Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.
Friday, 20 September 2013
Conservative Lobbyist Derails Bipartisan 'Science Laureate' Bill
Jason Reed/Reuters/Landov ![The U.S. Capitol at sunrise.]( "The U.S. Capitol at sunrise.")
The U.S. Capitol at sunrise.Jason Reed/Reuters/Landov
The U.S. Capitol at sunrise.Jason Reed/Reuters/Landov No one who's been paying attention for, say, the past few decades, needs to be reminded of how extremely polarized Washington is.
So it's usually good news when Democrats and Republicans can come together on an issue, as they did recently to support the idea of creating the new honorary position of "Science Laureate of the United States."
We have had poet laureates, and they seem to have worked out well to promote poetry to the masses, haven't they? (Though I bet you can't name the current one. Me, either. Google says it's Natasha Trethewey.)
So why not a science laureate to sing the praises of scientific discovery, a science ambassador who could get more young people considering science careers?
Legislation was drafted, and it gained bipartisan sponsors. The proposal was seen as so self-evidently noncontroversial that House leadership planned to have members vote on it through the same expedited "suspension" process used for naming post offices.
If this were a movie, right about now you'd hear a loud skidding car sound, like someone had suddenly slammed the brakes. That someone would be Larry Hart, legislative director of the American Conservative Union, who happened to notice the science laureate bill on the House legislative calendar.
Hart, who back in the day was an aide on the House Science Committee, saw plenty wrong with the bill. He was troubled by how the bill "never saw the light of day" until 24 hours before it was scheduled to be speedily approved (although the bill was introduced four months ago).
And, he told me in an interview, "I found the bill to be very oddly written."
According to the bill's language, the laureate would be appointed by the president, unlike the poet laureate, who is appointed by the Librarian of Congress. The bill would also allow for the naming of as many as three laureates, whose terms could be constantly renewed, another difference from the poet laureate.
"What I couldn't understand," Hart told me, "was why [Republican] folks who constantly give speeches saying that they're upset with President Obama's appointments would give him the power for new appointments, particularly in the area of science, which he has a particular view of — in my opinion — a very politicized view of science. And his appointments in that area, on the regulatory side, have been very political."
Hart said that the administration's stance on global warming and climate science is part of what he sees as Obama's "very politicized view."
"I couldn't understand why the Republican House would take this bill up without any discussion," said Hart.
Neither could the House leadership after Hart made his objections known. The bill was pulled from the calendar and sent to committee for debate and revision.
ScienceMag.org's "Science Insider" blog quotes an unnamed aide for a House Republican co-sponsor of the bill, who says Hart is wrong in his suspicions that the bill would let Obama push a certain agenda.
But the House Republican leadership already has enough fights with its conservative base. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that House GOP leaders are trying to keep one more issue from spinning out of control.
Administration to Press Ahead With Carbon Limits
The proposed regulations, announced at the National Press Club by Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year. The regulations are certain to be denounced by House Republicans and the industry as part of what they call the president’s “war on coal.” In her speech, Ms. McCarthy unveiled the agency’s proposal to limit new gas-fired power plants to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt-hour and new coal plants to 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Industry officials say the average advanced coal plant currently emits about 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour. “The president’s Climate Action Plan calls on federal agencies to take steady, sensible, and pragmatic steps to cut the harmful carbon pollution that fuels our changing climate, to prepare our communities for its unavoidable impacts, while continuing to provide affordable and reliable energy for all,” Ms. McCarthy said. Opponents of the new E.P.A. rule quickly vowed to take measures to stop it. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who is from coal-dependent Kentucky, promised to use his legislative skills to prevent the measure. “The president’s decision today is an escalation of the war on coal and what that really means for Kentucky families is an escalation of his war on jobs and the Kentucky economy,” Mr. McConnell said. “I will file a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act to ensure a vote to stop this devastating E.P.A. rule.” Ms. McCarthy also announced a yearlong schedule for an environmental listening tour — a series of meetings across the country with the public, the industry and environmental groups as the agency works to establish emissions limits on existing power plants — a far more costly and controversial step. Mr. Obama has told officials he wants to see greenhouse gas limits on existing