News & Views from an Embedded Systems Designer
There’s a movement starting to bring back the The Office of Technology Assessment, read about it in these posts.
denialism blog : Bring Back the OTA – Bring Back Evidence Based Government
denialism blog : OTA Thread II
If you think it’s a good idea to get Congress some non-partisan scientific help, go sign the petition.
Sadly the NCCAM has requested $122 million for its FY 08 budget and they’ll likely get it. After decades of research and tons of cash spent what do we have to show for it, nothing. Well not exactly nothing we have more studies showing that none of it works better than other placebo effects. When are we going to wake up and smell the coffee, disband the NCCAM and give the money to NIH to help us actually improve health care.
It’s one thing for private individuals in the US to waste their own $40 Billion per year on placebo effects but, it’s totally unfair to spend my tax dollars on studying these bogus treatments. No matter how many CAM studies show there ineffectiveness, people will keep spending their money on quackery. Many of these CAM practices have been shown ineffective for centuries yet people keep buying in do to wishful thinking and deluded or fraudulent practitioners. 😦
Hat tip to Orac for pointing this out this insanity.
Ed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars posted about a False Comparison of Military Deaths. This was his response to a couple of blog posts that make claims completely failing common sense tests.
The first post is: Active Duty Deaths: Bush vs. Clinton, here’s a quote:
US Military active duty deaths simply have not gone up that much despite the fact that we’ve fought two major wars, liberating two formerly oppressed countries, and have struggled against an active terror insurgency in both countries ever since.
The second one is: US Lost More Soldiers Annually Under Clinton Than in Iraq, I won’t bother with a quote, the title clearly shows the premise. Ed does a good job pointing out the errors using the official D.O.D. statistics .
Wishing a more detailed analysis and wanting to get more practice with the greatly enhanced charting capabilities of Open Office I created a spreadsheet. I put the official data in a sheet and constructed some graphs to see if the data agreed with my common sense gut feeling that there are more military deaths in war time than peace time. Here is the result (click the graph to see the full size image).
Looking at this chart there were clearly more deaths in administrations before and after Clinton. In fact the absolute lowest point is the final year of the Clinton administration.
Some commenter’s at the three blog posts thought that if you accounted for the differing sizes of the U.S. Military over time then GW Bush’s time would look better, one commenter even claimed that there was a 50% change in military personnel population. A 50% change in a population would certainly have a large impact on the graph so I investigated. Here’s a chart showing the change in U.S. Military population over time:
Clearly the military population has changed over time however, it sure doesn’t look like 50%. In the spreadsheet I calculated the percent reduction from the high in 1986 and the low in 1999 and the drop was 35%. Even though the worst case drop is 35% I felt it could still have a major impact on the previous graph so, I did a variation were the death counts are expressed as the percentage of the total military population. This is the result (click the graph to see the full size image).
Accounting for the changing population certainly made a difference in the graph. The pre-Clinton years don’t look so bad but, the post-Clinton years look the same or worse. Of course I doubt any of the people buying into the, all Democrats are bad and all Republicans are good, philosophy will adjust to reality. I still am amazed at how firmly peoples blinders can be set, on an engineering list there’s one guy who blames everything on the Democrats. He claims they are at fault for any and all problems in the U.S. even problems that occurred when they were out of power in all branches of government, sigh. Myself I’m a registered independent, I dislike most politicians of all the political parties because they so often fail to grasp reality. Note: My favorite description of reality:
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later , 1978
You can download the spreadsheet and a PDF of the main spreadsheet data and graphs to review my work.
BTW – Open Office Calc is improved to the point were I think I can finally abandon MS Excel entirely.
Johann Hari of The Independent wrote an excellent article about:
From time to time, National Review “the bible of American conservatism” organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in – and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.
The amount of bigotry and failure to grasp reality from the conservative elites is astounding. Read the whole article here: Ship of fools: Johann Hari sets sail with America’s swashbuckling neocons
Industry has long maintained that they don’t use the H1-B visa program to drive down wages for technical professionals. There have been many allegations but until recently I hadn’t seen good evidence of an organized effort to avoid hiring American tech workers.
That was until earlier this week when GrrlScientist posted about this issue complete with a damming video courtesy of The Programmers Guild. In the post is this comment from “Human Resources Rep” who gives further details of this disgusting practice. I suspect there are many people in this country who have knowledge of this abuse of the system but blowing the whistle is a sure way to cause you and your family financial ruin. That’s why the people who know can’t say so publicly and leaking documents can also cause legal problems.
A few days later she posted again about this and included a video clip from Lou Dobbs CNN show. It is nice to see this issue getting some press again. I think Congress should launch a formal investigation into the bad practices of H1-B visa abusers. There will need to be extraordinarily good guarantees of anonymity and immunity from prosecution for whistle blowers who can provide evidence.
The number of ridiculous things I encounter on mail lists and web sites is truly astounding. A little over a year ago I first encountered DDT misinformation on an engineering mail list. The misinformation was coming from some of the members who believe in popular conspiracy theories, don’t seem to grasp the basics of science and, generally don’t seem to want to look at evidence before jumping to conclusions. I generally ignore their wacky posts after learning my lesson long ago that I won’t change their minds regardless of how much evidence I present refuting their claims.
Fast forward to this year and I see that the DDT misinformation is proliferating and some people are equating Rachel Carson to Hitler and Stalin. This is way over the top, so I figured I had better start investigating the situation in greater detail. What I’ve found is that there is no logical basis for the allegations. The best places to start researching for yourself are DDT posts at Deltoid (Tim Lambert’s blog) and, DDT Posts at Bug GirlÂ’s Blog. They both link to the allegations and refute them with links to actual evidence.
