View 375 August 15 - 21, 2005 (original) (raw)
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Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Off to Seattle tomorrow for the Writers of the Future thing.
I was reading the editorial in the latest Scientific American, and apparently I need to write, yet again, my essay on Voodoo Sciences and the difference between citizen, novelist, advocate, and scientist. Sigh. Apparently the honorable editors at Scientific American have never learned.
Neither has Dawkins, but that's another story.
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Subject: Re: This will make you proud
http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/THISWILLMAKEYOUPROUD.HTML
Copy and Paste. It will make you proud!!!
"GOD BLESS AMERICA"
Anne
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Subject: windows worm
Dear Jerry:
I know people probably are very grateful for your Windows worm/virus/ malware warnings but I'm really getting to the point, when I see a headline like today's on CNN Online "WORM HITS WINDOWS 2000", of asking that the implicit footnote (that is: "Macs unaffected") be made explicit. Maybe OS X will get cracked some day and I'll be laughing out of the other side of my mouth, but really: if you want a secure, reliable, attractive OS get (and use) an Apple!
All the best,
Tim Loeb
For now, at least. It is not inevitable. Linux has been hit (not as hard as Microsoft, but hit). Apple will not be safe forever. Alas.
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Science, Scientific American, Voodoo, Stem Cells, and the Public
Scientific American came today. I do not usually read the magazine except when a particular article interests me. I have the same habit regarding Atlantic magazine. Enough articles in each are worth reading that I will continue to subscribe, but the editorial philosophy is so predictable as to have no information content, and/or it is infuriatingly wrong, and I don't need extra strains on my blood pressure.
But once I a while I will read the front matter in Scientific American, and I did today. The editorial, and "The Skeptic" column were as I expected: nothing awful, but predictable given the subject matter, preaching to their audience that the flaws in evolutionary theory do not prove the existence of God or the fundamental unsoundness of evolutionary theory (although which evolutionary theory is glossed over, just as people who thought Steven Jay Gould's views on evolution dead wrong would still use his arguments against theological intervention). None of that is very interesting, at least to me.
There is also the usual insistence that science must lead in public policy, and scientists must be the leaders, and it is meet, right, and their bounden duty to be so. Of course sometimes they are only citizens and they must then admit that, but, etc. etc. What there isn't is any glimmering that scientists and advocates have different jobs, and operate by different rules, and when scientists become advocates they cease to be scientists, and have no more credibility than any other advocate. I wrote all this thirty years ago in my C. P. Snow Memorial Lecture "The Voodoo Sciences"; but apparently the lesson isn't being learned very well. It is simply this: novelists need only be plausible, and a novelist is no more expert than anyone else (although he may be more persuasive than some others). Advocates need only present evidence -- the information and data favorable to their case; they can rely on the opposition to produce the counter arguments. Scientists, though, must deal with data, and that includes all of it, most particularly including the evidence and data unfavorable to their theory, and if their theory does not account for known facts and data it is the job of the scientist to call attention to this, not to gloss it over.
That's the nature of science. "My theory accounts for almost all the data. Alas, here are these inconvenient data points it cannot predict or explain, but no one else's theory does as well as mine with the major part of the data."
Of course that isn't what the "scientists" who are all out for Kyoto and other policies that implement "regulatory" science say. They put on their white coats and stand in their laboratories surrounded by students and expensive equipment and computers (mostly paid for by tax money) and shamelessly speak as if they were scientists -- but they act like any lawyer presenting only his side of the case. And there are very few exceptions to this in major scientific debates.
Now let's talk about Stem Cells and California. A real estate agent and land speculator grown wealthy invested 2millionofhisownmoneytogetcontrolofabout2 million of his own money to get control of about 2millionofhisownmoneytogetcontrolofabout3 billion to be spent on Stem Cell Research. So far, according to Scientific American, the Institute he is to head that will dole out this public money isn't structured, but Real Soon Now.
