Kurt Bouwhuis, Mackinac Center Intern
This is a fantastic piece by the always great Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek. It is barely over four pages and is definitely worth the read.
by Russ Roberts on November 12, 2009
Here is my take on financial reform at The Economists Voice. Other opinions by Posner, Richardson and Acharya, Hubbard , and Calomiris, here. My piece is very Hayekian as you might guess from the title.
Kurt Bouwhuis, Mackinac Center Intern
EconTalk host Russ Roberts talks about the role of empirical evidence and bias in economics and why economists disagree. Is approximately an hour and 15 minutes but well worth your time. If you are on a huge time crunch, the first 40 minutes will suffice.
Kurt Bouwhuis, Mackinac Center Intern
The Large Hadron Collider — a $9 billion particle accelerator was built underground on the border of Switzerland and France. The experiments will send atoms around a 17-mile tunnel in separate directions at the speed of light. Upon collision, it has been hypothesized that there will be a “God” particle created, would help us better understand mass. There are also people who believe it may help us understand multiple dimensions.
The article can be found at cnn.com as well as a video describing the project located here.
–Lauren Ruhland, 2008 MCPP intern
I’m not an expert on health issues, but among the biggest projects of my academic career was a research presentation on advancements in the treatment of cervical cancer, the culmination of countless hours of research during my final semester. In particular, my project focused on new vaccine technologies that promise protection against human papillomavirus (HPV). HPV is a common (and incurable) STD that causes virtually all cancers of the uterine cervix. Gardasil was the first vaccine against the disease approved by the FDA.
As with any new medical technology, there are risks to consider before getting vaccinated (or choosing to vaccinate your child.) If it were up to Erin Brockovich, though, you wouldn’t even have to make that decision. No, she doesn’t want to make HPV vaccines mandatory– though many state legislatures have tried to do effectively that. Instead, Brockovich siezes on reports of a few tragic deaths that have occurred after vaccination and concludes that Gardasil manufacturer Merck is killing young girls in the pursuit of profits.
I’m taking her blog post on point-by-point, here. It’s pretty long, so consider yourself warned.
Gardasil, as you should know by now, is an HPV vaccine sold by Merc(sic), a vaccine with a flawed marketing campaign targeting young girls. The premise is that the vaccine will protect young girls from cervical cancer, as well as a couple of varieties of HPV.
The vaccine prevents infection with four varieties of HPV– two are associated with cervical cancer, while the other two are associated with genital warts, an unpleasant but not deadly disease. Though there are many risk factors for cervical cancer, like tobacco use and family history, these factors are not sufficient on their own to cause the disease. Upwards of 99% of cervical cancers are directly associated with HPV infection, though most women with HPV won’t ever get cancer.
Since young women are the most likely to be infected with HPV and the benefits of vaccination greatest for females, that’s where Merck chose to focus its research. Because the research was conducted among this age group, the FDA has only approved the vaccine for girls and women between the ages of 11 and 27. Continue reading
~Lauren M. Ruhland, SET intern
Title IX, the federal regulation mandating gender equality in public education, has been subject to controversial interpretations since its inception in 1972. Most commonly, Title IX debates surrounded funding for women’s athletics programs at the high school and college levels. Today, John Tierney of the New York Times writes that some would like Title IX intervention in order to establish a stronger feminine presence in the hard sciences:
The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be “Title Nined” say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.
In other words, women aren’t avoiding science because the lab has a prohibitive glass ceiling. It’s that there are so many other appealing choices out there. Even as somebody who’s been known to don heels and pearls for an date with D. melanogaster, I’m not counting on spending my career shackled to a lab bench. Marie Curie, Maria Mitchell, and Rosalind Franklin were able to harness their passions to make groundbreaking scientific discoveries, and for that they should be admired. However, women who chose to reach for other dreams should not be held up to an ideal they never embraced.
LM Ruhland, 2008 MCPP intern
Skeptical Inquirer’s Benjamin Radford has a good article about water shortages and why we aren’t actually running out of water. In a nutshell– the hydrologic cycles don’t ever just stop; there’s not a whole lot of water that ever actually leaves earth. It just gets more expensive to make it useful. Everything there is applicable in the ongoing debate about the commodification of Great Lakes water, so I encourage you to take a look. The science is presented in easily digestible chunks.
“The Sciences…My Supreme Delight: T. Jefferson, 1809″; Kalamazoo Valley Museum, June 14-September 1
If you’re a lover of liberty and a big science dork (like, say, me), you’re probably already familiar with the Founding Fathers’fascination with the physical sciences. Benjamin Franklin and his many practical inventions are probably the first to come to mind, but Thomas Jefferson was another who filled his free hours as an amateur natural philosopher. According to Archiving Early America, even his political enemies conceded his prowess in the realm of science (though he considered himself an amateur).
“Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight,” he wrote. The exhibit in Kalamazoo features some of Jefferson’s own possessions in conjunction with other 18th and 19th century artifacts in an attempt to replicate Jefferson’s scientific collection.
If you can’t get over to the west side of the state this summer, indulge your inner science history geek with this online exhibit of Jefferson’s fossil collection from the Academy of Natural Sciences.
In other Jeffersonian news, the “Jefferson 1“, who was arrested on April after dancing at the Jefferson Memorial and charged with “interfering with an agency function,” has not yet had her day in court, but it’s expected in late June.
~LM Ruhland, SET intern@MCPP
