Hardly anybody knows basic science and technology these days. Few of us are going to wade through the National Academy of Sciences report. We depend on intermediaries to tell us what to think, and a lot of them are also scientifically illiterate. Most journalists are generally more interested in controversy than in evidence. Environmental activists are in the business of opposing, and have no interest in solving real-world problems like providing heat and light at a reasonable cost. The people who actually know how things work – engineers and technology types – tend to be uninterested in politics and are poor communicators. Meantime, some of the most deeply anti-science activists (like the artfully named Union of Concerned Scientists) are quoted as if they were neutral actors for the public interest.
Some of my dearest friends harbour irrational fears about nuclear power, agricultural chemicals and anything genetically modified. They consider themselves enlightened, and since enlightened people are against these things, they are too. These beliefs are an expression of identity, just as a belief in creationism is part of the identity of a Southern Baptist.
Fifty years ago, enlightened people campaigned to ban the bomb. Today, they campaign to ban GMOs and modern agriculture. Vivienne Westwood, the famous British fashion designer, hand-delivered an anti-GMO petition to the British government earlier this month. Asked about people who can’t afford expensive organic food, she declared that they should “eat less.” She believes one of the problems with non-organic mass food is that it’s too cheap.
But in most parts of the world, food is not too cheap. And the fear-mongering campaign against genetically modified food by the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth has been a serious setback for global food security, depriving millions of people of more nutritious, affordable and sustainable food sources. “The actions of Greenpeace in forestalling the use of golden rice to address micronutrient deficiencies in children makes them the moral and indeed practical equivalent of the Nigerian mullahs who preached against the polio vaccine,” says Mark Lynas, an environmental activist who reversed his position on GMOs and now campaigns for them. “They were stopping a lifesaving technology solely to flatter their own fanaticism.”
The kind of doomsayers who warn that oil sands and pipelines will wreak environmental devastation are often the same people who warn that modern agriculture will prove catastrophic. These people are not harmless. As Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, observed, “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”
…The unrest surrounding Brown’s death has underscored the often-tense nature of U.S. race relations. But the gas station has stood out as a beacon, literally and figuratively, as nightfall has descended and chaos has reigned around it.
On Tuesday night, as police and soldiers took up positions in the parking lots of virtually every strip mall and big box store around it, the forecourt of the brightly lit gas station was busy with customers.
One, a 6-foot-8-inches man named Derrick Jordan — “Stretch,” as friends call him — whisked an AR-15 assault rifle out from a pickup truck parked near the entrance.
Jordan, 37, was one of four black Ferguson residents who spent Tuesday night planted in front of the store, pistols tucked into their waistbands, waiting to ward off looters or catch shoplifters.
Jordan and the others guarding the gas station are all black. The station’s owner is white.
Ferguson has seen a stark demographic shift in recent decades, going from all white to mostly black. About two-thirds of the town’s 21,000-strong population are black. By some accounts, the Brown shooting has heightened racial tensions in the city. But not at the gas station.
“We would have been burned to the ground many times over if it weren’t for them,” said gas station owner Doug Merello, whose father first bought it in 1984.
Merello said he feels deep ties to Ferguson, and if the loyalty of some of his regular customers is any indication, the feeling is mutual.
As a longtime proponent of sweeping reforms to the criminal-justice system, I’m extremely apprehensive of the impulse to treat the killing of Michael Brown as a focal rallying point, even granting that the case has mobilized people and attention. His death is a perfect illustration of the need for dashboard cameras on every patrol vehicle and lapel cameras on every police officer in America. The way officials in Ferguson reacted to the protests over his death did illustrate the alarming militarization of U.S. police agencies. But when it comes to the problem of police officers using excessive force, including lethal force, against people they encounter, there are scores of cases that better illustrate the problem.
Why not start shifting focus to them?
