Newsweek 'The Time is Right'

"Even if the 2008 race does not come down to a Hillary-Condi showdown, women undoubtedly have made enormous political strides since Geraldine Ferraro made it onto a White House ticket. One example: the perhaps-surprising number of female leaders—from the governor of Louisiana to the mayor of Galveston—who became familiar faces in television coverage of the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast. That makes these gratifying times for Marie Wilson, 65. As president of The White House Project, a non-partisan organization helping advance women’s leadership, Wilson has been the inspiration for such initiatives as the “President Barbie” doll and Take Our Daughters to Work day. Now, she believes, the United States is at a tipping point—and that shows like “Commander in Chief” are reflections, not vanguards, of the current zeitgeist. "

Minnesota Woman's Press The results are in!

"Most of you (79 percent) think it’s somewhat likely that a woman will run for president (in real life) in 2008, and even more of you (83 percent) believe that a woman will be on the ticket as a vice presidential candidate.

Exactly half of you hope Sen. Hillary Clinton (over Donna Brazile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, Winona LaDuke and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice) wins the White House, and half of you believe she’s the most electable woman on that list."

Eye on Unmarried America Unmarried households becoming the "new majority"

"The United States Census Bureau released data today which shows a continuing decline in married-couple households and a corresponding increase in the percent of households headed by unmarried adults. If the trend continues, within the next year or two unmarried adults will become the "new majority" in terms of America's living arrangements."

"Public officials and government agencies have begun to pay more attention to unmarried and single Americans in recent years."

The Christian Science Monitor How do voters feel about 'Commander'?

"The Monitor threw a political party to find out how some viewers responded to a show premised on the idea of a woman in the Oval office - especially since a certain New York senator is widely expected to run in the 2008 presidential race. After gathering four men and three women to watch the pilot episode, it was immediately evident that the vote was split along gender lines: The women gave the show the benefit of the doubt, the men did not."

"One consensus, however, did emerge. The group agreed that TV shows such as this one can influence public opinion."

The Village Voice Madam President, Madam President

""Hillary must have friends at ABC," says Bob Kunst, of hillarynow.com, a grassroots effort to "draft" Clinton to be the next president. "This is just too much of a coincidence."

Actually, Clinton does have friends on the show. Writer Steve Cohen used to work for her in the 1990s, serving as the then first lady's deputy communications director. "I have no doubt she is capable, qualified, and ready to be the president of the United States should she choose to run," he tells the Voice, in all candor."

BBC News Marriage rates continue to slide

"Marriage rates look set to continue their decline as more people opt to live together rather than tie the knot, statisticians have predicted."

"The proportion of men aged 45 to 54 who have never married is predicted to rise from 14% in 2003 to 40% by 2031, with women in the same situation increasing from 9% to 35%."

USA Today Census: More Americans living alone

"For all its crowds, Manhattan may also be the country's loneliest metropolis. It has the highest percentage of single-person households of any county in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau."

"And overall, the report said, the number of Americans living alone has exceeded the number of households comprised of the classic nuclear family: a married couple and their natural children.

Thomas Coleman, executive director of Unmarried America, an association that promotes the political interests of single people, credits part of the shift to changing social norms."

Eye on Unmarried America Unmarried households becoming the "new majority"

"The United States Census Bureau released data today which shows a continuing decline in married-couple households and a corresponding increase in the percent of households headed by unmarried adults. If the trend continues, within the next year or two unmarried adults will become the "new majority" in terms of America's living arrangements."

"Public officials and government agencies have begun to pay more attention to unmarried and single Americans in recent years."

MLive.Com Judge rules gay couples can receive health insurance

"Public universities and governments can provide health insurance to the partners of gay employees without violating the Michigan constitution, a judge ruled Tuesday."

""Health care benefits are not among the statutory rights or benefits of marriage," she wrote, arguing that health insurance coverage is not limited to those who are married. "Health care benefits for a spouse are benefits of employment, not benefits of marriage.""

Reason Magazine What Marriage Means

"The love marriage, in which people more or less freely chose partners on the basis of mutual affection, was really an 18th century invention, Coontz argues. As late as the mid-19th century, French wags were still bemused at the new fashion of "marriage by fascination." Among some opponents of gay marriage, of course, this is seen as the central problem: the idea that marriage is centrally about uniting a loving couple, from which the notion that it ought to be equally available to gay couples follows. Conservatives, though, sometimes talk as though this is an innovation of last Tuesday's vintage, rather than a transformation that's been ongoing for centuries. As Coontz notes, during the 1950s, conservatives' golden age of marriage, it was precisely this prospect of finding personal fulfillment through marriage to one's soul mate that led to the valorization of married life and its central place in the social imagination.