and new power plants by the time he leaves office in 2017. “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said in January. But he acknowledged that “the path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.” On Friday, Ms. McCarthy said: “We have proven time after time that setting fair Clean Air Act standards to protect public health does not cause the sky to fall. The economy does not crumble.” She also said: “The overwhelming judgment of science tells us that climate change is real, human activities are fueling that change, and we must take action to avoid the most devastating consequences. We know this is not just about melting glaciers. Climate change — caused by carbon pollution — is one of the most significant public health threats of our time. That’s why E.P.A. has been called to action. And that’s why today’s action is so important for us to talk about.” The limits unveiled on Friday are a slightly more relaxed standard for coal plants than the administration first proposed in April 2012. Officials said the new plan, which came after the E.P.A. received more than 2.5 million comments from the public and industry, will give coal plant operators more flexibility to meet the limits over several years. The rules on new power plants will soon face a 60-day public comment period, likely to be followed by intensive industry and environmental lobbying and possible court challenges. Officials said the rules could be finalized by the fall of 2014. Once the rules are in place, coal power plants will be required to limit their emissions, likely by installing technology called “carbon capture and sequestration,” which scrubs carbon dioxide from their emissions before they reach the plant smokestacks. The technology then pumps it into permanent storage underground.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 20, 2013
An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from the average advanced coal plant. It is 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour, not 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per hour.
These Smartphone Apps Track Every Step of Your Day
"Quantified self" apps know where you are, how you got there (by foot, bike, or train), who you're with — even how well you slept last night. Ellis Hamburger, a reporter at The Verge, reviews a handful of apps that track your daily movements, such as "Human" and "Moves."
Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.JOHN DANKOSKY, HOST:
Up next, smartphone apps that track your every move. I guess the smarter your smartphone gets, the more it can learn about you, and you don't even have to take it out of your pocket. All that data adds up to what is called the quantified self, a snapshot of your life based on the steps you take, the miles you run, where you go, who you meet, even how you sleep.
So what do you think about all this? Do you use quantified self apps? Does this sound more like your personal privacy nightmare? You can call us at 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. Here to talk about it with us is Ellis Hamburger, who's a reported at the Verge here in New York. He joins us at SCIENCE FRIDAY. Ellis, welcome to the show.
ELLIS HAMBURGER: Thanks for having me.
DANKOSKY: So which one of these do you use?
HAMBURGER: I actually use a combination of a few of them, and there are a few we can talk about. Some of them have more explicit goals for you, and some of them simply track you. So, the first one we can talk about is Moves. And you open it, you install it for the first time, and then you might just forget about it. You might check it at the end of every day. But as you move around every day, as you take a bike ride, go on the subway, it records what you're doing, how fast you're moving, decides if you're in the car or on a bike, and then, at the end of the day, you can actually see how many miles you've walked, how many miles you've biked, how many calories you've burned.
DANKOSKY: So, first of all, let's just - I want to understand this. How does it know if I'm walking or biking or riding the train, or in my car?
HAMBURGER: They use a lot of signals. It's a combination of triangulation from cell towers, GPS, whether you're connected to your Wi-Fi at home or at work, and it decides how fast you're moving using a combination of those signals.
DANKOSKY: So you download this app and you put it in your pocket, and at the end of the day, what's it going to tell you? I mean, what's the report on you at the end of the day on Moves?
HAMBURGER: The interesting thing about Moves is that it provides the tools to measure yourself, but it doesn't necessarily ask you to do anything with it. So you could see how many calories you've burned or how many miles you've walked. But there's another app that just came out a few weeks ago called Human that actually has a premise, a philosophy behind it, that 30 minutes per day of any kind of activity - whether you're walking or biking or running - can dramatically decrease your risk of just about any malady you can think of. So I think a goal like that is a little more accessible.
DANKOSKY: I'm John Dankosky, and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. So, Human, this app, it has this very explicit goal, but it's not really giving you much more information than that. It's saying I want you to move around for 30 minutes a day, and essentially once you're done, yay, I've done it. Is that the point?
