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Do we really need to spend money on social science?

by BessBaskett Posted on June 29, 2015

Do we really need to spend money on social science?

By on 29 Jun 2015commentsShare

When it comes to budgeting out a pittance to cover a range of activities, I probably should be an expert by now (hello, journalism salary in a rapidly expanding and expensifying city!), but I am most definitely not. Did I need to spend approximately $200 on farmers market strawberries last month? No, but they were goddamned delicious. If only I didn’t also have to pay for rent and electricity and internet — you know, the important, if somewhat less fun, stuff.

The National Science Foundation seems to be having a similar problem, says Stanford physician and molecular biologist Henry Miller in an LA Times op-ed. Instead of prioritizing hard science with definite social utility — like research into Alzheimer’s, or, say, the physical science of climate change — one sub-group of the NSF has been funneling that funding into more, er, questionable uses:

Here are some doozies: the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey, Viking textiles in Iceland, the “social impacts” of tourism in the northern tip of Norway, legal careers in transition following law school, and whether hunger causes couples to fight (using the number of pins stuck in voodoo dolls as a measure of aggressive feelings). …

Several academics and others have recently written commentaries praising the value of social science projects and condemning congressional attempts to rein them in. The wrongheaded notion that social science projects are inherently just as worthy as basic research in the physical and biological sciences and engineering has distorted and diminished the value of public investment in scientific research.

Do the mandarins of the social sciences really believe that a study of depictions of animals in National Geographic magazine (which the foundation funded) should take precedence over research to identify markers for Alzheimer’s disease or pancreatic cancer? A large fraction of highly ranked, important grant proposals are not accepted because of limited resources.

As for the geosciences, research on climate change is legitimate — when it is performed by meteorologists, oceanographers, physicists and biologists. But the NSF and other federal agencies have been funding redundant, politically overheated and even ludicrous climate change boondoggles. For example, the NSF has wasted millions of dollars on projects that include a climate change musical ($697,177), a series of games ($449,972) and art shows ($2.51 million).

I do have to disagree with Miller on that point. While the number of open questions about the climate (What happens in the deepest parts of the sea? What do clouds even do?) is significant, the main part is pretty well-trod territory: Human-caused carbon pollution is cluttering up the atmosphere, and heating it up at a truly alarming rate.

We know all this — what we don’t know is how to translate fact into definite action. For that — sorry, science hardliners — we are going to have to delve into the messy world of people. And, yes, that might just mean we need Climate Change: The Musical after all.

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With NSF funds limited, is $697,177 for climate change musical worth it?

, LA Times.

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Do we really need to spend money on social science?

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The Government Killed 8 Eagles, 730 Cats, and a Million Starlings Last Year

by AmbroseCawthorn Posted on April 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama finally released his kill list, and it’s 46 pages long.

No, not the list of suspected terrorists targeted for extrajudicial killing—the Department of Agriculture’s tally of every animal it killed or euthanized over the last fiscal year. All 2,713,570 of them, from 319 different species.

The culling, conducted by the agency’s Wildlife Services division, is controversial. That’s because—much like the actual kill list—the USDA’s operations are shrouded in secrecy, prone to collateral damage, and symptomatic of an approach that often uses force as something other than a last resort. (A 2012 Sacramento Bee series explored the problems with the USDA’s methods in detail.) One of the problems with culling wildlife is that once you’ve gotten into the business of killing some animals to save other animals, it’s awfully hard to get out of it.

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The Government Killed 8 Eagles, 730 Cats, and a Million Starlings Last Year

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The Fulbright Program Is the Flagship of American Cultural Diplomacy. So Why Are We Cutting It?

by GTVMichale Posted on May 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Often it’s the little things coming out of Washington, obscured by the big, scary headlines, that matter most in the long run. Items that scarcely make the news, or fail to attract your attention, or once noticed seem trivial, may carry consequences that endure long after the latest front-page crisis has passed. They may, in fact, signal fundamental changes in Washington’s priorities and policies that could even face opposition, if only we paid attention.

Take the current case of an unprecedented, unkind, under-the-radar cut in the State Department’s budget for the Fulbright Program, the venerable 68-year-old operation that annually arranges for thousands of educators, students, and researchers to be exchanged between the United States and at least 155 other countries. As Washington increasingly comes to rely on the “forward projection” of military force to maintain its global position, the Fulbright Program may be the last vestige of an earlier, more democratic, equitable, and generous America that enjoyed a certain moral and intellectual standing in the world. Yet, long advertised by the US government as “the flagship international educational exchange program” of American cultural diplomacy, it is now in the path of the State Department’s torpedoes.

