No one's immune

Sometimes my colleagues worry about how the public perceives them and their profession (that is, research scientists). There's a worry across the country that too many laypeople are uninformed about basic science and thus unable to appreciate what it is that we do. This can reflect poorly when it comes to public attitude about the sciences, affecting funding and policy.

Guys . . . stories like this don't help:

Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, grew sixfold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times.

The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency's inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.

Okay. This is bad. But at least the people involved copped to it, right? I mean, intelligent, rational people know when to acknowledge that they've been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Right?

When finally caught, the NSF official retired. He even offered, among other explanations, a humanitarian defense, suggesting that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women. Investigators put the cost to taxpayers of the senior official's porn surfing at between $13,800 and about $58,000.

"He explained that these young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents and this site helps them do that," investigators wrote in a memo.

. . . I don't think that's gonna help your case, buddy.

I'm always glad when a spotlight is shone on the abuse of taxpayer dollars, but this is just embarrassing. Thanks NSF, glad to know that you're putting a good face out there for us.

Furthering the health care discussion

I'm putting my conversation with Ryan from the comments below into a new post, for various reasons. Partly because it gives me an excuse to have another post on the blog, partly because the amount I'll need to write is just not conducive in the meager commenting function Blogger offers, and partly because it's my blog and I feel like it. So there.

Anyhow . . .

• Re: Preventative Care

I wouldn't fuss with this one, except that the people attempting to sell the President's health care bill keep saying that this will pay for itself by cutting costs and finding new efficiencies, such as emphasizing preventative care. This raises so many problems for me. How do you achieve such savings, since preventative care is largely dependent on the cooperation of the patients? How much money would this actually save, since the estimates say that Obama's plan will cost at least $1 trillion? Would a failure of patients to follow preventative care measures result in penalties for doctors? Would treatment of conditions which could be prevented be rationed, discouraged, or used as reason to punish doctors?

I'd like answers to those questions before I accept "More preventative medicine!" as a cure-all for this bill.

• Re: Other models

I'm not sure which country the Obama bill most resembles, a lot of people suspect that it's a "foot-in-the-door" strategy to get to a British system (based largely on things like this).

In any case, I'm still not sure why we'd want to emulate the health care models of other countries. We still have the best system in terms of outcome following treatment, and the other systems have plenty of problems associated with them. Japan faces a problem of staffing shortages as well, and Germany's care comes at the cost of what I understand to be excruciating taxes.

• Re: Skepticism on the spending

First off, I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned with revolutionary levels of spending during painful recessions; there are a lot of estimates that the passage of Obama's bill could strangle any economic recovery for years, maybe even decades. It just seems like a bad idea to restructure such a large portion of our economy in one fell swoop like this, especially when it keeps seeming like Obama wants to hurry it through.

In any case, I think the appeals to Iraq and Afghanistan are unfair. "If you're going to spend money on X, why not spend it on Y as well?" doesn't strike me as a logical argument if X and Y aren't really related. It's a debate of national security vs. domestic policy, and it's not really the topic at hand (plus, I think most people will agree that national security ought to take priority). In any case, I did complain during the spending sprees of the previous administration; not in regards to foreign policy, but definitely relating to TARP and automotive bailouts.

• Re: Insurance industry collapse

I posted a link earlier as to why people think the insurance industry will be threatened by this, but I'll sum up the arguments: The plan currently would force insurance companies to accept all applicants, the plan forces mandatory coverage, the proposal is to subsidize those who can't afford coverage, and the plan puts mandates on employers for employee health care as well.

I don't have a lot of data to support the threat those issue pose. I can say that they seem threatening. I can say that mandatory coverage doesn't seem to have worked so well for Massachusetts. I can say that forcing insurance companies to compete with the government will never work out for them, but I'm incredibly skeptical.

• Re: Letting them die

You know, I never said I just wanted to let the uninsured sit outside emergency rooms and die. I feel like that's putting words in my mouth.

