On 15 June the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would slash Department of Energy spending nearly $6 billion below President Obama's request for fiscal year 2012. The measure would bring to a sudden halt a bipartisan drive to double the budget of DOE's Office of Science over a 10-year period, and would carve $1.9 billion out of Obama's request for the agency's energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. The $1.3 billion provided in the bill for those programs is nearly $500 million less than current-year spending.
The $7.1 billion the committee's bill would provide for DOE's nuclear weapons program is $195 million above its current level, but nearly $500 million below the Obama request. Despite applauding the new Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, which provides grants for high-risk clean-energy R&D projects in the private sector, appropriators provided only $100 million of the $550 million the administration requested for ARPA–E. The bill approved just $160 million of the more than $1 billion that was requested to back up loan guarantees for the construction of nuclear and, to a lesser extent, renewable-energy power plants. In the report accompanying the bill, the committee stated that the department has sufficient existing loan guarantee authority to cover the low demand for new nuclear plants.
The $406 million provided in the bill for the civilian fusion program is a $31 million increase from the current year, and also $6 million more than the administration request. The chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), chairs the appropriations subcommittee that wrote the bill. His district is adjacent to the one that includes the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, DOE's flagship fusion research facility.
The bill report praised DOE's high-energy physics program for its emphasis on the "intensity frontier," saying it was an area where the US could lead the world. The appropriators were equivocal on the role that the agency should play at the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory in South Dakota, the project that NSF abandoned early this year. While cautioning DOE against taking on construction and operation of the proposed multidisciplinary laboratory at the former gold mine, the committee supported an ongoing caretaker role for the agency at DUSEL, "in order to preserve it as an option while [DOE] weighs the alternatives."
The $1.7 billion provided for DOE's Basic Energy Sciences program is $297 million below the administration's request. The report instructs BES to terminate $25 million worth of its multiyear research projects, based upon the results of a "performance ranking" of all BES-sponsored research at universities, the national laboratories, the 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers, or the three Energy Innovation Hubs. Appropriators described the ranking exercise as a "first step towards increasing the accountability and effectiveness" of the BES program. They said the bulk of BES's research portfolio "lacks transparency to the public and to the Congress," and that sponsored projects are not held accountable for results. The bill provides $20 million for a new hub that will be focused on batteries and energy storage.
The energy and water development bill was the fifth of the 12 annual appropriations bills to be approved by the full House committee. Senate appropriators have yet to move any of their spending bills. Given that Republicans control the House, and Democrats the Senate, the amounts established in the House bills are likely to represent the funding floor for the House–Senate conference committees that will reconcile the two versions of each spending measure later this year.
David Kramer
]]>At a late-May meeting, the three SESAME member countries each promised $1 million a year for five years if another of the nine members matches their pledges this year, and at least one more later. Turkey and Egypt have set in motion the process to join the initiative. The project's other members are Bahrain, Cyprus, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Authority.
If the initiative succeeds, it would cover much of the $35 million still needed in capital costs. The total tab for construction is $110 million, including the building and land, which Jordan has contributed, and the first three beamlines.
The idea for SESAME was hatched in the late 1990s when a synchrotron light source in Berlin was being retired. Herman Winick of Stanford University and Gus Voss of the Electron Synchrotron laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, thought it could be retooled. The finished SESAME is to be a third-generation 2.5-GeV light source.
When ground was broken for SESAME in 2003, the hope was that it would be open for science by 2010. But insufficient funds have delayed the project. Christopher Llewellyn Smith, an Oxford University professor and president of the SESAME council, said he is "now confident that SESAME is on track technically, and will soon also be positioned financially, for experiments to begin in 2015."
Toni Feder
]]>The students will participate in the nuclear security R&D projects at the NNSA-owned weapons laboratories, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories. Anne Harrington, NNSA deputy administrator for defense nonproliferation, said the UCB collaboration topped a number of bids submitted by other university teams in response to NNSA's request for proposals. The consortium will train students in nuclear physics, nuclear and radiation chemistry, nuclear engineering, nuclear instrumentation and public policy.
Although NNSA annually funds about $15 million worth of research at US universities, those interactions involve directed R&D projects, with the academic partner performing research for one of the three NNSA weapons laboratories. The new collaboration will be "exploratory and we hope, very innovative," she said. "If we don't keep the vital pipeline of talent coming into our laboratories, and more importantly, if we don't excite a new generation about the importance of working on nuclear security and nonproliferation issues, it doesn't matter how beautiful our facilities are; we will not be able to do the work that must be done."
Referring to the collaboration, Per Peterson, chair of UCB's nuclear engineering department, said that "coordinating efforts at the partnering universities and creating linkages with national laboratories will give students the opportunity to gain a much broader interdisciplinary perspective on why their research matters and what it's going to be able to do." Interest in that field has "grown enormously over the past several years," he said, and his students tell him they think they have an opportunity to change the world's future. The consortium goes well beyond typical small grants to principal investigators, which provide a "stovepiped environment."
Through the consortium, participating faculty from engineering, chemistry, physics and public policy departments plan to collaborate in a fashion that mirrors the interdisciplinary model found at national laboratories. If a public policy-related question were to come up, a teleconference could be arranged with officials at NNSA, the Department of State, or other relevant agencies.
Nuclear resonance fluorescence
One topic of investigation for the consortium is nuclear resonance fluorescence for the detection of nuclear materials. The technology, in which gamma-ray photons with the appropriate energy can generate fission in uranium, could provide a new method for detecting nuclear materials in locations that are very difficult to monitor by other means and would also be capable of identifying the specific isotope that is present. "A whole host of applications" could further ensue from developing NRF, Peterson said, such as in verifying arms control agreements, where inspectors have to ascertain the presence of a warhead without disclosing classified design information.
Another topic the consortium could explore is the growing risk that uranium ore concentrates are diverted to terrorists or rogue nations, Harrington noted. The risk is heightened by the fact that many uranium mines are in developing countries having high levels of corruption. "That gives us a natural opportunity to engage a broad set of countries in very low-level, fundamental nuclear forensics materials analysis and characterization using uranium as the base, but in a form that is completely non-sensitive," she said. "So we can explore things like geological watermarking. We can explore different ways of developing and controlling databases on things like uranium ore concentrates." Scientific advances from that work might be transferred into the highly sensitive field of post-detonation nuclear forensics, she added.
Over the program's five years, a total of 230 students are expected to be trained by the program over the five years, Harrington said. Six graduate students are to be enrolled at UCB initially, with that number doubling in later years, Peterson said.
David Kramer
]]>Although NNSA manages production of 3He, the isotopes office is responsible for sales and distribution of the gas. Because neither DOE office was in charge, both failed to spot the shortage developing until the inventory had been nearly exhausted, the GAO report said. From 2003 to 2009, an average of 30 000 liters of 3He was sold, but NNSA had a capacity to produce only 8000 to 10 000 L annually. As a result, inventory of 3He plunged from 260 000 L in 2003 to 31 000 L at the end of February 2011.
The GAO report, prepared for Representatives Brad Miller (D-NC) and Donna Edwards (D-MD), noted that officials from NNSA and the Office of Science told the GAO auditors they did not consider 3He to be part of their respective missions. NNSA, whose primary mission is maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile, did not keep the Office of Science up to date on the inventory's size because it believed the information to be classified. NNSA failed to inform the isotopes department at the Office of Science it had transferred 34 000 L of 3He—more than the total average annual demand for the gas—to the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory until after it was shipped. The Office of Science, for its part, failed to tell NNSA the rate at which demand for the gas was growing. Isotope department managers considered the sale of 3He to be a courtesy to NNSA, since unlike other isotopes they sell, they don't control 3He production.
Helium-3 is a decay product of tritium, which is used in nuclear weapons. NNSA periodically extracts the 3He from tritium reservoirs to ensure that the warheads will function as they were designed. According to the GAO, NNSA believed that revealing the amount of 3He in the inventory might allow a potential adversary to calculate the number of weapons in the US nuclear arsenal. As the number of weapons dropped in line with arms control treaties, the need for tritium has plunged. At the same time, a vast new demand source for 3He came with the deployment of thousands of radiation portal monitors at US ports and border crossings and abroad to prevent the smuggling of nuclear materials. Use of the isotope in neutron detection dwarfed all others.
History of the supply crunch
The developing supply crunch was first detected in June 2008, when a contractor told the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office that it could not get enough 3He to fill its needs. DOE suspended sales of the gas three months later, even as NNSA and the Office of Science renewed a memorandum of understanding to continue their arrangement. In 2009 an interagency task force headquartered at the National Security Council ordered a halt in sales to DNDO and began to ration 3He to the other users.
The GAO found that Linde, formerly Spectra Gases, which is the sole distributor of US-origin 3He, was far better informed of the supply and demand situation than anyone at DOE. Linde operates the only US facility licensed to purify 3He of trace amounts of tritium.