Right now, all over the world, former Fulbright scholars like me (Norway, 2012) are raising the alarm, trying to persuade Congress to stand by one of its best creations, passed by unanimous bipartisan consent of the Senate and signed into law by President Truman in 1946. Alumni of the Fulbright Program number more than 325,000, including more than 123,000 Americans. Among Fulbright alums are 53 from 13 different countries who have won a Nobel Prize, 28 MacArthur Foundation fellows, 80 winners of the Pulitzer Prize, 29 who have served as the head of state or government, and at least one, lunar geologist Harrison Schmitt (Norway, 1957), who walked on the moon—not to mention the hundreds of thousands who returned to their countries with greater understanding and respect for others and a desire to get along. Check the roster of any institution working for peace around the world and you’re almost certain to find Fulbright alums whose career choices were shaped by international exchange. What’s not to admire about such a program?

Yet the Fulbright budget, which falls under the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), seems to be on the chopping block. The proposed cut amounts to chump change in Washington, only $30.5 million. But the unexpected reduction from a $234.7 million budget this year to $204.2 million in 2015 represents 13 percent of what Fulbright gets. For such a relatively small-budget program, that’s a big chunk. No one in the know will say just where the cuts are going to fall, but the most likely target could be “old Europe,” and the worldwide result is likely to be a dramatic drop from 8,000 to fewer than 6,000 in the number of applicants who receive the already exceedingly modest grants.

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The Fulbright Program Is the Flagship of American Cultural Diplomacy. So Why Are We Cutting It?

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 27, 2013

by LinoConrick Posted on December 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Marines and sailors with Ragnarok Company, 2nd Supply Battalion, 2nd Marine Logistics Group tramp through the sands of Onslow Beach aboard Camp Lejeune, N.C., Dec. 13, 2013. The sand simulated snow, which the service members expect to hike through during winter training aboard the Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, Calif., and Cold Response 2014 in Norway. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 27, 2013

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Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere, As Far As the Eye Can See

by marsxxzaa Posted on December 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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One of the fundamental causes of the housing bubble of the aughts was a global glut of investment money with nowhere productive to go. So instead it went into housing, causing bubbles in the U.S. and several other countries. When the bubble burst, the economy tanked. And since the United States is so big, the Great Recession affected the whole world.

Here in America, we’d like to believe that we learned our lesson. And maybe we did. But there’s still a global glut of investment money around, and there still aren’t enough productive uses for it. So where’s it going? Neil Irwin reports that Nouriel Roubini thinks it’s still going into housing:

Roubini doesn’t see bubbles in the places where they were most severe in the pre-2008 period. He doesn’t mention the United States or Spain or Ireland. Rather, Roubini sees housing prices getting out of whack in quite a few small and mid-sized nations that are well-governed and managed to avoid the worst economic effects of the financial crisis: Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the London metropolitan area in the U.K.

….Roubini’s argument boils down to this: The major economies have been growing only slowly. Yet with low interest rates and aggressive central bank action across the globe, there is a giant pool of money that has to go somewhere. That somewhere has not been productive new investments, like companies building new factories. Rather, it has come in the form of people taking advantage of cheap credit to bid up the price of existing real estate in cities from Stockholm to Sydney.

The key problem, as it’s been for over a decade, is why investors can’t find enough productive uses for their money. Weak economic growth due to rising income inequality is one possibility. Another is the rise of cheap entertainment—Facebook, Xbox, World of Warcraft—which portends lower demand for physical goods and services in the future. Or maybe it’s because of steadily rising unemployment thanks to the growth of automation.

Whatever the reason, if this imbalance continues, it’s hard to see things turning out well in the medium term. We need either less capital formation or else more consumer demand—or both. The alternative is bubble after bubble. They may come in different places and different things, but what other alternative is there?

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Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere, As Far As the Eye Can See

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U.K. joins the club, vows to curb coal financing

by DarellHollway Posted on November 21, 2013

U.K. joins the club, vows to curb coal financing

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No longer will British taxpayers have to foot the bill for the climate-unfriendly practice of building coal power plants in developing countries.

Britain pledged Wednesday to end most financing support for coal power projects. The pledge came during U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, Poland. The U.S., Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the World Bank, and the European Investment Bank have already made similar promises, which are aimed at curbing carbon emissions. From Bloomberg:

“We will work to get support of more countries and the multilateral development banks,” U.K. Energy Secretary Edward Davey said in Warsaw, where delegates from about 190 countries met for United Nations climate talks. Funding for coal would be allowed under the “rare circumstances” when alternatives aren’t available and there’s a case for reducing poverty.

