Since he prefers a Kim Jong Il-style commenter policy –“only those who flatter the Premier need comment” — Anthony Watts‘s site doesn’t get the pleasure of my visits much, anymore. Consequently I missed the announcement he made last week that he was “suspending” his blog, at least temporarily, until some great news came out.
Anthony Watts, June, 2010. Speaking in Gold Coast, Australia, on a tour searching to find some place on Earth not affected by global warming. (Photo: Wikipedia)
Now the great news is out. I think. Watts may have been right to suspend blogging. He should have kept the suspension longer.
Watts says NOAA‘s temperature measurement in the U.S. is way off, and that if we ignore all the cities, and if we ignore sites that show the greatest increases in temperature over the past century or so, global warming doesn’t look so bad.
This pre-publication draft paper, titled An area and distance weighted analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends, is co-authored by Anthony Watts of California, Evan Jones of New York, Stephen McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, and Dr. John R. Christy from the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama, Huntsville, is to be submitted for publication.
Wait a minute. “Prepublication draft paper?” ” . . . to be submitted for publication?”
Yes, Dear Reader, that claxon you hear is your and my Hemingway III Solid Gold [Excrement] Detectors™ going off. It may be a false alarm, but still — isn’t this how bogus science is done, isn’t this what Robert Park warns us about? Indeed, in the Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science, Park says to pay attention to key indicators: “1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.” It is, indeed, a press release from Watts, about a paper he hopes to get through the peer review process at some point in the future — but it has not yet been pitched to the science journals. (Yes, that’s also one of the Seven Warning Signs of Bogus History . . . one discipline at a time, please.)
Same old stuff, new day. Watts has been arguing for years that NOAA’s temperature measurements err, but after the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) Project determined that warming exists, even using Watts’s modified measurements and accounting for his claimed errors, some of us hoped Watts might turn to blogging about science, instead.
No, Watts turned to finding a hint of a methodology that might support his preconceived notions. He found one.
So, Watts’s big announcement is that he’s found a methdology which favors his criticisms of NOAA; so we should ignore temperature readings from cities, because cities are hot, and we should ignore temperature readings from suburbs of cities, because suburbs are warm; and if we do that, then warming in the U.S. doesn’t look so bad.
Were I allowed to ask questions at Watts’s blog, I’d ask why we should ignore warming in cities, because are they not part of the planet? Oh, well.
The Twitter version:
Watts: Ignore city temps (hot!) and ‘burbs (warm!), temps on farms don’t show so much global warming! Oops – did we say that before?
Anthony, how about you suspend your blog until you get the paper accepted at a good journal? Make sure you got the numbers right . . .
Gee, I think I first posted this more than a year before the Pennsylvania decision. In any case, the subject has come up once again in another forum: Why don’t we teach intelligent design as an “alternative” idea in public school science classes? The answer is, simply, ID is not science. It’s not an alternative hypothesis, it’s a chunk of minority cult religious dogma.
Most bad science claims recirculate year after year, until they are simply educated out of existence in the public mind. We can hope intelligent design falls into that category. But we might worry that modern creationism, begun as a backlash to the anti-Soviet, National Defense Education Act‘s effects on beefing up science teaching in American schools, survives.
We’re talking past each other now over at Right Reason, on a thread that started out lamenting Baylor’s initial decision to deny Dr. Francis Beckwith tenure last year, but quickly changed once news got out that Beckwith’s appeal of the decision was successful.
I noted that Beckwith’s getting tenure denies ID advocates of an argument that Beckwith is being persecuted for his ID views (wholly apart from the fact that there is zero indication his views on this issue had anything to do with his tenure discussions). Of course, I was wrong there — ID advocates have since continued to claim persecution where none exists. Never let the facts get in the way of a creationism rant, is the first rule of creationism.
Discussion has since turned to the legality of teaching intelligent design in a public school science class. This is well settled law — it’s not legal, not so long as there remains no undisproven science to back ID or any other form of creationism.
Background: The Supreme Court affirmed the law in a 1987 case from Louisiana, Edwards v. Aguillard (482 U.S. 578), affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment against a state law requiring schools to teach creationism whenever evolution was covered in the curriculum. Summary judgment was issued by the district court because the issues were not materially different from those in an earlier case in Arkansas, McLean vs. Arkansas (529 F. Supp. 1255, 1266 (ED Ark. 1982)). There the court held, after trial, that there is no science in creationism that would allow it to be discussed as science in a classroom, and further that creationism is based in scripture and the advocates of creationism have religious reasons only to make such laws. (During depositions, each creationism advocate was asked, under oath, whether they knew of research that supports creationism; each answered “no.” Then they were asked where creationism comes from, and each answered that it comes from scripture. It is often noted how the testimony changes from creationists, when under oath.)