The US has been holding discussions with Ontario Power Generation (OPG) about extracting 3He from tritium in storage at the Canadian utility. That tritium has been extracted from the heavy-water moderater/coolant of OPG's 16 Canadian deuterium-uranium reactors. OPG estimates that as much as 100 000 L of 3He could be extracted from the tritium right away, with another 10 000 L becoming available annually thereafter. The US Bureau of Land Management, which operates the national helium reserve, estimates that it contains 150 000 L of 3He. Extraction could take 10 years, GAO said. A second reserve of helium in Wyoming is estimated to hold 200 000 L of 3He, according to the GAO report.
David Kramer
]]>New York Times op-ed: enormous land use for solar or wind power
An 8 June New York Times op-ed highlights for the public an informal technocivic phenomenon often seen among physicists, engineers and others who muse about large-scale energy production: rough calculations of the enormous amounts of land that would be required for solar or wind.
For example, Chris Uhlik, Google's engineering director, told in a recent unpublished talk about calculations showing that to scale up wind power for generating U.S. primary energy would require a footprint roughly the area of Nevada plus Arizona, and that to scale up solar would require an area equivalent to California.
In the Times op-ed, Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute begins by citing California's self-imposed new "ambitious mandate" to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewables like sunlight and wind by 2020. "Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have renewable electricity mandates," Bryce adds—and there's talk in Washington of a federal mandate.
Bryce continues:
But there's the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources—most notably, land. Even a cursory look at these costs exposes the deep contradictions in the renewable energy movement.
Bryce offers a few paragraphs of back-of-an-envelope calculations for solar and wind under California's mandate, notes that the Nature Conservancy has coined the term energy sprawl to describe such land requirements, and tosses in a few numbers illustrating "the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects." No matter how "you crunch the numbers," Bryce writes, "the takeaway is the same: the amount of steel needed to generate a given amount of electricity from a wind turbine is greater by several orders of magnitude" than for natural gas.
Bryce ends by citing environmentalists' "small is beautiful" dictum. If we are to take that principle to heart "while also reducing the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions," he declares, "we must exploit the low-carbon energy sources—natural gas and, yes, nuclear—that have smaller footprints."
Washington Post front: Romney vs. fellow Republicans on climate science
Above the fold on the 9 June Washington Post front page appears the headline "Romney in hot seat on warming—Views on climate change put presidential candidate at odds with GOP base."
The article elaborates on implications from something reported online by CBS News and others: "Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke with many in his party on Friday when he said he believes humans have contributed to global warming." In New Hampshire, Romney reportedly said, "I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed."
The Post piece emphasizes polling numbers that highlight the left-right divide on human-caused climate disruption. It observes that the "putative Republican presidential front-runner, eager to prove his conservative bona fides, could easily have said what he knew many in his party's base wanted to hear," but instead "stuck to the position he has held for many years."
A "conservative backlash" has ensued, the article reports, citing the Club for Growth, the blog Conservatives4Palin.com, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Rush Limbaugh. From a transcript at rushlimbaugh.com, here's some of what Limbaugh told his national radio audience:
Bye-bye, nomination. Bye-bye nomination. Another one down. We're in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of manmade global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates who want to buy into it! Why? 'Cause in New Hampshire they obviously care about it. . . . People in New Hampshire for some cockamamie reason want to believe in global warming. There was snow on the summit of Hawaii's biggest mountain, Mauna Kea, after a thunderstorm dropped inches of ice this morning. In Hawaii!
CBS's online report charges that Republican candidates Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty have "shift[ed] on climate change issues."
Yucca Mountain science and politics, cont.
As of the morning of 9 June, the Yucca Mountain geologic repository for nuclear waste was back in the news at the Washington Post, though not at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.
The 8 June Post carried an editorial with the headline (in the paper version) "Radioactive politics: What happened to an administration that was going to be guided by science?"
Guided by science? Is Yucca Mountain about science as clearly as, say, evolution is about science? Robert Alvarez, a former Clinton administration energy official, doesn't think so. The 9 June Post, at the foot of the editorial column on the left-hand side of the opinion spread, carried a "Taking Exception" box containing Alvarez's letter with the headline "Politics has always outranked science at Yucca Mountain."
Richard M. Jones of the American Institute of Physics explained the recent background in some detail in the 7 June issue of "FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News." It carried the headline "New Developments in Yucca Mountain Controversy." Jones reported on Capitol Hill discussions and a 76-page report from the Government Accountability Office.
That GAO report begins, "DOE decided to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository program because, according to DOE officials, it is not a workable option and there are better solutions that can achieve a broader national consensus. DOE did not cite technical or safety issues." It's that second sentence that caused the Post to headline its editorial with an assertion that Yucca Mountain is about science.
There are "reasonable things to do if Yucca is permanently dead," wrote the Post's editors, after offering a brief recap of past developments leading to the Obama administration's effort to kill the project. The editors continued:
But it's not even clear that's the case. House Republicans want to restore funding for the project and forbid money from going to shut it down—though Mr. Reid will no doubt fight back in the Senate. The government's 2008 license application is still pending at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The only thing that seems certain is that toxic politics have resulted in a lot of wasted time and money.
Alvarez's "Taking Exception" letter declares, "Fierce opposition to disposal sites in the states where most of the nation's 104 reactors are located resulted in a choice that had more to do with political convenience than scientific merit." The letter concludes:
Even if Yucca Mountain were to open today, by the time it accommodated all the spent nuclear fuel now housed in unsafe conditions at reactors across the country, a comparable amount of highly radioactive waste would be stockpiled at crowded and vulnerable spent fuel pools at 51 sites. The safe and secure storage of nuclear spent fuel in dry, hardened casks should have a higher priority than pursuing the quest, now in its 55th year, to find a dump for the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.
Jones at AIP concluded, "The controversy will continue, playing out at the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], in the courts, and in Congress."
"When it comes to making light," wrote Andrew Rice in the 5 June Sunday magazine of the New York Times, "libertarians and aesthetes are joined in an unlikely alliance." That alliance opposes environmentalists and the federal law that will soon ban the sale of energy-wasting, Thomas Edison-style, incandescent light bulbs, which emit light of a quality that many people prefer. Rice's article and recent Wall Street Journal articles, taken together, offer an anecdotal snapshot of the current state of the light-bulb wars.
The Times piece summarized the entrepreneurially motivated applied physics that has been underway thanks to what many conservatives condemn as deplorable federal intrusion into the market. "Over the past few years," Rice began, "in conditions of strict secrecy, a multinational team of scientists has been making a mighty effort to change the light bulb." He described how "some of the industry's most brilliant minds are plumbing the mysteries of light on an atomic level, working to devise the bulb of the future." They're developing LED technology to overcome objections to the compact fluorescent and other bulbs that meet the new federal requirements. To fill America's billions of light sockets in this new way, Rice wrote, "represents not just a technological challenge but also an opportunity the industry hasn't encountered since Edison first flipped a switch."
Rice retold the story of Edisonian light-bulb technology and explained a bit of the engineering, and the perceptual esthetics, of bulb radiation. He cited the view of a scientist named Roland Haitz "that just as computer chips were becoming exponentially more powerful," LEDs are "getting brighter and cheaper at a predictable rate"—a proposition that, according to Rice, is now known as Haitz's Law. Rice analyzed the marketing challenges that will arise if that law holds true. He cited the federal government's $10 million L Prize, designed to encourage bulb innovation. The phaseout will initially send people toward toward hybrid halogen bulbs, which he called "a transitional product that only barely meets the new regulations," and toward compact fluorescents. But the industry is well aware that people dislike these alternatives—which is why, he wrote, there's so much R&D, and why there's an L Prize.
Meanwhile a Wall Street Journal article covered some of the same ground, complete with an illustration comparing and differentiating traditional incandescent bulbs, halogen-incandescents, compact fluorescents and LEDs. The article focused in large part on the industry's coming marketing challenges, and closed this way:
"Right now people don't think about light bulbs," says Ellen Sizemore, product marketing manager for LED retrofit lamps at Osram Sylvania. "And the industry is going to force them to do that."
That closing led to one of the two letters that the WSJ published in response. "It would have been more accurate," the letter said, if the reporter had used the word government instead of the word industry, given that "the government is the driving force behind the 'us versus them' battles: low-flow toilets that don't work well, shower heads you have to 'fix' and, soon, a smart grid that won't let you have electricity when you want it." The letter continued: "As every day goes by there is more 'force' and less 'freedom.' It just goes on and on. Don't laugh at the hoarders of light bulbs. In the face of the enemy, it's the only choice."
Battles? Enemy? Well, these are the light-bulb wars—as the second letter showed too. It offered bitter terseness in recycling a gun-rights bumper-sticker slogan. In its entirety, the WSJ's second letter said: "To adapt Charlton Heston: They can pry the last incandescent light bulb out of my cold, dead hands."
A few days later, the editors who selected and printed that pair of letters offered a fusillade of their own: the editorial "The Light Bulb Police: Americans deserve their choice of illumination." The editorial showed no awareness of the LED developments, maybe because the WSJ's usual sharp awareness of the power of entrepreneurial innovation lessens when the government has intruded. It lamented, without full accuracy, that "we will all be required to buy compact fluorescent lights." Then came sarcasm:
The ban passed at the height of the global warming fad-scare when all proper thinkers were supposed to sacrifice to the anticarbon gods. . . . Mr. Obama's Energy Department told Congress recently that to repeal the ban would "detrimentally affect the nation's economy, energy security, and environmental imperatives." Yes, and cause the seas to rise to swamp Miami and New York too.
