Mike the Mad Biologist

The Focus on the Family Super Bowl Ad: It's All About...

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:12:09 -0500

...the money. Over at Pandagon, Jesse Taylor, on the subject of the Focus on the Family anti-legal and safe abortion ad, asks (italics mine):

The question is instead this: if the anti-choice position is so true, so mainstream and so critical to the future of our nation, why did Focus on the Family spend $2.5 million to avoid saying anything whatsoever about it? Pam Tebow's lines were all oblique references to her choice not to have an abortion, but if FotF felt the need to couch her story in such coded and oblique terms that it could have been an ad for Wii Family, doesn't that say something incredibly telling about how weak and radical their position actually is?

This is why I think the ad won't be successful. I think the ad was never designed to change people's minds--the Super Bowl is the wrong place to run that kind of ad. So why run the ad?

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Very Cool Staphylococcus aureus Interactive Surveillance Site

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:05:33 -0500

The success of a European MRSA surveillance network shows just how stupid, foolish, and short-sighted the Obama Administration's decision to cut CDC antimicrobial resistance surveillance is. But let's turn this frown upside down campers, and look at the really cool website the European Staphylococcal Reference Laboratory Working Group set up.

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Monday Links

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:49:06 -0500

Who dat dem gonna beat the Saints? Oops, wrong marketing strategy. Geaux Saints! Links for you. Science:

Postdoctoral researchers at UMass unionize
First Federal Court Hearing on Whether Human Genes Should Be Patented
"Could You Patent the Sun?"*
Global Ocean Protection Measures Have Failed
Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

Other:

How a poll is conducted
The Monster's Sweet Perfume
The Great Tim Tebow Fallacy
Government driver hits pedestrian, MPD gives victim a ticket
Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie
Defending Sarah Palin's hand
Why a flat tax is a bad idea
Tea Partiers Panic, Informed Tea Produced by 'Fereigners'

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Obama to CDC Efforts in Antimicrobial Resistance: Drop Dead

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:12:38 -0500

(from here)

By way of Maryn McKenna, we find that the Obama Administration has decided to massively cut the funding for the CDC's antimicrobial resistance and vaccination efforts. I thought this was the kind of anti-science bullshit that the Bush Administration did. From the IDSA (pdf):

Under CDC's proposed budget, the agency's already severely strapped Antimicrobial Resistance budget would be cut dramatically by $8.6 million--roughly 50 percent. This vital program is necessary to help combat the rising crisis of drug resistance, a critical medical problem that the agency deems "one of the world's most pressing public health problems." Yet the President's FY 2011 budget would allow CDC to target only 20 state/local health departments and health care systems to be funded for surveillance, prevention, and control of antimicrobial resistance, down from 48 this past year. It would also eliminate all grants to states for the successful Get Smart in the Community program to combat improper uses of antibiotics.

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Sunday Links

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:17:09 -0500

I hear there's some kind of sporting event today. No excuse to not check out some links though. Science:

Random thoughts on CDC's swine flu effort: epidemiology and surveillance
In Praise of Deference
Seven habits of highly successful toads
Man Hunts Crocodile That Has Eaten Over 200 People
Climate change causes wolverine decline across Canada
Hubble Sights Strange Spaceship-Shaped Object Traveling at 11,000MPH
Peer review: What is it good for?
Yes, ecology shapes evolution, but guppies show reverse also true

Other:

The GOP id speaks
Fiscalizing Failure
Great exchange between President Obama and Senator Lincoln
Bank Lobbyist Jamie Gorelick Endangers Student Loan Reform
One Bowl = 2 Servings. F.D.A. May Fix That.

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Past Due (and Brad DeLong) on Political Paralysis

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:50:53 -0500

If you're looking for a good primer on Big Shitpile and other recent economic events, I highly recommend Peter Goodman's Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy. It's well written, and does what many other books about the recent economic collapse fail to do: puts it into a larger context. But this small excerpt from Past Due hits the nail on the head as to what our problem is:

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Putting Wakefield in a Larger Context

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:13:52 -0500

Over at DailyKos, there's a very good post about anti-vaxxer idiocy (I believe in rewarding non-science blogs with links when they take this stuff head-on). The author's motivation illustrates just how murderous this lunacy is:

Part of what infuriates me about this issue is that I'm aware of a case where a child was infected with Measles before he was old enough to be immunized against it. The source of the infection was an older child at a day care whose parents decided against vaccination.