What emerges above all from Coontz's account is the realization that marriage has no "essence." There is no one function or purpose it serves in every time and place—and indeed, for each function marriage does serve, there is a time and place where some other institution primarily did that work. "

in character The Ties That Do Not Bind: The Decline of Marriage and Loyalty

"But talking about marriage is essential to the future of our society. Marriage shapes our commitments and builds our character. No one is quite certain what will restore marriage to its once privileged position, but many private groups and some state governments are trying to find out. Our task ought to be to encourage and to evaluate these efforts.

If we are successful in revitalizing marriage, we shall have dramatically improved loyalty and the benefits that flow from this commitment. Marriage, it is true, is a lasting restriction on human freedom; indeed, some young people resist marriage because by accepting it they lose some of their freedom. But every human freedom has its limits: we cannot falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater nor knowingly print libelous stories about another person. In every aspect of our lives we accept limits to freedom, but in the case of the limits set by marriage we gain a great deal in return: longer, healthier lives; better sex; and decent children. Loyalty to spouse and children and relatives enhances our capacity to enjoy the freedom we have."

The Globe and Mail Rita 'may set an all-time record' for destruction to offshore oil rigs

"Hurricane Rita severely damaged a major offshore oil production platform and left several drilling rigs missing or aground off the Louisiana coast, energy companies said yesterday."

As companies began to report the damage sustained from the hurricane, offshore infrastructure appeared to be hit much harder than onshore facilities, threatening to add to energy supply woes in the United States, analysts said."

Slate The Grip of Gas: Why you'll pay through the nose to keep driving.

"n repeated studies of consumer purchases over the years in the developed world, drivers in the United States consistently rank as the least sensitive to changes in gas prices. Even when gas gets expensive, we just keep on truckin'. The latest estimates, based on a comprehensive study released in 2002, predict that if prices rose from $3 per gallon to $4 per gallon and stayed there for a year (far greater and longer than the impact of Katrina), purchases of gasoline in the United States would fall only about 5 percent."

"Practically speaking, the only hope of changing America's driving habits is a hefty price increase that lasts. For, oh, five years. The data show that after that long, even the response of American drivers to higher prices can be pretty sizable."

Wired News Pricey Gas Fuels Alternatives

"With gas prices hovering near record highs, motorists today often fantasize about filling up with something other than fossil fuel. But back in the real world, few viable alternatives exist.

Certainly, there are other ways to power a car, using grain-derived ethanol fuel, an electrical socket or even reprocessed fast-food grease. The trouble, however, is that alternate sources are normally more expensive and harder to obtain than gasoline."

The Boston Globe We're extending our lives, but at what price?

"How much is an extra year of your life worth?

That blunt inquiry is at the heart of a Rand Corp. study to be published today, and the answers are sobering."

"For instance, the study found that new pacemakers could cost Medicare and other insurers $1.4 million for every extra year of life they add. In comparison, healthcare economists often use $100,000 per added year of life as the maximum of benefit worth paying by the government insurer. In another example, the study predicted the use of tumor-strangling drugs would mean $498,809 per additional life-year."

redux [03.26.04]
The New York Times Magazine The Human Factor
[requires 'free' registration]

"How much is your life worth to you? On the face of it, that's an idiotic question. No amount of money could compensate you for the loss of your life, for the simple reason that the money would be no good to you if you were dead. And you might feel, for different reasons, that the dollar value of the lives of your spouse or children -- or even a stranger living on the other side of the country -- is also infinite. No one should be knowingly sacrificed for a sum of money: that's what we mean when we say that human life is priceless.

But the government set a price for it four years ago: $6.1 million. "

redux [01.02.02]
Salon The impossible calculus of loss

"Is the life of an investment banker who died in the World Trade Center worth $1.65 million in taxpayer money? What about $3 million? Is the life of a firefighter worth more than that of the janitor he tried to save? How about the life of a woman who died in the Oklahoma City bombing?

These sound like rhetorical questions, the kinds of queries we hope never to have to answer. But they are the questions that the administrators of private charities and federal compensation funds must consider -- and answer to the satisfaction of an entire nation -- as they begin to divvy up and distribute enormous sums of money to the victims of the Sept. 11 disaster."

