Test post from the new Mac Mini, which is hooked up to the living room tv. Now all I need is a mini fridge and a piss tube and I don’t need to move on Saturdays and Sundays during football season.
Apple is just amazing.
by John Cole| 90 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Test post from the new Mac Mini, which is hooked up to the living room tv. Now all I need is a mini fridge and a piss tube and I don’t need to move on Saturdays and Sundays during football season.
Apple is just amazing.
This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
There is a table has been making the rounds of the science blogosphere for the last couple of weeks — and I thought it’s the kind of thing that the B-J crowd enjoys:
Blog friend Southern Fried Science is extending the list, and you can add your own gems on his public Google Docs spreadsheet.
The original table comes from this Physics Today feature — “Communicating the science of climate change“ [PDF], by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol. I entirely agree with their conclusion:
We must find ways to help the public realize that not acting is also making a choice, one that commits future generations to serious impacts. Messages that may invoke fear or dismay—as projections of future climate under business-as-usual scenarios often do—are better received if they also include hopeful components. Thus we can improve the chances that the public will hear and accept the science if we include positive messages about our ability to solve the problem. We can explain, for example, that it’s not too late to avoid the worst; lower emissions will mean reduced climate change and less severe impacts. We can point out that addressing climate change wisely will yield benefits to the economy and the quality of life. We can explain, as figure 5 shows, that acting sooner would be less disruptive than acting later. Let us rise to the challenge of helping the public understand that science can illuminate the choices we face.
The most important claim in that paragraph, IMHO, is that “it’s not too late to avoid the worst…” As outright denialism becomes ever more risible, the fall back for those hopelessly drunk on dinosaur wine* is that climate change is just too bad, because some irrecoverable threshold has already been crossed. This is nonsense. See, e.g., for just one of many arguments on this issue, this 2009 report from the Yale e360 project. [Another PDF]. Confronting the (tactical) climate fatalists is the next huge communications challenge for scientific — and science writing — communities.
That said — the gap between what’s understood in conversation between people speaking the same technical jargon, and what gets through to the public remains a major stumbling block. Which, I suppose, keeps me and my students in work. Ill winds and all that.
But I digress. The point of this post is to encourage the Balloon-Juice commentariat both to add to the list above — or perhaps, depending on your mood, to come up with a similar table, a what-they-say/what-they-mean guide to Republican debate speak.
Have fun.
*”Dinosaur wine” is a phrase I steal from Dan Jenkins’ classic (sic–ed.) football novel, Semi–Tough. So yes, I know. It ain’t dinosaur corpses that wind up in black gold.
Image: Thomas Blount, Glossographia Anglicana Nova, (Title page from the 2nd edition, 1719)
This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, Excellent Links, Science & Technology
National Food Day is next Monday, October 24. From the website’s “About” page:
Food Day seeks to bring together Americans from all walks of life—parents, teachers, and students; health professionals, community organizers, and local officials; chefs, school lunch providers, and eaters of all stripes—to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way. We will work with people around the country to create thousands of events in homes, schools, churches, farmers markets, city halls, and state capitals… the day is sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the nonprofit watchdog group that has led successful fights for food labeling, better nutrition, and safer food since 1971. Like CSPI, Food Day will be people-powered and does not accept funding from government or corporations—though restaurants, supermarkets, and others are certainly encouraged to observe Food Day in their own ways.
CSPI‘s sometimes-sanctimonious attacks on everything from beer ads at sporting events to the toys in fast-food kiddy meals can inspire an urge to go out and eat multiple bacon cheeseburgers washed down with a sixpack of Four Loko, but this might still be a good time to think about where our food comes from and the price(s) we’re paying for it.
Per the NYTimes, the source of the second-deadliest food-borne illness outbreak since the CDC began tracking in the early 1970s has been identified:
A nationwide listeria outbreak that has killed 25 people who ate tainted cantaloupe was probably caused by unsanitary conditions in the packing shed of the Colorado farm where the melons were grown, federal officials said Wednesday.
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Government investigators said that workers had tramped through pools of water where listeria was likely to grow, tracking the deadly bacteria around the shed, which was operated by Jensen Farms, in Granada, Colo. The pathogen was found on a conveyor belt for carrying cantaloupes, a melon drying area and a floor drain, among other places….