[…]
One needn’t deny the disproportionate harm police abuse does in minority communities to see that it’s inaccurate to say that police abuse of whites isn’t a problem, too. Racism is far from the only factor here, and eliding that fact is surely counterproductive for reformers. Whites would be obligated to help reduce police abuse even if they were never subject to it, but the cold political reality is that people of every race have a purely selfish incentive to rein in law enforcement—even white people, whether they’re being assaulted by police with pepper spray or high-powered pepper plume or tasers … or literally beaten to death.
So what specific reforms are needed? Too many to list them all in this article. But here are a few measures, beyond video cameras, that would improve policing:
Decisions about when to charge officers should be made by independent prosecutors, not regular district attorneys, who rely on police to testify in most of the cases they bring. That gives these district attorneys a perverse incentive to refrain from aggressively prosecuting misconduct.
Police unions should be able to negotiate salary, benefits, and nothing else. Firing an abusive police officer should be easy.
All police departments should have strong civilian oversight.
The War on Drugs should end.
Most military-grade police equipment should be returned to the federal government or destroyed.
Civil asset forfeiture should be reformed.
No-knock raids should stop in almost all cases.
The movement that grew in the wake of Brown’s death will need to pursue concrete, specific goals like these if their anger and outrage is to serve any purpose. Supporters with constructive criticism might improve the odds of success. The present course probably isn’t sufficient, despite the rhetorical support it enjoys.
The bitter irony of the Michael Brown case is that if he had actually put his hands up and said don’t shoot, he would almost certainly be alive today. […] the credible evidence suggests that Michael Brown — after a petty act of robbery at a local business — attacked Wilson when the officer stopped him on the street. Brown punched Wilson when the officer was still in his patrol car and attempted to take his gun from him. […] Again, according to the credible evidence, [Brown] turned back and rushed Wilson. The officer shot several times, but Brown kept on coming until Wilson finally killed him.
[…] Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protesters spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened — Michael Brown murdered in cold blood while trying to surrender — into a meme and a chant (“Hands up, don’t shoot”), and then a mini-movement. When the facts didn’t back their narrative, they dismissed the facts and retreated into paranoid suspicion of the legal system. The grand jury process was rigged, they complained, because St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch didn’t seek an indictment of Wilson and instead allowed the grand jury to hear allthe evidence and make its own decision. Who could really object to a grand jury hearing everythingin such a sensitive case?
Then there is the argument that Wilson should have been indicted so there could be a trial “to determine the facts.” If a jury of Wilson’s peers didn’t believe there was enough evidence to establish probable cause to indict him, though, there was no way a jury of his peers was going to convict him of a crime, which requires the more stringent standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. Besides, we don’t try people for crimes they almost certainly didn’t commit just to satisfy a mob that will throw things at the police and burn down local businesses if it doesn’t get its way.
“[Prosecutor Bob] McCulloch short-circuited the process — reinforcing a sense among African Americans, and many others, that the justice system is rigged. He almost certainly could have secured an indictment on a lesser charge simply by requesting it, yet he acted as if he were a spectator, saying that jurors decided not to return a ‘true bill” on each possible charge — as if this were a typical outcome. As has been repeated often in recent weeks, a grand jury will indict a proverbial ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to.” [“Bob McCulloch’s pathetic prosecution of Darren Wilson”]
By “a grand jury will indict a proverbial ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to”, Milbank admits to wanting to rig the system to indict Wilson despite their being no factual basis for doing so.
Yet, thanks to McCullough releasing all of the evidence, we that know Brown was in the wrong because several Black eye-witnesses who were on the scene confirmed Officer Wilson’s account of the events — and their statements were backed up by the physical evidence. This evidence is publicly available for any protestor or looter to study if they can take the time away from blocking streets, chanting slogans, and putting buildings on fire. (If you read the documents pay special attention to witness number 10, page 4).