The New York Times: College Federal Plan for an Aid Formula Is Criticized
[requires 'free' registration]

"The Justice Department has provoked a sharp debate among lawyers by asking whether it should use formulas to help determine awards from the federal fund for victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks."

"A grid approach is essentially the opposite of the traditional case method of American courts, where individual determinations are made on issues like the value of a person's suffering. Proponents say a grid could calculate damages through formulas that would include factors like the age, earnings and number of children of each victim."

George Street Journal Economist Feldman takes different route toward assessing value of a life

"Although this economic model - willingness-to-pay measures - has been adopted by most economists, the courts use the human capital model to determine damages in cases of wrongful death. "This views people as a machine - a stream of income," said Feldman. "To make [the plaintiffs] whole, they look at what the deceased would have earned and passed on to them."

Feldman believes there is a certain logic to this when widows and children go before the courts to seek justice for a family member who has lost his or her life through another's negligence. But such an approach "implies that someone who is 65 years old or is retired is worth nothing," said Feldman. "A younger person's life is going to always be more valuable using this model.""

David Friedman WHAT IS 'FAIR COMPENSATION' FOR DEATH OR INJURY?

"Compensation for death or bodily injury involves two quite different problems. The first is the problem of how much' damage there is to make up for. The second is the problem of in what coin damages can be paid. One might imagine that someone would be willing to give his life in exchange for a sufficiently high price--five years of ecstasy, perhaps. Faust, after all, traded not merely life but eternal bliss for a finite payment. More mundanely, we observe that people are willing to enter dangerous professions (driving dynamite trucks, for example) in exchange for somewhat higher pay, thus in effect trading life--a small increase in the probability of getting killed--for income. Both examples suggest that the reason it is impossible to 'fully compensate' someone for the loss of his life is not that the value of his life to him is infinite--it is not--but that the value of compensation to a corpse is in most cases small."

Nola.Com Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated

"That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.""

redux [09.07.05]
Guardian Unlimited Murder and rape - fact or fiction?

"There were two babies who had their throats slit. The seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in the Superdome. And the corpses laid out amid the excrement in the convention centre.

In a week filled with dreadful scenes of desperation and anger from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina some stories stood out.

But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated and may yet prove to be apocryphal."

Reason Online The Deadly Bigotry of Low Expectations?

"All along Hurricane Katrina's Evacuation Belt, in cities from Houston to Baton Rouge to Leesville, Louisiana, the exact same rumors are spreading faster than red ants at a picnic. The refugees from the United States' worst-ever natural disaster, it is repeatedly said, are bringing with them the worst of New Orleans' now-notorious lawlessness: looting, armed carjacking, and even the rape of children.

"By Thursday," the Chicago Tribune's Howard Witt reported, "local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge...were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized.

The only problem—none of the reports were true."

ABC News Evacuation Disrupted by Gunshot Report

"The evacuation of the Superdome was temporarily disrupted Thursday after a shot was reported fired at a military helicopter. No injuries were immediately reported."

"Laura Brown, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman in Washington, said she had no such report.

"We're controlling every single aircraft in that airspace and none of them reported being fired on," she said, adding that the FAA was in contact with the military as well as civilian aircraft."

University of Delaware Disaster Research Center Looting In Disaster: A General Profile Of Victimization

"We are aware as anyone else in the research area that while looting is commonly believed to occur in disasters, almost no social or behavioral scientist looking €or the phenomena has found much evidence for it. In fact, the supposed widespread existence or prevalence of looting in such situations is frequently cited as one of the more important disaster myths which researchers have uncovered. In a moment, we ourselves will discuss for background purposes the large gap between popular and journalistic beliefs about looting, and the inability of scientists to find much empirical support for the common belief. Now, among the more important scientific conclusions are that looting incidents are typically very rare in community disasters, that the contexts of natural and technological disasters very seldom lead to an increase in anti-social or criminal behavior (including looting) beyond that which prevails in pre-disaster times in affected communities, and that such rare looting incidents as do occur are carried out not by the affected population, but by outsiders including security forces brought in obstensibly to prevent such behavior."

MSNBC ‘Intelligent design’ faces first big court test

"The Pennsylvania case “is probably the most important legal situation of creation and evolution in the last 18 years,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, which opposes challenges to the standard model of evolution.

