment industry.
I must miss Access Hollywood while I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh :-P

I never wrote or implied the majority of people in California were in the entertainment industry. I stated it "is the center of the US Entertainment Industry." No reference was made to the porportion of Californians that are involved in it.

The size of the government is based on the cost, not the number of regulations in place.
Perhaps I should have chosen better words. All the references I've read about the size of government are about the amount of programs the government is involved in. That includes regulating various things and social programs like welfare, social security, medicaid, headstart, etc.

The amount of regulations and social programs the government is involved in directly affect the budget it needs to operate. So, the amount of things the government does determines its size.

Besides, smaller government is the battle cry of the Republicans, not of the Democrats.
I saw Al Gore give a speech saying he was for small government in the last election. He made it a point about how he was for small government.

The big difference is that Democrats try to collect enough tax revenue to pay for the cost of running the government.
Funny, as Congress only had a Republican majority for the first time in quite a long time in '94 (year?. The election where Republicans led by Newt Gingrich campaigned with their Contract With America programs.) Budget deficits existed with Roosevelt, Johnson, Carter, Clinton's first term, and half of his second.

If you take a look at the numbers and charts, you'll notice that a major portion of the federal budget is spent on social welfare programs. As you are aware, social welfare programs find greatest support among Democrats.

Republicans, on the other hand, make massive tax cuts and then do deficit spending to make up the difference. As a result, in less than two years, George W. Bush has managed to wipe out the surplus that was built up under Clinton/Gore, plunging us back into deficit spending, and prolonging and deepening the recession.
Oh please. The surplus was projected, it didn't exist yet. The only reason it existed on paper at all was because of the boom in the '90s and stock market bubble. I'd really love to shake Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton's hand for their excellent use of monetary and fiscal policy to rein in the rapid growth. I doubt Clinton really cared though as it kept people from caring about his many scandals.

When people woke up and realized that Yahoo stock wasn't worth $150 a share the bubble burst and people's expected incomes (and therefore spending shrank). All the capital gains tax that would be paid when making $120 per share on Yahoo stock is now a loss of $28 per share and a tax deduction reducing government tax revenue.

Lower incomes + decreased consumer spending + greatly decreased projected taxable incomes = projected surplus goes bye bye.

Deficit spending by the Federal Government won't deepen a recession, it will help alleviate it. It's a stabilizing effect of fiscal policy.

Like father, like son...
I didn't care for SR., and don't like JR. either.

Note that the report on Kosovo was the basis of testimony used in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Streaming video of the testimony is here, see 13-14 March.

Note that the report on Kosovo was the basis of testimony used in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Streaming video of the testimony is here, see 13-14 March.

Note that the report on Kosovo was the basis of testimony used in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Streaming video of the testimony is here, see 13-14 March.

Right on. Access to strong cryptography and anonymity tools is very important for human rights workers. In addition to CryptoRights, the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has done some PGP training and awareness-raising on this topic. Here' a link.

Phil Zimmermann's website has some nice testimonials. This crypto stuff really does save lives, and I hope the geeks of the world are up to the challenge of keeping PGP alive.

I have seen no empirical evidence whatsoever, published in an accredited, peer-reviewed scientific journal, which supports any detail of the 'creation of the world' as described in the bible.

On May 19, 1992 Humphreys submitted his article *"Compton scattering and the cosmic microwave background bumps" to the Scientific Correspondence section of the British journal Nature. The editorial staff knew Humphreys was a creationist and didn't want to publish it (even though the article did not contain any glaring creationist implications). The editorial staff didn't even want to send it through official peer review. Six months later Nature published an article by someone else on the same topic, having the same conclusions. Thus, most creationist researchers realize it is simply a waste of time to send journal editors openly creationist articles. To say that a "slight bias" exists on the part of journal editors would be an understatement.

Ah, yes! The evil, black-helicoptered Scientific Orthodoxy! An army of jack-booted, blue-helmeted thugs, commanded by Persian-catted evil overlords in their concrete fortresses on the far side of the moon. They are coming for us. They are coming for us all.

I think the folks behind the Public Library of Science movement are attempting to draw a line in the sand on this issue, so their perspective is intentionally extreme. I know that information wants to be free, but in the interests of balance I feel compelled to point out that the current nonprofit journal publishing system is not necessarily greedy and exploitative. Science magazine, for instance, is published at substantial cost by a nonprofit organization called the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). When you subscribe to Science you join the association. The membership dues and the advertising revenue from the magazine pay for a wide range of activities that are of tremendous benefit to science and society.

