Every year the Union of Concerned Scientists runs a scientific editorial cartoon contest. The cartoon above, by John Klossner, is this year's winner. Head over to http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/science_idol/ to see other finalists and to order your copy of this year's calendar.Recently in Policy Category
Every year the Union of Concerned Scientists runs a scientific editorial cartoon contest. The cartoon above, by John Klossner, is this year's winner. Head over to http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/science_idol/ to see other finalists and to order your copy of this year's calendar.
Ferdinand von Prondzynski1 recently had this to say.
[A]t least two leading candidates vying for the Republic nomination for President - Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann - hold views that are profoundly anti-science, calling key scientific theories into question and suggesting bad motives on the part of scientists. There are touches of something medieval here. If someone with such views were indeed to take over the US presidency, the results could be profound, and could easily lead to the United States becoming a backwater in geopolitical terms.
It is not, or at any rate should not be, the task of politicians to second guess science, or to declare its theses right or wrong based on ideology. That approach is total madness. No country can afford it, not even America. (emphasis added)
Reasonable people can differ on what policies we should adopt in the face of human-caused climate change, but it is unreasonable to base public policy on denial of human-caused climate change. And we serve our children best when we teach them that the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life is evolution.
Continue reading Science and politics.
A couple of weeks ago the Pew Research Center for People and the Press released a very interesting new study, Beyond Red vs. Blue. In addition to a quiz where you can find out where you'd be classified according to Pew's political typology,1 if you browse through the report, you find the remarkable graphic at the left.2 Just stare at that for awhile and think about it.The first thing that may pop out at you is that 63% of those participating in the survey think it's more important to develop alternative energy sources than to expand oil, coal, and natural gas. That's a much larger fraction favoring alternative energy development than I would have guessed from the chatter I hear on TV or radio or from what I read in newspapers and magazines.
But as Ruy Teixera points out, an even more remarkable thing about those results is that of the 8 different groups Pew identified, only staunch conservatives have a strong preference for expanding production of oil, coal, and natural gas. Libertarians are about equally split. Every other constituency, including, Main Street Republicans are solidly in favor of developing alternative energy sources. Pew points out that the stark divide on energy policy isn't a partisan issue. It's an issue within the Republican Party.
The divide within the Republican base is stark on this issue: fully 66% of Main Street Republicans say alternative energy development should be the focus of America's energy policy, while just 26% would focus on expanding oil, coal and natural gas exploration. In this view, Main Street Republicans agree with the predominantly Democratic groups.I'll leave it to political scientists to speculate about what appears to be a disconnect between the preferences of a solid majority of Americans and the obstacles that face federal support of alternative energy development, but in the face of strong support across a wide range of the political spectrum, it is no longer plausible to claim that a lack of federal action on developing alternative energy sources is the result of public apathy or oppositioin.
Continue reading Beyond red vs. blue.
Ezra Klein pointed out that Senate.gov provides a lot of historical data on the composition of the Senate and its procedures. One of the pieces of data it provides is the number of cloture motions filed in every congress since the 66th (1919-1920). I've plotted the data (in black dots) in the graph to the left. The red dots show the fit of a statistical model to the data in which the number of cloture motions is elated to the session in which they were filed, the proportion of Democrats in the Senate, and an indicator of whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican. As you can see, the model fits the data pretty well. (See the next page if you're interested in more details.)As Klein points out, the number of cloture motions filed is an imperfect measure of how frequently the filibuster is used. For example, Senators often threaten filibusters and don't have to follow through. Still, the dramatic increase in the number of cloture motions filed over the last four decades must reflect a dramatic increase in the number of times bills have been filibustered in the Senate. There's a hint of an increase in the number of filibusters up to the 91st, but since then the number of filibusters has increased dramatically.
If you're thinking that's a Watergate effect, I'm afraid the timing isn't quite right. The dramatic increase in the number of cloture motions files occurs in the 92nd Congress (1971-1972) - pre-Watergate. I'm sure some political scientist has noticed this before and has a good explanation for why there was such a break with tradition in 1971-1972. It also can't be associated with the change in rules reducing the margin necessary to invoke cloture from 2/3 to 3/5. That rules change happened in 1975. If someone has a good explanation, I'd be delighted to hear it. In fact, the dramatic increase may not be so dramatic after all. Read on for an explanation.
Continue reading Statistics and the filibuster.
Hannah Rosin presents data showing that women are coming to play a dominant role in many parts of western society. Women are the majority of the American workforce. Over 50 percent of managers are women. All but two of the 15 professions projected to grow most in the next decade are dominated by women. In short,
For more on Hannah Rosin's views about "the end of men", watch her TED presentation below. You may also want to click trhough to the TED website, where you can read the transcript of her presentation.1
This is really just about the facts of this economic moment that we live in. the 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end, believe it or not, and that's why I talk about the end of men.
For more on Hannah Rosin's views about "the end of men", watch her TED presentation below. You may also want to click trhough to the TED website, where you can read the transcript of her presentation.1
Continue reading The end of men.
Nate Silver provides an interesting perspective on the charges against Julian Assange at FiveThirtyEight.com. It's a nice example of a real-world application of Bayes' theorem. His conclusion? You should really read the whole column, but here it is:
[T]he fact that the charges are (apparently) politically motivated is indeed a reason to regard them skeptically, and they make it less likely -- perhaps much less likely -- that Mr. Assange is guilty of them. (Although he may be guilty of being a creep even if he is not guilty of a crime.)Go read the whole column to understand why.
