SUPER: BRITAIN'S PLAN TO FIGHT SUPERBUG INFECTION SUCKS

Oh good:

Confronted by an epidemic of drug-resistant staph infections, the UK government has promised to fight back. But experts say their plan is more pose than solution. Among the proposals made by health secretary Alan Johnson are "deep cleans" for hospitals and short sleeves for doctors and nurses. But a Lancet editorial blasts Johnson, saying that such steps, while looking nice, don't actually follow what superbug science recommends.

A system of socialized medicine has undoubtedly ensured that the best, brightest, and most competent British subjects go into medicine. So we're not worried about that. But we are starting to suspect that maybe - at some point - the relationship between humans and the natural world species has gone awry. And that we're all very much screwed.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]

The Elements

The Elements. A song by Tom Lehrer.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

What climate change and fusion tell us about orthodoxies versus dissent in sceince and religion

Over at Climate Audit they are discussing “Miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis”.

Let me relate this to my current field of study - Nuclear Fusion.

The big money is going into projects like ITER (the US is spending something like $200 to $400 mil a year on this project). All the scientists involved say we are at least 30 years away from a net power reactor delivering watts to the grid. When that net power device is built it will be too big 17GW (most power plants built today are under 100MW and the largest are in the 1 GW range), too expensive (at 20X to 30X the current cost of electricity), and too late. All this is inherent in trying to get fusion by heating things up. And yet funding rolls on. Grant money is relatively easy if there is an ITER angle.

Contrast this with IEC fusion. In the US there are 5 to 10 projects going on at a funding rate that is probably on the order of $20 million or less total. The thing about IEC Fusion is that instead of heating up a mass of gas to get fusion in the high energy tail, particles are accelerated directly to fusion speeds. This makes the devices much smaller, less costly, and quicker to develop. So who is doing IEC Fusion? Basically a bunch of old cranks who see ITER and the Tokamaks as useless except as science fair projects. Let me quote Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall who said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

And yet the money rolls on.

If I was in charge of science I would see that in any discipline 70% went to mainstream and 30% to dissenters. That would tend to keep everyone honest. Does it mean some money would go for stupidity? Sure. As Murray Gell-Mann says - there is a reason most new stuff ought not get funded, most of it is flat wrong. However, if we do not encourage dissent from orthodoxy we will never learn anything new.

Our current ratios are out of balance.

Let me add that a significant part of the 30% should go towards replication by dissenters.

If we are really going to do good science we must encourage a climate of dissent and replication.

Let me add that we see this in Cold Fusion. The mainstream derided it because at first replication was difficult. Now at least the laboratory aspects are better under control and replication is the norm. We still do not understand what is happening or why. However, finally progress is being made. So far it seems to be a low energy process. Heat is created. Just not enough to even boil the water (actually D2O) in the experimental apparatus. It is being researched. We will find out why. We lost 10 years of useful work because of clinging to orthodoxy.

In many ways the institutional science world is like the institutional religious world: Woe be unto him who strays from the canon.

Interestingly enough the US Navy is funding IEC Fusion and Cold Fusion. Why? They don't look at it from a right/wrong basis. It is all about risk vs reward. They are not crazy. They do require at least a minimum of results before funding. They come at it from: "we don't know everything" and "mathematics can be helpful but is not definitive. Only real world results count".

Why not more dependence on math? Because with math - if you pick the right assumptions - you can prove anything.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

LIBERAL CAUSE CELEBRE COLLIDES WITH SCIENCE: HYSTERICAL CLAIMS OF "BIOPIRACY" GET RENOWNED SCIENTIST, TIME "HERO FOR THE PLANET" 16 YEARS IN PRISON

For decades academics and human rights activists have screamed about biopiracy, which is what they labeled virtually any intrusion by Western scientists into the sanctified environ of the Third World. Defenders of measured biotechnological research were screamed down as "racists". Now this happened:

Marc van Roosmalen is a world-renowned primatologist whose research in the Amazon has led to the discovery of five species of monkeys and a new primate genus. But precisely because of that work, van Roosmalen was this year sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison and jailed in Manaus, Brazil. Last month, his lawyers managed to get him freed on bail while they appeal his conviction on charges stemming from an investigation into alleged biopiracy. But scientists in Brazil and across the world are outraged, and describe the case as the most glaring example of laws and government policies they say are stifling scientific inquiry.

To understand the sheer scope of this disaster, you should realize that this description of his honors - which include the phrase "one of the most accomplished field biologists of our time" are underselling his achievements. Tetrapod Zoology recently did a four-post series about new mammals that van Roosmalen has discovered. This is a total outrage.

This style of the activism - the smug self-righteousness of the activists, the hysterical ad homs against anyone who tries to steer a middle course, etc - creates an environment ripe for abuse. This is how global warming research became an anti-scientific endeavor where data is withheld from dissidents until they reverse engineer flawed algorithms, it's how absolutist claims about scientific practice have recently been used to shut down open source science journals, etc.

A more measured model of scientific progress - one that recognizes the sociology of scientific communities while refusing to cede ground to the cultural left on the question of science's privileged relationship to truth - would go a long way to avoiding these pitfalls. But that would lack something in the way of smug sophistication, and where would that leave the soft anti-intellectualism of international human rights activism?

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]

Climate Science Needs To Go Underground

I have been doing some more thinking about how to measure climate change. If we actually want to measure if the earth is heating, we ought to actually measure the temperature of the earth.

If climate was my interest, I’d find the “constant” temperature transition point in the ground and string thermometers (electronic of course) at, above, and below that level below ground. From watching the change in those temperatures over time climate change could actually be determined. Heat flows too. Similarly for the sea. Let the earth or water do your averaging for you.

From that and satellite measurements it ought to be relatively easy from first principles to figure out what is going on. We will have some measure of the heat flows. Which will give us a much better idea of what is going on than measuring the daily high and low air temperature for a given day.

If we are going to measure the air we need to measure it much more frequently than at two unknown times to get just the high and low. Because the heat capacity of air is so low, you can’t determine heat flows very well unless the recording frequency of temperature measurement goes way up.

Measurement 4 ft above ground (or what ever the standard is) to get the high and low for the day has so little climate information that it is tantamount to useless for climate observation. Or heat flows either. The only reason to keep doing it that way is that we have always done it that way.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

What Causes Ice Ages?

Since we have a consensus on climate science could some one please tell me the cause of ice ages?

Propaganda Wise

Ever since Steve McIntyre nudged the Goddard Institute for Space Studies to correct its error in the "adjusted" data many of the AGW folks (global warming is man made) have been saying that this is a minor correction. [in the comments]

Without "the hottest year on record was 1998" the climate looks more naturally variable.

Scientifically this is minor correction.

Propaganda wise it is a big thing.

It has also alerted people to the idea that data and methods must be open in science.

Update 13 Aug 007 1709z:

Steve McIntyre on why Hansen's Error Matters.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values