Pangloss

This should be good. John Stossel, one of the few libertarians in modern mainstream media, interviews the queen of welfare-state liberalism, Ariana Huffington. Here are some juicy experts from Stossel's weekly email announcement: Rofl. You tell her, brother! The show it tomorrow (Friday) night, April 26th, in the ABC network here in the states. I imagine it will show up on YouTube or at least ABC's web site.

I upgraded my sat dish the other day and now I'm getting Mythbusters in HD. Woot.

That seemed to be what he was saying, yes. I haven't seen any math on this, though. I'm hoping to hear more about it in the near future.

She's not full of it with regard to Florida, IMO, but certainly you can't look seriously at the Michigan numbers and talk about popular vote. That's silly. But she has every right to claim that Floridians voted for her over Obama. Absolutely. Doesn't mean a thing, of course, but it's absolutely true.

The former -- according to the ABC News article I linked above, many companies are now refusing to hire smokers, for example, not just opting them out of healthcare. What's not clear to me at the moment is why they can't hire them and just opt them out of healthcare, or charge them more money, but that's what they said. (Actually I'm assuming it was in the article; they said it in the video piece. Maybe they're just wrong? It does seem like a non-sequitur, I admit, or perhaps the reporter didn't realize it was a moral policy rather than an insurance-derived mandate.) Very interesting. I've always felt that a lot of what happens in the insurance industry is only very loosely tied with actual statistics. Actuarial science may be a perfectly healthy and valid academic study, but the people who run the companies may not adhere to it, understand it, etc. I've met people who work very high up in that business, often working for them as a consultant, and some of them can barely spell MBA, much less read an actuarial table, and yet are responsible for setting policy. We should get KLB back in here. I tried to make that argument a couple of years ago and it didn't go over real well -- he linked a bunch of studies showing how it almost didn't matter how much you smoked, just that you smoked at all. The thread should still be in here somewhere.

Actually as I understand it most automobiles have been on a train at some point in time (at least in the US). That's how they typically get from the factory or shipping port to the region, at which point they're reloaded onto a truck for local delivery. Trucks are just too small to carry enough cars to make cross-country shipping in that manner efficient, so trains do the job most of the time. (That's why if you get a new car you have to clay it immediately to get off that really fine, gritty, metallic dust that settles on the finish from the train ride.)

In many cases these rules are changed after the employees are hired, and forced on existing employees based on the requirements of the health insurance provider. Employees can seek employment elsewhere, but if all employers are doing the same thing, for the same reasons, then that produces a situation where you can't get work because of your habits in eating, drinking, vacations, etc. This just underscores, IMO, the need to separate healthcare from employment.

It is my opinion, iNow, based on relevent past experience (which you've acknowledged). I've acknowledged your point as well. Let's move on.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=4712330&page=1 Apparently more and more employers are taking a hard line about heathcare. Some companies refuse to hire smokers, for example. But what this story is about is a case in which employees stated on their applications that they were non-smokers (in order to get a healthcare discount), and then we seen smoking outside a building on company premises. To me that seems like a pretty clear-cut case of fraud, but the larger issue of employers screening applicants over healthy practices is one for concern, given the way it's based on medical information that can often be rapidly developing or not fully understood, such as the use of certain medications, or the links between other kinds of behavior (besides smoking) and health effects (like obesity and cancer). We could see, for example, employers firing employees who spent more than the company-permitted (insurance-guided) amount of time on the beach working on their tans, or forgot to use the company-mandated suntan lotion in the correct amount. Or ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken. What's the difference?

Well, I will admit that I don't have any first-hand knowledge of this specific case, and you're right, it's always possible. It just seems highly unlikely to me, given the way the story was distributed. Usually in cases like the one you describe, the story will appear first in the New York Times or one of the other first-tier organizations. In this case the first appearance seems to be an Associated Press wire story. Those are quite often "redistributed faxes" (like the scenario I described), and the AP doesn't have any scientists under its employ -- it leaves that kind of reporting to the "face" outlets like the Times. So what probably happened here is that one of the people involved in the study faxed it off to the AP, perhaps on a lark (perhaps not), and the AP decided to put it on the wire. One thing that I think would be really helpful is a "story tracker" application, Web 2.0 style. Something like Google News, but more like a wiki instructure, showing the geneology of a story from its point of origin, and allowing editable notations. I've yet to see something like that, but I think it would be good to have for cases like this where you're wondering who created the media frenzy and why. I agree, that's on the media. But if a researcher (I did say "if") played this story to the media to gain his tenure or some other prestige element, then I think it's clearly on him or her as well. Oh dear. Sorry man.

Sure, but we don't allow skepticism on GW any more than we allow denialism.

Well I think there are a lot of reasons why people are starving, but I take your point, and actually this just underscores the basic interconnectedness that the world's food supply has become. This has both positive and negative aspects. I'm extremely reticent to look at this problem as if I owe some kind of personal debt to starving Africans, but I thought it was interesting to hear Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute talking yesterday about how if we were to better equip African farmers with a little more education and a few tools, we would be able to double food production there within just a couple of years. But what was really interesting about his comments was the suggestion that doing so would reduce food costs here at home, just on the basis of more supply equalling lower prices. That's a good way to look at it, and one that might actually produce change. (Mod note: This thread was split off from Virgin Atlantic to run 747 on Biofuel.)

Not sure if this got posted yet or not, but below is a link to SciAm's podcast on Expelled which was recorded following a screening of the movie at their offices. The editors are asking questions about the film of one of the producers, who brought the film to the office for review. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-conversation-with-mark-mathis

Agreed.