“This will be the first legal challenge to intelligent design, and we’ll see whether they have been able to mask the creationist underpinnings and basic orientation of intelligent design,” she said. Regardless who wins, “it will have quite a significant impact on what happens in American public school education.”"

redux [08.24.05]
New York Times In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash
[requires 'free' registration]

"Mainstream scientists say that intelligent design represents a more sophisticated - and thus more seductive - attack on evolution. Unlike creationists, design proponents accept many of the conclusions of modern science. They agree with cosmologists that the age of the universe is 13.6 billion years, not fewer than 10,000 years, as a literal reading of the Bible would suggest. They accept that mutation and natural selection, the central mechanisms of evolution, have acted on the natural world in small ways, for example, leading to the decay of eyes in certain salamanders that live underground.

Some intelligent design advocates even accept common descent, the notion that all species came from a common ancestor, a central tenet of evolution."

"Nonetheless, many scientists regard intelligent design as little more than creationism dressed up in pseudoscientific clothing. Despite its use of scientific language and the fact that some design advocates are scientists, they say, the design approach has so far offered only philosophical objections to evolution, not any positive evidence for the intervention of a designer."

redux [08.10.05]
The Boston Globe God vs. Darwin: no contest

"In some ways, evolutionary theory is more compatible with conservative ideas than with leftist ones. Indeed, proponents of applying evolutionary theory to human social structures tend to be viewed by the left with suspicion, particularly on biological explanations for sex roles. As several commentators have pointed out, it's conservatives who reject the notion that complex organization requires deliberate central planning -- in economics. Why should biology be different?

Is evolutionary theory a vehicle for anti-God ideas? One of the more extreme ''theo-conservatives," National Review writer David Klinghoffer, has even argued that evolution should be regarded as a doctrine of the ''religion" of secularism. But this is nonsense; plenty of people who follow traditional religions do accept evolution. Yes, some champions of evolution such as British scientist Richard Dawkins are militant atheists, but there were militant atheists long before Darwin."

Time Magazine Let's Have No More Monkey Trials

"To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it."

redux [07.29.05]
Science & Theology News Accessible ‘Endless Forms’ shows the evolution of evolution

"The [ intelligent design ] people argue that the world is just too complex to have come about through blind law — intelligence must have intervened. However, evo-devo [ evolutionary development ] today is starting to fill in the gaps — the gaps that, in the opinion of Michael Behe and his friends, demand miracles. Existence is a miracle and life is a miracle, but increasingly it seems that the gaps do not need special miracles. Regular science can do the job.

More generally, I would go back to where I came in. The best of all arguments against the critics of science is the wonderful world that the best science reveals and explains. Offense is the best defense. Richard Dawkins is surely right when he argues against the cramped little medieval world of Genesis taken literally, and for the wonderful land of evolutionary studies. Sean Carroll’s book on evo-devo is a great passport to that land. "

Science & Theology News The problem with Darwinian solutions

"To sum up, developmental geneticists have found that the genes that seem to be most important in development are remarkably similar in many different types of animals, from worms to fruit flies to mammals.

Initially, this was regarded as evidence for genetic programs controlling development. But biologists are now realizing that it actually constitutes a paradox: if genes control development, why do similar genes produce such different animals? Why does a caterpillar turn into a butterfly instead of a barracuda?

If evo devo actually resolved the problems raised by these questions, then more power to it. Yet the real problem here is that Darwinian biologists like Carroll and Darwinian philosophers of biology like Ruse are pretending that evo devo has resolved fundamental problems of evolutionary biology when in fact it hasn’t.

Harris Interactive: The Harris Poll Nearly Two-thirds of U.S. Adults Believe Human Beings Were Created by God

"Earlier this year, the State Board of Education in Kansas reignited an old debate – whether or not creationism should be taught in public schools – and shone the spotlight on a new theory, intelligent design. While many in the scientific community may question why this issue has been raised again, a new national survey shows that almost two-thirds of U.S. adults (64%) agree with the basic tenet of creationism, that "human beings were created directly by God."

At the same time, approximately one-fifth (22%) of adults believe "human beings evolved from earlier species" (evolution) and 10 percent subscribe to the theory that "human beings are so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them" (intelligent design). Moreover, a majority (55%) believe that all three of these theories should be taught in public schools, while 23 percent support teaching creationism only, 12 percent evolution only, and four percent intelligent design only."

redux [03.17.04]
The Cincinnati Post Science teachers wary: Fear new lessons based on religion

"The new lesson plan will serve to help students analyze the theory of evolution, supporters say. Critics -- including the Ohio Academy of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the faculty senate of Case Western Reserve University -- said the lesson plan includes elements of intelligent design, a theory that life is so complex that a higher being must have created it. The lesson plan refers students to printed materials and Web sites on the intelligent design concept."