The editorial closed by criticizing Republicans for insufficient opposition: "If Republicans can't understand the appeal of sparing Americans from the light bulb police, what are they good for?"
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
]]>Wall Street Journal editorial criticizes physics-trained German chancellor's nuclear-closure plan
German Chancellor Angela Merkel studied physics at the University of Leipzig. Later, at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof, she earned a doctorate with a thesis on quantum chemistry. Now she's planning, as an editorial on the Wall Street Journal's "International Editions" online page puts it, "to decommission every nuclear power plant in the country 14 years ahead of schedule."
The editorial carries the headline "Germany's Nuclear Panic" and calls the decision "a political, economic and environmental blunder." It asks, "So a huge earthquake and a massive tsunami devastate northern Japan in March, and the effects are felt two months later in . . . Germany?" It notes that nuclear plants provide about a quarter of Germany's electricity and predicts that the closures will not only "raise energy costs as consumers subsidize 'renewable' replacements" but will "endanger some 30,000 jobs." It recites common criticisms of hopes for large-scale solar and wind power.
"The irony here," the editorial declares in closing, "is that Ms. Merkel, a physicist by training, is one of the few politicians of any stature who could credibly explain that all energy sources have risks and costs, while modern nuclear plants are far safer than those at Fukushima."
Front pages: cellphones "possibly carcinogenic"
Prediction: This Friday's weekly "What's New" e-mail commentary by Bob Park, University of Maryland physicist, will address Park's longstanding bugaboo: Can cellphones cause cancer? Headlines in major newspapers report that a World Health Organization panel has questioned the kind of deep skepticism that Park regularly expresses.
Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have flagged the story with prominent front-page teasers pointing to articles inside each paper's main section. The Washington Post front page carries the story itself, under the headline "Cellphones are possible cancer risk, WHO says; Panel urges further research; industry group dismisses report."
The Post explains:
Cellphones are "possibly carcinogenic" to humans, according to [a] panel organized by the World Health Organization. But an exhaustive, eight-day review of hundreds of studies concluded that the existing evidence is insufficient to know for sure. And because cellphones are so popular, further research is urgently needed, the experts said.
"Possibly carcinogenic" is the WHO's third-highest rating, falling below "carcinogenic" and "probably carcinogenic" but above "not classifiable" and "probably not carcinogenic." Other substances that the group has categorized as "possibly carcinogenic" include talcum powder, which has been possibly linked to ovarian cancer, and low-frequency magnetic fields, which are emitted by power lines and appliances and have been possibly associated with childhood leukemia.
Nonetheless, the cellphone classification marks a departure for the WHO, which previously said there were no risks from exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by the devices.
The Post later adds that the "classification was based primarily on two large epidemiologic studies that found an association between cellphone use and brain cancer, particularly a malignant form called glioma and a benign tumor known as acoustic neuroma"—and that the "panel, which included 31 scientists from 14 countries, did not quantify the possible risk; nor did it estimate how much cellphone use might be safe or risky, make any recommendations about whether cellphones should be regulated more strictly, or recommend what steps consumers should take."
The article also adds a thought about a precaution that Park, as it happens, mocked in "What's New" just last week: "But one panel member said users might consider common-sense precautions such as ... using a headset to keep the phone farther from the head to minimize exposure."
Pervez Hoodbhoy: better democracy, not nuclear bombs
On 28 May 1998, Pakistan detonated five nuclear devices and became a nuclear power. On 28 May 2011, Pakistan's Express Tribune's front page carried "Anniversary: What if Pakistan did not have the bomb?", a commentary by Pervez Hoodbhoy—the polymath nuclear physicist and political commentator who has been discussed frequently in these media reports, most recently in early May.
This time Hoodbhoy begins by quoting A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear proliferator: "If we had had nuclear capability before 1971, we would not have lost half of our country—present-day Bangladesh—after disgraceful defeat." This sets up as counterpoint Hoodbhoy's theme: "Given that 30,000 nuclear weapons failed to save the Soviet Union from decay, defeat and collapse, could the Bomb really have saved Pakistan in 1971? Can it do so now?"
Hoodbhoy reviews the turmoil of those years, leading him to more questions about Khan's view:
Would the good doctor have dropped the bomb on the raging pro-independence mobs in Dhaka? Or used it to incinerate Calcutta and Delhi, and have the favour duly returned to Lahore and Karachi? Or should we have threatened India with nuclear attack to keep it out of the war so that we could endlessly kill East Pakistanis? Even without the bomb, estimated civilian deaths numbered in the hundreds of thousands if not a million. How many more East Pakistanis would he have liked to see killed for keeping Pakistan together?
Later Hoodbhoy asks, "What can the bomb do for Pakistan now?" He answers:
Without it, will India swallow up Pakistan and undo partition? Such thought is pure fantasy. First, India has a rapidly growing economy and is struggling to control its population of 1.2 billion, of which almost half are desperately poor. It has no reason to want an additional 180 million people to feed and educate. Second, even if an aggressive and expansionist India wanted, asymmetrical warfare would make territorial conquest and occupation impossible. The difficulties faced by America in Iraq and Afghanistan, or of India in Kashmir, make this clear.
The bomb did deter India from launching punitive attacks at least thrice since the 1998 tests. There were angry demands within India for attacking the camps of Pakistan-based militant groups after Pakistan's incursion in Kargil during 1999, the December 13 attack on the Indian parliament the same year (initially claimed by Jaish-e-Muhammad), and the Mumbai attack in 2008 by Lashkar-e-Taiba. However, this problem only exists because the bomb has been used to protect these militant groups. The nuclear umbrella explains why Pakistan is such a powerful magnet for all on this planet who wage war in the name of Islam: Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks, Uighurs, and various westerners. It was, as we now know, the last lair of Osama bin Laden as well.
Ultimately Hoodbhoy comes to, and concludes with, the counsel that he regularly offers. Instead of nuclear bombs, he urges, in Pakistan "we need to protect ourselves by building a sustainable and active democracy, an economy for peace rather than war, a federation in which provincial grievances can be effectively resolved, elimination of the feudal order and creating a tolerant society that respects the rule of law."
Louisiana still mixes religion and science, but separationists persist
In 2008, the Louisiana Science Education Act became state law overwhelmingly, despite vocal opposition. This year, in what amounts to a beau geste on behalf of the separation of science and religion, a repeal effort has failed resoundingly.
Separationists, however, persist. They include, and enjoy encouragement from, scientists. Alan I. Leshner, for example—chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science—wrote in April to the sponsor of the doomed repeal measure, Sen. Karen Carter Peterson. In part he told her:
The LSEA features language that could be used for the insertion of religious or unscientific views into science classrooms. The bill disingenuously implies that particular theories, including evolution, are controversial among scientists. In reality, the science of evolution underpins all of biology. The principles behind it have been tested and retested for many decades, and it is supported by tens of thousands of scientific studies. Evolution informs scientific research in a broad range of fields such as agriculture and medicine, work that has important impact on our everyday lives.
Last week, in the article "Senators reject repeal of 2008 Science Education Act," the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported the failure of repeal, saying in part:
Defenders of the 2008 science education law call it a matter of academic freedom that is intended only to help science teachers encourage critical thinking and allow them to use instructional materials that supplement what textbooks say about topics such as evolution and global warming. The law originally was adopted at the urging of the Louisiana Family Forum, a conservative Christian group with considerable influence over legislative affairs.
[State Sen.] Peterson pushed the repeal, she said, to defend the integrity of Louisiana public education and end "an embarrassment" for the state. A Roman Catholic, Peterson quoted from the Nicene Creed, which calls God the "creator of all things, seen and unseen." She called it a statement of faith, not a conclusion of scientific discovery.
She wielded endorsements of her repeal effort from 43 Nobel laureates, faculty members and administrators from Louisiana State University and LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and a host of state and national organizations of scientists and educators. Dr. Wade Warren, a biology professor at Louisiana College, countered with a letter signed by 15 scientists who support the law as it is.
This week, Times-Picayune readers heard from columnist James Gill, whose scathing piece begins: "There are plenty of straight-talking Christians in foxholes too. But you'd have a hard time finding one in the Louisiana Legislature. Legislators prefer to be liars for Jesus."
Gill notes that in 2008, the bill passed the Senate unanimously and got only three "no" votes in the House. Such "numbers are eloquent," he declares, for "a rational bill would never have received that kind of support." He condemns what he calls the "wittily named Science Education Act" as "an exercise in intellectual dishonesty." He disdains "the fiction that an act inspired by the Family Forum had nothing to do with the promotion of religion, its sole raison d'etre." And he explains what he thinks is really going on:
The act does indeed say that it should not be construed "to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion."
But that was written with a nod and a wink, and it just goes to show how much craftier the obscurantists have become. First they tried to foist anti-Darwinism on public schools in the name of creationism, but the courts put the kibosh on that. Reborn as intelligent design, their notions once again failed to survive constitutional challenge.
Their latest dodge is to cast themselves as champions of academic freedom.