The child's Measles progressed to subacute sclerosing panencephalitis from which his brain deteriorated, eventually causing loss of body function, and an all-around horrible death. All of which could be traced back to abject human stupidity.

As the kids say, read the whole thing.

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Note to Herbert: It's Not Radical At All, It's Centrist

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:01:45 -0500

A recent question posed by NY Times columnist demonstrates just how far to the Palinist right our political and social discourse has shifted:

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Friday Links

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:56:54 -0500

I believe that someone once said, "Thank God It's Friday." Links for you. Science:

Oh my fucking god. (Really, it's about science)
MTS43 - Rob Knight - The Microbes That Inhabit Us
New organism discovered in a dirty pond
Is There Sh*t in Your Salad? 39% of Bagged Salads Have Too Much Fecal Bacteria
My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird

Other:

Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite
Why bipartisanship can't work: the expert view
More from the "why bipartisanship can't work" guy
Causation Analysis: What "But Fors" Caused the Crisis ?
The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News
He's a Yuppie: Why Obama can't connect with the working class.
The death penalty -- it's unworkable: The American Law Institute, instrumental in structuring the model statutes on which most death sentences are based, has withdrawn its support of such laws.
American Decline: The sleeper issue of the 2010 elections.

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A NY Times (Silly) Idea of the Day: 'The War Against Suburbia'?

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:33:27 -0500

There's been some discussion about Joel Kotkin's argument "The War Against Suburbia", kicked off by The NY Times making it their Idea of the Day. Leaving aside whether there should be a 'war against suburbia', it's just not true. First, there has been a decades-long policy of federal subsidization of housing prices through the mortgage interest tax deduction. Since there are far more homeowners in suburbs than in cities, this is a massive wealth transfer to suburbs. Also, Obama's non-cramdown policies which have the effect of (temporarily) keeping housing prices higher than they should be are also pro-suburb.

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This Is Not the French Consulate

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:02:09 -0500

Crime in the urban hellhole known as Boston:

01/11/10 - At approximately 5:29 a.m., officers responded to a radio call for a removal from the French Library, located at 53 Marlborough St.
On arrival, police spoke to the executive director of the library (the witness), who stated that a male suspect on the premises was refusing to leave.

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A Tale of Two Polls, or What I Learned from 16S rRNA Microbiome Analysis

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:22:53 -0500

I'll return to the Research 2000 poll I discussed Wednesday, and also talk about this Gallup poll Digby discusses (and I think misinterprets), because I think we have to really think about the data we're collecting--and the questions in those polls really are different in quality from each other. But first, the 16rRNA.

Something that's applicable to many fields is that you have to understand the limitations of your data, not just the strengths. In addition, you also imagine what the data would look like given certain outcomes: given scenario X, we would expect to see A, and given scenario Y, we would expect to see B--if you can't really tell A and B apart, then you've reached your limits of resolution given your data type.

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Poll: Rank-and-File Republicans Are Insane

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:44:16 -0500

Here are some 'interesting' results from a poll conducted by Research 2000:

QUESTION: Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?

Yes 63
Not Sure 16
No 21

But that's not the crazy part. There's more:

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Democratic Senators Party with Banking Lobbyists at Miami Beach Ritz Carlton

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:03:43 -0500

Are Democrats intentionally trying to lose the next election? Because that's the only possible way to explain this:

Twelve Democratic Senators spent last weekend in Miami Beach raising money from top lobbyists for oil, drug, and other corporate interests that they often decry, according to a guest list for the event obtained by POLITICO.

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Gregg Would Have Been a Great Commerce Secretary

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:50:02 -0500

Once again, Republican Sen. Judd Gregg makes me wonder what the Obama administration was thinking when they nominated him for Commerce Secretary--they must have really believed that post-partisanship bullshit. Gregg's latest eruption:

Judd Gregg just had a meltdown on MSNBC that came out of nowhere. He's been attacking everything Obama, almost from the minute he turned down a Cabinet post offer from the White House, but his performance today was really weird. The conversation was about spending and, as usual, Gregg was acting like the incredible deficit freak that he is.

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