""I've been teaching 32 years, and in all those years we have pretty much taken the stance that the kids have to understand there is more than one theory, but we are qualified, because of our training in the scientific method, to teach scientific theories," said Brandon, a biology teacher and department chairwoman at Norwood High School. "If they want to know about non-scientific theories, I advise them to go to their rabbi, their minister or their priest."

redux [02.03.04]
NPR: All Things Considered Georgia Wrestles Evolution Question

"NPR's Ari Shapiro in Atlanta reports that Georgia is considering whether its public school science instruction would drop any mention of evolution. Instead students would hear the term "biological changes over time." That's brought a torrent of criticism that the plan would offer an inferior education that would cost the state economically."

redux [04.15.03]
Guardian Unlimited The battle for American science

"As prescient observers of the events north of Atlanta last year realised, these aren't the old wars of science versus religion. The new assaults on the conventional wisdom frame themselves, without exception, as scientific theories, no less deserving of a hearing than any other. Proponents of [ Intelligent Design ] - using a strategy previously unheard of among anti-Darwinists - grant almost all the premises of evolution (the idea that species develop; that the world wasn't necessarily created in seven days) in order to better attack it.

"It's not that I don't think Darwinian evolution can't explain anything," says Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the movement's foremost academic advocate, when asked how he accounts for the very visible evolution of, say, viruses. "It's just that I don't think it can explain everything. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example, is one of the things it can explain.""

The Daily Times Creationism vs. evolution central debate behind rejection of textbooks

"Treadway said he had reservations about the approach to the theory of evolution in the three texts. He said he does not want people to believe he is against evolution, but wants it to be taught as a theory along with creationism.

"With the overwhelming references to evolution, I don't feel comfortable with (adopting these texts),'' Treadway said."

The Univeristy of Southern Mississippi: The Student Printz - Opinion Evolution: Put up or Shut up!

"Kent Hovind, a creation scientist from Pensacola, Fla. is coming to the Polymer Science building room 101 April 3 from 6 to 9 p.m. to speak about creation, evolution, and dinosaurs. There might be a debate, but probably not. I mean, who would want to defend the idea that we came from a rock? After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session.

This is not religion versus science. They must both be accepted by faith. Although they are both only theories, one is right and the other is wrong. While you must decide for yourself which view is correct, you should first learn what the creationist worldview is, before passing judgment."

redux [06.27.02]
Scientific American 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

"When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination.

Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy."

redux [04.13.02]
The New York Times 'Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics'
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before we get to the scientific arguments of the neo-creos, a word should be said about their motivation. Just what do they have against Darwinism? Unlike the old-fashioned creationists, they are not especially worried about evolution conflicting with a literal reading of Genesis. Then why can't they join with the mainstream religions, which have made their peace with Darwinism? In 1996, for example, Pope John Paul II said that the theory of evolution had been ''proved true'' and asserted its consistency with Roman Catholic doctrine. Stephen Jay Gould, though agnostic himself, salutes the wisdom of this papal pronouncement, arguing that science and religion are ''nonoverlapping magisteria.'' But the neo-creos aren't buying this. They think that belief in Darwinism and belief in God are fundamentally incompatible. Here, ironically, they are in agreement with their more radical Darwinian opponents. Both extremes concur that evolution is, in the words of Phillip Johnson, ''a purposeless and undirected process that produced mankind accidentally'' and, as such, must be at odds with the idea of a purposeful Creator."

redux [09.23.01]
The New York Review of Books Saving Us from Darwin

"Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities - one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath, absolution, and grace, the other a curiously inept cobbler of species that need to be periodically revised and that keep getting snuffed out by the very conditions he provided for them. Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away thirteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company? And should the God of love and mercy be given credit for the anopheles mosquito, the schistosomiasis parasite, anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague...? By purporting to detect the divine signature on every molecule while nevertheless conceding that natural selection does account for variations, the champions of intelligent design have made a conceptual mess that leaves the ancient dilemmas of theodicy harder than ever to resolve."

redux [02.05.00]
Slate Is Natural Selection the Result of Design?