At the end, Gill laments, "Perhaps the courts will intervene and consign faith and science to their proper spheres, but there is no sign that will happen any time soon." He adds, "Certainly, the act will never be repealed, unless legislators finally develop the ability to walk upright and speak the truth."
Never? What's surely certain is that separationists will persist. Evidence on the Web includes the sites Louisiana Coalition for Science and Repealing the Louisiana Science Education Act, and the "Support for Louisiana repeal effort" page at the site of the National Center for Science Education.
Public university researchers' e-mail: private or not? (continued)
Back in April, I began one of these media reports this way:
The e-mail of public university scholars and scientists—to what extent, if any, should law and society privilege it, grant it privacy, and sequester it from the rules for publicly owned information? In a recent conversation at the American Center for Physics, I asserted that this is one of those questions best left unasked.
It's being asked.
That was then. Now it's being asked even louder.
In the special "Taking Exception" box at the bottom of the editorial column on the left-hand side of the 3 June Washington Post opinion spread, Christopher Horner, director of litigation at the American Tradition Institute's Environmental Law Center, offers a letter headlined "A hypocritical response to U-Va. records request."
He's responding to the Post's 30 May editorial "Harassing climate-change researchers," which criticized Horner and his organization for asking the University of Virginia for copies of thousands of e-mail messages and other documents by Michael E. Mann, the prominent climate researcher who left the university several years ago.
Even though Mann "wasn't an agent of the commonwealth in any practical sense," the editorial said, "the university hasn't been able to dismiss ATI's requests, since Mr. Mann's e-mails are public records in a technical sense." Horner's organization's "motives are clear enough," the editorial continued. "The group's Web site boasts about its challenges to environmental regulations across the country" and the group "declares that Mr. Mann's U-Va. e-mails contain material similar to that which inspired the trumped-up 'Climategate' scandal, in which warming skeptics misrepresented lines from e-mails stored at a British climate science center."
The editorial concluded:
Going after Mr. Mann only discourages the sort of scientific inquiry that, over time, sorts out fact from speculation, good science from bad. Academics must feel comfortable sharing research, disagreeing with colleagues and proposing conclusions—not all of which will be correct—without fear that those who dislike their findings will conduct invasive fishing expeditions in search of a pretext to discredit them. That give-and-take should be unhindered by how popular a professor's ideas are or whose ideological convictions might be hurt.
Teresa A. Sullivan, U-Va.'s president, said that the university will use "all available exemptions" from the state's public records law to shield Mr. Mann. And a university spokesperson said that U-Va. anticipates that most of the documents at issue will be exempt under a statute that "excludes from disclosure unpublished proprietary information produced or collected by faculty in the conduct of, or as a result of, study or research on scientific or scholarly issues." The university is right to make full use of such exemptions.
Horner's response charges that the editors "failed to articulate an argument grounded in the statute for treating one class of records, or people, differently from the rest of those expressly covered by the act's terms as a condition of taxpayer-funded employment" and that they also failed "to acknowledge a critical point," namely, that it's "customary among commonwealth universities to provide such records of academics, even the specific class of records we are seeking." For example, Horner writes,
U-Va. began providing to Greenpeace records of former research professor Patrick Michaels, before Greenpeace suspended its request. And just this year George Mason University released correspondence of professor Edward Wegman regarding an already published paper, just as we seek former U-Va. assistant professor Michael Mann's correspondence relating to his publications.
"For the uninitiated," Horner continues, "Mr. Michaels is a 'skeptic'" and "Mr. Wegman was involved in exposing Mr. Mann's statistical methods and problems with climate science's version of peer-review. So their records are somehow different." Then comes Horner's closing zinger:
For The Post to acknowledge this disparate treatment would be to acknowledge that the law is on our side, that the exception sought here is unique to a favored individual, and that this expression of outrage in response to our request is therefore selective and hypocritical.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
]]>The initiative would be coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Defense as the major federal participants, the PCAST report recommends. Agencies would assist US industry and universities with applied research on new manufacturing technologies and design methodologies. The proposal calls for formation of public–private partnerships to transfer technologies at the pre-commercial stage. Small manufacturers would have access to shared R&D facilities under the plan.
After a briefing on the report's major findings and recommendations, PCAST unanimously approved the report at a 19 May meeting.
"We were quite shocked to see how quickly [manufacturing] jobs have disappeared with globalization," said Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google who cochaired the PCAST subcommittee that wrote the report. Without government intervention, he said, job losses "will continue apace." During a 19 May presentation of the report's major findings and recommendations, PCAST cochair Eric Lander, an MIT biologist, observed that the US trade deficit in advanced technology manufactured products has increased from $17 billion in 2003 to $81 billion in 2010. Prior to 2000, the US had always run a trade surplus in those goods.
"We've been very careful to ensure that what we recommend does not constitute industrial policy," said subcommittee cochair Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "But there are cases when individual companies cannot justify the investments that are required to fully develop many important new technologies," and where private investments need to be complemented by public ones.
In determining the projects the initiative will fund, OSTP managers should consider the potential for "transformative impact," the presenters said. Specifically, a project should have a high probability of creating jobs, of providing a competitive advantage to the US, and of addressing a "market failure," where private investment is unavailable. Candidate technologies may include clean energy, pharmaceuticals, and advanced materials, said PCAST member Chad Mirkin, a Northwestern University professor. "We need to create ways of moving these types of discoveries past the valley of death," Mirkin said, a reference to the gap in financing that startup companies often face in the early stages of bringing a new technology to the market.
A model for the proposed manufacturing initiative was the government–industry collaboration known as the SEMATECH (Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology), the consortium created in 1987 by 14 US-based semiconductor manufacturers to overcome common manufacturing problems, said PCAST member Richard Levin, president of Yale University. That collaboration was widely seen as saving the US semiconductor industry. The $500 million that SEMATECH received in federal funding over a five-year period was matched by the industry partners. Similar cost-sharing would be expected from the initiative's manufacturer members.
The PCAST report also urges that the US corporate rate be lowered from its current 35% to bring it into line with the 27% average tax rate of other developed nations. It calls for the R&D tax credit to be made permanent, and it endorsed the continuation of the 10-year doubling of the budgets of NSF, NIST, and the Department of Energy's basic research program. More generally, the PCAST recommends improving US science and mathematics education and raising the limit on the number of highly skilled foreigners who are allowed to work in the US.
Pending minor editing, the report is to be delivered to President Obama and then released publicly. Although PCAST, like other advisory committees, is required to make all materials it considers and discusses publicly available, OSTP declined to provide a copy of the report to Physics Today. An OSTP spokesman said the agency's lawyers were reviewing whether public release is mandated.
David Kramer
]]>Skirmishes in the climate mockery wars
What's the state of American technocivic discourse on climate? That's a big question, but just anecdotally, there are the climate wars, and then there are the climate mockery wars. A pair of starkly contrasting mockery examples from early this week in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal might show something about the overall discussion.
It's hard for the WSJ's online "Best of the Web" columnist James Taranto to outdo himself in mocking the climate consensus and its advocates. For years he has repeatedly recycled what he considers the hardee-har-har of weather-climate conflation—gleefully reporting, for instance, that Al Gore has given a global warming speech on an outlier of an especially cold day.
Now, in a recent column, Taranto notes that something bothers him "about the media mockery of Harold Camping," the man who predicted the world would end last Saturday. Taranto asks, "Why are only religious doomsday cultists subjected to such ridicule?" Then he asserts:
Nonbelievers are no less susceptible to doomsday cults than believers are; Harold Camping is merely the Christian Al Gore. But because secular doomsday cultism has a scientific gloss, journalists like our friends at Reuters treat it as if it were real science. So, too, do some scientists. It may be that the decline of religion made this corruption of science inevitable.
Taranto may not be able to outdo himself in mocking anthropogenic climate disruption, but maybe the climate-change activist Bill McKibben can outdo Taranto from the opposite side.
The sustained sarcasm in McKibben's 24 May Washington Post op-ed extends even to the headlines on the piece, which come from editors, not the author. In the online version: "A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!" In the paper version: "See no climate change: What to make of these record-breaking natural disasters."
McKibben's op-ed begins:
Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week's shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn't mean a thing.
It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas—fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they've ever been—the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they're somehow connected.
If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year's record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest—resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi—could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.
"It's far smarter," McKibben adds, "to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change."
But as he continues in this vein of mockery, he never actually cites any climatological findings disputing that "mantra." Are such findings available? Have climate scientists moved beyond their former cautiousness on that scientifically and also socially crucial question?
Not according to the Post's own front-page news article from the same day. It reports that experts "have begun studying whether global climate change is driving more frequent—and more intense—tornado-spawning thunderstorms. Such work is at an early stage, making it difficult to draw conclusions."
But apparently if you're Bill McKibben, you grant yourself a license to write like James Taranto about it anyway.
My own assessment is that Taranto expects no techno-ideological conversions to result from his rhetorical strategy of fierce sarcasm. He's just enjoying some fun with a self-selected online-only audience already on his side.
