My last post quoted from Siegfried Hecker’s testimony on 30 April 2008 before the Water and Energy subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Hecker’s statement on risk aversion reminded me of a Science editorial by Harold T. Shapiro, “The Willingness to Risk Failure”. Shapiro opened the editorial, drawn from a prior commencement address, with: Let [...]
For thirty-six years, I was a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), most of the time spent doing some variation of atmospheric science and simulation with an extended foray into nonlinear solvers. But no more. As of last Friday, I became part of the “road-kill” in a process of lab downsizing. Following a [...]
The RIAA has framed the issue of music sharing as piracy. While that fits their interest in preserving a traditional business model, the indicators are increasing that the real issue is about a cultural change in how information is gained, used, and shared. While a result of technology, the effect is both a cultural change [...]
Years ago, I became fascinated by James Burke’s series Connections. Burke had the ability to string a chain of interrelations from the problem of pumping water out of silver mines in medieval Czechoslovakia to the construction of the atomic bomb. This post runs in that tradition, going from RIAA lawsuits to a potential consequence of [...]
Last Wednesday night I “BARTed” into San Francisco for the Northern California Science Writers’ Association (NCSWA) holiday dinner; a dinner intentionally timed to coordinate with the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Last night’s dinner speaker was Jack Shroder, a geologist and physical geographer with the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has [...]
We too often seem to live in a world in which few understand the method of achieving a goal by fostering conditions in which that goal would naturally occur. Groups opposing the rate of abortions try to reduce that rate by legal force rather than by working to create conditions of education and economic means [...]
An episode of Freakonomics embodied the concept that creating explicit requirements replaces prior tacit requirements. In this episode, a day-care center in Haifa imposed an explicit fine for late pick-ups by parents. In contradiction to the expected decrease in late pick-ups, the explicit fine replaced the tacit penalty of parental guilt and the number of [...]
In his Times Eye on Science Blog of 11 July, Michael Lemonick addresses the issues of Saving American Science, the theme of a recent meeting by the Aspen Science Center. The theme of lagging U.S. innovation in science and technology has been rising as a concern for several years now. Congressman Frank Wolf provides some [...]
One of the interesting things mentioned at this year’s Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop was the use of writing a book review as a venue for one’s own essay. John Horgan, who was the leader of my small group at the workshop, did this with his review of Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science. [...]
I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, but not dormant. The end of May, I was off to the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop. This allowed me to learn from the faculty and presenters with a great diversity of backgrounds and experience, including NY Times, Scientific American, Knight Media, and freelance work. It was a [...]
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