Especially after the Arkansas trial, it was clear that in order to get creationism into the textbooks, creationists would have to hit the laboratories and the field to do some science to back their claims. Oddly, they have staunchly avoided doing any such work, instead claiming victimhood, usually on religious grounds. To the extent ID differs from all other forms of creationism, the applicability of the law to ID was affirmed late last year in the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller v. Dover. (Please go read that case!)
Naming one of their top five targets per week, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) will name three more Members of Congress to their “Flat Earth Five,” members who not only vote against LCV positions, but also seem to dwell among flat-Earth believers on science, generally.
First two of the Flat Earth Five:
Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (N.Y.)
Rep. Dan Benishek (Mich.)
Who will fill the three remaining slots — and will they survive election?
Sunrise over Stonehenge on the summer solstice, June 21, 2005 — the analogy of Manhattan’s skyscrapers to the rocks of Stonehenge is obvious (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Dr. Tyson at the November 29, 2005 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Some time ago astronomy phenom Neil de Grasse Tyson mentioned the twice-a-year happenstance of the sun’s setting perfectly in line with New York City’s east-west gridded streets. On many streets, on most streets, you can watch the sun all the way down to the horizon, between the massive “rocks” of Manhattan skyscrapers, almost like watching the solstices at Stonehenge.
On May 30 at 8:16 p.m. and again on July 11 at 8:24 p.m., Manhattanhenge reaches its point of perfection as the full setting sun aligns with the city’s grid of East-West streets, according to the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium. The best places to view the fiery canyon of skyscrapers are at 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th Streets. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building offer especially good views.
Manhattanhenge on 34th Street, by Chaitanya Kapadia / UGC – Here’s what Chaitanya Kapadia says about this picture: “I had set up on a nice spot right in the middle of 34th Street, between the double yellow lines with a few photographers wanting to get the Empire State Building in my shot. However, I should have anticipated photographers to just swarm the streets when the sun lined up with the grid. Minutes later, the police drove down the middle of the road, getting everyone out, which only meant stepping to the side until they passed you, and then right back. Took this using three exposures hand-held.”
It’s stunning to listen to radio, or read newspaper letters-to-the-editor sections in the U.S., and see people who argue we have no need to control carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the European Commission (EC) Climate Change Committee (CCC) approved Britain’s plan to auction pollution rights, part of the UK plan to control and limit carbon emissions.
EU Emissions Trading System: European Commission approves the UK’s national auction platform
Press Notice 2012/081
11 July 2012
Today the European Commission (EC) Climate Change Committee (CCC) voted to approve the UK’s national auction platform for phase III and aviation auctions under the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS).
Welcoming this important vote, Greg Barker said:
“This announcement is a further step towards ensuring that we can start auctioning phase III and aviation allowances as planned. The endorsement by the EU Climate Change Committee reflects the strength of the UK’s proposal and continued leading role in carbon auctioning.”
The CCC endorsement is the latest step in the UK’s preparations for auctioning phase III and aviation allowances. Under EU rules, the Commission and Member States in the form of the CCC must first approve the platform. This will be followed by a three month scrutiny period by the European Council and Parliament. The UK expects auctioning to start in November 2012, subject to successful completion of this scrutiny process.
Following a decision by the CCC last year, Member States are due to start auctioning some 120m phase III emissions allowances early before the end of this year. The UK’s share of these allowances is 12m. Subject to EU approval, it is expected that these allowances will be auctioned in November and December this year. In addition, the UK is expected to auction approximately 7m aviation allowances by the end of 2012.
Auctions of these allowances will be held separately during the same period.
Further detailed information on the UK’s phase III and aviation auctions, including the proposed auction calendar and how to access the auctions, will follow in due course.
Notes to editors
The European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) is at the heart of UK Government policy to tackle climate change
The rules governing the system are set out in the EU ETS Directive; it covers sectors responsible for around half of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions
In 2008, the EU ETS Directive was revised to make auctioning the main method for allocating emissions allowances in Phase III of the EU ETS (2013-2020). In Phase III, at least 50% of general emissions allowances will be auctioned across the EU. In addition, EU member states will auction 15% of aviation allowances
Under the rules set out in the EU Auctioning Regulation, Member States have the option to either auction via a common EU platform, or set up their own, national platform. The UK, Germany and Poland have opted to set up national auction platforms.
In April DECC announced that ICE Futures Europe was its preferred supplier for the contract to conduct auctions of phase III and aviation EU ETS. This followed an EU-wide competitive tender process that launched in December 2011.