But McKibben's piece appeared in both the online and on-paper op-ed page, which reaches all sorts of readers. I wonder if McKibben thinks his own sarcasm can somehow convert skeptics under some principle of rhetorical parity violation, whereby the persuasive ineffectiveness of Taranto's side's sarcasm somehow avoids being mirror-matched by a comparable ineffectiveness on McKibben's.
Matt Stremlau and young American scientists
Last Sunday's Washington Post contained an op-ed that seems notable not only for what it says, but for who is saying it—a young voice for science. Matthew Stremlau may lack a Wikipedia page—so far—but he doesn't lack willingness at least to try to lead.
Stremlau has a Harvard biochemistry Ph.D. His work at Harvard showed why monkeys, unlike humans, resist HIV/AIDS. At Science magazine, his essay on that topic won the General Electric and Science Magazine Grand Prize for Young Life Scientists. He served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow at the State Department. He has published not only in scientific journals and Nature, but in the Los Angeles Times. He's now at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In 1999, as a Henry Luce Fellow, he spent a year as a visiting scientist in Beijing; in 2006, he began another year there conducting stem cell research.
Under the headline "Go to China, young scientist," Stremlau's Washington Post op-ed argued that as "public funding for science and technology shrinks, it just isn't possible for people who want to become scientists in America to actually become scientists." Here's the heart of the piece:
The global science landscape is radically different from what it was when I started graduate school 10 years ago. Opportunities for cutting-edge science are sprouting in many other countries. China stands out. But there are plenty of others. India, Brazil and Singapore boast world-class research institutes. Saudi Arabia aggressively recruits researchers for its King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. With a staggering $10 billion endowment there—larger than MIT's—American scientists no longer need to suffer through Boston's endless winters. Not to be outdone, Abu Dhabi opened the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in 2009. These emerging powers have a voracious appetite for good scientists. So they're trying to poach ours.
I spent nearly two years doing molecular biology research in China. I have worked at the National Laboratory for Agrobiotechnology and at Peking University in Beijing. The Chinese are serious about science. Government spending on research and development has increased 20 percent each year over the past decade. Even in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008-09, China continued to bet big on science and technology. China now spends $100 billion annually on research and development. The Royal Society, Britain's national science academy, estimates that by 2013, Chinese scientists will author more articles in international science journals than American scientists do.
Stremlau's op-ed closes with this line, addressed to his scientific peers: "If the United States can't fund its scientific talent, find another country that will."
Nature on AIP study: "Gender divide in physics spans globe"
Nature this week reports on an international survey conducted by the American Institute of Physics, Global Survey of Physicists: A Collaborative Effort Illuminates the Situation of Women in Physics. The study compared "the career experiences of 15,000 physicists from 130 developed and developing nations," Nature says, and found that "men have greater access than women to opportunities and resources, and their careers suffer less when they have children."
The article quotes Rachel Ivie, assistant director of AIP's Statistical Research Center: "We knew things were unequal, but not this unequal." Ivie spoke recently at the 4th International Conference on Women in Physics in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Slide 8 from her talk visually and vividly illustrates the survey's global reach. Nature reports that the "survey reveals few differences in the degree of gender inequality between developed and developing countries."
The article continues:
Ivie says that two factors contribute to these problems. First, physics remains a male-dominated field, operating through an old boy network. "It's not that senior people actively exclude women; they just don't think of recommending them for key posts or inviting them to speak at conferences," says Ivie.
Elizabeth Freeland, a physics postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, agrees. "This is an unconscious bias—which makes it harder but not impossible to get past," she says.
The other subtle but sinister factor is that women and men face different cultural expectations. The survey suggests that women are universally considered responsible for childcare and childcare decisions. "The overarching barrier [to women's ascension in the field] is the deeply entrenched perception of both men and women that men are expected to be solely breadwinners, while women are expected to be solely caregivers," says Prajval Shastri, an astrophysicist at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore.
Later the article adds, "Female participation in managerial, editorial or supervisory roles was up to 15% lower than male participation, but in one area women were far more active: advising undergraduates, a 'nurturing' task that typically garners little professional credit."
William Happer vs. climate "true believers, opportunists, cynics"
William Happer has renewed his vigorous public skepticism about human-caused climate disruption.
Here's a truncated snapshot of his stature in science: Princeton physics Ph.D., former director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, former director of energy research at the Energy Department, endowed chair at Princeton, fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the National Academy of Sciences.
He has just published a commentary, "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases," in the June/July 2011 issue of First Things, which says of itself that it's "published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society."
Happer's commentary contains nearly 4500 words, the length of a substantial magazine article. Here's a sampler of disconnected but representative passages:
Physics in the Wall Street Journal
Anyone who thinks about physics in the Wall Street Journal probably thinks first about the ideological wars over climate science, as seen in the WSJ's op-ed pages. But there are other dimensions. The WSJ regularly invites opinion pieces and reviews from physicists—for example, Jeremy Bernstein and Lawrence Krauss. Now the WSJ's op-ed page has offered a book review by Peter Woit of Columbia University, who holds a Princeton PhD in physics and wrote Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.
Woit's review—entitled "In the End Is the Beginning: A daring theory of how the universe, instead of expanding indefinitely, could start again in another Big Bang"—engages Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose, whom Woit describes as the author of "thought-provoking books on physics, consciousness and the theory of computation" and as "one of the most remarkable mathematical physicists of our era."
Woit explains that Penrose "has turned his attention back to the Big Bang and some of the seemingly imponderable questions it provokes: What came 'before' the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, and how might the universe it brought into being come to an end?" In a technical discussion that might be a bit extraordinary for a newspaper, the key paragraph seems to be this one:
Mr. Penrose's radical suggestion is that, somehow, this distant past and distant future can be matched together, since they share the same geometry. A universe at either extreme of its existence is one that has no fixed ideas about what is big and what is small. Perhaps this curious coincidence indicates that one can pass continuously from one extreme to the other, and this transformation is what happened at the moment of the Big Bang.
Woit later adds, however:
As Mr. Penrose acknowledges, there are various problems with his hypothesis. There is no real evidence that the universe will ever stop expanding, and it is unclear whether Mr. Penrose's use of conformal geometry can really solve that. As far as we know, electrons are stable, with unchanging non-zero mass. That means they will always be around to provide an energy scale, no matter how far out into the future one goes, ruining the conformal symmetry needed to ultimately match up with the Big Bang.
"Readers should be forewarned," writes Woit at the end, "that what they have in their hands is un-refereed research of a sort that may very well not pan out and convince other scientists."
Physics-community readers of the WSJ, meanwhile, should be forewarned that it's probably a mistake to overinterpret the WSJ opinion editors' strong views against the climate consensus as their only engagement of physics.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
Holdren said that he and Chinese minister of science and technology Wan Gang cochaired a meeting on 6 May in Washington to discuss their nations' innovation policies. The meeting took place under the framework of a bilateral "innovation dialogue" that was initiated in Beijing in October 2010. Holdren met his Chinese counterparts again on 9–10 May, as part of a much larger bilateral forum known as the US–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue.
In a brief interview on 19 May, Holdren said the Obama administration will abide by the Wolf prohibition, except in cases where it impinges on the president's exclusive constitutional right to conduct diplomacy. Holdren said both occasions were determined by White House lawyers to fall within the foreign policy realm. He declined to provide an example of a bilateral S&T activity at OSTP that could be barred by the law, saying that interactions with China will be reviewed "on a case-by-case basis as they come up."
Three-hour grilling
Holdren's meetings with Chinese counterparts occurred just days after he was grilled for nearly three hours by the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, which Wolf chairs. Such hearings are ordinarily perfunctory appearances for OSTP directors, given the office's puny budget—the White House has requested $6.7 million for OSTP in fiscal year 2012. Much of the questioning at the 4 May hearing focused on the interpretation of the language on China.
Wolf tucked the China provision into the 175-page spending bill that funds the government through the current fiscal year and was signed into law in April. The seemingly comprehensive language bars OSTP, as well as NASA, from any activity to
develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement, or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company unless such activities are specifically authorized by a law.
The subcommittee has jurisdiction over NASA, as well as NSF and the Department of Commerce. It's not clear why Wolf did not extend the ban to include NSF, DOC, and the Department of Energy.
Wolf has long been a vocal critic of China's suppression of human rights and religious freedom, and he is suspicious of the motives behind China's manned spaceflight program. Wolf berated Holdren, who also holds the title of science adviser to the president, in a speech the lawmaker delivered on 11 May. Citing several examples of human rights abuses in China, Wolf then remarked, "Rather than being a voice for the voiceless, we see US government officials—like the president's science advisor—who spent three weeks in China last year kowtowing to the Chinese regime."
Wolf suspects that China's plans to send humans to the Moon and to build its own space station aren't entirely peaceful, and he contends that China's space program is run by the People's Liberation Army. "There is no reason to believe that the PLA's space program will be any more benign than the PLA's recent military posture," he said in the speech to the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Wolf also added language to the spending bill to prohibit use of federal funds to host "official Chinese visitors" at NASA facilities.
Those upcoming restrictions on NASA and OSTP will make it harder for US scientists to collaborate with international partners, said physicist Stefan Schael of RWTH Aachen University in Germany. "This will hurt the US's ability to do good science."