Robert Klein, the real estate developer who sparked the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative wants to set things up "to shield decision making from the bureaucracy of state government and allow the agency to operate like an entrepreneurial startup." Now that scares me already. I've seen entrepreneurs running startups and burning capital. Told that a Saturn is a great car, they think their public image requires a BMW, and that the company needs an expensive headquarters in a high cost city rather than more modest quarters in a lower cost region. There are a few exceptions to this, but not enough to give me a warm feeling about spending public money in outfits that operate like an entrepreneurial startup.
He believes, he says, that he has a mandate from the public to improve the research funding model. Given that I doubt one in ten Californians have the faintest idea of how NIH operates, or how NSF operates (and how those differ from each other, and from mixed grant and operations agencies like NASA), I do not think he has a mandate to improve the grant structure. I think he has a mandate from the public to cure Alzheimer's, diabetes, and Parkinson's disease. That's sure what the campaign seemed to be promising. Give us the public money and we'll get the job done, with stem cells.
Of course the University of California, and NIH, and a bunch of other outfits have their own ideas of how that money ought to be dispensed. To begin with, the salaries of the research people shouldn't be set by the public or legislature. They ought to be set by "peers", just as tax supported universities ought to be "self governing" meaning that salaries and promotions should be set by tenured faculty acting in committees and on the faculty senate. None of this public participation: the public did its part by paying taxes. Now kindly get out of the way and let us do what we know how to do. Oh, and it will cost you more next year, and why were you so stingy this year?
Gordon Keller of the Mount Sinai Medical Research Center argues with state financing anyway. Exactly what he wants isn't entirely clear, but he says of state efforts, well, many states support unrestricted stem cell research but six states, while supporting research in embryonic stem cells, have banned funding cloning research. "How," Dr. Klein asks, "can it be moral to do research with one type of funds, but not with the other?"
And of course everyone is concerned that the public has too much power in spending this money. Sometimes parents attack research results they don't like (as in autism research) and even have the nerve to fund studies to test their own treatment theories. Heresy. "The public drives not just what disease areas get attention but what the research strategies are," says Mildred K. Cho, associate director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics.
The public just doesn't understand. It's the public's job to pay for all this. It's the task of our new masters to set up their own self-governing orders and institutions, and the Fellows of their New Order will determine who gets the money, and what it will go for, and don't you forget it. And don't you go raising money to test alternative theories either! That's unethical.
One thing is certain. We measure institutional effectiveness by how much of the money they raise goes into the actual work of the institution. The Salvation Army is up there around 85 to 90%, and few would say that the 10% or so spent on administration and fund raising is spent frivolously and with abandon. The California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative mandated that 3billionbespentonstemcellresearch.Itwillcost3 billion be spent on stem cell research. It will cost 3billionbespentonstemcellresearch.Itwillcost6 billion to get that much money together. Even if they spend 100% of it on research -- rather unlikely -- they will be down to 50% by the usual standards. One suspects that the board and staff of the Institute will be paid "competitive" salaries, meaning the kind of money that University of California administrators get.
Or competitive with Federal executive pay:
"Executive salaries are currently set at predetermined rates on a six-step salary schedule. Under federal law, salaries for the SES are capped at the third-highest pay level on the Executive Schedule, which sets salaries for members of Congress and executive branch political appointees. This year, the third-highest level is $142,500, and according to Office of Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James, about 60 percent of the SES is paid at the current cap. The Senior Executives Association, the professional association for the 7,000 members of the SES, has lobbied Congress and the administration for several years to raise the cap.
"There are some civil service issues that sharply divide people," said Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., who introduced the House version of the SES bill. "Pay compression is certainly not one of them. It is remarkable to think that more than 60 percent of the senior executives earn the same salary, simply because Congress has not been willing to lift the pay cap." Davis is chairwoman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Service and Agency Organization.
"The pending legislation would abolish the six steps and change the pay range to a salary band that starts at 102,000andiscappedat102,000 and is capped at 102,000andiscappedat154,700. Political appointees could set executives' salaries at any amount within that range. " http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0403/041403t1.htm
Well, we will see. But if Klein thinks he has a mandate to change the way research projects are managed, he's wrong: his mandate is to cure Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which is what the public thought it was voting for when it handed over 3billionandauthorizedspending3billion and authorized spending 3billionandauthorizedspending6 billion to get it.