Reliance on coal moved into focus at the talks after a UN report indicated that humans already burned more than half the amount of fossil fuels that could lead to dangerous changes in the climate. Coal generated 30.3 percent of the world’s primary energy in 2011, the highest level since 1969, according to the World Coal Association. It slipped to 29.9 percent last year.

“Now the Japanese and Germans need to follow suit,” said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.


Source
Sierra Club commends UK coal financing ban, Sierra Club
U.K. Joins U.S. Pledge to Stop Funding Foreign Coal-Power Plants, Bloomberg

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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Will the U.S. and New Zealand cave on plans for the world’s biggest marine reserve?

by Zack Leverett Posted on September 5, 2013

Will the U.S. and New Zealand cave on plans for the world’s biggest marine reserve?

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Russia is almost as far away from the Antarctic as you can get without climbing aboard a spaceship, but it still wants to make sure it can fish the living hell out of Antarctic waters.

cortto

The Ross Sea in the Antarctic.

The U.S. and New Zealand have been pushing plans to create the world’s largest marine reserve, 890,000 square miles in the Ross Sea, an Antarctic bay in the Southern Ocean teeming with spawning fish, whales, seals, penguins, and other wildlife.

But that proposal was thwarted by Russia during the last two meetings of the multi-nation Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. (Russia also blocked a separate bid by Australia and Europe to establish a similar but slightly smaller chain of reserves nearby in East Antarctica.) Chile, China, Japan, Korea, and Norway, also members of the commission, share some of Russia’s concerns about the economic impacts of fishing restrictions in the Antarctic.

Now comes word that New Zealand will likely propose a smaller reserve to accommodate the Russians. From Fairfax NZ, which operates newspapers in New Zealand:

[New Zealand Prime Minister John] Key said today officials are working on a new plan, ahead of talks in Tasmania next month. …

“This is the second attempt to get change, and if we are going to get change we are probably going to make some alterations,” he said today. …

[I]nsiders are speculating that as much as 40 per cent of the sanctuary, including important spawning grounds in the north, will be cut.

Environmentalists are calling for New Zealand and the U.S. to stand strong.

“It would be a missed opportunity to retreat from US Secretary of State John Kerry’s commitment earlier this year to the Ross Sea,” Andrea Kavanagh, director of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Southern Ocean sanctuaries project, said in a statement. “We ask that US and New Zealand officials hold the line. The Ross Sea is one of the most beautiful and pristine areas left on Earth and we are urging governments to protect it.”

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.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Politics

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Will the U.S. and New Zealand cave on plans for the world’s biggest marine reserve?

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Smash patriarchy, save the planet

by Michalak876 Posted on March 9, 2013

Smash patriarchy, save the planet

By Susie Cagle

Women might make up more than half the Earth’s human population, but we often bear the brunt of the same sorts of policies and destructive ways of thinking that are responsible for global climate change.

Do those things seem unrelated? Well, they’re not, which is why International Women’s Day is a perfect time to remember that the systems that degrade the planet are also the ones that oppress women.

Eve Ensler, the artist and activist behind The Vagina Monologues, connected the dots between abusing the planet and abusing women last month in this interview with Grist, where she called out the global economy’s destructive “pressing rape mentality, which has to do with the powerful getting what they want at the expense of the person they’re taking it from, without an awareness of reciprocity or mutuality.”

From former Prime Minister of Norway and Director-General of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem Brundtland, writing at Fast Co.Exist:

Conflict and environmental degradation compound the problem in many contexts, leaving women even more vulnerable to violence. Soldiers and militias commonly use rape as a weapon of war. As climate change affects the availability of water, food and firewood, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, women have to travel longer distances to fetch supplies, putting them at greater risk of molestation, harassment, rape and beatings.

We cannot treat these issues in isolation; they are part of a bigger picture of systemic discrimination against women.

Policies that help the planet — such as family planning and flexible and remote work – also stand to help ladies maybe even more than guys (don’t whine too much, dudes, they’re good for you too). And this time, a lot of women are pushing back and vowing not to be left behind yet again. They’re taking the bike lanes, remaking cities, and leading the Idle No More movement (march tomorrow, Toronto!) all in the name of sustainability and equality.

I’d like to end this on a special IWD shout-out to the Ovarian Psycos women of color bike brigade in Los Angeles. “This is our own way of protesting,” says one member. “We think our bicycles are a revolutionary concept.”