David Kramer
]]>College physics: two-way engagement vs. one-way lectures
"As a psychologist, I'm ashamed that it is physicists who are leading this effort, and not learning scientists," admitted James W. Stigler, a UCLA psychology professor, to the New York Times. Here's the Science magazine abstract for the study in question, "Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class":
We compared the amounts of learning achieved using two different instructional approaches under controlled conditions. We measured the learning of a specific set of topics and objectives when taught by 3 hours of traditional lecture given by an experienced highly rated instructor and 3 hours of instruction given by a trained but inexperienced instructor using instruction based on research in cognitive psychology and physics education. The comparison was made between two large sections (N = 267 and N = 271) of an introductory undergraduate physics course. We found increased student attendance, higher engagement, and more than twice the learning in the section taught using research-based instruction.
The study has been reported and assessed in both the online Science magazine news article "A Better Way to Teach?" and in the New York Times piece "Less Talk, More Action: Improving Science Learning."
The Science piece summarizes:
Any physics professor who thinks that lecturing to first-year students is the best way to teach them about electromagnetic waves can stop reading this item. For everybody else, however, listen up: A new study shows that students learn much better through an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor.
The research, appearing online . . . in Science, was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman. First at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at an eponymous science education initiative at UBC, Wieman has devoted the past decade to improving undergraduate science instruction, using methods that draw upon the latest research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and learning theory.
In this study, Wieman trained a postdoc, Louis Deslauriers, and a graduate student, Ellen Schelew, in an educational approach, called "deliberate practice," that asks students to think like scientists and puzzle out problems during class. For 1 week, Deslauriers and Schelew took over one section of an introductory physics course for engineering majors, which met three times for 1 hour. A tenured physics professor continued to teach another large section using the standard lecture format.
The results were dramatic: After the intervention, the students in the deliberate practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. They were also more engaged—attendance rose by 20% in the experimental section, according to one measure of interest—and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.
The Times piece, after offering an equivalent summary, goes on to report criticisms. It quotes Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia: "The whole issue of how to draw on basic science and apply it in classrooms is a whole lot more complicated than they're letting on." The Times adds that he "said that, among other concerns, the study was not controlled enough to tell which of the changes in teaching might have accounted for the difference in students' scores."
The Times also quotes Stigler concerning the possible biasing effect of having the "deliberate practice" teachers serve also as the study authors: "This is not a good idea, since they know exactly what the hypotheses are that guide the study, and, more importantly, exactly what the measures are that will be used to evaluate the effects. They might, therefore, be tailoring their instruction to the assessment—that is, teaching to the test."
But the Times also quotes Stigler's opinion that "the authors are pioneers in exploring and testing ways we can improve undergraduate teaching and learning"—which is why he's "ashamed" that his own colleagues didn't lead the effort.
The news obviously calls to mind two buzz phrases from the science-outreach realm: the deficit model, in which scientists seek to defray citizens' knowledge deficit with one-way lecturing to captive audiences, and the engagement model, involving two-way interactions. Nowhere in either news article do those terms appear, but it's clear that the pedagogical researchers' "deliberate practice" overlaps substantially with the engagement model and contrasts sharply with the deficit model.
New York Times front page reports unbound or distant Jupiter-mass objects
As highlighted on the New York Times front page, as mentioned only in a single sentence in the Wall Street Journal's daily "What's News" roundup, and as ignored altogether in the Washington Post, this week's Nature carries the report "Unbound or distant planetary mass population detected by gravitational microlensing" plus the companion commentary "Astronomy: Bound and unbound planets abound."
The Nature report's authors are the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics Collaboration, from New Zealand and Japan, and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment Collaboration, from Poland and Chile. They announce "the discovery of a population of unbound or distant Jupiter-mass objects."
As the Times's Dennis Overbye explains it, the discovery is "that space [is] littered with hundreds of billions of planets that [have] been ejected from the planetary systems that gave them birth and either [are] going their own lonely ways or [are] only distantly bound to stars at least 10 times as far away as the Sun is from the Earth."
Overbye reports that astronomers "said the results would allow them to tap into a whole new unsuspected realm of exoplanets . . . causing scientists to re-evaluate how many there are, where they are and how they are created, even as astronomers immediately began to ponder whether the new planets in question are in fact floating free or are just far from their stars." He explains the gravitational microlensing method as relying "on the ability of the gravitational field of a massive object . . . to bend light and act as a magnifying lens, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity."
Nature editors: Recognize the Anthropocene to "focus minds"
Nature's editors this week are seeking to intensify the technopolitics of the word Anthropocene—the anthropomorphizing name that, on behalf of all of science, the International Commission on Stratigraphy is considering for the present geological epoch. The most obvious political implications involve climate, but that's far from the whole story.
As reported here last winter, the abstract for the introductory piece in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: "The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?" summarized the question:
Anthropogenic changes to the Earth's climate, land, oceans and biosphere are now so great and so rapid that the concept of a new geological epoch defined by the action of humans, the Anthropocene, is widely and seriously debated. Questions of the scale, magnitude and significance of this environmental change, particularly in the context of the Earth's geological history, provide the basis for this Theme Issue. The Anthropocene, on current evidence, seems to show global change consistent with the suggestion that an epoch-scale boundary has been crossed within the last two centuries.
A 28 February New York Times editorial argued that a "strong case" exists for the proposed name. Now a Nature editorial argues, "Official recognition for the Anthropocene would focus minds on the challenges to come." It asserts: "Humans may yet ensure that these early years of the Anthropocene are a geological glitch and not just a prelude to a far more severe disruption. But the first step is to recognize, as the term Anthropocene invites us to do, that we are in the driver's seat."
Building on a Nature news article from a week earlier, the editors offer this summary of the science:
Human activity is set to leave an indelible mark on the geological record. Deforestation, mining and road building have unleashed tides of sediment down rivers and onto the ocean floor. Fossil-fuel use and land clearance have already emitted perhaps a quarter as much carbon into the atmosphere as was released during one of the greatest planetary crises of the past, the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago. Now, as then, corals and other organisms are recording a global carbon-isotope shift. The increasing acidification of the oceans as they absorb carbon dioxide will dissolve carbonate from deep sediments, and what is likely to be the sixth great mass extinction in Earth's history will gather speed, adding vivid new markers to the record.
It's the technopolitical dimension, however, that characterizes the editorial. The editors want more than an apt scientific name; they want an apt scientific name that will generate action by reframing environmental issues.
They ask, is "it wise for stratigraphers to endorse a term that comes gift-wrapped as a weapon for those on both sides of the political battle over the fate of the planet?" Their answer is yes. "Official recognition of the concept would invite cross-disciplinary science." That's the scientific dimension. To that dimension they add an explicit technopolitical dimension: "And it would encourage a mindset that will be important not only to fully understand the transformation now occurring but to take action to control it."
Science magazine: "Fukushima Revives The Low-Dose Debate"
Front-page articles this week showed that Fukushima continues to command attention. On Wednesday, the New York Times offered "In Japan Reactor Failings, Danger Signs for the U.S." The Wall Street Journal offered "Fresh Tales of Chaos Emerge From Early in Nuclear Crisis." Now Science magazine has published a lengthy post-Fukushima analysis of the vexing challenges in developing scientific understanding of low-level radiation exposure.
"Radiation spiked 4 days after the first explosion," the article explains, but since then, "radiation levels have ebbed as short-lived radionuclides, such as iodine-131 with a half-life of 8 days, decay into stable isotopes." On the ground lie "small amounts of cesium-134 and cesium-137, isotopes with half-lives of 2 and 30 years respectively." Now "several thousand of Fukushima's 2 million residents have been thrust into the middle of a vigorous scientific debate about the health effects of long-term exposure to low levels of radiation."
Science summarizes some of that perennial debate's central questions:
Some researchers believe even unavoidable background radiation can be a factor in causing cancer. Others argue that tiny doses of radiation are not harmful. Some scientists even claim that low doses, by stimulating DNA repair, make you healthier—an effect known as hormesis.
There's hope, the article says, that despite difficulties like sample size and insufficient controls for various influences, studies in Fukushima "could help clarify the picture." The article summarizes the biophysics of radiation harm, mentions studies that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, laments inadequacies in studies of Chernobyl's effects, and cites animal experiments that seem to find low doses benign. It describes nascent post-Fukushima study efforts, and reports scientists' "hope [that] a respected entity will organize a high-quality research plan involving all levels of government."
But within an ending that recalls the perennial vexations of radiation-exposure studies, the article adds:
Some researchers doubt that any study in Fukushima, no matter how well devised, will reveal much. The radiation exposure of the general population "is too small to give a statistically significant increase in stochastic effects such as cancer," argues Ohtsura Niwa, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Kyoto University.
National Research Council re-emphasizes climate; Wall Street Journal editors silent
Late last week, the National Research Council published a report that warns, as the NRC's summary announcement puts it, that "the risk of dangerous climate change impacts is growing with every ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere." The NRC reiterated that a "pressing need" remains "for substantial action to limit the magnitude of climate change and to prepare to adapt to its impacts."
Early this week, the Washington Post published the editorial "Climate change denial becomes harder to justify." It appealed for the NRC report to be heeded—and it harshly criticized Republicans and others for not heeding.