To the best of my knowledge, the law on the books is that hospitals have to treat emergency patients, regardless of insurance or ability to pay. While I understand such a thing to be a burden to the hospitals, how much of a burden is it? It seems to be assumed that this is a massive cost, and while I've seen various numbers bandied about as to how much this runs, I've yet to see a citation for those numbers. It's worth asking, however, whether moving to a system where the uninsured receive taxpayer-subsidized insurance will actually do anything besides shift costs around; again, people still seem worried that a sudden influx of newly insured people will cause a strain on the system that will decrease the quality of care currently available. There's also the concern that a publicly subsidized plan would ration care in order to control costs. Is any of that unreasonable?

In the end, I'm not sure I'm the best spokesman for the issue; my grasp of the fine details is lacking, and I work mainly with hunches, suppositions, and reasoning based on incomplete knowledge. That doesn't change my position that it's a bad idea in its current form, though, as always, my mindless blatherings should be taken with an extra helping of salt.

The timely review is a lie

You know how I know I'm this guy? I recently played (and finished) Portal. Finally.

I'm not sure what would be gained from offering a "review" of this game. It's old enough at this point that you either know you should play it or have already played it. Everyone else probably just doesn't care about the FPS genre or PC games in general.

Still, I haven't met my useless blather quota for 2009 yet, so I might as well write about it.

This isn't a traditional FPS (first-person shooter, for those not in the know). The only "gun" you use during the game creates portals; by firing a blue portal at one location and an orange portal at another, you can instantly move through time and space. In essence, this is a physics platform/puzzle game played in first-person. It really is as clever and fun as everyone said it was.

I finished the game in roughly 2 hours. I'll give Valve credit for polishing it to a perfect shine, but it's essentially a demo, which is why I guess it came bundled with several other games as part of the Orange Box.

The mystery put together by the rather spartan clues of story in the game left me aching for more. Gee, what an unusual change of pace from Valve! The game should be enjoyed for what it is, but I'm a sucker when it comes to a good story, and the brief, leading clues drew me in easily. What I wouldn't give for a few minutes alone with the Valve writers just to pick at their brains.

Anyhow, this game comes with my recommendation, whatever that's worth. It's cheap and easy to pick up on Steam these days, too, so give it a try if you've got a couple of hours to kill and need something fun to do.

Autocratic Mash Note

Keeping with a theme, I guess, Thomas Friedman's column for today was yearning for the type of benevolent rule we see in . . . China? Yeesh.

Anyhow, Jonah Goldberg isn't buying it. Nobody in their right mind is.

Reasons to oppose Obamacare

Even with the "government option" seemingly off the table, there's still plenty of reasons that Obama's proposed reforms are a bad idea.

This post over at Ace's place is a concise summation of said reasons. It's worth a read if you think the only reason to oppose it is because dead peasants make excellent fertilizer for the lawns Republicans plant in front of their diamond mines.

Update
This is related: Five lies Obama will tell in his speech to Congress.

Harry Potter and the Health Care Reform Seminar

I know the title makes no sense, but I figured it might at least make the event seem more interesting than it actually was. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but certainly not what I received; the event was not open to the public, the crowd was completely subdued, and the floor was not open to questions. I'd complain, but they took pre-written questions before the event, and one of the organizers asked congressman Sarbanes the questions during a brief Q&A period. I'd speculate on the person asking only "friendly" questions, but mine was one chosen, so I can't imagine that to be the case.

The set-up for the event was such: John Sarbanes gave a 30 min. introductory talk, going over what they wanted to accomplish with health care reform, what they needed to do yet, and a bit of why it needed to be done. This was followed by representatives from each of the schools here (Pharmacy, Nursing, Law, Social Work, Dentistry, and Medicine) talking about what health care reform means to them, what challenges they see for their profession in the coming years, etc.