For a Grand Jury to indict someone — whether a policeman or not — the facts need to cast at least some evidence of guilt. Whether one person or a mob of three million protestors are emotionally distraught has no say in the justice of the matter. The purpose of justice is not to appease an ignorant lynch mob that cries “no justice-no peace” and goes on a looting binge. Jonathan Turley at USA Today emphasizes this point:
“The law requires us to deal with facts, and when those facts do not support a criminal charge, prosecution is barred regardless of popular demand. In the end, it rings hollow to cry ‘no justice, no peace’ when you are rioting or looting. There can be no justice if it is merely the result of demonstrations rather than demonstrated facts. Otherwise, the scales of justice become just one more object to throw through the window of an appliance store.” [‘Jonathan Turley, “Ferguson needs facts, not passions”]
In an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, police officer Darren Wilson spoke about the shooting of Michael Brown.
“I didn’t know if I’d be able to withstand another hit like that,” Wilson said of the altercation with Michael Brown. “I had reached out my window with my right hand to grab onto his forearm ’cause I was gonna try and move him back and get out of the car to where I’m no longer trapped…I just felt the immense power that he had. And then the way I’ve described it is it was like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big this man was.”
Comments Lowry on the issue:
There is good reason for a police officer to be in mortal fear in the situation Officer Wilson faced, though. In upstate New York last March, Police Officer David Smith responded to a disturbance call at an office, when suddenly, a disturbed man pummeled the officer as he was attempting to exit his vehicle and then grabbed his gun and shot him dead. [New York Post]
Here is a video on that shooting in New York, which could have been Officer Wilson.
Officer David Smith, 43, was shot and killed after a crazed man grabbed his gun from his holster during a disturbance call Monday morning, according to police. An upstate New York police officer was shot and killed by a crazed man who snatched his gun from his holster during a disturbance call Monday morning, according to police. Johnson City Officer David Smith, 43, was shot multiple times outside an MRI office near Binghamton after a disturbed employee managed to grab his gun just after 7 a.m., said Police Chief Joseph Zikuski. The married 18-year police veteran, who has an 11-year-old son, had just arrived at Southern Tier Imaging when MRI technician James Clark, 43, wildly ran up to him before punching him several times as he was trying to exit his vehicle, said Zikuski. During the attack witnesses said Clark managed to somehow grab Smith’s weapon and repeatedly open fire until the 40-caliber duty’s magazine was spent.
Yes, racism does exist — on both sides of the “color-divide.”
Yes, there are cops who unjustly target people because of their race. Officer Wilson was not one of them.
Officer Wilson is the wrong person to target and blame for a situation he did not create — Michael Brown created that problem when Brown robbed a store, and then violently assaulted a police officer. Rather then saying “Yes, sir Mr. Officer. No sir.” He resorted to violence. Whether one takes up a fist or sword — to start up and initate violence — is evil. To use force, to defend oneself is the good.
Brown was the assailant; Officer Wilson is the victim.
Ask yourself if Officer Wilson was black would there be any of the rage over this incident? Would this even be an issue?
From the October 2008 issue of the libertarian Reason Magazine, Mike Flynn, Shikha Dalmia, and artist Terry Colon show what it takes to legally immigrate to America. Click on the image to see it full size.
R&D costs of 106 new drugs were obtained from a survey of 10 biopharmaceutical firms.
Costs for compounds that were abandoned were linked to costs of approved compounds.
Pre-tax out-of-pocket per approval is $1395 million (2013 dollars).
Pre-tax capitalized per approval is $2558 million (2013 dollars).
Total capitalized costs were found to have increased at a real annual rate of 8.5%.
With post-approval R&D costs the estimate increases to $2870 million (2013 dollars).
From the press release:
BOSTON – Nov. 18, 2014 – Developing a new prescription medicine that gains marketing approval, a process often lasting longer than a decade, is estimated to cost $2,558 million, according to a new study by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. The $2,558 million figure per approved compound is based on estimated:
Average out-of-pocket cost of $1,395 million
Time costs (expected returns that investors forego while a drug is in development) of $1,163 million
Estimated average cost of post-approval R&D—studies to test new indications, new formulations, new dosage strengths and regimens, and to monitor safety and long-term side effects in patients required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a condition of approval—of $312 million boosts the full product lifecycle cost per approved drug to $2,870 million.
All figures are expressed in 2013 dollars.
