Author Archives: Emily Collins

Monsanto is currently testing GMO wheat in two states

by Emily Collins Posted on June 4, 2013

Monsanto is currently testing GMO wheat in two states

By John Upton

John Novotny

Last week, when the USDA announced that an unauthorized strain of GMO wheat was recently discovered on an Oregon farm, it was widely reported (by us, among others) that Monsanto had stopped field-testing its genetically modified wheat in 2005.

Now Bloomberg reports that the biotech giant actually resumed field tests of GMO wheat in 2011:

The world’s largest seed company planted 150 acres of wheat in Hawaii last year that was genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate weedkiller, which the company sells under the brand name Roundup, according to a Virginia Tech database administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Another 300 acres of wheat engineered with Roundup tolerance and other traits are being tested in North Dakota this year.

Were these recent field trials linked to the outbreak of unwanted GMO wheat in Oregon? We don’t know that yet. Monsanto, which you may or may not choose to trust, told Bloomberg in an email that the Roundup Ready wheat in the new trials is “an entirely different event” than the escaped crop discovered in Oregon.

It’s weird to describe wheat as an “event,” instead of, oh, I don’t know, a “crop.” Seems like somebody is playing with words.

The company didn’t say whether the GMO wheat that it’s now growing in field trials is the same strain as the GMO wheat that showed up in Oregon. “The Roundup Ready wheat project that is the subject of the USDA report was previously discontinued,” Monsanto cryptically told Bloomberg.

Monsanto abandoned its previous Roundup Ready wheat trials in 2005, without securing government approval for the crop, at least in part because U.S. wheat farmers feared that a GMO strain could hurt exports. They were right. Exports have been hurt, even though the GMO strain was never OK’d or sold. Just imagine how much damage Monsanto could do to exports if it ever actually brings GMO wheat to market.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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John Kerry Updates His Climate Change Creds at the Arctic Council

by Emily Collins Posted on May 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Secretary of State John Kerry is headed to Kiruna, Sweden, tomorrow, 14 May, for a ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council, the only diplomatic forum focused exclusively on the Arctic region. Members represent the eight nations with territory north of the Arctic Circle (Canada, the US, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden), plus representatives of Arctic indigenous peoples. The Council’s concerns include a broad swath of environmental issues stemming from a wildly changing global climate amplified in the Arctic.

The meeting comes 25 years after Kerry hosted climate change hearing with Al Gore in the Senate and nothing happened. This year’s Arctic Council is focused on mitigating a future oil spill as drilling in the far north ramps up. Ministers will be signing of an historic Arctic Marine Oil Pollution Preparedness and Response Agreement. The State Department describes this as an agreement that will “forge strong partnerships in advance of an oil spill so that Arctic countries can quickly and cooperatively respond before it endangers lives and threatens fragile ecosystems.”

Sounds great, except we can’t contain offshore spills, no matter the level of cooperation. Still, Kerry’s attendance will boost interest in an obscure Council and the problems—for most—of a faraway place.

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John Kerry Updates His Climate Change Creds at the Arctic Council

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Finally, a Real Scandal for Conservatives to Chew On

by Emily Collins Posted on May 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Hey, guess what? Conservatives now have a real scandal to tout! They’ve been complaining for a while that the IRS singled out tea party groups for audits, and it turns out they were right. Today, the IRS fessed up:

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups…”That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out. About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.

In this case, conservatives will undoubtedly demand more information about how this happened, who was involved, and when top officials found out about it. And this time, they’ll be right to.

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Finally, a Real Scandal for Conservatives to Chew On

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California town of Sebastopol will require solar panels on all new homes

by Emily Collins Posted on May 9, 2013

California town of Sebastopol will require solar panels on all new homes

By John Upton

Sebastopol

Vineyards won’t be the only things flourishing when the sun shines on the fertile city of Sebastopol, Calif., in Sonoma wine country. The liberal stronghold of fewer than 8,000 residents this week became California’s second city to require that new homes be outfitted with panels to produce solar energy.

A vote by the City Council on Tuesday evening came less than two months after a similar program was approved in Lancaster, Calif., a conservative desert city with 150,000 residents nearly 400 miles away.

From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:

Sebastopol’s ordinance would require new residential and commercial buildings — as well as major additions and remodelings — to include a photovoltaic energy-generation system.

The system would have to provide 2 watts of power per square foot of insulated building area or offset 75 percent of the building’s annual electric load.

In situations where solar power is impractical, such as shaded areas, new buildings may use other energy alternatives or pay a fee.

Councilman Patrick Slayter, who co-authored the measure with [Mayor Michael] Kyes, remarked that the council’s action — before a crowd of about 40 people — was “on the low end of the scale (of controversy), which is welcome.”

The two Californian cities that have adopted solar mandates have markedly different climates and demographics, showing solar’s wide appeal.

