January 2010 Archives

From Pete Davies at the TerraPass blog:

Next time you're chatting with somebody and find yourself making the case for legislation, remember these four things:

• Energy independence
• American jobs
• Cleaner, healthier air
• Corporate accountability

He's getting those themes from Frank Luntz. Yes, that Frank Luntz. The Republican message maestro. Luntz's full report, The Language of the Clean Energy Economy, is available at http://www.edf.org/language. If you're interested in building a consensus for environmental protection, it's essential reading.

From a posting this morning on HERBARIA-L

Dr. Reid Moran (1916 - 2010) was Curator of Botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum from 1957 to 1982. Dr. Moran died January 21 at age 93 in Lake County, California, where he had spent his final few years. He is survived by his daughter, Jenna Moran.
 
As an explorer of Baja California, he spent much of his time during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s traveling by truck, mule, and boat to the most remote and obscure places of the peninsula and its waters. He kept meticulous and often entertaining field notebooks documenting his travels and his botanical collections. In addition to his research expeditions in the peninsula, Reid gained a devoted following among museum members as a leader of field trips throughout Baja California. Moran's field notes are available online at http://bajaflora.org/MoranNotesSearch.aspx .
 
Moran earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1951, after serving as a navigator in the Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1946. His research focused on the systematics of the Crassulaceae (Stonecrop Family), and in the flora of the peninsula of Baja California. He continued to produce significant scientific work for two decades after his official retirement.
 
In addition to his large body of technical research papers, he wrote the Flora of Guadalupe Island, Mexico and the treatment of the Crassulaceae for the Flora of North America (in Vol. 8, published in 2009), and also co-authored (with Frank W. Gould--"Gould knew the grasses; I knew Baja") the Grasses of Baja California, Mexico, and (with Geoffrey A. Levin, his successor as curator) the Vascular Flora of Isla Socorro, Mexico.
 
Jane Goodall, in the internet supplement to her recent book Hope for Animals and their World, says he was "for decades a sort of living myth in botanical exploration in Baja California" and called him "a truly dedicated field biologist whose work led to the restoration of an island."

That's where the United States stands on a ranking of 163 countries in environmental performance, tied with Paraguay, just ahead of Brazil, and right behind Georgia. Iceland, Switzerland, Costa Rica, and Sweden are the top 4.

The 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators tracked across ten policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. These indicators provide a gauge at a national government scale of how close countries are to established environmental policy goals. The EPI's proximity-to-target methodology facilitates cross-country comparisons as well as analysis of how the global community is doing collectively on each particular policy issue.

The data used to compile the index are available from the EPI website, and a banner at the top of the website promises an interactive version will be available on Monday.

A new ranking of the world's nations by environmental performance puts some of the globe's largest economies far down the list, with the United States sinking to 61st and China to 121st.

In the previous version of the Environmental Performance Index, compiled every two years by Yale and Columbia University researchers, the United States ranked 39th, and China 105th.

...

"Countries that take seriously the environment as a policy challenge do improve, and those that don't deteriorate," said Daniel C. Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, who oversees the index project. "Both the U.S. and China are suffering because they're industrial and haven't been paying much attention to environmental policy." ("Iceland Leads Environmental Index as U.S. Falls". by Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, 27 January 2010)

No, I don't have video to share, but a few nights ago NPR reported on a Keynes vs. Hayek rap video. In case those names don't ring a bell, let me remind you that John Maynard Keynes was the author of The Means to Prosperity (1933) and argued for government intervention in markets to reduce unemployment during recessions. Friedrich von Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom (1944) in which he argued vigorously that government's role in the economy should be limited to "the monetary system, work-hours regulation, and institutions for the flow of proper information."

[John] Papola agreed with a lot of what [Russel] Roberts had to say and appreciated the fact that the economist wasn't afraid of talking to people whose views conflict with his own. So in 2009, he cold-called Roberts and left a "long, ranting message" about how he was interested in the business cycle and monetary policy.

"Eventually I got around to, 'I love your podcast. I'm a big fan. I really would like to work together on some kind of video project to dive into economics using visuals and entertainment value, not just lectures and graphs and [charts],' " Papola told NPR's Alex Blumberg

Here's what they came up with. Although Papola and Roberts think Hayek is right and Keynes is wrong, they do a good job of explaining the differences. They make basic principles of macroeconomics hard to forget.¹ The differences between R.A. Fisher and Sewall Wright are every bit as profound and important.² Anyone up for a Wright vs. Fisher rap? I can't do it, but maybe the kids from Bill Durham's class can.