HAMBURGER: That's the point. So, the premise of Human is based on this talk by Dr. Mike Evans. It was called "23 and 1/2 Hours," and he was saying: What is the best thing you can do for your health? And his thesis was that it was 30 minutes of activity. And so Human tracks you the same way that Moves does, and at the end of the day, it says, hey, you only did 24 minutes a day. Maybe you should take a walk after dinner.
And I think the habit-making, the changing your own behavior is what can matter the most here. Maybe tomorrow, you'd get off one subway stop early just so you hit your daily 30, as they call it.
DANKOSKY: So, look, I pretty much am aware of what I'm doing every day. Why do I need to download an app to tell me what I'm doing every day?
HAMBURGER: Are you sure you know what you're doing every day?
DANKOSKY: Well, I think I know what I'm doing every day.
HAMBURGER: I thought I did.
DANKOSKY: OK.
HAMBURGER: And once I installed a couple of these apps, I realized I was only walking 17 or 18 minutes a day. And that's what was most interesting to me, is that in your effort to move closer - especially in an urban area like New York, you want to move closer to the subway for work and for at home. And I realized I was walking three minutes to the subway in the morning, three minutes at night, a couple minutes to the office. I wasn't doing anything except walking to the bathroom during the day. And it helped me realize that maybe I should get off at Union Square and walk the rest of the way home.
DANKOSKY: And you think these apps are better than some of the other devices that you can wear on your wrist or around your neck? They're - it's more convenient for you?
HAMBURGER: I think convenient is the key word. If you look at something like the Jawbone Up or the Fitbit or the Nike Fuelband, you wear them, but you also have to recharge it every night. It's one more thing to maintain, even though the batteries last pretty long. And I think for most people, they love downloading apps onto their iPhone, and they love trying them out. And having it on your phone means that there's no upkeep. It's always there. And it can hurt your battery life a little bit, but on the whole, it's easier to try out, I think, than buying a $100 gadget.
DANKOSKY: Tell us about - what is Memoto?
HAMBURGER: Memoto is a little, square camera that you attach to your lapel - and this is a little more progressive. And it takes a photo every 30 seconds. And then, at the end of the day, it uploads the photos to the cloud, where you can review them on your computer or on your phone and see a 30-minute snapshot of every time you were meeting with somebody in the bathroom, at lunch, what have you. And the goals of that one are a little more abstract. It's kind of getting a window into recording everything you do and trying to remember all of it.
DANKOSKY: So whether it's an app or a device that's taking pictures of you all the time, or one that's tracking your every movement, I would guess that there are a lot of people out there - perhaps myself included - who might think, well, this is pretty scary. I'm uploading this into the cloud. Somebody's got this information. I mean, what if my insurance company gets it? What if my boss gets it? I mean, what are the concerns here?
HAMBURGER: I think there are definitely concerns. The utmost importance to most of these companies is keeping your data private. And a lot of these guys are on Amazon servers, the same way that big companies like Dropbox are. So this is industry-level. This is - sorry, government-level, like, encryption. And so you can worry about that, but I think that the benefits are greater.
If you look at some of what some of these companies are doing, let's say Foursquare, which tracks the places that people go, there is so much to learn by all of this anonymized data - if we all decide to share it - about our health. That was one of the things that I learned when I was writing about Human, is that there have been so few long-term studies about something as simple as moving every day, and some of the ones they were citing were in the '90s from a company in China that was trying to create healthier lives for their workers. And they're really...
DANKOSKY: Ah, but whenever somebody says I want to create a healthier life for you, I guess I'm worried about what they're doing - not that somebody's going to steal my data, but that the company I'm giving it to is going to do something I don't want them to do with it.
HAMBURGER: Certainly a cause for concern, but I think that when you look at the level of transparency that some of these apps and gadgets give you, you can hopefully become healthier and make some changes in your life. But you're right. In the wrong hands, who knows what could happen?
DANKOSKY: A last thing for you: Is there anything new that's coming out, anymore of this quantified self that we should be looking for?
