Tag Archives: universities

The life-altering, world-ending topic they’re still not teaching you about in school

by MilagroViy Posted on June 4, 2019

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The life-altering, world-ending topic they’re still not teaching you about in school

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Science for Sale – David L. Lewis, PhD

by Myrna Posted on September 3, 2017

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Science for Sale

How the US Government Uses Powerful Corporations and Leading Universities to Support Government Policies, Silence Top Scientists, Jeopardize Our Health, and Protect Corporate Profits

David L. Lewis, PhD

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: June 3, 2014

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC


When Speaker Newt Gingrich greeted Dr. David Lewis in his office overlooking the National Mall, he looked at Dr. Lewis and said: “You know you’re going to be fired for this, don’t you?” “I know,” Dr. Lewis replied, “I just hope to stay out of prison.” Gingrich had just read Dr. Lewis’s commentary in Nature , titled “EPA Science: Casualty of Election Politics.” Three years later, and thirty years after Dr. Lewis began working at EPA, he was back in Washington to receive a Science Achievement Award from Administrator Carol Browner for his second article in Nature . By then, EPA had transferred Dr. Lewis to the University of Georgia to await termination—the Agency’s only scientist to ever be lead author on papers published in Nature and Lancet . The government hires scientists to support its policies; industry hires them to support its business; and universities hire them to bring in grants that are handed out to support government policies and industry practices. Organizations dealing with scientific integrity are designed only to weed out those who commit fraud behind the backs of the institutions where they work. The greatest threat of all is the purposeful corruption of the scientific enterprise by the institutions themselves. The science they create is often only an illusion, designed to deceive; and the scientists they destroy to protect that illusion are often our best. This book is about both, beginning with Dr. Lewis’s experience, and ending with the story of Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

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Science for Sale – David L. Lewis, PhD

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Chart of the Day: Universities Are Pretty Liberal Places

by cazaresighisoaraieftina Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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The chart on the right comes from Heterodox Academy, a group founded a few months ago to promote more ideological diversity on university campuses. What it shows is unsurprising: over the past few decades, university faculties have become almost entirely liberal. And this is for all university faculty. According to HA, humanities and social science faculty are closer to 95 percent liberal.

Why? Paul Krugman thinks it’s because conservatives went nuts starting in the 80s, so nobody with any intelligence and genuine curiosity wants to associate with them anymore. Michael Strain suggests that it might be because faculties actively discriminate against conservative job candidates. This argument has been going on forever, and there are a few basic points of view:

Undergrads, especially in the humanities, are mostly liberal, which means that PhD program fill up with liberals. Conservatives just aren’t interested in the liberal arts these days, so there are very few to choose from when it comes time to hire new faculty.
Being exposed to graduate work in the humanities converts a lot of people to liberalism.
Liberal arts departments consider conservative views inherently racist/sexist/etc. and are loath to hire anyone who promotes conservative views.

Needless to say, all of these interact with each other, and more than one may be right. But here’s what I don’t get: why the endless argument? These all seem like eminently testable hypotheses:

Are undergraduate liberal arts departments predominantly filled with liberal students?
Are conservatives not much interested in the liberal arts these days? Why?
How many conservatives apply to grad programs in the liberal arts? How many are accepted?
How much do views change while in grad school?
How many conservatives end up getting PhDs in the liberal arts?
Of those, how many get tenure-track jobs?

If, say, 95 percent of job candidates are liberal, then there’s probably no discrimination. Conservatives are being hired in proportion to their numbers. If conservatives generally don’t major in the liberal arts as undergrads, then probably PhD programs aren’t discriminating either. Etc. These all seem like fairly answerable questions.

Most likely, there’s a vicious circle involved. As the American right became more conservative while the liberals arts became (say) modestly more liberal, it would make sense if conservatives just didn’t feel like joining up. This naturally produced a more left-leaning liberal arts faculty, rinse and repeat. Eventually you end up at 95 percent.

But why guess? Can’t these questions at least be suggestively answered?

For what it’s worth, I agree that it’s a problem regardless of how it happened. It’s easy for liberals to see the conservative bubble when we talk about Fox News or talk radio, and we immediately understand why it’s bad: it makes people lazy and unwilling to question their basic beliefs. We don’t see this so clearly when it’s our own bubble, but we should. Bubbles are bubbles, and ours are no better than theirs.