Before auctions can begin on the UK platform, the platform must first be approved by the Climate Change Committee and then be subject to a 3 month scrutiny period by the European Parliament and Council. These requirements are set out in the EU Auctioning Regulation.
Both Germany and the European Commission (auctioning on behalf of 24 Member States) have announced their intention to start auctioning after the summer.
Map of Superfund sites in California. Red indicates sites currently on final National Priority List, yellow is proposed for the list, green means a site deleted (usually due to having been cleaned up). Data from United States Environmental Protection Agency CERCLIS database available at http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/phonefax/products.htm. Retrieved April 24, 2010 with last update reported as March 31, 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It’s near midsummer, so the sputtering of right-wing and anti-science propaganda calls for a “return to DDT” should begin to abate, absent a serious outbreak of West Nile Virus human infections, or some fit of stupidity on the part of DDT advocates.
DDT remains a deadly poison, and you, American Taxpayer, are on the hook for millions of dollars needed to clean up legacy DDT manufacturing sites across the nation. Contrary to bizarre claims, DDT really is a poison.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) works constantly at these cleanups. Comes this press release from EPA talking about a small success, a $14.6 million settlement with past property owners or users of sites in Torrance, California, designated for cleanup under the Superfund. The money will pay for cleanup of groundwater at the sites.
Links to sources other than EPA, and illustrations are added here.
Plant will Treat a Million Gallons per Day, Prevent Spread of Contamination
LOS ANGELES – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reached a $14.6 million settlement with four companies for the construction of a groundwater treatment system at the Montrose and Del Amo Superfund sites in Torrance, Calif. Construction of the treatment system is the first step in the cleanup of groundwater contaminated by chemicals used to manufacture DDT and synthetic rubber over three decades.
Once operational, the system will extract up to 700 gallons of water per minute, or a total of a million gallons each day, removing monochlorobenzene and benzene, and re-injecting the cleaned, treated water back into the aquifer. The treated water will not be served as drinking water, but will instead be re-injected to surround the contamination and prevent it from any further movement into unaffected groundwater areas. Construction of the treatment system is expected to be completed in 18 months. EPA will pursue further settlements with the four companies and other parties to ensure that additional cleanup actions are taken and the groundwater treatment system is operated and maintained until cleanup levels are met.
“One of the toxic legacies of DDT and synthetic rubber manufacturing is polluted groundwater,” said Jared Blumenfeld, EPA’s Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest. “The treatment plant will be a milestone for the site, protecting the groundwater resources for the thousands of people who live or work near these former facilities.”
Montrose Chemical Corporation of California manufactured the pesticide DDT from 1947 until 1982. Monochlorobenzene was a raw material used in making DDT. The Montrose site was placed on the EPA’s National Priorities List (NPL) in 1989. The Del Amo Superfund site, located adjacent to the Montrose site, was formerly a synthetic rubber manufacturing facility that used benzene, naphthalene and ethyl benzene. The Del Amo site was placed on the NPL in September of 2002. Groundwater contamination from both sites has co-mingled and will be cleaned up by this single treatment system.
The four responsible parties for this settlement are: Montrose, Bayer CropScience Inc., News Publishing Australia Limited, and Stauffer Management Company LLC. In addition to constructing the treatment system, these parties will also pay oversight costs incurred by EPA and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.
To date, extensive investigations and cleanup actions have been performed at both sites. EPA’s DDT soil removal actions in the neighborhood near the Montrose site were completed in 2002. In 1999, Shell began cleaning-up the Del Amo Superfund site, constructing a multi-layer impermeable cap over the waste pits and installation of the soil-vapor extraction and treatment system. Additional soil and soil gas cleanups at the Del Amo site are slated to begin in 2013.
The proposed consent decree for the settlement, lodged with the federal district court by the U.S. Department of Justice on July 9, 2012, is subject to a 30-day comment period and final court approval. A copy of the proposed decree is available on the Justice Department website at: http://www.justice.gov/enrd/Consent_Decrees.html
Here is the complete press conference held today, July 4, 2012, at the CERN offices in Geneva, Switzerland. (Alas, the press conference was not held in Cedar Hill, Texas, making it a monument to the dangers of saying “we can’t be great in America any more” and refusing to appropriate money for science, or anything else good.)
This may be the biggest discovery of the decade for particle physics; it’s incredibly exciting, despite the appearance of calm. It may be the biggest discovery of the century. (We have 88 years left in the century, too.)