As paper publishing becomes less and less relevant, I think that it's going to get harder and harder for journals and their sponsoring organizations to come by revenue. Making it even harder by clamoring for completely free and unrestricted access to high-quality peer-reviewed material is at least partially a bad thing, isn't it? Somebody's got to foot the bill, and journals and their sponsoring societies add a lot of value to the science community.

Final note: Science has adopted a compromise position on this issue; issues older than one year will be freely available on the journal's website.

I don't know where you got your bogus figures from. Clinton increased NASA's budget by 4.8% for FY 2001, and Bush increased NASA's budget by 2% for FY 2002.

NASA's budget has remained approximately constant after adjusting for inflation since 1992; Clinton's budget increase for NASA in FY 01 was the first real budget for NASA since then.

See http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/rd/ca01ag.htm#nasa
and
http://www.space.com/news/spaceagencies/funding_20 02_010228.html

It doesn't say much more than the Science Daily article, but it has a whole slew of interesting-looking links on it.
--

AAAS currently supplies technical fellows to the Executive branch and the Legislative branch. I am quite friendly with several of the fellows as my SO is here in Washington, D.C. on a fellowship.

More information about the fellowships is availible here.

If you have a Doctorate (or a Master's in Engineering) you should apply for one. You really get to influence public policy.

Yeah, but cryptography is *nothing like* as important as these things.

I must disagree. To start with, cryptography is the rock upon which our banking and currency systems rest. If you use an ATM, or get your paychecks directly deposited, you've directly relied on cryptography. Even you keep your money in a mattress, the whole reserve banking system (upon which, for good or ill, the economy is based) needs it to function. Every day between one and two trillion dollars worth of interbank transfers are processed by Fedwire and the Clearing House Interbank Payment System; all these transations use cryptography.

And cryptography is essential for modern military operations. Whether you're a hawk or a dove, you can't help but admit that military operation have an important impact on the lives of people around the globe, and that impact would (for good or ill) be much lessened in the absence of secure communication. Cryptography is also important in the diplomacy that holds tensions short of a state of war - the old "Red Telephone" line between Moscow and Washington was protected with, IIRC, a one time pad.

Cryptography is used by people around the globe working for human rights; groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International use cryptography to secure their communication.

So, if you want to engage in commerce, protect or attack a nation, or are concerned about human rights, cryptography is fundamental. There are good reasons why it gives certain government agencies extreme heartburn to think of cryptography in the hands of the rest of us...

Perhaps he intended the Randian definition of a Communist: Both taking and giving according to desires proclaimed as "needed for the common good". An accurate description of some scientists, who do not recognize the need for justifying the benefit of their research to garner high levels of public funding, and disdain private research because the source of the funding benefits.

Of course, ScienceMag is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It's a non-profit group.
What annoys me is that you have to join the AAAS and subscribe to the dead tree edition - which means both killing trees and supporting their lobbying efforts, some of which I object to.

There's nothing wrong with paying money for a service (most of us would starve otherwise), but the reality is worse than the original poster felt. You have to hand over your ideology to gain access to the information - which defeats the purpose of getting information in the first place.

I think we've conflated three distinct issues, and that we'd benefit from separating them:

1. The process by which information is generated and its quality is assessed - peer review, free-for-all, etc.
2. The mechanism and medium by which information is distributed - paper, www, etc.
3. The economic model by which information is distributed - for free, by subscription, per-use, etc.

Quality control becomes a problem with all (free-for-all, *, *) systems. (I disagree with (#41) that "it's about time to shake up the peer review system." Peer review is a great way to assure quality, addressing the questions raised eloquently in (#35, 54, etc.). "Non-elites" may clamor for "democratic" publishing, but Usenet illustrates its impact on quality.)

Similarly, publisher resistance may become a problem with all (*, *, free) systems. Archiving is a concern with (*, www, *). And so on.

By treating each of these three issues separately we can draw useful distinctions, e.g., there are at least two, very different Old Guards:

1. for-profit publishers (e.g. Reed Elsevier) who want to preserve (peer-reviewed, paper, subscription) because it's profitable
2. non-profit publishers (e.g. AAAS) who can accept (peer-reviewed, *, *) because they are driven by the professional demands of their members.