I agree with all of that, except the last.

Dude, chill out, it's an honest question. I did see talk in those links about shortages in the UN Food Bank, which seems like it would point to starvation probabilities, but I didn't see actual statements that people are starving, and it sounds like what needs have been served by food banks (and the like) continue to be met currently. You said a lot of people are starving over ethanol subsidies, and I still see no evidence of that, however if you want to amend that to "people may starve", it appears to be a legitimate concern. Actually this was quite informative to me -- I didn't realize until your reply earlier that other countries also subsidize corn, or that it was used in food bank efforts. Apparently it's a legitimate "fu(king" concern, I agree. The UN apparently asked for a moritorium on ethanol subsidies in 2007, and that seems like a rational thing to do.

I tell you what, it sure seems that way sometimes. The school I'm working for is suffering from declining enrollment, and I'm really starting to worry about their academic integrity. I had a student get PO'd because the class was taught in one programming language but he didn't know that language and wanted it taught in another language. He asked, I said no but offered to help him convert his knowledge on the side, but he ignored my suggestion and started turning in assignments in the language he preferred! When I told him he couldn't do that, he complained to administration, got withdrawn from the class and put in his own directed study, and my email (in which I was the soul of courtesy!) was circulated amongst management as an example of "how NOT to perform retention" (i.e. keep students at the school). (Er, sorry for the digression, but I guess it's General Discussion anyway.)

Potential? You said people are starving right now. Who is starving? My store shelves are stocked, guy. I've got five Publix supermarkets 30,000 square-feet+ within a mile of my house, not one of which are short on supplies. Do we ship corn overseas as food aid? Could that be what you mean? Are we not able to do that anymore? I have heard about shortages at food banks, but I've not heard anything like "people are starving", even when John Edwards does a drive-by for the camera -- then it's just "well we passed bridge and there were a bunch of homeless under it" (and then refuses to say where the bridge was, etc etc).

Some nice HTML work, there.

Sure, but they're not promoting skepticism about global warming, they're shunning it, saying everyone needs to shut up and stop opposing it, because skepticism in this case is (in their view) a BAD thing. Everyone needs to get on board and stop fueling the "global warming deniers", a phrase that Skeptic's editor, Michael Shermer, practically coined, writing the most popular treatise on the subject back in 2006. (We've talked all this here before.) And yet this is supposed to be a magazine for... skeptics. And here you thought skepticism wasn't based on ANY specific viewpoint, but that in fact we should be skeptical about EVERYTHING. Oh no, you were quite wrong. They're telling you so. Don't you believe them?

Skeptics are supposed to pay attention to the facts, but just look at how exaggerated this cover art for the new issue of Skeptic Magazine is. "Evangelist" would be a better name for this magazine nowadays. And look at the article list -- four articles about global warming. Apparently there is scarcely else to talk about in the entire world of science but global warming, and about that there can be no... skepticism. So, uh, what's the point of having a magazine about skepticism, then? /boggle http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/index.html

Starving? Who is starving?

I think you might've missed my point (although I can see how you got that given my last sentence). I don't have a problem with the study, in so far as it may be useful to future research, I have a problem with someone releasing the hounds of the press on this and playing it up just to ensure their tenure (or whatever happened). The press doesn't read academic journals, they respond to the ringing of their fax machines. Somebody publicized this in order to garner attention. That's why it appeared in (according to Google news) 528 news sources on the same day. I have no doubt it will run on all three major networks tonight. There's a reason for this, and it's NOT because it was published in an academic journal. I used to work as an intern at CNN. Granted this was years ago, but my job was to pull press releases from fax machines and organize them for the "reporters" who would then read them and start calling experts for responses and verification. Well you get three guesses what kind of stories I was supposed to look for, and your first two guesses don't count. Only the most sensational stuff got reported, and its accuracy or relevency was quite irrelevent, so long as a scientist was saying it. That's how they reported science news. It was pathetic then and so far as I can tell it hasn't changed since. They only paid those guys 15.5k (albeit 1990 dollars). Who's gonna roam the halls of Georgia Tech or pound the pavement at the Centers for Disease Control (both of which are just a few miles from CNN world headquarters) for that kind of money when the fax machine is chock full of ready-made stories, complete with names and phone numbers, just begging to be run? They're just going to re-word the press release, hand it to the anchor, change the paper and toner cartridge and call it a day. Meanwhile thousands of hopeful (and pregnant!) women will now change their diets -- some very dramatically -- with all the consequences THAT entails -- all because of a slight statistical bump. But those researchers, by golly, they got their tenure! That's the important thing! Not sure what you mean there. I already noted that the study was about diet prior to pregnancy, which is what the abstract and the articles seem to say.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gf8KKKMVtpIsCKAvX5WDzUm7ALbQD907LSJ05 In fairness, the article is suffused with cautionary reminders that this is just a statistical hint, but you KNOW people are going to go right out and start severely modifying their diets over this. Not to mention the ones who will misread the article and severely modify their diets during pregnancy. Is this data useful to researchers? Maybe. But there's no science in hiring a publicist to light up the fourth estate's fax machines. That's about tenure and notoriety. This actually came from the ROYAL SOCIETY, of all places! Poor Isaac Newton must be rolling in his grave. Modern science at its finest.

Sturdy enough to survive re-entry, yes. Crushing or burning its occupants on the way down, however, is an apparently open question. The Russians do get a lot of credit, I agree, but they may need to step up their quality control.