And as soon as a third city joins up, we’ll be ready to call this a trend.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

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What We Know—And What We Don’t—About the Oregon Medicaid Study

by Emily Collins Posted on May 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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I’ve been spending a bit of time this weekend trying to understand better what the real issues are with the Oregon Medicaid study that was released on Thursday and shortly afterward exploded across the blogosphere. Unfortunately, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s next to impossible to explain it in a way that would be understandable to most people. My readers, however, are not “most people,” so I figure I’ll take a crack at it anyway. The damage may have already been done from the many misinterpretations of the Oregon study that have been published over the past few days, but who knows? Maybe this will help anyway.

First, to refresh your memory: In 2008, Oregon expanded Medicaid coverage but didn’t have enough money to cover everyone. So they ran a lottery. If you lost, you got nothing. If you won, you were offered the chance to sign up for Medicaid. This provided a unique opportunity to study the effect of Medicaid coverage, because Oregon provided two groups of people who were essentially identical except for the fact that one group (the control group) didn’t have access to Medicaid, while the other group (the treatment group) did.

There are several things to say about the Oregon study, but I think the most important one is this: not that the study didn’t find statistically significant improvements in various measures of health, but that the study couldn’t have found statistically significant improvements. It was impossible from the beginning.

Here’s why. The first thing the researchers should have done, before the study was even conducted, was estimate what a clinically significant result would be. For example, based on past experience, they might have decided that if access to Medicaid produced a 20 percent reduction in the share of the population with elevated levels of glycated hemoglobin (a common marker for diabetes), that would be a pretty successful intervention.

Then the researchers would move on to step two: suppose they found the clinically significant reduction they were hoping for? Is their study designed in such a way that a clinically significant result would also be statistically significant? Obviously it should be.

Let’s do the math. In the Oregon study, 5.1 percent of the people in the control group had elevated GH levels. Now let’s take a look at the treatment group. It started out with about 6,000 people who were offered Medicaid. Of that, 1,500 actually signed up. If you figure that 5.1 percent of them started out with elevated GH levels, that’s about 80 people. A 20 percent reduction would be 16 people.

So here’s the question: if the researchers ended up finding the result they hoped for (i.e., a reduction of 16 people with elevated GH levels), is there any chance that this result would be statistically significant? I can’t say for sure without access to more data, but the answer is almost certainly no. It’s just too small a number. Ditto for the other markers they looked at. In other words, even if they got the results they were hoping for, they were almost foreordained not to be statistically significant. And if they’re not statistically significant, that means the headline result is “no effect.”

The problem is that, for all practical purposes, the game was rigged ahead of time to produce this result. That’s not the fault of the researchers. They were working with the Oregon Medicaid lottery, and they couldn’t change the size of the sample group. What they had was 1,500 people, of whom about 5.1 percent started with elevated GH levels. There was no way to change that.

Given that, they probably shouldn’t even have reported results. They should have simply reported that their test design was too underpowered to demonstrate statistically significant results under any plausible conditions. But they didn’t do that. Instead, they reported their point estimates with some really big confidence intervals and left it at that, opening up a Pandora’s Box of bad interpretations in the press.

Knowing all this, what’s a fair thing to say about the results of this study?

One fair thing would be to simply say that it’s inconclusive, full stop. It tells us nothing about the effect of Medicaid access on diabetes, cholesterol levels, or blood pressure maintenance. I’m fine with that interpretation.
Another fair thing would be to say that the results were positive, but the study was simply to small to tell us if the results are real.
Or there’s a third fair thing you could say: From a Bayesian perspective, the Oregon results should slightly increase our belief that access to Medicaid produces positive results for diabetes, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure maintenance. It shouldn’t increase our belief much, but if you toss the positive point estimates into the stew of everything we already know, they add slightly to our prior belief that Medicaid is effective.
But you can’t say that the results are disappointing, at least not without a lot of caveats. At a minimum, the bare fact that the results aren’t statistically significant certainly can’t be described as a disappointment. That was baked into the cake from the beginning. This study was never likely to find significant results in the first place.

So that’s that. You can’t honestly say that the study shows that Medicaid “seemed to have little or no impact on common medical conditions like hypertension and diabetes.” That just isn’t what it showed.

POSTSCRIPT: That said, there are a few other things worth saying about this study too. For example, the researchers apparently didn’t have estimates of clinical significance in mind before they conducted the study. That’s odd, and it would be nice if they confirmed whether or not this is true. Also: the subjects of the study were an unusually healthy group, with pretty low levels of the chronic problems that were being measured. That makes substantial improvements even less likely than usual. And finally: on the metrics that had bigger sample sizes and could provide more reliable results (depression, financial security, self-reported health, etc.), the results of the study were uniformly positive and statistically significant.

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What We Know—And What We Don’t—About the Oregon Medicaid Study

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The Reinhart/Rogoff Episode Shows Us Why Data Openness is So Important

by Emily Collins Posted on April 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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What’s the most important takeaway from this week’s kerfuffle over the errors in the Reinhart/Rogoff dataset? Obviously there are public policy implications, since R&R concluded that debt levels above 90 percent of GDP lead to a sharp dropoff in economic growth. This provided important intellectual support during the past few years for the belief that it’s more important to focus on deficit reduction than on unemployment and fiscal stimulus.