And now to end on a griping note: I would be a lot more sympathetic to conservative complaints about the academy if they showed an equal concern about fields that lean heavily conservative (big business, the military, etc.). For some reason, though, that never seems to strike them as a problem. Why?

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Chart of the Day: Universities Are Pretty Liberal Places

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Conservatives Need to Admit That Racism Still Exists

by Kerstin50Z Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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I hopped over to The Corner to see what was going on, and the answer is….political correctness. Here are first few headlines I saw:

The Hidden Cost to Crazy Leftist Domination of Universities

Yale & Missouri: Power Play

The Left Is Starting to Tear Itself Apart: College Coeds Are Like Yazidi Slaves?

Campus Cattle Actually, I believe the correct term is “veal.” -ed.

The Mugging Continues

Conservatives are really flooding the zone over this. And since there’s obviously been some bad behavior on the part of the Yale and Missouri protesters, they have an easy time mining a few days of outrage over it. As for myself, I haven’t said much of anything, for a couple of reasons. First, I’m not just a middle-aged white guy, I’m a middle-aged white guy who grew up in Orange County and now lives in Irvine. Off the top of my head, I can remember only one black schoolmate while I was growing up, and pretty much none in the neighborhood I live in now. So I’m not exactly well placed to have any deep insights on interracial relationships.

Second, when things like this erupt, it’s often the case that the proximate cause is merely the last in a long series of things that already have everyone simmering. So the provocation itself (say, a fairly anodyne email about Halloween from a residential master) is often easy to mock because it really is sort of trivial on its own. And the reaction (“friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals”) can seem absurdly delicate. But fixating on a single incident like this is as silly as trying to figure out why all those European countries really cared so much about Archduke Ferdinand. In both cases, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

And this is why the conservative reaction to this stuff always seems so shallow. Sure, students shouldn’t scream at people. Sure, professors shouldn’t call in “muscle” to kick people out of public spaces. Sure, yet another demand for more diversity training can seem tiresome. Go ahead and criticize all this stuff. Plenty of people on the left have done so too.

But at the same time, if you are going to comment on these affairs, take the time to understand not just the (possibly trivial) proximate cause, but the underlying problems that have been building up for months or years. At least acknowledge what the real grievances are. I haven’t spent a lot of time reading about the Yale and Missouri protests, but even I know that there are a whole raft of complaints about racist behavior that have been accumulating for some time. Is it asking too much for conservatives to at least mention this, and perhaps condemn it? Even a “to be sure” paragraph would be better than nothing.

For what it’s worth, I think the hair trigger that campus lefties seem to have for all manner of isms often goes too far. It’s not just tiresome, it’s counterproductive, since it convinces too many people that they shouldn’t engage with these issues at all. One wrong word at the wrong time bears too much risk of career or education-threatening blowback—especially in an era when social media can randomly pluck people out of obscurity to become sacrificial lambs. Better to just hunker down and say nothing. Unfortunately, the result is that you lose the engagement of some of the very people it would be most helpful to have on board. Just a thought.

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Conservatives Need to Admit That Racism Still Exists

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What makes owls deadly could make wind turbines silent

by LoriSteere Posted on June 22, 2015

the silence of the owls

What makes owls deadly could make wind turbines silent

By on 22 Jun 2015 3:44 pmcommentsShare

Owls — those whimsical and deadly hunting machines that crafty people love and Harry Potter characters employ as postal workers — have the unusual ability to fly in (virtual) silence.  That’s bad news if you’re a delicious-looking rodent minding your own business, but it’s good news if you’re a scientist looking for a way to silence noisy wind turbines.

Nigel Peake, a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, happens to be one of those scientists. And by using a 3D-printed material meant to mimic the surface of owl wings, he and his colleagues were able to lower the noise level of a wind turbine blade by about 10 decibels. (For comparison: The typical wind turbine a few hundred yards from a house will come in around 40 decibels, about as loud as the in-house refrigerator, according to GE.)

Here’s more from a press release out of the University of Cambridge:

Peake and his collaborators at Virginia Tech, Lehigh and Florida Atlantic Universities used high resolution microscopy to examine owl feathers in fine detail. They observed that the flight feathers on an owl’s wing have a downy covering, which resembles a forest canopy when viewed from above. In addition to this fluffy canopy, owl wings also have a flexible comb of evenly-spaced bristles along their leading edge, and a porous and elastic fringe on the trailing edge.