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The outbreak, which began in late July, is the deadliest caused by foodborne disease since 1985. A total of 123 people in 26 states have fallen ill, including those who died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…
I haven’t seen much tv-news attention paid to this particular outbreak, possibly because listeria has an unusually long incubation period (up to a month or more) and most of the tainted cantalopes were supposed to be past their sell-by dates by the end of September, when it was definitively labelled. Also, per the CDC, “Listeria… only sickens the elderly, pregnant women and others with compromised immune systems… the median age of all the people that had been infected was 78.” The NYTimes did provide some details that are not likely to encourage the nervous eater:
[Emphasis mine.] Which brings us to the Washington Post‘s publication of a News21 study, titled “States vary widely in reporting foodborne illnesses“:The outbreak is likely to focus new attention on the use of auditors in the food industry. Typically farms or processors are required by their customers, like supermarket or restaurant chains, to have an auditor evaluate their food safety procedures.
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Jensen Farms hired an auditor called PrimusLabs, based in California, to inspect its facility. Primus gave the job to a subcontractor, Bio Food Safety, which is based in Texas. Jensen and Primus declined to provide a copy of the audit report.
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Robert Stovicek, the president of PrimusLabs, said his company had reviewed the audit and found no problems in how it was conducted or in the auditor’s conclusions.
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“We thought he did a pretty good job,” Mr. Stovicek said. He said the auditor, James M. DiIorio, has been doing audits for the company since March. He said that Mr. DiIorio had received two one-week training courses as part of his preparation and had also gone on audits with other auditors.
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Asked how Mr. DiIorio could have given high marks to a facility that the F.D.A. described as a breeding ground for listeria, Mr. Stovicek said, “There’s lots of variations as to how people interpret unsanitary conditions.”
Inconsistent reporting of foodborne illnesses such as listeria, salmonella and E. coli leaves large portions of the country vulnerable to the spread of potentially deadly outbreaks before health officials can identify their causes and recall contaminated foods…
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National outbreak surveillance depends on the collaboration of 2,800 state and local health departments subject to at least 50 different reporting requirements.
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Although the CDC coordinates investigations when these multi-state outbreaks occur, it can only “provide guidelines and recommendations” as a non-regulatory agency, said Ian Williams, chief of the CDC’s outbreak response and prevention branch. Without a federal standard, each state has a unique set of disease-reporting requirements and practices.
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The speed of response is critical for foodborne illnesses, yet 10 states allow a week to report a case of listeria — the bacteria that caused 15 deaths this year from contaminated cantaloupe — to the health department. Florida is the only state that requires immediate reporting of listeria, while the others fall somewhere in between, with 16 requiring health departments to be notified within one day.
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The breakdown between stringent and lax reporting requirements among states holds true for most illnesses, provided that requirements exist at all. The CDC recommends reporting for 20 foodborne illnesses, but fewer than half of the states require reporting for all of them.
Another NYTimes article, about an unrelated melon-based salmonella outbreak, indicates that major players in the food industry are not exactly cheering for the FDA to tighten safety standards:
… Aside from suing the F.D.A., the company has threatened legal action against a leading state food-borne disease investigator in Oregon, where the Del Monte cantaloupes were identified as the cause of the salmonella outbreak. And it has challenged some of the basic techniques of food safety investigations, like relying on ill people’s memories of what they ate when microbiological testing does not find pathogens on food.
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Asked if having raw sewage in an open ditch near its packing house was consistent with high food safety standards, Mr. Christou said that tests on melons had found no pathogens.
Economists talk about a Golden Triangle, loosely summarized as “Cheap, fast, good — choose any two.” The specific adjectives for our produce supply would probably be “cheap, available year-round, and non-pathogenic”.
Toxic Cantalopes, the CDC, and National Food DayPost + Comments (51)
by Zandar| 65 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology
Hey, I like physics and physicists, thanks.
by Zandar| 136 Comments
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Science & Technology, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
A funny thing happened on the way to the Koch Brothers’ latest “scientific triumph” over the nefarious forces of global warming mind control. First, the story as K-Drum rolls this out:
Physicists are notorious for believing that other scientists are mathematically incompetent. And University of California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller is notorious for believing that conventional wisdom is often wrong. For example, the conventional wisdom about climate change. Muller has criticized Al Gore in the past as an “exaggerator,” has spoken warmly of climate skeptic Anthony Watts, and has said that Steve McIntyre’s famous takedown of the “hockey stick” climate graph made him “uncomfortable” with the paper the hockey stick was originally based on.