Steven Pinker: "Warm rooms are a goal of thermostats, thermostats a goal of people, people a goal of their genes. Darwin, and then Dawkins, made it scientifically respectable to talk about genes as having goals, because natural selection makes them act as if they do. But natural selection itself, being a product not of a teleological process but of the physics and mathematics of replicating systems, has no right to have a goal in the way that genes or people or thermostats do."

Robert Wright: " A system can be entirely mechanical, complying with the laws of physics and mathematics, yet be teleological, designed to realize a purpose. In fact, that seems to be true of all teleological systems I know of, including genes and people and thermostats."

redux [09.05.01]
The Third Culture Science and the Psychology of Beliefs

"The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things, or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else."

redux [09.13.00]
Scientific American A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn

"Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it."

Detroit Free Press Who's washing hands? Not everyone

Women do it better than men, but no one does it perfectly, according to new surveys that found 83% of U.S. adults wash their hands after using the bathroom though 91% claim they always do."

"Among men, 88% said they washed their hands after using a public restroom though only 75% were actually seen doing it. Among women, 94% said they washed their hands, but only 90% were caught in the act."

Time Argus Fewer companies offering health benefits as costs rise

"People reading the article by Lauran Neergaard of the Associated Press are instead fed the line "Wednesday's results mark the American Society of Microbiology's latest look at how many people take what is considered the single easiest step to staying healthy: spending 20 seconds rubbing with soap under the faucet."

What self-serving hyperbole! What else could I do that would keep me healthy and happy, that is really easy? I could avoid being influenced by industry patsies."

The Economist Swamped

"Before Hurricane Katrina (and now the prospect of Hurricane Rita) shook up everyone's calculations, Medicaid was expected to cost $329 billion this year, making it as large as Medicare and the single biggest expense for the states. Even more striking is the rate of growth. Medicaid is expected to swallow 2.6% of GDP this year, 13 times its share in 1966, its first full year of operation. It has grown partly because medicine keeps getting more expensive, but mostly because it now covers far more people than its founders ever envisaged.

It is no longer just a safety-net for the poor. As private health insurance has grown ever more expensive—the average family policy cost more than $10,000 this year—small firms have stopped offering it. To prevent the number of uninsured Americans from rising, successive governments have relaxed the eligibility criteria for Medicaid. Some 52m people now receive its benefits, a caseload that has soared by 30% in the past five years."

redux [09.16.05]
The Boston Globe Fewer companies offering health benefits as costs rise

"As health insurance costs continue to spiral upward, fewer companies are offering health benefits to their employees, according to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

About 60 percent of companies nationwide offer health benefits to employees, compared to 69 percent in 2000, the survey found. Most of the companies that eliminated health benefits have fewer than 200 employees."

"The survey said premium costs are rising at about three times the rate of increase of the average worker's earnings and at about two-and-a-half times the rate of inflation."

BusinessWeek Health Care: More Money, Less Care

" All told, the U.S. will probably spend an estimated $1.9 trillion on health care in 2005, $100 billion more than the prior year. That's 15.7% of the gross domestic product. Despite such mammoth sums, hospitals will continue to struggle to stay solvent, employers will continue to face higher insurance premiums, employees will continue to shoulder a higher percentage of those premiums, and insurers -- well, insurers will continue to do very well, thank you, because they get to pass on their higher costs to the policy holders. Though not, of course, to the 45 million people who are uninsured -- 15.6% of the population.

At some point, and probably in the not-too-distant future, this level of spending will almost certainly become unsustainable."

The New Yorker The Moral-Hazard Myth

"The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem."

Environmental Science & Technology The environment isn’t flat

"Thomas Friedman discovered that The World is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2005) while touring information services companies in Bangalore, India. According to Friedman, a “flat world” represents a level playing field in which free trade, open markets, and globalization have created equal economic opportunity for all. This great flattening was made possible by the end of the Cold War, and the advent of the Internet, high-speed broadband communications, open-source software, powerful search engines, and wireless technologies. To be sure, a flat world challenges developed countries like the U.S. to be as economically nimble and efficient as China and India while still trying to pay labor forces 5–20 times more.

Overall, it is a fascinating and thought-provoking book. But Friedman is such an unrepentant cheerleader for globalization and free markets that he fails to recognize severe constraints on production caused by environmental degradation.