About a century ago, Arthur Conan Doyle published the story "Silver Blaze," in which Sherlock Holmes identified "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." From a dog's silence during the disappearance of a race horse, Holmes inferred much.
But I'm no Sherlock Holmes, so all I can do—in recycling the old "dog that didn't bark" cliché—is report the dog that didn't bark: the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I have no idea why the WSJ's editors and opinion writers have remained silent about the NRC report, given that its tone and content constitute a direct challenge targeted precisely at them. (Nor, by the way, am I Holmes enough to explain why the WSJ's guide to climate change, as I think it was called, has disappeared from the online editorial page.)
The Post's editorial adds to the challenge to the WSJ. Here are three examples of its harshness:
The Post's editorial concludes this way:
Every candidate for political office in the next cycle, including for president, should be asked whether they disagree with the scientific consensus of America's premier scientific advisory group, as reflected in this report; and if so, on what basis they disagree; and if not, what they propose to do about the rising seas, spreading deserts and intensifying storms that, absent a change in policy, loom on America's horizon.
If the Wall Street Journal editorial page should decide after all to accept a new battle in the technopolitical climate wars, I'll play the role of Dr Watson and report it.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
In a draft of its interim findings made public on 13 May, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future called for the US to establish one or more interim storage facilities for the consolidation of spent fuel that is now stored on-site at each of the nation's 104 operating reactors and at commercial reactors that have been decommissioned. Although it found no unmanageable safety or security risks with current spent-fuel storage practices at reactor sites, it cautioned that "rigorous efforts will be needed to ensure this continues to be the case." Spent fuel that is stored at decommissioned reactor sites should be the first in line for transport to consolidated storage, it said.
Chartered by Energy Secretary Steven Chu in January 2010 after President Obama terminated construction of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, the commission also urged creation of a new government agency with the sole purpose of selecting the locations of the proposed interim storage and repository facilities. The proposed agency should be given the necessary financial and institutional resources, as well as sufficient authority, to make its policies stick.
The panel said that the new agency must be allowed to tap the Nuclear Waste Fund, the reserve financed by a levy on the electric bills of nuclear utility ratepayers. The fund has been accumulating monies since it was established under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 to pay for the construction of a repository. Including interest, the fund currently stands at $35 billion, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
The commission called for a transparent science- and consent-based process to be used in the selection of new storage and disposal sites. That would contrast with the political process that resulted in the 1987 selection by Congress of the Yucca Mountain site. Over the years, the Department of Energy spent more than $10 billion performing scientific and environmental studies of the Nevada site as it fought off repeated legal and legislative challenges from the state. Nuclear utilities also have sued DOE, which was supposed to begin accepting waste into the repository in 1998.
The panel looked into reprocessing, advanced reactors, and other fuel-cycle technologies as potential alternatives to storage, but it concluded that no reasonably foreseeable technologies could change the waste management problem for several decades. It did recommend that the government continue to fund R&D and demonstration of advanced reactors and fuel-cycle technologies, with a goal of improving their economics, safety, and nonproliferation characteristics.
David Kramer
]]>"The president remains committed to robust growth in key dimensions of S&T," Holdren said, pointing to President Obama's commitment to double the basic research programs at DOE, NSF, and NIST over 10 years and his goal of raising the total amount of spending by government and industry on R&D to 3% of US GDP. Holdren said that Obama had reiterated the need for "a coherent energy and climate policy that entails large investments in both mitigation and adaptation" during a 3 May conversation with Holdren.
"Virtually all international cooperation comes under scrutiny when budgets are tight, because many members of Congress do not believe that international cooperation in science and technology benefits the United States," Holdren said. "We believe that our very strategically focused investments in these domains are of great benefit to the US and to the world. We plan to defend those investments, but you can expect some arguments."
Holdren said he also expects budget cutters to go after the social sciences programs at NSF, the peer-reviewed research programs at the US Department of Agriculture, and the basic research programs of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.
On another topic, Holdren praised the performance of Japanese authorities in sharing with US counterparts information concerning the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in the aftermath of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. "I would say that the level of transparency has been extraordinarily good, really," he said, responding to a questioner. "We have had representatives from the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] in place with the Japanese team, managing the situation from very early in the game. We have gotten extraordinarily detailed reports multiple times daily from the Japanese authorities, and we've been in continuous contact by phone and conference call with the leaders of the Japanese operation."
Holdren said that he and Energy Secretary Steven Chu had convened "an informal group" of experts in nuclear accident prevention and mitigation immediately following the accident. Consulting daily during the initial weeks of the crisis, those advisers continue to hold twice weekly teleconferences, and have been "interacting intensively with the Japanese authorities," he said.
"I think basically we know everything they know," Holdren said of the Japanese nuclear authorities. "One of the problems in this kind of situation is that nobody knows everything we need to know because it's extremely difficult to operate and observe in a high radiation environment."
Holdren said that the administration intends to comply for the most part with a 2011 funding law provision that prohibits NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from cooperating with China on S&T matters. But Holdren, who is also director of OSTP, said the administration will ignore the congressional restriction in cases where it might "infringe on the president's constitutional prerogatives to conduct foreign diplomacy." Without elaborating, Holdren noted that "some of the things that we are doing with China we believe that if we curtailed them, would infringe on those constitutional prerogatives."
David Kramer
]]>"This is high science return at a price that's right," said Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division in Washington. "The selected studies clearly demonstrate a new era with missions that all touch their targets to perform unique and exciting science."
Next year NASA will select one of the three projects to receive up to $425 million (excluding launch costs) for the spacecraft to be built and launched by 2016.
Technology programsAlong with the three mission projects, NASA also announced preliminary funding of several experimental technology demonstrators:
Over the next several years, additional funding will depend on how those proposals progress in terms of flight readiness.
Paul Guinnessy
]]>Shale gas and fracking: Dyson OK, Chu maybe
The Global Warming Policy Foundation calls itself "open-minded on the contested science of global warming" but "deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated." Though its website carries, for example, the link "Is There No End To The Corruption Of Climate Science?" and though its academic advisory council includes the prominent climate-consensus skeptics William Happer, Harold Lewis, Ross McKitrick, and Richard Lindzen, the foundation does advocate overcoming the environmental costs of coal—at least in part by shale gas, which, of course, has its own environmental costs.
Several days ago, the foundation issued the report "The Shale Gas Shock." Very soon, a Wall Street Journal opinion page "Notable and Quotable" blurb quoted from the report's foreword by the physicist Freeman Dyson:
[The report gives] a fair and even-handed account of the environmental costs and benefits of shale gas. The lessons to be learned are clear. The environmental costs of shale gas are much smaller than the environmental costs of coal. Because of shale gas, the air in Beijing will be cleaned up as the air in London was cleaned up sixty years ago. Because of shale gas, clean air will no longer be a luxury that only rich countries can afford. Because of shale gas, wealth and health will be distributed more equitably over the face of our planet.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration, "seeing increased domestic natural gas production as a linchpin in its long-term energy strategy, has named a panel of experts to find ways to make hydraulic fracturing, a fast-growing method of extracting natural gas, safer and cleaner." The Times article continues:
The administration hopes to avoid the safety and regulatory breakdowns that led to the Deepwater Horizon blowout a year ago as it oversees onshore drilling using hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu has asked the panel's seven experts, to be led by John Deutch, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and deputy defense secretary, to recommend within 90 days immediate steps to make fracking cleaner and safer.
The group will have an additional three months to come up with comprehensive safety and environmental policies for state and federal regulators who oversee gas drilling.
Mr. Chu said that he was acting at the direction of President Obama, who outlined a new energy strategy last month that calls for stepped-up domestic oil and gas production but also new rules to make the business safer.
The Times article summarizes fracking and reports that numerous cases have been documented "in which fracking fluids leaked into aquifers and contaminated drinking water." It also reports that "House Republicans issued a press release denouncing the study as wasteful, duplicative and another example of red tape run amok" and that these legislators declared "that fracking has been used safely for more than 60 years and that the Environmental Protection Agency already has sufficient authority to regulate it."
(see also David Kramer's story on this from last week).
New York Times letters blast Helen Caldicott
A media report in this venue last week quoted extensively from Helen Caldicott's New York Times op-ed "Unsafe at Any Dose," which attacked physicists and the nuclear industry. "Physicists had the knowledge to begin the nuclear age," wrote the physician author, who also wrote the book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. "Physicians have the knowledge, credibility and legitimacy to end it." Now a set of four letters in the Times have blasted her.
The first letter comes from physics Nobel laureate Burton Richter, who among other things belongs to the Energy Department's Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee. He charges that Caldicott "does not seem to want a debate but an acceptance of her negative conclusion about nuclear energy." He declares that the "real question should be which sources of energy do the least harm." He cites the National Academy study Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation VII. In closing, Richter sends a challenge: "If Dr. Caldicott is really concerned about human health, she should join me and others in an effort to rid the world of coal generation, switching first to natural gas and nuclear, and when we do develop large-scale, cleaner generation systems, moving toward those."