Nevertheless, I have come across a number of analyses that try to evaluate the merits of the charges without regard to this political context, or which otherwise seem caught up in debating their salacious details. That is likely a mistake: in a world of limited information, the political motivation behind the charges might be the most important clue we have in evaluating their merit. (emphasis added)
You may have run across the visualization work done by Hans Rosling. If you haven't, you owe yourself a trip to Gapminder.org. The data that are available there on the health and wealth of nations and the tools that are available to visualize them are truly amazing. But even if you've been to Gapminder and you know about Hans Rosling's work. this short video will blow you away. His conclusion? "It's entirely possible that everyone can make it to the healthy, wealthy corner.
He's right isn't he? It's a pretty neat visualization, too. I wish I could pull something like this off. Talk about communicating science.
He's right isn't he? It's a pretty neat visualization, too. I wish I could pull something like this off. Talk about communicating science.
The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is sponsoring congressional district visits by biologists during the August congressional recess. The Botanical Society of America and several other scientific organizations are sponsors of the event. This nationwide event enables scientists to meet with their members of Congress in their own district rather than in Washington, DC, and allows elected officials to learn first-hand about the science and research facilities in their district. This initiative is an opportunity to show elected officials how science is conducted and to showcase the people, equipment and facilities that are required to support and conduct scientific research.
For more information and to sign up (registratiion is open until 16 July) head over to http://www.aibs.org/public-policy/congressional_district_visits.html.
I just started reading What the best college teachers do, by Ken Bain, and I think it's going to be very useful. But I'm not going to write about teaching today, I'm going to point out how a fundamental insight that Bain shares has large implications for how we understand the problem of communicating science to a broad public audience.
Bain refers to an article by Abou Halloun and David Hestenes1 showing that students entering physics courses at Arizona State University had intuitive notions of physics incompatible with Newtonian mechanics, or as they put it, students held "a cross between Aristotelian and 14th-century impetus ideas."2 That's not too surprising. But since most people who graduate from college probably never take a physics course and since most Americans never go to college, that means most adults have intuitive notions of physics incompatible with Newtonian mechanics.
And it doesn't stop there.
Halloun and Hestenes administered the same test to students after they finished the course and found that the course had only a small impact on those prior beliefs. The pre-course average in the physics with calculus course was 51%. The post-course average was 64%. Informal peer opinion and student course evaluations suggest that the four professors involved are all good teachers. One even received awards for outstanding teaching -- twice. In a companion study,3 Halloun and Hestenes interviewed some of the students, showed them experiments indicating that their intuitive understanding was wrong, and often found that "the students still refused to give up their mistaken ideas about motion" (Bain, p. 23).
Rather than throwing up their hands and complaining about how stupid or unteachable physics students are, Halloun and Hestenes take a different tack:
What does this mean for communicating science to a broad public?
Bain refers to an article by Abou Halloun and David Hestenes1 showing that students entering physics courses at Arizona State University had intuitive notions of physics incompatible with Newtonian mechanics, or as they put it, students held "a cross between Aristotelian and 14th-century impetus ideas."2 That's not too surprising. But since most people who graduate from college probably never take a physics course and since most Americans never go to college, that means most adults have intuitive notions of physics incompatible with Newtonian mechanics.
And it doesn't stop there.
Halloun and Hestenes administered the same test to students after they finished the course and found that the course had only a small impact on those prior beliefs. The pre-course average in the physics with calculus course was 51%. The post-course average was 64%. Informal peer opinion and student course evaluations suggest that the four professors involved are all good teachers. One even received awards for outstanding teaching -- twice. In a companion study,3 Halloun and Hestenes interviewed some of the students, showed them experiments indicating that their intuitive understanding was wrong, and often found that "the students still refused to give up their mistaken ideas about motion" (Bain, p. 23).
Rather than throwing up their hands and complaining about how stupid or unteachable physics students are, Halloun and Hestenes take a different tack:
Historians tell us about the long and difficult critique of CS [common sense] beliefs that prepared the way for the "Newtonian revolution." If the evaluation of common sense was so difficult for the intellectual giants from Aristotle to Galileo, we should not be surprised to find that it is a problem for ordinary students today. Accordingly, common sense beliefs should be treated with genuine respect by instructors. They should be regarded as serious alternative hypotheses to be evaluated by scientific procedures. This would provide students with sound reasons for modifying their beliefs beyond the mere authority of teacher and textbook.
What does this mean for communicating science to a broad public?
Continue reading Teaching and communicating science.
Over at Framing Science Matt Nisbet has some interesting observations on results from a recent Pew survey on the American's political and public affairs knowledge:
We need to remember Aristotle's advice in the Rhetoric. Persuasion depends not only on logos (logic and data), but also on ethos (the character and trustworthiness of the speaker) and on pathos (the empathy that a speaker has for her/his audience).1
What does this mean for those who are concerned about making sure that science informs policy? I'm no expert, but to me it means (a) that we need to invest in research on how to communicate science to different audiences and (b) that we need to ensure that scientific results are presented using "a diverse set of voices from different backgrounds".What these political knowledge surveys and studies show is the tendency of Americans to make up for their lack of knowledge by relying on heuristics and mental short cuts such as values, identity, and trust; by turning to trusted media sources and political leaders; and by sorting out personal uncertainty through conversations with friends and co-workers, just like they rely on the same heuristics and sources in making sense of science-related debates.
Importantly, if the public has limited knowledge of even the most visible and prominent political issues in the news or basic attributes of major institutions such as the U.S Senate, can we realistically expect that the public will be well informed about issues and institutions receiving much less media attention such as climate change or funding for the NSF?
We need to remember Aristotle's advice in the Rhetoric. Persuasion depends not only on logos (logic and data), but also on ethos (the character and trustworthiness of the speaker) and on pathos (the empathy that a speaker has for her/his audience).1
Continue reading Worth thinking about.
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