“No other bird has this sort of intricate wing structure,” said Peake. “Much of the noise caused by a wing – whether it’s attached to a bird, a plane or a fan – originates at the trailing edge where the air passing over the wing surface is turbulent. The structure of an owl’s wing serves to reduce noise by smoothing the passage of air as it passes over the wing – scattering the sound so their prey can’t hear them coming.”

Peake and his collaborators first experimented with a wedding veil-like material, which they found could reduce the noise level of a turbine blade by up to 30 decibels. But that material wasn’t practical for real-world applications, so they turned to 3D-printed plastic:

Early tests of the material, which mimics the intricate structure of an owl’s wing, have demonstrated that it could significantly reduce the amount of noise produced by wind turbines and other types of fan blades, such as those in computers or planes. Since wind turbines are heavily braked in order to minimise noise, the addition of this new surface would mean that they could be run at much higher speeds – producing more energy while making less noise. For an average-sized wind farm, this could mean several additional megawatts worth of electricity.

The silence of owl flight (good movie title?) is not a revelation, but how owls manage it is. And if you don’t believe that they do, just check out this PBS video, where Kensa the owl squares off against Smudge the “urban opportunist” pigeon and Moses the “king of speed” peregrine in a quiet fly-off:

Source:
Silent flights: How owls could help make wind turbines and planes quieter

, University of Cambridge.

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What makes owls deadly could make wind turbines silent

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Scott Walker Still Having Some Teething Problems Balancing the Tea Party with the Mainstream GOP

by hucmzfbl Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve been talking up Scott Walker as a good bet to win the Republican presidential nomination next year, but there’s no question that he first has to find the right balance between the bullheaded “Hulk Smash Democrats” persona designed to appeal to tea partiers and the more mild-mannered Midwestern executive persona designed to appeal to moderates and big-money donors. The latest example of his difficulties with this balancing act comes from a laughable attempt to change the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin. Here’s Walker’s proposal:

The mission of the system is to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs, to discover and disseminate knowledge….

So far, no problem. He just wants to add a bit of boilerplate about training future workers. No one objects to that. But then there’s more. Everything he wants to delete is in bold:

….to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society by developing develop in students heightened intellectual, cultural, and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise, and a sense of purpose. Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.

By cracky, we’ll not have our universities extending knowledge beyond the borders of their campuses! And the search for truth? Sounds like a steaming pile of secular liberal claptrap. Off with its head!

But that’s not the end of it. Heather Digby Parton describes what happened next:

After the changes were revealed publicly Walker made a hilariously fatuous claim worthy of Rosemary Woods and the 18 minute gap: somehow those changes just appeared and he didn’t know nothin’ about how they got there and anyway it was the University’s fault for “overlooking” it. He has had to backtrack from that as well, admitting that his people did make these changes and the university official argued vociferously against it. But none of it is his fault because well, it just isn’t. Or anyone else’s.

Last Wednesday, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Walker finally acknowledged that university officials had raised objections about the proposal but “had been told the changes were not open to debate.” And as the Sentinel graphic on the right shows, the proposed changes were, in fact, quite deliberate.

In any case, even Walker is now being forced to pretend it was all a big misunderstanding. So what happened? My guess is that his inner circle thought the changes might win Walker some brownie points with the tea party crowd, which has always been suspicious of long-haired academics and their lefty ideas, but failed to see how bad it would look among the less wild-eyed crowd that looks to Walker as a pragmatic executive type. Walker’s team is having trouble balancing those two constituencies, and that’s a problem since Walker’s key appeal is that he bridges the gap between them.

Needless to say, this dumb little affair won’t do Walker any long-term damage. It’s just a minor dust cloud. Nonetheless, it’s an instructive dust cloud. Clearly Walker still hasn’t quite managed to polish up the balancing act that’s his biggest source of strength in the 2016 presidential race. That’s something he needs to figure out in short order.

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Scott Walker Still Having Some Teething Problems Balancing the Tea Party with the Mainstream GOP

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This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

by UteBelairmt Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Michael Mann, the perennially embattled climate scientist best known for his “hockey-stick” temperature graph, came out victorious yesterday in a court battle against a Virginia legislator and a conservative think tank that had sought to obtain thousands of Mann’s emails and research documents from his time as a University of Virginia professor.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that unpublished scientific research can be exempted from the state’s Freedom of Information Act requirements, because disclosing such information would cut into the university’s competitive advantage over other universities. As a result, some 12,000 of Mann’s emails and papers won’t be released to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (formerly known as the American Tradition Institute) and Virginia Delegate Robert Marshall (R-Prince William), who had requested the documents in 2011.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Mann called the decision “a victory for science, public university faculty, and academic freedom.”