The new analysis, which updates similar Tufts CSDD analyses, was developed from information provided by 10 pharmaceutical companies on 106 randomly selected drugs that were first tested in human subjects anywhere in the world from 1995 to 2007.
“Drug development remains a costly undertaking despite ongoing efforts across the full spectrum of pharmaceutical and biotech companies to rein in growing R&D costs,” said Joseph A. DiMasi, director of economic analysis at Tufts CSDD and principal investigator for the study. He added, “Because the R&D process is marked by substantial technical risks, with expenditures incurred for many development projects that fail to result in a marketed product, our estimate links the costs of unsuccessful projects to those that are successful in obtaining marketing approval from regulatory authorities.”
In a study published in 2003, Tufts CSDD estimated the cost per approved new drug to be $802 million (in 2000 dollars) for drugs first tested in human subjects from 1983 to 1994, based on average out-of-pocket costs of $403 million and capital costs of $401 million. The $802 million, equal to $1,044 million in 2013 dollars, indicates that the cost to develop and win marketing approval for a new drug has increased by 145% between the two study periods, or at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5%. According to DiMasi, rising drug development costs have been driven mainly by increases in out-of-pocket costs for individual drugs and higher failure rates for drugs tested in human subjects.
Factors that likely have boosted out-of-pocket clinical costs include increased clinical trial complexity, larger clinical trial sizes, higher cost of inputs from the medical sector used for development, greater focus on targeting chronic and degenerative diseases, changes in protocol design to include efforts to gather health technology assessment information, and testing on comparator drugs to accommodate payer demands for comparative effectiveness data. Lengthening development and approval times were not responsible for driving up development costs, according to DiMasi. “In fact,” DiMasi said, “changes in the overall time profile for development and regulatory approval phases had a modest moderating effect on the increase in R&D costs. As a result, the time cost share of total cost declined from approximately 50% in previous studies to 45% for this study.”
The study was authored by DiMasi, Henry G. Grabowski of the Duke University Department of Economics, and Ronald W. Hansen at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.
The research and development costs of 106 randomly selected new drugs were obtained from a survey of 10 pharmaceutical firms. These data were used to estimate the average pre-tax cost of new drug and biologics development. The costs of compounds abandoned during testing were linked to the costs of compounds that obtained marketing approval. The estimated average out-of-pocket cost per approved new compound is $1395 million (2013 dollars). Capitalizing out-of-pocket costs to the point of marketing approval at a real discount rate of 10.5% yields a total pre-approval cost estimate of $2558 million (2013 dollars). When compared to the results of the previous study in this series, total capitalized costs were shown to have increased at an annual rate of 8.5% above general price inflation. Adding an estimate of post-approval R&D costs increases the cost estimate to $2870 million (2013 dollars).
Conservatives largely oppose right-to-suicide laws. Many criticized Brittany Maynard’s decision. A Vatican official, Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, called it “an absurdity,” declaring that suicide “is a bad thing because it is saying no to life and to everything it means with respect to our mission in the world and towards those around us.” The National Right to Life organization quotes a woman condemning physician-assisted suicide because “it does not strengthen the common good, but only alienates, separates and dismantles us as a people who truly care for one another.”
Here’s a radical thought for conservatives: Brittany Maynard has a right to life — to her life. And a right to one’s life requires, as an inseparable corollary, the right to terminate it. What else is a right to some action if not the freedom to choose whether or not to engage in it?
“In the 4th century BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle traveled to Lesvos, an island in the Aegean teeming, then as now, with wildlife. His fascination with what he found there, and his painstaking study of it, led to the birth of a new science — biology. Professor Armand Leroi follows in Aristotle’s footsteps to discover the creatures, places and ideas that inspired the philosopher in his pioneering work.”
Comments Nick Romeo on Aristotle in an article in The Daily Beast:
Shortly before his death in 1882, Charles Darwin received a letter from a physician and classicist named William Ogle. It contained Ogle’s recent translation of Aristotle’s The Parts of Animals and a brief letter in which he confessed to feeling “some self-importance in thus being a kind of formal introducer of the father of naturalists to his great modern successor.”