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Everyone to Asia: We don’t want your stinkin’ unsustainable palm oil

by 0c4g78x Posted on March 8, 2013

Everyone to Asia: We don’t want your stinkin’ unsustainable palm oil

By Susie Cagle

danielnugent

There’s great news this week for everyone except the people producing tons of unsustainable palm oil: Customers are jumping ship right and left, swearing off of the processed food grease that has become the top cause of deforestation in Southeast Asia.

Dunkin’ Donuts has agreed to phase out the palm oil it stuffs into its sweet, fatty pastry rings. The move came under pressure from the green-minded comptroller of New York state, Tom DiNapoli, who leveraged the state’s investment in Dunkin’ to bring about the change, 350.org-divestment-campaign style.

From the New York Times’ City Room blog:

The comptroller is best known for his role overseeing the state’s pension fund, not for pushing for breakfast-food reform. But in this case, the goals are one and the same: as of last week, the pension fund owned 51,400 shares of Dunkin’ Brands Group worth about $2 million, and Mr. DiNapoli seeks to prod companies in which the fund invests to embrace sustainable practices …

“Consumers may not realize that many of the foods and cosmetics they eat and use contain palm oil that has been harvested in ways that are severely detrimental to the environment,” Mr. DiNapoli said in a statement. “Shareholder value is enhanced when companies take steps to address the risks associated with environmental practices that promote climate change.”

Ironically, Dunkin’ had switched to using palm oil as a kind of healthy alternative (ha) during the Great Transfat Scare of the Mid-Aughts.

This week Norway, too, announced it has divested from Asian palm oil completely, due to environmental concerns. Reuters reports:

“We are very happy with this development in the palm oil sector,” said Nils Hermann Ranum, of Norway’s branch of the Foundation.

Still, he said that Norway should do more to pull out of other sectors that cause deforestation, such as logging companies, oil and gas firms, soy and meat producers.

Palm oil’s gotten too big for its own greasy britches, sending prices into the toilet as the market is “struggling to generate more demand,” according to Bloomberg. Struggle away, palm oil! We’ll find other ways to fatten up our terrible treats.

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For the first time, a fossil fuel tanker is navigating the Arctic

by Myrna Posted on November 26, 2012

For the first time, a fossil fuel tanker is navigating the Arctic

By Philip Bump

The Ob River is a massive tanker that can carry 150,000 cubic meters of liquified natural gas. (You can tell it carries liquified natural gas because the side of the vessel says “L N G” in massive letters.) And the ship is about to do something that no tanker has done before: traverse the winter Arctic to ship fossil fuels from Norway to Japan.

MarineTraffic.com

You can follow its progress from your own natural gas-warmed home! Click to embiggen.

From the BBC:

The tanker was loaded with LNG at Hammerfest in the north of Norway on 7 November and set sail across the Barents Sea. It has been accompanied by a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker for much of its voyage. …

“It’s an extraordinarily interesting adventure,” Tony Lauritzen, commercial director at [the company that owns the vessel,] Dynagas, told BBC News.

“The people on board have been seeing polar bears on the route. We’ve had the plans for a long time and everything has gone well.”

Oh, good! There are still polar bears!

According to the BBC, the Hammerfest LNG facility (which, I’ll note, is an awesome name) was created to ship gas to the United States. With the natural gas boom created by fracking, the market has shifted to the east — particularly Japan, which needs energy sources in lieu of its nuclear plants. Under traditional conditions, that would have required a route around Europe, through Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, and around the southern expanse of Asia. Now, however, it can slip above Russia and down to Japan in 20 fewer days.

Why is this possible? You know why this is possible. Because we’ve polluted the atmosphere with things like the methane in that tanker.

The owners [of the Ob River] say that changing climate conditions and a volatile gas market make the Arctic transit profitable.

But the fossil fuel profiteers want to assure you that climate change is just a tiny part of this.

“The major point about gas is that it now goes east and not west,” says Gunnar Sander, senior adviser at the Norwegian Polar Institute and an expert on how climate change impacts economic activity in the Arctic.

“The shale gas revolution has turned the market upside down; that plus the rapid melting of the polar ice.”

He stresses that the changes in climate are less important than the growing demand for oil and gas.

Yes, that’s important to note. This huge tanker is shipping fossil fuels through the Arctic — something that has never been feasible before – just because there’s demand for it on the other side. If the Arctic hadn’t melted, they would have done this anyway, somehow.

As the commercial director of Dynagas said: “It’s an extraordinarily interesting adventure.” This changing climate, this brand new world is indeed a fascinating, uncharted adventure for us all!

Polar bears included.

artic pj

The Arctic Ocean, off the coast of Norway.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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