Janet is currently exploring the implications of the California university furloughs. If you haven’t been paying attention, California is so grossly dysfunctional that the state government has had to order all employees– including university faculty– to take 9% of their work time off as unpaid “furlough” days, in order to cut costs enough to have […]
Category: Politics: Economics
Paul Volcker: More Science, Less Finance
The main speaker at yesterday’s Commencement was Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman (the guy before Alan Greenspan) and current chair of President Obama’s economic advisory council. As you would expect from somebody of his background, the bulk of the speech was about the current economic crisis. The full speech is online, but the […]
Kissing and Comic Books
Two things that are worth a plug beyond the Links Dump level: 1) Over at the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum wants you to look at pictures of people kissing. This is for Science, so stop giggling, and tell her what you think of the pictures. 2) There’s a new blog, Ecocomics, dedicated to exploring the burning […]
Banking in the Future
I’m currently the president of the local chapter of Sigma Xi (an honor society, not a fraternity, thankyouverymuch), and as such have been collecting RSVP’s and dues for this year’s new inductees. As part of this process, I’ve been struck by how many students don’t have checks– I’ve had a couple of students give me […]
Physics Can Fix This
One of the NCAA pools I’m in has a copy of Obama’s bracket entered, and the last I checked, I’m a couple of games up on him. This means I’m as qualified as anyone else to offer a plan to fix the financial crisis, and I have just the plan we need. On the question […]
Why “Clean Coal” Matters
Back before things went pear-shaped this weekend, Jonathan Zasloff had a good post about why “clean coal” is important: I think it’s terrific that the Coen Brothers are making funny, effective ads against relying on “clean coal” as part of the US energy program. But I worry that the clean energy community is really missing […]
Nationalism and Science
Via email, Mike Steeves points me to an Ars Technica article about a Thomson Reuters report on the “decline in American science”: The US is beginning to lose its scientific dominance. That’s the message from Thomson Reuters, the people behind EndNote and impact factors. According to a report in their publication ScienceWatch, the US’ science […]
Wanted: News Smoothing
Back in the fall, I got all caught up in the election, like everybody else, and I added a bunch of blogs to my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I’m thinking that I might need to cut back to pre-election levels, if not lower, though. Following too many political blogs is giving me whiplash. This […]
Don’t Let the Door Hit You in the Ass
The big news of the day from the world of politics is that President Obama plans to cap executive pay at banks that take bailout money in the next round of emergency cash payments. This is not popular with the executive class: “That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly […]
Message from APS: Support Science Funding
The American Physical Society has sent out another of its email alerts encouraging people to write to Congress in support of more funding for science. Actually, they’re urging people to send two messages: a thank-you to Speaker Pelosi for the generous science funding in the House stimulus bill, and a letter to your Senators asking […]