All in all, it was non-controversial. Sarbanes stuck to the party line talking points when discussing reform. I was hoping for something YouTube worthy. At least something like, "All those people who oppose this are morons!" Nothing. The only real moments of conflict were drawn from my question and inspired by the dean of the law school, of all people. I asked Sarbanes why litigation reform wasn't on the table (his answer being that studies show that it won't save any costs, though I'm not inclined to believe such and don't think that's sufficient anyhow). When the law school dean was up to speak, he mentioned it again in a, "Yeah, that's not gonna happen," kind of way. However, later when the med school representative spoke, he looked at the rest of the panel and countered with, "Nuts to you guys, we need tort reform." The law school guy spent the rest of the evening shooting daggers with his eyes at the med school speaker. Very exciting, yes?

A couple of things I do want to grab onto, though. First, Sarbanes spoke continually about moving to preventative care as a means of saving money. I have yet to see anybody show this to be the case. In fact, it's part of the "defensive medicine" that doctors complain about practicing now; running extraneous tests to catch something "just in case" is not a money saving procedure.

Second, Sarbanes got an answer about increasing access to health care for the millions of new people who will end up on the public dole because of this, and his answer was incredibly evasive. The fact of the matter is, if you suddenly have 50 million new people with insurance, they're going to start seeing doctors. That means we need a lot more health care workers at all levels, or we're going to have the same, awful staff shortages that Britain's NHS suffers. Exactly how does Congress propose to get these people without the quality of the care suffering?

Third, Sarbanes made a point of saying that the public plan will remain competitive with private insurance because it isn't for-profit, but that it must also stand on its own feet (by law). That is, it can't be taxpayer subsidized by pay for itself. He said with a smirk afterwards that those darn insurance companies are just gonna have to cut executive pay to stay competitive. I could dedicate an entire post to what was wrong with that sentiment, but suffice it to say that nobody in their right mind believes a politician when they say that a program will pay for itself. When has a government program like this ever been within budget? And why on Earth would a politician not opt to "temporarily" infuse tax dollars into the program to keep it afloat once it's running?

He also mentioned that the CBO estimated only 12 million people would be on the public plan after however many years, and I don't recall ever hearing that. You know, because the government has never underestimated the popularity of one of its programs.

Finally, just a bit of rhetoric. In talking about the emphasis in moving to preventative care, Sarbanes stated that it was society's duty to keep people healthy, not just treat them once they're sick. That, as Jonah Goldberg might say, is liberal fascism talking. It is a personal responsibility to take care of oneself. Society has no place there.

(And when Obama appeals to Christians that the Bible says that, "I am my brother's keeper," he's talking out the wrong end of his digestive tract. That never appears in the Bible.)

So, the event wasn't terribly exciting, but it did give me something to blog about. Finally.

Interesting things to come

You'd think that, since I seem to have moved to a monthly posting schedule, that I'd be putting more interesting or substantive posts up. Not today, friends.

However! Tonight I'll be attending an "informational seminar" regarding the proposed healthcare reform bill, and apparently my congressman (John Sarbanes) will be there. I'm not entirely certain if it's going to have a Q&A session or not. Either way, I'm hoping to have some very interesting material to write about afterwards.

As an aside, the promotional material for the event invites people to attend "a civil discussion" about healthcare reform. I'm going to be ticked if there's no Q&A; how arrogant is it when people call it a discussion but don't allow questions? That's not a discussion, that's you sharing your point of view and me having to shut up and listen.

Obama the Fascist

One more timely example. It would be easier for Obama to avoid charges of fascism if perhaps things like this weren't coming out of the Whitehouse:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

The president of the US . . . asking his supporters to act as informers on any political speech which opposes his plans . . . reminds me of Wilson and his American Protective League.

Obama the "Liberal"

There were several requests in my last blog post to expand on my premise about Obama's similarity to previous fascistic movements. I suppose I can finally get around to doing so.

An aside: I have no idea why it's been so long since I've posted. I guess I haven't had much interesting to say about science, video games, or philosophy, and there's only so much I can say about politics without drumming the same beat over and over.