The American Association of University Professors just launched a new online journal devoted to scholarly discussions about academic freedom. From the journal's web site:

Scholarship on academic freedom--and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining--is typically scattered across a wide range of disciplines. There has been no single journal devoted to the subject. Now there is. It is published by the organization most responsible for defining academic freedom.
The journal will be freely accessible online.

In reflecting on how momentum for action on global climate change has waned, Chris Mooney offers the following observation:

We should never again assume that science alone is going to make the political difference on this issue, no matter how strong it gets.

I was more than a little disappointed to read that. Chris is a smart guy, and he's been around science and politics for a long time. He should realize that while science can inform the policies we adopt, it can't determine them (see also this post and this one).

Policy decisions involve choices about the kind of world we want to live in. Science can tell us which worlds are possible. It can't tell us which are desirable.

I've been reading a lot about data visualization recently.¹ Maybe it's because I'm extremely near-sighted,² but I've never been very visual. Nonetheless, it's finally dawned on me³ that most people are and that I need to learn more about communicating visually if I'm ever going to communicate effectively in published papers, formal presentations, or classrooms. Here's a video from Alex Lundry that makes the point a lot better than I ever could.

In early December the Office of Science and Technology Policy launched an effort to gather opinions on how to enhance public access to the results of federally funded research. Normally such requests for comment are published in the Federal Register and comments must often be submitted in hard copy, though e-mail is now often accepted.

This time OSTP did something different. They established a section of the OSTP blog devoted to gathering comments. The comment period closed on Thursday.

I submitted comments (PDF) on behalf of the Botanical Society of America. I won't repeat the entire letter, but I do want to share two observations.

• The Botanical Society, like most not-for-profit scientific societies, heartily endorses efforts to ensure the broadest possible access to the results of scientific research. Like many societies, we make papers published in the American Journal of Botany available to institutions in the developing world at little or no cost through programs sponsored by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. We also make papers published in the American Journal of Botany available without charge one year after publication.
• Publishing journals costs money. Institutional library subscriptions not only provide wider access to research published in the American Journal of Botany than individual subscriptions, but also provide more than half of the revenue necessary to continue publishing. In finding ways to enhance public access to the results of federally funded research, policy makers must ensure that not-for-profit publishers, like the Botanical Society of America, have the revenue to continue publishing the journals in which scientific research is published.
  

The lead editorial in this week's Nature summarizes some of the challenges facing climate scientists in talking to the public about their work.

Climate science, like any active field of research, has some major gaps in understanding (see page 284). Yet the political stakes have grown so high in this field, and the public discourse has become so heated, that climate researchers find it hard to talk openly about those gaps.

...

No matter how evident climate change becomes, however, other factors will ultimately determine whether the public accepts the facts. Empirical evidence shows that people tend to react to reports on issues such as climate change according to their personal values (see page 296). Those who favour individualism over egalitarianism are more likely to reject evidence of climate change and calls to restrict emissions. And the messenger matters perhaps just as much as the message. People have more trust in experts -- and scientists -- when they sense that the speaker shares their values. The climate-research community would thus do well to use a diverse set of voices, from different backgrounds, when communicating with policy-makers and the public. And scientists should be careful not to disparage those on the other side of a debate: a respectful tone makes it easier for people to change their minds if they share something in common with that other side.

As comforting as it may be to think that the best evidence will eventually convince the public on its own, climate scientists can no longer afford to make that naive assumption: people consider many factors beyond facts when making decisions. Even as climate science advances, it will be just as important to invest in research on how best to communicate environmental risks. Otherwise scientific knowledge will not have the role that it should in the shaping of public policy. (emphasis added)

While the challenges climate scientists face are more daunting than those facing conservation biologists or evolutionary biologists, the fundamental message is the same. If scientific research is to have a positive influence on public policy, we need political scientists and communication scientists to help us figure out how to have that influence.

The small number of you who check in here occasionally may have noticed that posting has been light lately. Not only am I on my way to Cape Town for research work on white proteas,¹ but I've been working like mad for the last several weeks to get a proposal ready for submission to the Evolutionary Genetics Program in the Evolutionary Processes Cluster at the National Science Foundation. I finished a pretty solid draft last night and sent it to my collaborators. We'll have our last conference call² Wednesday afternoon Cape Town time. I'll make final revisions on Thursday and send them to my collaborators, who will make the final upload to FastLane. We'll submit the proposal on Friday and keep our fingers crossed.

I'm very excited about the proposal. It builds nicely on the work I've been doing with a graduate student and post-doctoral research associate for the past 2 1/2 years³ and extends it, using cutting-edge DNA sequencing technology, to provide an unusually complete description of the genetic architecture of adaptively significant traits involved in a striking evolutionary radiation. I hope reviewers agree.