More Information:
Latest entries on this at Deltoid and Bug Girl’s blog:
Reaction to Tierney’s bad science
DDT, Junk Science, Malaria, and the attack on Rachel Carson
Short Biographies of Rachel Carson:
Rachel Carson
TIME 100: Rachel Carson
WHO report on DDT:
DDT and its derivatives: environmental aspects (EHC 83, 1989)
Info on Raptors and DDT:
Patuxent Science Notes, DDT and Birds of Prey
Conservation of Raptors
I’ve encountered a number of very weird web sites this week, not the good kind of weird either. Be careful if you visit them your IQ might plummet. 🙂 I’ve intentionally not linked the [crazy sites] because I don’t want to improve their search rankings. If any of the owners or supporters of the crazy sites wants my opinion, here it is, seek professional psychiatric help, sooner rather than later.
Barcodes are evil, as in Satan (echoing like the Church Ladies voice) – Warning: 666 Is Coming – [www.av1611.org/666.html] and [www.av1611.org/666/barcode.html].
These people think theocracy is good – Society for the Practical Establishment and Perpetuation of the TEN COMMANDMENTS – [www.tencommandments.org].
Too crazy to describe – 11:11 O’Clock Explained – [www.1111spiritguardians.com].
Wow they have an professional organization – the American Society of Dowsers – [www.dowsers.org], and a local chapter in my area – Greater Boston Chapter of ASD – [susantom.com].
On the way home from the office today I listened to this weeks The Infidel Guy Show a totally NOT crazy site and one of the fine “The Triad of Reason” podcasts. I’ve only been listening for a little while but so far I’ve liked the podcasts, in particular the Massimo Pigliucci interviews are excellent.
This weeks show is an interview with Glenn Borchardt [www.glennborchardt.com], Director (and possibly only member of) the Progressive Science Institute [www.scientificphilosophy.com]. Glenn has written a book, “THE SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW, Beyond Newton and Einstein: Understanding the Universal Mechanism of Evolution”, that he talks about on this weeks The Infidel Guy Show.
I can’t find words to describe the craziness but, I did find another blogger, Damian Guerra, who found the words: Glenn Borchardt and the Scientific Worldview and, The Scientific Worldview .
On this weeks Bill Moyers Journal there was an interview with Reason Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie.
BILL MOYERS: You know, there’s an anomaly. I have to come back to this. You you– have strong opinions about politics, parties, elections. You’re registered to vote but you don’t vote. You feel stateless? You feel lost in America?
NICK GILLESPIE: You know, it’s been so long since I’ve had political heroes that I don’t worry. I was thinking about watching the piece about Regent University and the discussion about the role of religion and the state. One of my great heroes is Roger Williams, who is, like Pat Robertson, was a Baptist.
This was– the guy who– he was kicked– he was a– trained at Cambridge during the great Puritan years in the 17th century. He was a classmate of John Milton. He came to America to preach. Got kicked out of Massachusetts Bay Colony because he said, “You guys are mixing– the Lord’s work with secular government.”
And he ended up founding– he got kicked out, founded Providence, bought land from the Indians– you know, which is almost unheard of then. Created the– — colony of Rhode Island. Got a royal charter for that as a place for religious tolerance.
He came up– and this is a Baptist, who, like Pat Robertson, in his heart of hearts, thought that the pope was the antichrist– or a werewolf. You know, in the popular prejudices of the days. But articulated the absolute need to have a secular government where your religious faith was a private concern that the state could not control but it also couldn’t compel any individual to worship in a particular way. And it seems to me, you know, Roger Williams may be my last political hero.
I’m so pleased to see this on a nationally distributed TV show. Since my posts for the Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm, here and here , I’ve wondered why there isn’t more mention of Roger Williams‘s influence in the anti-theocracy movement. Williams used the Bible to show that government with absolute freedom of religion, including non-belief, is the the only just form of government.
On the way home from the office today I was stuck in traffic behind a car with a bunch of www.FreeJoeLab.com bumper stickers and the unusual vanity license plate of “PRISMS”. Being curious about this I checked out the web site once I got home. It turns out the site is about Joe Labriola a highly decorated Marine who served two tours in Vietnam. He is currently serving a life sentence in Massachusetts and has published a book of his poetry entitled “Prisms of War”.
After reading everything on that web site tonight, I can only say that it certainly appears there may have been an injustice done to Joe Labriola . However, the site does not contain much in the way of evidence to back up the claims of injustice. If the 1973 trial transcript was posted in its entirety it would help but there is only one page available there. I searched around a bit with Google but there is very little at other spots on the net about Joe. There is one poem on a guys My Space page, and mentions in newsletters from two political groups, MIM Notes 1997 and, MASSRAIL 1999.
If any law students happen to read this post please check out his site, I think Joe’s case would make a good project for you. I can strongly recommend that everyone read the articles on www.FreeJoeLab.com many are very sad or troubling making them a tough read but they are all informative and thought provoking so I feel it is well worth the effort.
From an article in the Hampstead and Highgate Express:
In the question and answer session that followed, Rabbi Sacks was asked how he would convince someone like scientist and atheist, Richard Dawkins of the benefits of religious identity.
Mr Sacks responded: “We need atheists to remind us things are not God’s will, God does not want hunger, injustice or violence. I am quite happy Richard Dawkins stops us having too much faith. There’s a lot more religion in the world than there was 25 years ago and there’s a lot more violence in the world than there was 25 years ago.”
Paul Hutchinson's Blog 