In any case, I have to be very careful here. Goldberg spends a lot of time in his book detailing what he means by fascism because its use today is so generalized. Most people just use it as an epithet for something they don't like. "You mean they took the free coffee out of the break room? What a bunch of fascists."

Also, Goldberg spends the first part of the book looking at the fascist movements of Europe, first Italy and then Germany, then follows up with the American fascist movements before talking about what they ended up looking like in modern America. Yes, it happened here in America. No, it wasn't identical to Italian or German fascism. All of these movements were born of their own time period to specific peoples, so each fascist movement is going to carry specific markers. Italian fascism didn't involve virulent anti-semitism, and American fascism never involved dictators (though it came close at times). My point being that fascism doesn't just mean, "tyrannical dictatorship," and because Goldberg spends hundreds of pages setting up his premises, it would be very difficult for me to do the arguments justice in a single blog post.

So, why do I think Obama is eerily reminiscent of American fascist movements? The political messianism, the cult of youth and action, the reliance on personality and destiny rather than argument and idea; those are strongly familiar themes. The general philosophy of governance is similar, too: Everything within the state, nothing outside the state. American fascism (which took the name "progressivism") worked diligently to dissolve individualism, erase the lines between private corporations and the federal government, establish a welfare state so expansive that people would be absolutely reliant on the government, and create a government not "of the people" but of benign experts who would create an ordered society through their expertise and brilliance as opposed to the debauchery of "democracy."

So what do we see? A man who campaigned on "hope and change," as "the One we have been waiting for." Under his governance, the federal government became the majority shareholder of a major American corporation and has attempted to expand that ownership to the healthcare field. We have more "czars" in the Obama administration than Russia ever had. The drumbeat for a "new New Deal" repeats almost every other day.

So, no, I'm not calling Obama a Hitler or a Mussolini. He's more like a Wilson or an FDR. But it would be worth it to understand why the comparisons can be made before criticizing them. I recommend reading Goldberg's book; even if you disagree with conservatives, it's worth it to understand where ideas come from and how they evolve over time. If you end up thinking that he's gotten it wrong, at least you know what it is that he's arguing first.

"Liberal" Indeed

I recently picked up a copy of Liberal Fascism from an airport bookstore. I'd intended to read it for some time, but never got around to it. Now that I'm starting it . . . this book terrifies me.

Goldberg ends his introduction by settling on a definition for "fascism," which is apparently much more complicated than you would think. As much as the term gets thrown around by hot-headed political junkies (and politicians), most people never really explain what they mean when they say it. The definition Goldberg uses encompasses a lot of progressive movements, both at home and abroad. I've only read through the chapters on Mussolini and the Italian Fascists (with a capital 'F'), Hitler and his National Socialists, and the Woodrow Wilson / Teddy Roosevelt era. I never knew much about Wilson, but now that I read some of the things he wrote and said . . . the man would have been a dictator had he been given the chance.

Anyhow, what's starting to spook me is the degree of similarity between Obama, his presidency, and these fascist movements of the past. The rhetoric, the reasoning, the nature of the popular support, the direction of government . . . a lot of it looks very familiar to those who know what to look for.

I often hear how "those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it." It's a shame nobody ever applies this to the pedigree of the philosophy and ideas being sold to them by politicians and movements.

See figure 1

One of the first lessons you learn in grad school is that your text book(s) is/are as valuable as a paperweight. At least in the hard sciences, the field tends to move fast enough that, by the time a text book is published, the information within is either incomplete or inaccurate. Consequently, you'll spend more time reading the relevant journals for your field than any text book, and new information is introduced through review articles.

The long preface is only to introduce Shamus's post on the problems he encounters in the tech world, writing support documents and other technical documentation. Though many of his examples are angled towards programming or coding languages, the general principles are by no means unique to his field.