Back in 2012, a lower Virginia court ruled that the documents in question were considered “proprietary,” and thus shielded from FOIA requests. ATI appealed the decision, and the case landed with the state’s Supreme Court last October. The main question was whether research-related documents should get the same kind of protection as trade secrets and other information that could cause financial harm if released. ATI argued that Mann’s emails didn’t merit such protection, while Mann and U-Va. maintained that scientists should be able to hammer out their work behind closed doors before presenting a finished product to the public.

In a brief filed with the Supreme Court late last year, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued that in protecting Mann’s research, the lower court had actually set the scope too wide, leaving open the possibility that a university could claim virtually any document to be proprietary. But yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling revised the exemption criteria so that non-research-related documents—things like budgets and communications between administrators—could still be accessed with a FOIA, said Emily Grannis, the Reporters Committee staffer who authored the brief.

Of course, Grannis said, the ruling is only binding in the state of Virginia, but it could serve as a model for how other states set limits for what qualifies as proprietary if similar cases arise elsewhere.

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This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

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Gregory Clark Says We Humans Suck at Social Mobility

by HildegardTraylo Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Gregory Clark writes interesting books. His last one, A Farewell to Alms, made a contentious argument about why, after a hundred centuries of zero average economic progress, growth suddenly exploded around 1800 in the tiny island of England and then spread throughout Europe and the world. Basically, Clark argues that the Industrial Revolution started in England because of “accidents of institutional stability and demography….and the extraordinary fecundity of the rich and economically successful. The embedding of bourgeois values into the culture, and perhaps even the genetics, was for these reasons the most advanced in England.”

Bourgeois values! Genetics! Rich people reproducing faster than poor ones! That was bound to piss off some people. I myself found it pretty fascinating, but I also felt like Clark was drawing some pretty spectacular conclusions from some pretty scant data. Sadly, I read Farewell to Alms on one of the original Kindle reading devices, and thus found it virtually impossible to follow. It relies heavily on tables and charts, and those rendered so poorly that I had a hard time following Clark’s argument. Shortly after that I ditched my Kindle.

I’ve since replaced it with a succession of tablets, all of which render the book just fine. But I’ve never gone back to reread it, and now Clark has a new book out, The Son Also Rises.1 His latest big idea is that status is remarkably stable over periods of centuries. Families that were well off in 1700 are, on average, still pretty well off. Basically, we suck at social mobility. Josh Harkinson interviewed him for Mother Jones:

MJ: How do you measure status?

GC: I have a number of different measures for different societies. So for England, where we have some of the best data, we know everyone who went to Oxford and Cambridge from 1200 to the present. That tells us who the educational elite were in England over 800 years, and then we can ask, “What are the names that are showing up in that elite, and how persistent is their appearance in this elite?”

….We find that there is a very strong persistence of elite families at the universities. In recent years, the universities have tried to become more meritocratic and more democratic: They admit students based on performance on national exams. They don’t give any privilege to the fact that your parents went there. And public financing for tuition is now available. But what we find is that elite families persist at Oxford and Cambridge at the same rate as they did in the 19th century. It hasn’t managed to change the rate of social mobility.

Clark uses this strategy of following family names in other countries as well, and comes to similar conclusions. Is this legit? Are family names enough to figure out who’s going up and who’s going down? I have my doubts, but I haven’t read the book. And I have to say that my personal experience is a data point in favor of Clark’s thesis. Many years ago I got interested in genealogy and started digging up my family tree. Roughly speaking, I managed to go back about 200 years through most of my branches. And one of the things that intrigued me was just how homogeneous it all was. Some of my ancestors were better off than others, but mostly within a pretty narrow band. As near as I can tell, none of them were destitute and none of them were rich. They were small farmers, shopkeepers, linen drapers, sign painters, electricians, and stonecutters. Over seven or eight generations, social mobility has been pretty close to zero.

So maybe there’s something to this. I’ll let you know what I think if I end up reading the book.

1Yes, he’s apparently stuck on Hemingway puns. This is undoubtedly a rich vein for economists. Next up: To Have and Halve Not. Followed by For Whom the Swell Toils and The Gold Plan and Me.

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Gregory Clark Says We Humans Suck at Social Mobility

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