Radiological Scans of Downtown DC Released

(Via the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog)

A pre-inauguration DOE/NSA study of radioactivity in the downtown DC area has just been released. They obviously didn't find any significant man-made radioactivity, as the ceremony went off without (much) disturbance. Now the report stands as a testament to the level of security last January and (for DC natives) a powerful alternative look at the streets we know and love.

There is one horrifyingly fitting piece of the report. See that lone big purple blotch in the middle/left of the map? That's the WWII memorial. Apparently, it was built with mildly radioactive materials.

Sabbatical

Apologies for the absence, by the way. In the meantime, check out this blog: http://summerofscience.wordpress.com/

Science!

How it should have been for last 8 years:

WASHINGTON – From tiny embryonic cells to the large-scale physics of global warming, President Barack Obama urged researchers on Monday to follow science and not ideology as he abolished contentious Bush-era restraints on stem-cell research. "Our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values," Obama declared as he signed documents changing U.S. science policy and removing what some researchers have said were shackles on their work.

"It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology," Obama said.

Researchers said the new president's message was clear: Science, which once propelled men to the moon, again matters in American life.

Opponents saw it differently: a defeat for morality in the most basic questions of life and death.

"The action by the president today will, in effect, allow scientists to create their own guidelines without proper moral restraints," Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said.

Also, anyone know why Tony Perkins gets quoted in the 5th paragraph of the AP story?

Intellectual Property, Biotechnology and the Stimulus

This is a small section of a much larger project that I've been working on for some time. Though the moment of perfect relevance has passed, and I've voiced some of these sentiments before, I hope it's useful to have some more precise numbers out there.

Intellectual property is something of a paradox. Konstantinos Karachalios of the EU patent office put this point elegantly at the 2009 TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue conference on patents, copyrights and knowledge governance: public perception of patenting is precisely the opposite of its linguistic history and dictionary definition. While patent, the opposite of latent, comes from the latin pateo, meaning to be opened, revealed or exposed, even the most educated about the subject think first about the limitations imposed by patents rather than the disclosure they encourage. It is important to remember that patents and copyrights exist solely to facilitate human advancement, which makes the economic benefits and rights of inventors merely a means to attain an end, not ends themselves. For this is quite deeply not how intellectual property has been treated and generally understood in recent years.

In large part, the schism is due to the fundamentally lopsided number of experiences with intellectual property: as there are simply more consumers than producers, the vast majority of personal encounters with patents or copyrights will entail the hinderance of access to knowledge or technology. Most famously – and the fame itself is a contributing factor, here – long-standing fights over the ownership and widespread piracy of audio and video works exploded in the late 1990s as internet file-sharing became ubiquitous. As the temptations of technology and corporate approaches to profit together turned what would formerly be mere irresponsibility on the part of private citizens into a prosecutable criminal act, the public perception of intellectual property naturally took a nose dive.

At the same time, less well-known consequences of the recent priority of intellectual property are felt far more deeply than the copyfight. The “patent thickets” created during the development of drugs, diagnostic tests and medical devices, for example, play an unfortunate role in the high cost of medical care. Genetic tests are a particular assailable, as the price to patients is a massive multiple of the strictly calculated cost of development or administration. Still, though the tremendous expense of researching and testing drugs justifies their cost more intelligibly, they usually come with unaffordably high price tags as well. The move towards biotechnologically developed drugs will only worsen this phenomena.

Nevertheless, the increasing economic importance of intellectual property over the last several decades is hard to overstate. In 1995/1996, for example, investment in knowledge-based industries took up 8.4% of the United States GDP, compared to 16.9% in physical industries; but the value added by knowledge-based industries made up 55.3% of the total.*

Nor is this a merely academic characterization of the state of the economy. During the February 6th senate debate on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) argued for a shift in the way that the Congress has traditionally viewed infrastructure: “The new infrastructure is also about intellectual property, and it is also about strengthening our scientific investments.”

Ultimately, despite objections to aspects of the proposed NIH funding from House Republicans, the final package contains more than $15 billion for scientific research, split between the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

As these agencies comprise the bulk of non-military federal science, and $15 billion represents a substantial percentage of their combined annual budgets, the economic stimulus package contains unprecedented federal funding of scientific research. The NSF, to take perhaps the most extreme example, will receive $3 billion on top of a 2008 budget of just over $6 billion – a nearly unheard-of 50% increase in available funds.

But there is reason to be wary of such a sharp increase as well, for we must be that much more careful not to elide scientific research with the pursuit of commercial inventions. It may be that the boundary between (pure) science and (applied) technology has been largely erased by biotechnology, if it ever existed at all. But this is not reason to deny the substantive normative and legal differences between the production of scientific knowledge and the production of science-related intellectual property. Despite their increasing interconnection, placing economic concerns over scientific ones has clear and severe consequences for scientific progress: confidentiality agreements that limit the spread of vital information, and outside influences on the nature, direction and results of research.

Thus, to actively define scientific research as the infrastructure behind the economic growth of the United States – as increasingly accurate as that characterization may be – risks burdening that research with economic expectations that it would otherwise avoid. Profits within the current system depend strongly on patents and the paradoxical drawbacks they entail. As the economic aspects of scientific progress become more clearly central to the economy of the United States, therefore, we need to be clearer about the nature of scientific knowledge and the manner in which it gets transferred into commercial products.


*Nico Stehr's Knowledge Politics, p. 177

Oh Hell Yes: Dr. Steven Chu

JJ already put up a post about this, and I'll still be in the thicket of work for another couple of weeks, but I want to take a second to note how excited I am about Dr. Chu's nomination (which has now been made official).