In the second letter, a professor emeritus of technology management accuses Caldicott of promoting "a Dr. Strangelove image of physicists" and of caricaturing doctors as authoritarian. He continues:
Credibility and legitimacy spring from scientific evidence and verifiable analysis, not from self-congratulatory cries of "trust me." Society must face up to the full magnitude of the Chernobyl disaster without conflating it with the consequences of Three Mile Island.
The benefits of radiation therapy in treating cancer should be kept in mind and the possibilities of new, safer technologies, such as the emerging thorium reactors in China, should be evaluated on their merits.
Both physicists and physicians need to join together in pursuing scientific methods, rather than promoting simplistic stereotypes.
The third letter comes from Fred A. Mettler of Albuquerque, identified as emeritus commissioner of the International Commission on Radiological Protection and as representing the US on the United Nations Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. "Helen Caldicott is a known antinuclear activist," he writes, "and would have us believe that there is a vast conspiracy among physicists to promote nuclear power and that physicians are the good guys who know better." He, too, cites the work of the National Academy, and he makes a particular point of ridiculing Caldicott's allegations that milk from cows that grazed too close to Three Mile Island has made Hershey's chocolate dangerous.
In the fourth letter, a health physicist questions Caldicott's huge confidence "that doctors know what's good for you in terms of radiation." The writer asserts that many "millions of people are being exposed to nontrivial doses of radiation for medical procedures without adequate risk-benefit analysis and without adequate recordkeeping for the doses they receive," and expresses the suspicion that "many doctors have not been well trained enough with regard to radiation risk to make informed decisions about the benefit versus the risk of the radiation procedures they order."
It's probably dangerous to extrapolate too much from the letters that appear on a given issue, but maybe in this case it's fair to conclude that at least among those who submitted letters to the Times, Caldicott found little support for her enthusiastic anti-physicist, anti-nuke charges.
New York Times interviews Stephen Hawking
What the New York Times calls a "rare interview" with Stephen Hawking dominates the front page of this week's Science Times section. The interview took place in conjunction with a recent visit, at the invitation of Lawrence Krauss, to a science festival at Arizona State University.
"Like Einstein," the Claudia Dreifus piece begins, Hawking "is as famous for his story as for his science." Dreifus summarizes his physics accomplishments, then says that "at 69, Dr. Hawking is one of the longest-living survivors" of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis "and perhaps the most inspirational."
"I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible," Hawking says. "I am lucky to be working in theoretical physics, one of the few areas in which disability is not a serious handicap." He adds: "My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn't prevent you doing well, and don't regret the things it interferes with. Don't be disabled in spirit, as well as physically."
Hawking comments on
I entered the health care debate in response to a statement in the United States press in summer 2009 which claimed the National Health Service in Great Britain would have killed me off, were I a British citizen. I felt compelled to make a statement to explain the error.
I am British, I live in Cambridge, England, and the National Health Service has taken great care of me for over 40 years. I have received excellent medical attention in Britain, and I felt it was important to set the record straight. I believe in universal health care. And I am not afraid to say so.
Today, a note appears at the top of the online version of that editorial: "This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK."
Corrects it indeed. The mention of Hawking has been outright removed.
New York Times, American Physical Society, direct air capture of CO2
The New York Times—but so far, not the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post—has reported on reactions to a new American Physical Society report that found that if systems achieving direct air capture of carbon dioxide are ever to "have a substantial role in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, [they] would need to be much less costly than the benchmark system considered in the report."
The report, Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals, follows a two-year study conducted by a 13-member committee whose members work in industry, academia, and government laboratories. A 9 May APS press release summarizes what they studied:
In systems achieving direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide (CO2), ambient air flows over a chemical sorbent, either liquid or solid, that selectively removes the CO2. The CO2 is then released as a concentrated stream for disposal or reuse, while the sorbent is regenerated and the CO2-depleted air is returned to the atmosphere. DAC is now included in discussions of climate change policy because it is among the few strategies that might lower the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to reduce the negative impacts of climate change.
The press release observes that "it makes little sense to ignore the emissions of CO2 in the flue gas from a coal power plant while removing CO2 from ambient air where it is 300 times more dilute," that the assessment estimates that such removal "would be seven or more times less expensive" than with the benchmark DAC system, and that "it would not be wise to delay dealing with climate change on the grounds that at some future time DAC could be available as a significant compensating strategy."
The Times's article stipulates that the DAC "concept is entirely different from capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide from power plants and other big polluters before it enters the air. Rather, the aim would be to remove the gas from the planet's ambient air, where it exists in low concentrations everywhere." The article reports that in 2007, the British billionaire Richard Branson and former vice president Al Gore "created a $25 million prize for the first creator of such a technology" and that "millions of dollars in venture capital have since flowed to start-up companies tackling the problem."
The DAC report's "conclusion was greeted with dismay by several leading scientists," the Times reports. One is Wallace S. Broecker, a professor of geology at Columbia University, who argues that the "cost depends on how widely" DAC is implemented, and who notes that the "first computers cost a fortune, and now they cost almost nothing."
Another is Klaus S. Lackner, a physicist and director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia's Earth Institute, who reportedly criticized the study "as too narrowly focused" and as having "analyzed only outdated technology." Lackner has an alternative design.
Another critic reportedly charged that "the report had failed to take into account the use of captured carbon dioxide as a feedstock for biofuels, like those made from algae."
Schoolteachers, scientist volunteers, Nature's editors
Has recent public discussion sometimes unfairly mischaracterized schoolteachers, or even unjustly maligned them?
Yes, according to Jon Stewart, the serious comic who anchors the satirical Daily Show on Comedy Central. He has displayed video clips of pundits stereotyping allegedly lazy teachers who vanish every afternoon at 3. He testifies about the contrast between that and what he saw with his own eyes while growing up in the household of a dedicated professional teacher.
No, according to a Washington Post editorial declaring that the maligners target teachers unions, not teachers—and that the unions have it coming.
But consider the tone and content of Nature's advocacy this week of Scientific American's "1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days" program, which seeks scientist volunteers for what a Nature editorial calls "a kind of science corps to support the growth of developing minds." Scientific American says the program will make "it easier for scientists and teachers to connect."
Great stuff, except for some of Nature's implicit assumptions about the teaching profession.
Nature's editors note that "in the younger grades, many US science teachers have no science training." None at all? Granted, no one wants high school physics taught by physical education majors. But does it follow that just because a graduate from a respected university chooses teaching "in the younger grades," she has faulty knowledge of—and lacks communicable enthusiasm for—the concept of geological time, or the wonders of electromagnetism, or the marvels of animal adaptation?
And even if a teacher earned her degree from a nonprestigious school, must she inevitably lack any special spark for inspiring curiosity in kids about weather's complexity? For "the younger grades," does that task really require a science degree or a science minor? Or does it actually require a decent grounding plus pedagogical talent and honed teaching skill? And is it fair to speculate that such talent and skill may not appear widely even among scientists themselves, most of whom have presumably never even tried to teach school?
Nature's editors ask, "What can scientist volunteers do?" The editors' answers suggest that they assume that pretty much any given scientist, thanks to qualities including her own special spark of curiosity, can step right into the school science environment and not just catch up fast and find her way, but lead.
The editors suggest, "Perhaps [such scientist volunteers] could spend an hour in a local classroom or school auditorium talking about a typical day in the lab—thereby helping to demystify the world of science for children." But that's the deficit model of science communication—the questionable belief that scientists can enhance science awareness simply by delivering ever-better lectures to captive audiences on a one-way basis. Have Nature's editors—who themselves, in other contexts, sometimes advocate the two-way engagement model—consulted any seasoned professional teachers about that?
The editors also suggest that a scientist volunteer "could give a local school board advice about curricula." No doubt that could be constructively true—for a scientist willing to commit to learning about, and participating within, a school system's long-range planning effort, as opposed to merely generating off-the-cuff wisdom and lobbing it over the school board's transom.
The editors assert, "How scientists participate ... will be up to them." In a context genuinely respectful of the teaching profession, wouldn't that say instead something like, "Scientists can learn from teachers and school leaders what opportunities are available for helping"?
But in Nature's editors' framing, it's not a context genuinely respectful of the teaching profession.
And here's how you can tell that for sure:
Long ago, George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman contained a famous line: "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." Over time, that line became remembered as the cliché "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."
For their editorial summoning not just volunteers to Scientific American's worthy program, but superscientists to rescue schoolkids from faculties made up mainly of doltish, undereducated, science-unenthusiastic teachers, Nature's editors chose the headline "Those who can."
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
Other members of the committee include former Clinton administration officials Kathleen McGinty, who chaired the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and Susan Tierney, former assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Energy. Others are global energy analyst and Pulitzer-prize winning author Daniel Yergin, Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback, Texas A&M University petroleum engineer Stephen Holditch, and Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp. The panel was established as a subcommittee of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, although only Deutch, Tierney, and Yergin are members of the full SEAB.
Announcement of the panel's formation drew criticism from some lawmakers who believe the gas exploration business is already sufficiently regulated. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, accused the Department of Energy of "piling on" in getting involved with an issue that is already overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. Noting that fracking has been used in gas extraction for more than 60 years, Upton complained in a statement that "adding another study to the mix will do little to prove anything and only serve to waste more government resources."
David Kramer]]>