This is the full press conference update on the search for the Higgs boson at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. This press conference followed the 2-hour Seminar that you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAlgX4FNiyM
This original CERN webcast recording was officially published at https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1459604 but I re-uploaded it here because YouTube is best. The CERN Copyright notice seems to say doing something like this may be ok http://copyright.web.cern.ch/ but if they release this video on the official http://youtube.com/cerntv YouTube channel, I may remove this copy from my YouTube account.
So, if the video above goes dark, check the official CERN YouTube site.
Especially for middle school and high school teachers, More:
Slacktivist points out that the Nessie claim is taught in schools funded with public money. Your tax dollars at work, parents, teachers and politicians, teaching your children that Nessie is real.
What constitutes real science evidence, for creationism? Looking west as Nessie marches up 6th Avenue on a sunny early afternoon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
What about monsters under the bed? Does the text claim they contradict evolution, too?
In order to question evolution theory, a publisher claiming to be Christian, publishing books to be used in nominally Christian schools that get charter school funds, claims that the Loch Ness Monster is real. Why?
[Loch Ness Monster = dinosaur] + [Alive with humans] = [Falsification of evolution theory]
Like Dave Barry, we could not make this stuff up. It’s too lunatic for fiction.
Here’s the story, from Scotsman.com (not “true Scotsman,” of course) (links added):
Loch Ness monster cited by US schools as evidence that evolution is myth
The Loch Ness monster: Used as evidence that evolution is myth*
By CLAIRE MCKIN
Published on Monday 25 June 2012 14:05
THOUSANDS of American school pupils are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real – in an attempt by religious teachers to disprove Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Pupils attending privately-run Christian schools in the southern state of Louisiana will learn from textbooks next year, which claim Scotland’s most famous mythological beast is a living creature.
Thousands of children are to receive publicly-funded vouchers enabling them to attend the schools – which follow a strict fundamentalist curriculum.
The Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme teaches controversial religious beliefs, aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism.
Youngsters will be told that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man, then Darwinism is fatally flawed.
Critics have slammed the content of the religious course books, labelling them “bizarre” and accusing them of promoting radical religious and political ideas.
One ACE textbook called Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc reads: “Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence.
“Have you heard of the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”
Another claim taught is that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur.
One former pupil, Jonny Scaramanga, 27, who went through the ACE programme as a child, but now campaigns against Christian fundamentalism, said the Nessie claim was presented as “evidence” that evolution could not have happened.
He added: “The reason for that is they’re saying if Noah’s flood only happened 4,000 years ago, which they believe literally happened, then possibly a sea monster survived.
“If it was millions of years ago then that would be ridiculous. That’s their logic. It’s a common thing among creationists to believe in sea monsters.”
Private religious schools, including the Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, Louisiana, which follows the ACE curriculum, have already been cleared to receive the state voucher money transferred from public school funding, thanks to a bill pushed through by Republican state governor Bobby Jindal, a Hindu convert to Catholicism.
Boston-based researcher and writer Bruce Wilson, who specialises in the American political religious right, said: “One of these texts from Bob Jones University Press claims that dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons. It has little to do with science as we currently understand. It’s more like medieval scholasticism.”
Mr Wilson believes that such fundamentalist Christian teaching is going on in at least 13 American states.
He added: “There’s a lot of public funding going to private schools, probably around 200,000 pupils are receiving this education.
“The majority of parents now home schooling their kids are Christian fundamentalists too. I don’t believe they should be publicly funded, I don’t believe the schools who use these texts should be publicly funded.”
And you wonder why kids turn out like they do?
Christians, you may disagree with evolution theory, or Darwin’s findings and the work of 10,000 other scientists, but do you want to perpetrate bald-faced hoaxes to defend your disagreement? Call on the publisher to change the book. Spreading falsehoods is the wrong way to go about getting at the truth.
Contrary to the history of history-turning books, the controversy over Silent Spring grows stronger in the last decade. Upton Sinclair‘s fictional works on Chicago meat packing company misdeeds gets lionized in high school history courses. Thomas Malthus‘s work on population growth crops up in economics texts. Adam Smith shows up on ties. Few read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but no one defends slavery nor calls Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s book inaccurate even though it was a work of fiction.
In contrast, the attacks on Carson and Silent Spring grow more shrill — today’s Google searches find many more listings for scathing and wildly inaccurate critiques of the book than there are tributes to either.
Carson and her book deserve the praise most often denied, and they deserve little if any of the criticism. Fifty years on Silent Spring’s influence is almost universally positive.