The Department of Energy is not not some backwater outpost. With a budget of around $24 billion, they are one of the largest funders of science in the entire world. The National Science Foundation, for a quick contrast, only gets $6 billion annually. NASA gets $16B. The fact that the energy secretary has never been a qualified scientist is just absurd, and I expect the change in tone and level of discourse on these issues to be one of the biggest improvements on previous administrations.

Watching some of his speeches, it's clear that Chu is not messing around. He actually intends to introduce new solutions to these growing problems, both by advancing technology in obvious but unexplored ways and by unapologetically altering the way we live our overly wasteful lives. We are actually going to have a secretary of energy with scientific and environmental priorities! This is huge.

Hi, Everyone!

First of all, I want to apologize for my unannounced absence from The Train of late.

And unfortunately, second of all, I want to take a moment to turn that unannounced absence into an announced hiatus. Having ten days left in my college career would be a hectic time even if I didn't work the way that I do – but since my writing style tends to consist in several months of "thinking" and "research" followed by a couple weeks of nearly uninterrupted writing, well, it's really hectic.

But here's a glimpse of what I've been doing on the astrophotography front.


ATTEMPT 1, 11/21/08 (already showcased here):




ATTEMPT 2, 12/3/08:




While the first image is a single shot, taken on my first successful night of imaging, the second is a composite image of 23 separate exposures stitched and blended together in Photoshop. This not only allows for a much wider field of view, it means that I can balance different exposures and levels of focus. And the good news is that I haven't fully taken advantage of the technique, so should be able to get something even better (though not so much better) before finishing the project.

While I was hesitant to recommend that anyone click on the previous image (it looks about as good as it ever will at the smaller size), this time I encourage everyone to check out the larger version.

My Friday Night

Didn't go to any parties. But I did make this:





It took four hours to get the telescope functioning, and I had to reset the entire system and program in every bit of information about location, time and orientation from scratch. Then another hour or so to get this one image, because I accidentally un-aligned the telescope and the Orion Nebula was the only thing I could find manually. And even after all that work, the focus is off more than I'd like and I'm not really sure how to correct it.

If there's any moral to this all, it's that science is fucking hard. There isn't even anything but aesthetics riding on this project, and it was amazingly difficult.

Still, as far as first attempts go, I couldn't be more satisfied. Also, a plane happened to fly precisely through my field of vision! To put the total insanity of that in perspective, its lights took up 3/4 of the frame and if I hadn't happened to have been looking at precisely that moment I would have missed it.

No Kidding: A Cure for AIDS?

The procedure as stands kills 30% of patients, and science hasn't advanced far enough for full-fledged gene alteration to be a remotely safe (hell, a remotely sane) idea except in the most dire of circumstances. And it should be noted that a single instance of a phenomenon isn't so different, scientifically speaking, from no instances of a phenomenon.

But it looks like they've found a potential cure for AIDS.

An Endorsement that Means Something

After performing an in-depth analysis of each candidate's stance on scientific issues back in September – to which Obama responded thoughtfully and at length while McCain did not respond at all – the science journal/publication company Nature endorsed Barack Obama for president of the United States. To give you an idea of how big of a deal this is, a list of Nature journals can be found here. Suffice it to say that the title "Nature" would be audacious if they weren't one of the premier sources of information for practically every scientific field.

This is, I believe, their first political endorsement of all time. As such, and because of the fact that these are scientists, the editorial reads somewhat differently from most endorsements. Rather than pressing any particular issue, it focuses directly on the intellectual abilities of the candidates by comparing their decision-making styles to scientific practice:

But science is bound by, and committed to, a set of normative values — values that have application to political questions. Placing a disinterested view of the world as it is ahead of our views of how it should be; recognizing that ideas should be tested in as systematic a way as possible; appreciating that there are experts whose views and criticisms need to be taken seriously: these are all attributes of good science that can be usefully applied when making decisions about the world of which science is but a part. Writ larger, the core values of science are those of open debate within a free society that have come down to us from the Enlightenment in many forms, not the least of which is the constitution of the United States.

While they (perhaps wrongly) laud McCain's stances on carbon emissions and (again, questionably) praise Obama's choice of advisors, the overall stress is on Obama's tendency to seek a wide range of alternative views before making his own decision:

On a range of topics, science included, Obama has surrounded himself with a wider and more able cadre of advisers than McCain. This is not a panacea. Some of the policies Obama supports — continued subsidies for corn ethanol, for example — seem misguided. The advice of experts is all the more valuable when it is diverse: 'groupthink' is a problem in any job. Obama seems to understands this. He tends to seek a range of opinions and analyses to ensure that his own opinion, when reached, has been well considered and exposed to alternatives. He also exhibits pragmatism — for example in his proposals for health-care reform — that suggests a keen sense for the tests reality can bring to bear on policy.

Some will find strengths in McCain that they value more highly than the commitment to reasoned assessment that appeals in Obama. But all the signs are that the former seeks a narrower range of advice. Equally worrying is that he fails to educate himself on crucial matters; the attitude he has taken to economic policy over many years is at issue here.

And then, just like practically every other endorsement from an unexpected source, they get around to our old friend Bible Spice:

Either as a result of poor advice, or of advice inadequately considered, he frequently makes decisions that seem capricious or erratic. The most notable of these is his ill-considered choice of Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, as running mate. Palin lacks the experience, and any outward sign of the capacity, to face the rigours of the presidency.

That is, for the record, about as damning a statement as I've ever seen in a formal publication. I will miss her. Or, at least, her effect on this election.


BONUS:

Also, Stephen Colbert endorsed Barack the other night. Sort of.