Can the environment really assimilate the current consumption patterns of even one U.S., let alone three? Can we raise the living standard for 3 billion more people in developing countries from poverty to the middle class, from an annual income of $3000 to $20,000 per capita, from an annual energy consumption of 30 to 150 gigajoules per person, from an emissions level of 0.5 to 6.0 metric tons of CO2 carbon per person per year? Can our atmosphere assimilate an additional 10 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases every year when we have the equivalent of five more countries with U.S. emission rates?

Of course, the answer is NO."

redux [07.26.05]
The New York Review of Books The World Is Round

"Friedman's by now famous discovery of the world's flatness came to him when he was talking to Nandan Nilekani, CEO of one of India's leading new high-technology companies, Infosys Technologies, at its campus in Bangalore. The Indian entrepreneur remarked to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." The observation is commonplace, but it hit Friedman with the force of a revelation. "What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened.... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!" Five hundred years ago, Columbus "returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round." As a matter of fact it was not Columbus who provided the proof but the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, whose ship circled the globe in a three-year voyage from 1519 to 1522. Regardless, Friedman sees himself as a latter-day Columbus who has discovered that the world is no longer round: "I scribbled four words down in my notebook: 'The world is flat.'"

The metaphor of a flat world is worked relentlessly throughout this overlong book, but it is not its incessant repetition that is most troublesome. It is Friedman's failure to recognize that in many ways, some of them not difficult to observe, the world is becoming distinctly less flat."

Wired Magazine Why the World Is Flat

"This is Globalization 3.0. In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind."

The New York Times Global Playing Field: More Level, but It Still Has Bumps
[requires 'free' registration]

"Mr. Friedman is right that there are forces flattening the world, but there are other forces making it less flat. At issue is the balance between them. So is the world really much flatter than before?"

"Meanwhile, the new ''rules of the game'' that were part of the last round of global trade negotiations -- notably intellectual property regulations requiring all countries to adopt American-style patent and copyright laws -- are almost surely making the playing field less level. They will make it easier for those who are ahead of the game to maintain their lead."

New York Press FLATHEAD: The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.

"On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is."

The New York Times Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore
[requires 'free' registration]

"In fact, said Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the author of "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention," the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before.

Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, "higher" regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more "bestial" neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions."

Translation Journal Emotions, Taboos and Profane Language

"This is a simple question about a deceptively simple fact of life. Yet there is no readily available, coherent theory of cursing to explain this verbal behaviour which is well-documented from times immemorial. Timothy Jay, psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and author of several psycholinguistic studies on dirty talking, takes us on an exciting and comprehensive tour of profane language. But one of the reasons why his book is so engaging is because through the study of cursing as language it is first and foremost about human behaviour and thinking."

The Seattle Times Doctor wants to try a face transplant

"In the next few weeks, five men and seven women will secretly visit the Cleveland Clinic to interview for the chance to have a radical operation that has never been tried anywhere in the world.

They will smile, raise their eyebrows, close their eyes, open their mouths. Dr. Maria Siemionow will study their cheekbones, lips and noses. She will ask what they hope to gain and what they fear.

Then she will ask, "Are you afraid that you will look like another person?"

Because whoever she chooses will endure the ultimate identity crisis.

Siemionow wants to attempt a face transplant."

International Herald Tribune Face transplant takes leave of science fiction

"The medical challenges to face transplants are formidable. As Siemionow envisions it, the series of operations will require rotating teams of specialists who may be deployed in more than one operating theater. The face to be transplanted will be removed, or "degloved," from a cadaver; it will most likely include the epidermis, along with the underlying fat, nerves and blood vessels, but no musculature.

Surgeons also will remove the patient's own damaged facial tissue, then reattach the clamped blood vessels and nerves to the transplanted face. The procedures will take 15 hours, perhaps longer."

Chicago Tribune Surgery's next step: face transplants

"Critics note that face transplants won't save or prolong lives but will require recipients to take powerful and perhaps dangerous immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives. Such drugs normally are given to organ transplant recipients whose only other option is death.

And if the surgery goes wrong--if the body rejects the face, for example--the consequences could be dire.

"The risks to the patient are staggering. This is a terrible idea that should not be tried," said Arthur Caplan, chairman of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania."

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Area contractors get silence in reply to offers of Katrina help

"Eager to cash in on Katrina, Ken Kubalek blazed all night down I-55 last week, pitched a tent in Mississippi and began his bid to join Operation Blue Roof, nailing tarps on damaged homes.

On the way south, he passed truck after truck hauling backhoes and other heavy equipment, as well as whole semis full of Bobcat mini-dozers - all part of a migration of contractors and laborers seeking opportunity along the Gulf Coast.