So in 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right. Who better, after all? “Muller’s views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics,” said Scientific American, “and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results.” The Koch Foundation, founded by the billionaire oil brothers who have been major funders of the climate-denial machine, gave BEST a $150,000 grant.
House Republicans and energy companies pinned a lot of money and time on BEST as the ultimate weapon to permanently cloud the “debate” on climate change. But the problem is the skeptical physicist who said “yes, I’d like to take a look at those numbers!” has run them and discovered that hey, they’re right:
But Muller’s congressional testimony last March didn’t go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about land temperatures. [3] (Ocean studies will come later.)
Oops. Hey, Muller centered his entire debate on running the numbers correctly and with complete integrity and guess what? The vast group of scientists working on it were pretty much right all along.
In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.
I’d be laughing if the deniers in Washington and K Street hadn’t killed any efforts for the US and the world to do anything substantial to save the planet.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 26 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
If you want to waste a few minutes on the Internet, check out this gallery of pictures taken with the Lytro light field camera. Light field pictures allow you to choose the focus point of the image, and you can focus anywhere in the photo. Lytro introduced a new camera yesterday. It’s $400, looks pretty cool, and is dirt simple to use. It reminds me a bit of the Polaroid SX-70 — something completely new in photography, priced on the high end of impulse, in an elegant package.
In slightly related focus news, Adobe is working on a way to automatically deblur photos. The demos are impressive. (via)
This post is in: KULCHA!, Open Threads, Science & Technology
Shuffling my feet a bit at the self-promotion involved, I’d like to invite anyone interested to tune in to a conversation I’m going to have with Naomi Oreskes tonight.
Oreskes, for those of you who may not know, is a professor of history and science studies at UC San Diego. Our chat will center on her recent book, Merchants of Doubt co-authored with Erik Conway.
I think I’ve mentioned that book more than once here. IMHO, it’s one of the most important works published in America in the last several years. In it, Oreskes and Conway document how a clutch of cold-war scientists, many of them physicists, transformed the truth of scientific uncertainty and incompleteness into hugely damaging lies, first about the (lack of) risk associated with cigarettes, and then on just about every other major science/policy issue of the last several decades.
We’re going to talk about how these ego-ideology-and-money driven figures did that, and how their actions shaped the specific stories of tobacco, acid rain, climate change and the like.
But to me the larger story — and here’s where I think our exchange will go over the course of the hour — is the way that these self-styled iconoclasts have managed to undermine the whole idea of science as a way to gain real insight into critical policy issues. If you want to know why the GOP candidates can get away with denying climate change, it is at least in part because staged controversies about scientific “doubt” have undercut the whole idea of technical expertise or knowledge gained through specialized skills and methods.
To me that sets up an enormous personal and professional question: as a science writer and teacher of incredibly idealistic and hopeful aspiring science writers one of the goals has always been to tell stories that help to inform our civic conversation. But on the evidence that Oreskes and Conway bring to bear, we’ve lost ground on that hope over every year of my career. So one question I’ll have tonight is what can be done that will take public engagement with science beyond the cool story and into some usable appreciation of scientific habits of thought.
I do have some notions of my own on that — but these are matters Oreskes knows well and has considered deeply. So check out what she has to say.
Which means, I suppose, I should link to the venue!
That would be Virtually Speaking Science, and new weekly feature of/spin off from Jay Ackroyd’s Virtually Speaking empire. (Jay comments here, and FP’s over at Eschaton.) I’m in the rota of hosts for the show, taking on the third Wednesday of every month. You can listen to tonight’s program here Update: at 9 p.m. EDT. It’s also going to run live in Second Life, for those of you tired of your first one. You can take part in live chat through the IRC servicee. (Instructions below the fold.)
Image: George de la Tours, Cheater with the Ace of Diamonds, 1635
1. Connect to http://webchat.freenode.net/
2. Create a log-in name
3. Enter #vspeak into the channel field.
4. NOTE: ‘Relay Rinq’ is not a person but a bridge to IRC chat.
5. Type into the text field along the bottom of the screen.
6. Begin your question with ‘QUESTION’ so it’s easy to spot.