HAMBURGER: I think something that people don't always consider quantified self, but that's going to become more pervasive in our society is when you look at something like Google Glass, where you have the ability - not yet, because of the constraints of the battery on Google Glass. But some day, we're going to be able to record every minute of our lives. And I think people need to start thinking about what that means for them, and how that's going to affect their life and how they live it and what type of changes they might make based on what they can learn. Or maybe it's just sharing with your kids, here's what it was like when I was walking around every day.
DANKOSKY: Well, we've run out of time. I'm going to go check to see how many calories I've burned during this interview. Thank you so much for joining us, Ellis Hamburger.
HAMBURGER: Thanks for having me, John.
DANKOSKY: Ellis Hamburger is a reporter at The Verge, here in New York.
Copyright © 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.Letters: Science Education for All
Re “Learning What Works” (Sept. 3): While bringing more students to STEM fields is important, it cannot and should not be the major goal. All students benefit from learning science, especially science as process rather than rote memorization. Understanding and employing the critical thinking skills involved in the scientific method can help inform anyone’s life. Furthermore, we are all consumers of science. We use medicines, we vote for legislators who decide which scientific endeavors get government funding. We face issues like climate change, antibiotic resistance and genetically modified organisms. Don’t all of us deserve to really understand what we are debating? Jennifer Zinman Glen Ridge, N.J. TO THE EDITOR: I heartily agree with Salman Khan’s desire to position creativity and invention as the foci of STEM courses. To begin to address how we can do this, there are several critical success factors to consider. The most important of these is failure, since it is critical to figuring things out about the natural world or to creating a new design. Repeatedly reiterating the process used while making small changes, approaching the problem from multiple perspectives, or working backwards from the desired outcome — these are examples of strategies that we use in a wide variety of contexts, including STEM exploration. Our assessment of students needs to reward thoughtful detours and dead-ends if we want to encourage a culture of creativity and innovation in STEM classrooms. Koshi Dhingra Dallas The writer is the former assistant director of the Science and Engineering Education Center at the University of Texas, Dallas.
Mama Mia, Mama Mia! A Canadian Bohemian Rhapsodizes About String Theory
Let me confess right off that I didn't understand anything Tim Blais sings in this video, except that it's hard — very hard — erase-the-blackboard-constantly-in-frustration hard — to find a mathematical theory that explains everything in the universe. That's OK. I'm not a physicist, so this isn't my problem. But when Tim produces an Albert Einstein sock puppet having a high-tenor tantrum, I found myself doing a little happy dance.
With no apologies to Queen, this is Tim's "A Capella Science" take on String Theory set to Bohemian Rhapsody. He calls it "Bohemian Gravity." He's 23. He wrote this. He sang this. He designed this. He's amazing.
A year ago Tim's college paper, The McGill Daily, sat him down and asked "who are you?" He says he grew up not too far from Montreal, that he's been a science nerd all his life, or for as much of it as he can remember. When he was about 3 or 4, he says ...
a kid in my preschool introduced me to "Bill Nye The Science Guy," which became the only TV I watched for about six years. After kindergarten I didn't go to school until Grade 10, but was homeschooled by my parents. We had a very multifaceted way of learning [...] that I think allowed me to see the big picture of things without getting bogged down in the horrible little details that are often the stumbling block when you start learning something. That gave me a fascination with science that's essentially carried me through a science DEC and one-and-a-half university degrees. But my parents have always been super cool about not pressuring us kids to be anything in particular, and now to show for it they've got an emerging rock star — my brother, Tom; a dedicated speech pathologist — my sister, Mary-Jane; and me, researcher in incomprehensible physics and recently popular internet fool. I think they did alright.
Me too. And if you liked this video, you should know he's got a few others. Last year, his A Capella Science version of the Higgs boson, sung to Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" was a monster success. The McGill paper asked him if he considered himself a singer or a scientist and he answered, "I don't really know what I am. I'm a person with varied interests." I think that's kind of obvious.
Thanks to Jacquie Lowell for sending this video my way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)