But so far, Kubalek and many others have encountered frustration at the pace of the cleanup and confusion about who's in charge of billions of dollars in taxes that will pay for it."

The Wall Street Journal No-Bid Contracts Win Katrina Work

"The Bush administration is importing many of the contracting practices blamed for spending abuses in Iraq as it begins the largest and costliest rebuilding effort in U.S. history.

The first large-scale contracts related to Hurricane Katrina, as in Iraq, were awarded without competitive bidding, and using so-called cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend."

CNN Firms with White House ties get Katrina contracts

"Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration's first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

""The government has got to stop stacking senior positions with people who are repeatedly cashing in on the public trust in order to further private commercial interests," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight."

AFL-CIO Bush Buddies Get No-Bid Contracts While Workers Get the Shaft

"Some of the first large-scale Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery contracts awarded by the Bush administration were awarded on a no-bid basis to corporations with strong ties to the administration and the Republican Party, according to news stories in The Wall Street Journal and other media. At the same time, the administration is using the catastrophe to push a reactionary anti-worker agenda, gutting federal regulations that protect worker safety and ensure quality work and living wages."

"The no-bid contracts “guarantee profits regardless of how much those companies spend or waste,” says AFT President Edward J. McElroy. “This is happening at the same time that the local hires of these firms will, in many cases, not earn a living wage. It is unconscionable that our national government would act to hurt those most in need while delivering a windfall to wealthy contractors. These decisions must be reversed.”"

The New York Times Official Vows Investigation of No-Bid Relief Contracts
[requires 'free' registration]

"The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that his office had received accusations of fraud and waste in the multibillion-dollar relief programs linked to Hurricane Katrina and would investigate how no-bid contracts were awarded to several large, politically well-connected companies.

The inspector general, Richard L. Skinner, who serves as the department's internal watchdog, said in an interview that he intended to be "extremely aggressive" in monitoring the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which will receive most of the $62 billion in disaster-response financing approved by Congress last week."

The Boston Globe Fewer companies offering health benefits as costs rise

"As health insurance costs continue to spiral upward, fewer companies are offering health benefits to their employees, according to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

About 60 percent of companies nationwide offer health benefits to employees, compared to 69 percent in 2000, the survey found. Most of the companies that eliminated health benefits have fewer than 200 employees."

"The survey said premium costs are rising at about three times the rate of increase of the average worker's earnings and at about two-and-a-half times the rate of inflation."

BusinessWeek Health Care: More Money, Less Care

" All told, the U.S. will probably spend an estimated $1.9 trillion on health care in 2005, $100 billion more than the prior year. That's 15.7% of the gross domestic product. Despite such mammoth sums, hospitals will continue to struggle to stay solvent, employers will continue to face higher insurance premiums, employees will continue to shoulder a higher percentage of those premiums, and insurers -- well, insurers will continue to do very well, thank you, because they get to pass on their higher costs to the policy holders. Though not, of course, to the 45 million people who are uninsured -- 15.6% of the population.

At some point, and probably in the not-too-distant future, this level of spending will almost certainly become unsustainable."

The New Yorker The Moral-Hazard Myth

"The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem."

The Economist America’s airlines, flying on empty

"OVER the past four years, America’s airlines have lost $32 billion, hit by the effects of terrorist attacks, the collapse of the dotcom bubble, the war in Iraq, the SARS epidemic in Asia and fiercer competition from new low-cost carriers. This devastated landscape is now being visited by a sixth horseman of the apocalypse: oil prices. On Wednesday September 14th Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, America’s third and fourth-largest airlines, filed for bankruptcy. With United and US Airways already operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy regulations, at least half of America’s airline industry has now been declared bankrupt. These firms will keep flying on empty, thanks to court protection from their creditors. But a once-proud industry is officially on its knees."

Slate Why Do Airlines Go Bankrupt?

"Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines declared bankruptcy on Wednesday. United and US Airways are already in Chapter 11, as are the smaller companies Aloha and ATA. Continental went bankrupt in 1983 and again in 1990, and TWA filed three times before disappearing for good. In all, more than 100 airlines have filed for protection against their debtors since the late 1970s. Why do airlines go bankrupt?"

"The free market pushes business toward the airlines that have the lowest operating costs and thus can afford to have the lowest ticket prices. The legacy airlines—United, Northwest, Delta, Continental, American, and US Airways—pay more to fly their planes than less venerable companies