Carson forced the public, and scientists, to look at the wild as an integrated whole, including the plants and animals and mineral, land and ater resources, and also including the towns speckled among wild lands, and especially the farms sprawling in verdant production across most of America. Carson, almost as much as Darwin, forced scientists to see their science as part of a larger whole — study of ecosystems became important, perhaps more important that the study of individual species or locations.
Silent Spring alerted humans that all actions in the wild have consequences in the wild, and that the tyranny of numbers affects the entire out-of-doors as much as smaller parcels. Human effects were seen as world-wide.
Carson’s writing found firm footing in science and showed literary flair, with more than 50 pages of careful and thorough footnotes including precise citations to science research publications. This demonstrated what Richard Feynman later brilliantly described, that a knowledgeable, scientific view of nature makes it more beautiful, and more charming. This near-refutation of Mark Twain‘s philosophy of learning from Life on the Mississippiopened a new genre of literature that is non-fictional and floridly descriptive, but readable and persuasive because of its scientific accuracy.
Silent Spring made it clear that local actions can make big environmental effects. The bird-killing, spring-silencing actions that could cause the silent spring fable in the books introduction was not a massive federal project, but was instead the result of actions of small towns and cities, county governments, and even individual farmers. Planet-saving action could be started at home, next door, in the block in the neighborhood, in the county — and did not require first approval from a national government.
Silent Spring unabashedly pointed a finger at all of us as the culprit of the damage, and not some “other” as a bad guy. While this troubles many today, it carries with it the explicit realization that our own actions can start our own salvation. Personal responsibility becomes real in Silent Spring.
Silent Spring made nature appear accessible to anyone with a yard, or a patch of grass nearby. This gave rebirth to the parks movement, and it encouraged countless thousands to recreation in the outdoors, and to careers outdoors as farmers, ranchers, scientists, forest and park rangers, land managers and gardeners.
Carson specifically addressed the trade-offs required to stop pollution.DDT was a key part of the campaign to eradicate malaria from the planet, she noted. But overuse or abuse of DDT would surely lead to insect resistance to the stuff, she documented with research already a decade old that showed exactly that. If DDT overuse were allowed to continue, she said, DDT would stop being effective in the fight against malaria. The book was published in 1962. In 1965 the World Health Organization stopped its campaign against malaria in Central and Subsaharan Africa that relied on DDT. Getting support from the not-strong national governments in the region had delayed implementation (80% of all households must be treated with DDT in this program and medical care must be improved to cure malaria in human carriers to make it work). Worse, in areas yet untouched by the WHO campaign, mosquitoes were already resistant and immune to DDT due to overuse in agriculture and other fields. Within 18 months after her 1964 death, Rachel Carson had been revealed as a reluctant prophet.
Carson alerted the world to alternatives to technological fixes, especially those that carry high costs. Carson worried about the effects on the fight against malaria if DDT was to be rendered ineffective by overuse. Few planned for that eventuality, but it happened. Happily, she also pointed to other solutions. At peak DDT use, 500 million malaria infections annually killed 4 million people worldwide. Today, mostly without DDT but instead with wiser policies of medical treatment and the use of bednets, malaria infections have been cut in half, to about 250 million annually, and malaria deaths have been reduced by 75%, to under 1 million annually. This is more impressive when one realizes the total world population more than doubled in the same time, and the area where malaria is endemic also increased. Carson told us it was possible to defeat a disease without poisoning our selves and our environment, and we have done it, to a great degree, with malaria.
Birds still sing in the spring, the bald eagle is off the Endangered Species List, America’s air is cleaner, America’s water is cleaner, and more land is set aside for the regeneration of America’s renewable resources and our national, collective psyche in recreation. Much of this can be attributed to actions by people inspired by Rachel Carson’s book.
Rachel Carson in New Yorker, 2007, illustration by Tom Bachtell
Rachel was right. Careful research, care in writing forged by years of research and writing about research, gave Carson the voice and the research chops to write a readable, scientifically accurate call to action.
That call still sounds today, even if one must strain to hear it over the chorus of ill-informed or ill-intentioned hecklers.
May 27 is the anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson. Carson’s birth was May 17 1907 — 105 years ago.
1981 U.S. postage stamp honoring Rachel Carson
Good writers and good scientists deserve to be celebrated. Carson was both a good scientist and great writer. We have two reasons to celebrate her birth.
One way you might appropriately celebrate: Check with your local public library this week, to see whether they have both Carson’s book Silent Spring, and the best biography of Carson, by Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. If either one is missing, offer to donate the amount of money the library needs to purchase the book.
Spread the good words, spread the good news.
Gordo, Sunday comic strip honoring Rachel Carson, by Gus Arriola; for this strip (from the 1960s?) Arriola signed as “Frenda Mann.”
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 