I find often that the scientific literature suffers from the problems Shamus describes: No explanation of technical terms, assuming a higher level of knowledge on the part of readers than is warranted, assuming a high level of knowledge in related (or not) fields, over-complicated examples, building too steep a learning curve, and so on. One problem that is more unique to this field is the use of self-serving examples. That is, all of the "relevant" work referenced by the author of a review is to his (or their) own work in the field. While this might be appropriate if you're one of a handful of people who actually study the topic at hand, it usually gives only a narrow impression of the work being done in the field, and thus not appropriate for a "review."

One idea that Shamus introduced that I would love to see implemented more fully in the scientific journals is better use of the electronic medium. Everything that is published on paper also is published online as a PDF. Journals like Science usually affix a "title" page to it, with links to the supplemental material on the web (additional figures, movies, and whatever else the authors considered important enough to include but not critical enough to warrant space in the paper). However, taking this further would be an incredible step in bringing science into the age of the internet.

In a review article, what if certain terms or phrases were hyperlinks to either a "dictionary" of terms or to futher review articles on the specific topic? What if the citations at the end of the paper were themselves hyperlinks which would take you to the reference? What if each of the authors' names were hyperlinks to other articles they have published? When a technique is not fully explained by said to be done "as previously described," either link to where it was described or to a database which explains the principles such techniques.

While I realize this might seem like a lot of work to put into a simple PDF journal article, this would be insanely useful to all sorts of people. And these are just the hasty suggestions of a graduate student . . . I'd love to see what sorts of suggestions actual experts might come up with.

Sending a message

I wonder how Facebook decides on which ads it shows you when you surf their pages. This is what I saw today:

Exactly what are you trying to tell me, Facebook?

Tools of the trade

Grad school . . . what a meat grinder. I ought to be studying for my exams, but I'm feeling a bit of burnout, so a quick post to remind people that this site exists seems like quite the remedy. Allow me a bit of navel gazing (Ha! Like you have a choice.).

As I'm studying for my exams, I find myself pawing through piles of powerpoint printouts, each covering various areas of immunology in (sometimes) exquisite detail. I sometimes wonder how this process went for PhD students in ages past. Information imparted during lectures was limited to what the professor could write on the chalk board or show on an overhead transparency. You wrote down what you could during lecture, and tried to scrape everything else from the text books. These days, it's much different. You get superfluous notes and carefully rendered illustrations (graphs, models, photographs, etc.) from powerpoint presentations. The textbooks are rarely used, as they're typically behind the curve by the time they hit the shelves.

There's certainly advantages to the new system. The professors get to share much more information, rather than focussing on the bare essentials they want you to leave lecture with. You're free(er) to listen to the lecturer rather than furiously scribble notes in an attempt to have a lasting impression of the lecture. You get to see details of the science (such as FACS plots and tissue stains) in lecture rather than having to go to the library to look up the journals.

All of this makes me wonder, though . . . do these tools make us better or worse students? Subsequently, are we producing better scientists for all of these tools?

I have no answers to this. I'm not even sure how you'd begin to answer this, given all the variables involved, but I'm quite interested in how people might respond.

It's the end of the world as we know it

And I don't feel fine. Honestly, I never thought I'd see the decline of America as the world's superpower in my lifetime. I even figured, on the off chance that it happened, that I'd be an old man with grandchildren before then. But this?

PRAGUE – Just hours after North Korea launched a long-range rocket, President Barack Obama called for "a world without nuclear weapons" and said the United States has a “moral responsibility ” to lead the way, as the only nation ever to use them.

. . .

Obama proposed doing so by reducing America’s arsenal, if not altogether eliminating it; hosting a summit on nuclear security; seeking ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; and pursuing a new agreement aimed at stopping the production of fissile materials.

I wouldn't have believed even this of Obama during the campaigns. What could he possibly be thinking?

Hat tip to Big Lizards, with whom I agree; if Obama is crazy enough to go through with this, he'll be handing over the reigns of power to the likes of North Korea, China, and Iran. God help us all.