Friday, March 20, 2009
"The Enlightenment Returns," a guest editorial by Kurt Gottfried and
Harold Varmus in today's Science, reminds readers that the founders of our
nation were children of the Enlightenment. They "understood the power
that flows from combining human reason with empirical knowledge."
President Obama's Memorandum on Scientific Integrity directs
administration officials to neither suppress nor alter scientific and
technological findings, and make information developed for the government
available to the public. Our long winter is over.
The Recovery Act supplements NSF FY 09 funding by $3 billion. Of the $2
billion available in Research and Related Activities, the majority will be
used for proposals that are already in house. All grants issued with
Recovery Act funds will be standard grants with durations up to five
years. New principal investigators and high-risk, high-return research
will be top priorities. Proposals declined on or after October 1, 2008
will also be considered. The Recovery Act mandates a transparency and
accountability.
Stephen Harper, newly elected Conservative-Party Prime Minister, named
Gary Goodyear, an obscure Member of Parliament, to be Minister of Science
and Technology. Already this year Goodyear oversaw a series of massive
science funding cuts, including zeroing out the Genome program. A
chiropractor and acupuncturist with no science background, he is known for
opposing same-sex marriage and favoring full legal rights for fertilized
eggs. Asked in an interview if he believed in evolution, he objected to
being questioned about religion. Later that day he said he believed in
evolution. He should have stopped there, but expanded with an example
from chiropractic about women's shoes and the spine. He clearly confused
genetic inheritance with adaptation of an individual, or perhaps he
believes in Lamarckian evolution.
The Editor of Science and Technology magazine was fired over her plan to
mark the Darwin year with a magazine cover showing Darwin and the HMS
Beagle. Instead it marked the sad end of a secular society in Asia.
Last year a federal court refused to enjoin the Large Hadron Collider from
being turned on lest the enormous energy create a black hole that would
devour Earth http://bobpark.org/WN08/wn040408.html . Earth survived this
reckless adventure by experimental physicists, but could theoretical
physicists be behind the financial black hole that's sucking up all of the
world's wealth? The CBS News program 60 Minutes has warned repeatedly
that mathematicians and theoretical physicists are being recruited by Wall
Street Wall Street to concoct complicated financial "derivatives" that no
one can understand http://bobpark.org/WN95/wn031095.html . The current
favorite, assembled by the geniuses in the financial products division of
AIG, is the credit default swap, or CDS. You can think of a CDS as the
financial equivalent of an IED. For this they got millions in bonuses?
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