Aristotle is not typically remembered as the father of naturalists, but Darwin acknowledged a line of intellectual descent. “I had not the most remote notion of what a wonderful man he was,” Darwin wrote of Aristotle in his reply to Ogle. “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle.”
A fascinating new book by the evolutionary biologist and science writer Armand Marie Leroi claims that Aristotle fully deserves Darwin’s high praise. In The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, Leroi argues that Aristotle developed many of the empirical and analytical methods that still define scientific inquiry.
Back in late August a brief clip was posted on Dr Tyson’s off the cuff response to claims against GMO foods. On the science aspects of GMOs he is pretty good.
Comments Tyson:
“Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food…There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows…You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it’s not as large, it’s not as sweet, it’s not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It’s called artificial selection.”
Mystery Science provides open-and-go lessons that inspire kids to love science — by making it easy for elementary school teachers to deliver an incredible science lesson without a science background.
Rather than following a textbook approach to science vocabulary, Mystery Science employs hands-on activities to engage students with the wonders of science and expose them to the joy of scientific inquiry at an early age.
The site, created by former Facebook product manager for News Feed Keith Schacht and former LePort Schools science director Doug Peltz, makes it easy for teachers to deliver an incredible science lesson without a science background. With funding from a seed round led by 500 Startups, Mystery Science aspires to bring the unique approach Peltz created to every classroom. Lessons are aligned with Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards and designed to supplement existing curriculum.
“Elementary teachers are in an impossible situation, they’re expected to teach and be experts on every subject. Unfortunately the system too easily forces science to be an afterthought, given that few elementary teachers have a background in science and school funding is so tightly tied to test results in reading and math. Teachers understandably fall back on a textbook approach, which results in students being exposed to science vocabulary but never the mysteries behind the science. So we’re creating a new approach with less prep for teachers and more learning for students,” said Peltz, who taught science in the classroom for seven years before teaming up with Schacht to create the site.
Students in the United States rank 20th out of 34 countries in science, a situation that has not improved in the last five years despite a renewed focused on science and math education (PISA, 2012). “In spite of the national focus on STEM education, there is little focus on elementary science education. But these are the formative years when it’s most important,” said Schacht.
“Mystery Science supports teachers in exposing students to the joy of scientific inquiry at an early age,” Schacht continued, “We want to create that perfect ‘a-ha’ moment for students while helping elementary teachers who often struggle to teach science on top of every other subject.” Online modules include everything educators need, from visuals and videos, to step-by-step activity instructions and click-to-order materials.
While participating in a limited pilot with elementary teachers across the country, Katy Hyatt from Walnut Elementary in Iowa saw a marked difference in her class: “After starting Mystery Science, we had parent-teacher conferences and a parent remarked that whatever I’m doing with science right now, it’s really engaging. This mom’s son was coming home each night and telling her what he learned that day, taking her outside to look at the moon and find the constellations.”
The Mystery Science website is now live at mysteryscience.com. There, teachers can watch a video to learn more, explore a sample lesson, and sign up to participate for the upcoming school year.
Among the many changes the Nobel Prize brought to Schmidt’s life: travel hassles. Here’s what he said it’s like to carry a Nobel medal aboard an airplane:
“There are a couple of bizarre things that happen. One of the things you get when you win a Nobel Prize is, well, a Nobel Prize. It’s about that big, that thick [he mimes a disk roughly the size of an Olympic medal], weighs a half a pound, and it’s made of gold.
“When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.
“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
I said, ‘gold.’
And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
‘The King of Sweden.’
‘Why did he give this to you?’
‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”
This weekend, Eisner Award nominated cartoonist Bosch Fawstin joins The Flipside!! Don’t miss it! If you have not found where to watch in your local area, check the website. If it is not carried, be sure to contact your local station and ask them to carry The Flipside with Michael Loftus!
The fine folks at beautifulchemistry.net shot chemical reactions in 4K UltraHD resolution to capture their finest details. They also removed the distraction of beakers and test tubes so that you can enjoy watching these reactions in their purest form. Enjoy.
