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Politics of Science

 

At the risk of giving you the impression that Idaho is full of backwoods uneducated types, I’m going to mention a recent article about the “vaccination debate” here in Idaho.

The article tells the story of a group of anti-immunization crusaders in Northern Idaho through the lens of two contrasting women. One of these is the leader of the anti-immunization folks, Ingri Cassel. The other is state epidemiologist Christine Hahn.

I’m not going to wade into the depths of the ...(read more)

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A friend just posted a message to me on Facebook: “How is it going with your new position?  BTW, when I read this article, I thought of you.”

The “this article” is in The Nation magazine, and is titled “The Crisis in Higher Education.”

Yes, it’s bad out there in many ways, and not getting better.

But….

I like to take the optimistic view of things.  Challenges and problems are there to help us learn lessons.  This “crisis in higher ed” is a major ...(read more)

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Originally I was going to post just about being thankful.

See, despite shrinking budgets and challenging times, we scientists are a lucky group – especially those of us who have benefitted from the budget largesse of the USA towards our endeavor.

When else in history has any society spent so much money on people simply exploring and figuring out who the world works?  Never.  It’s actually amazing if you think about it.

We are so lucky to be living in a time when ...(read more)

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I’ve long thought that university administrations had difficulty with the concept of running their “business” efficiently. Now I have proof.

Someone that I know very well (snicker) has had some funding for a few years to develop software infrastructure for next-gen sequencing data. This is important work, since next-gen data poses quite a challenge. The work was done through NC State funds for cancer research.

After spending a lot of time and money building a great team, and getting ...(read more)

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How dare you to “speculate” about what your results might mean?

That’s the attitude I’ve received twice now, from two different reviewers, on two different papers.

In the latest case, we did some work related to antibiotic resistance, and we found interesting new pathways activated in one resistant strain.

At the end of the paper, we speculated about what these pathways might be doing. We even came up with a model for it.

We didn’t claim that this was “the correct answer” – ...(read more)

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