Louisiana devolves

by dbking
Louisiana governor signs creationist bill:
[Via National Center for Science Education]

Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal signed Senate Bill 733 (PDF) into law, 27 years after the state passed its Balance Treatment for Evolution-Science and Creation-Science Act, a law overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. Jindal’s approval of the bill was buried in a press release issued on June 25, 2008, announcing 75 bills he signed in recent days. Houma Today reports(June 27, 2008) that the bill “will empower educators to pull religious beliefs into topics like evolution, cloning and global warming by introducing supplemental materials.”
[More]

I guess they just made it harder for Louisiana students to get accepted to good universities, at least if they want to be a scientist. Should be interesting as parents sue school districts about teaching religion in their science class. This typically results in the school district losing and having to pay a whole lot of money.

But what does that matter to the politicians who pander? Of course, some school districts apparently have no problem with having creationist teachers. It took this one 11 years before the teacher was fired in Ohio for directly disobeying the school board. I mean , he only burnt crosses into the arms of students while he was supposed to be teaching science.

I am always amazed at the fortitude of those amazing students who make it through this sort of ignorance. Of course, it also explains why we do not have enough graduate students from America and have to import so many.

Technorati Tags: Education, Science

Norms are changing

by TankGirlJones

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

Column on NIH and Harvard policies:
[Via Open Access News]
Karla Hahn, Two new policies widen the path to balanced copyright management: Developments on author rights, C&RL News, July/August 2008.

A light bulb is going off that is casting the issue of author rights management into new relief. On January 11, 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a revision of its Public Access Policy. Effective April 7, 2008, the agency requires investigators to deposit their articles stemming from NIH funding in the NIH online archive, PubMed Central. Librarians have been looking forward to such an announcement, especially since studies found that the voluntary version of the policy was achieving deposit rates of affected articles on the order of a few percentage points.

Since we as taxpayers pay for this research, it should not be bound up behind access control. Now, because of the NIH’s revision, it won’t.

With the article deposit requirement, researchers can no longer simply sign publication agreements without careful review and, in some cases, modification of the publisher’s proposed terms. While this may be perceived as a minor annoyance, it calls attention to the value of scholarly publications and the necessity to consider carefully whether an appropriate balance between author and publisher rights and needs is on offer.

The norm in science has been to always quickly sign over copyright so that the paper could be published. This sometimes resulted in the absurd prospect that the author of a paper could not use his own data in slides, since he no more owned the copyright of it than any other random scientist. Now there is a little leverage for the author to retain some aspects of copyright.

As institutions, as grantees, become responsible for ensuring that funded authors retain the rights they need to meet the NIH public Access Policy requirements, there is a new incentive for campus leaders to reconsider institutional policies and local practices relating to faculty copyrights as assets. …
The February 2008 vote by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to grant Harvard a limited license to make certain uses of their journal articles is another important indicator of an accelerating shift in attitudes about author rights management, and also reveals the value of taking an institutional approach to the issue. …

Academic pressure is coming to bear on these policies and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. In most instances, providing open access will be the better route but now the individual institutions will be responsible for providing the necessary infrastructure.

Perhaps something like Highwire Press will appear. Here , instead of each scientific association having to develop their own infrastructure, Highwire does it for many of them, greatly simplifying publishing for all. Highwire now has almost 2 million article published with free access. Perhaps something similar for institutional storage would be helpful.

Norms are always more difficult to change than technologies. We are now witnessing a key shift in norms for sharing scholarly work that promises a giant step forward in leveraging the potential of network technologies and digital scholarship to advance research, teaching, policy development, professional practice, and technology transfer. …

What scientists expect when they publish a paper is changing rapidly. What once took 6-9 months from submission to publication can now happen in weeks. Where once all rights had to be assigned to the publisher, now the authors can retain some for their own use.

What will the norms be like in five years?

Technorati Tags: Government, Science, Web 2.0

Ask a question. Fix a problem.

by *L*u*z*a*
[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

How Do I Add FriendFeed Comments to My Blog:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

Hey, smarter people: how do I add a FriendFeed comments module under my blog comments? I want to see all these great comments. Just found these several days later:

Man, so many great people saying great things, and I didn’t engage at all. : (

Not only is this blog entry a great example of how to start a conversation (i.e. ask your community), the comments are a great example of how the conversation progresses. They provide a solution, naturally, but there is also extensive debugging help to get it to work. Eventually, the creator of the needed plug-in arrives to help and ends up making his own software better.

So by asking for help, the community not only provided an answer to Chris, it helped troubleshoot and make the product even better. All in less than 24 hours. How is that for a development cycle!

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Depressing

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/D.Evans et al.; Optical/UV: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/VLA/CfA/D.Evans et al., STFC/JBO/MERLIN

Apparently, Belief in Evolution Makes You a Minority Figure:
[Via Genome Technology Online Current Issue]

What a day for creation theory. John Lynch at Stranger Fruit blogs about the latest results of a Gallup poll on political leaning and belief in creation, intelligent design, or evolution. Republicans emerged with 60 percent believing in creationism, 32 percent believing in ID, and just 4 percent believing in no-strings-attached evolution. Democrats were an even split on creationism and ID (38 and 39 percent, respectively), with 17 percent opting for evolution. Independents had the highest rate of belief in evolution — 19 percent — but still had 40 percent opting for creationism and 36 percent for ID.

While we’re on the subject, members of the American Society of Plant Biologists are urging Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to veto the creation-in-the-classroom bill that’s on his desk. Pamela Ronald includes the full text of the letter at her Tomorrow’s Table blog.

I was really depressed by this until I actually looked at the data, something worth doing. It is even more depressing. They asked “which comes closest to your views:

1. Humans developed over millions of years, God guided
2. Humans developed over millions of years, God had no part
3. God created humans as is within the last 10,000 years.

So we are not just talking creationism, where God did it. We are talking God did it within the last 10,000 years! 60% of the Republicans feel that mankind was created as is within the last 10,000 years. That is a really horrifying number. An overwhelming number of Republicans believe in a total fantasy for which there is not only no proof but actually a huge amount of information showing it is false. There is absolutely NO evidence at all for proposition 3.

The people who founded Jericho left behind tools and pottery that have been dated to 14,500-11,000 years ago. There is evidence of farming from 11,000 ago. But these Republicans just ignore that evidence. I wonder how they place Neanderthal in their histories. Probably just make stuff up.

But 40% for independents and 38% for the Democrats is not something to cheer about either. Why is this? Why are so many americans ignorant of such basic facts about our natural world. The data answers that question. It is going to church that produces this error.



Those that attend church weekly are the most likely to believe this myth, probably because they hear it all the time. Most never got any education regarding evolution in school at all. This drops to 24% for those that seldom attend church (I’d be worried more about that high number except something like 20% of those surveyed believe the Sun goes around the Earth.)

I guess the one hopeful thing is that those that believe proposition 2, that mankind evolved over millions of years without God, has risen since 2000 from 9% to 14% in 2008. This is higher than the sapling error. Maybe there is hope.

But then again, these questions have been asked since 1982 and essentially 44% of Americans have always believed in something that is demonstrably false. This unchanging level of ignorance

So, while religion may be useful for many things, it is substantially responsible for perpetuating a fable that can be shown to be false by a plethora of methods. Well, at least there are a small percentage of us who can actually deal with the world as it really is. I guess this is how Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho gets elected in 500 years.

Technorati Tags: Science