In the end, though, although R&R’s results were important, they probably weren’t crucial. As Jared Bernstein notes, deficit hawks were “using research findings the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination. If the R&R lamppost turns out to be wobbly, the austerions [] will find another one. In this town, I’m sorry to say, you can pretty much go think-tank shopping to buy the result you seek.”

I agree. R&R’s results were convenient to have, but not crucial. People who are dedicated to cutting spending, either for political or ideological reasons, would simply have trotted out other justifications if R&R’s study hadn’t been available.

More important, then, may be the light this shines on the fact that an awful lot of research is based on datasets that are kept private. Megan McArdle pinpoints both the reason for this and the dangers involved:

There are a lot of private data sets out there these days, and a lot of work being produced off of them. Why can’t more of us see it?

Mostly, I suspect, because of the economics of the thing. Assembling a nice private data set is a huge amount of work. You want to be able to mine that work for publishable insights. Very little professional credit accrues to the guy who built a great dataset which everyone else uses to generate elegant new findings. The credit goes to the authors of the elegant new findings. Which means that once you’ve built a dataset, you want to keep the thing to yourself as long as possible.

….Unfortunately, there’s always the possibility that “I want to hold onto it as long as possible so I can publish” can be a cover for “I need to hold onto it as long as possible because if anyone else sees it, it will rapidly become obvious that my results aren’t very robust.” Or, in some cases, for “There are no results because I made the whole thing up.”

This was an issue that was front and center during Climategate. Climate skeptics were unhappy that the raw data collected by various research groups (mostly using public money) wasn’t made available to them, and they made the reasonable point that if your analysis is correct, you shouldn’t be afraid to share the underlying data. Professional researchers, for their part, were reluctant to make their data available because they knew it would generate an enormous flurry of amateur debunkings that they’d have to waste their time picking apart. In the end, though, releasing the data didn’t make much difference because it turned out the professionals were interpreting it correctly.

This is why the R&R incident might be more important. It’s not just that critics found errors in the dataset once they got hold of it. Even more important might be the fact that once the raw data was available, they were motivated to do certain types of analysis that R&R didn’t do. For example, they discovered that R&R’s results were quite fragile, changing dramatically with the addition or subtration of just a few observations. They also found that, far from showing a sharp drop in growth when debt passes 90 percent of GDP, the data actually showed a sharp drop between 0-30 percent of GDP and only a rather leisurely decline above 70 percent. Finally, and perhaps most important, UMass economist Arindrajit Dube took a closer look at what the data said about causality, and produced persuasive evidence that R&R’s own data suggested not that high debt leads to low growth, but that low growth leads to high debt. R&R could have performed the same analysis, but for some reason they weren’t interested in it.

As long as the dataset was private, nobody would ever have known any of these things. We could have guessed them—and a lot of people did—but we wouldn’t have had any evidence. Now we do. Unfortunately, as McArdle says, “the incentives are all wrong for data openness.” This episode suggests why it might be worthwhile to try to change those incentives.

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The Reinhart/Rogoff Episode Shows Us Why Data Openness is So Important

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Generate your own personal electricity with DIY Solar Panels

by Emily Collins Posted on March 27, 2013

Solar Panels are effective and save your cash from paying every month electricity bills. These panels require onetime installation charges or you’re able to make it your self by using DIY Solar Panels. All these solar panel systems are safe and produce clean electricity as compared to the electrical energy made by gas or fuel. By working with DIY Solar Panels you’ll need several tools that you must buy from the market.

The first thing you will need for producing solar electricity would be the support frame on which solar cells will work and you should put on the top roof of the home exactly where rays of sun arrives straight. It is a sheet of copper where these cells operate, you can buy these sort of copper frame from market place very easily.

The 2nd tool you need is a solar cells which are produced from silicon and phosphorus. There are also several varieties of cells available at the market place but purchase those that are unbreakable. Place these cells on the solar panel and arrange them in a line, join every cell with electrical cable and be sure electricity easily moves from one solar cell to another.

Now you need larger battery that will store huge quantity of electricity inside it that is made from the solar cells. You can’t utilize this electrical energy directly to power up your home appliances. To convert this electricity you need inverter which will convert these electricity into useable electrical energy from which you are able to power up your house usage home appliances.

Right after getting every item now you have to get screwdriver and few iron nails. Make use of screwdriver and iron nails to connect solar cells with solar panel and connect them with electrical wire. Attach all of them using copper cable without damaging solar cells. Learn How solar panels work contain specific strategies on the subject of how to build solar panel.

If you follow above method then it will help you in saving your time and dollars. You could save great deal of cash by using above DIY solar panels instruction. Once you step-up solar power system you will end up saving lot of cash on paying power monthly charges.

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