What's New Friday March 20, 2009

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 20 Mar 09   Washington, DC

1. ENLIGHTENMENT: SPRING ARRIVES FOR AMERICAN SCIENCE.
"The Enlightenment Returns," a guest editorial by Kurt Gottfried and 
Harold Varmus in today's Science, reminds readers that the founders of our 
nation were children of the Enlightenment.  They "understood the power 
that flows from combining human reason with empirical knowledge."  
President Obama's Memorandum on Scientific Integrity directs 
administration officials to neither suppress nor alter scientific and 
technological findings, and make information developed for the government 
available to the public.  Our long winter is over.  

2. RECOVERY ACT: THE BIGGEST BASIC RESEARCH INCREASE IN HISTORY. 
The Recovery Act supplements NSF FY 09 funding by $3 billion. Of the $2 
billion available in Research and Related Activities, the majority will be 
used for proposals that are already in house.  All grants issued with 
Recovery Act funds will be standard grants with durations up to five 
years. New principal investigators and high-risk, high-return research 
will be top priorities. Proposals declined on or after October 1, 2008 
will also be considered. The Recovery Act mandates a transparency and 
accountability.  

3. CANADA: ELECTION DID NOT GO WELL ABOVE THE 49TH PARALLEL. 
Stephen Harper, newly elected Conservative-Party Prime Minister, named 
Gary Goodyear, an obscure Member of Parliament, to be Minister of Science 
and Technology.  Already this year Goodyear oversaw a series of massive 
science funding cuts, including zeroing out the Genome program.  A 
chiropractor and acupuncturist with no science background, he is known for 
opposing same-sex marriage and favoring full legal rights for fertilized 
eggs.  Asked in an interview if he believed in evolution, he objected to 
being questioned about religion. Later that day he said he believed in 
evolution.  He should have stopped there, but expanded with an example 
from chiropractic about women’s shoes and the spine.  He clearly confused 
genetic inheritance with adaptation of an individual, or perhaps he 
believes in Lamarckian evolution.

4. TURKEY: ISLAMIZATION OF TURKISH SOCIETY.  
The Editor of Science and Technology magazine was fired over her plan to 
mark the Darwin year with a magazine cover showing Darwin and the HMS 
Beagle.  Instead it marked the sad end of a secular society in Asia.  

5. DISASTER: DID STRING THEORISTS MAKE A FINANCIAL BLACK HOLE?
Last year a federal court refused to enjoin the Large Hadron Collider from 
being turned on lest the enormous energy create a black hole that would 
devour Earth http://bobpark.org/WN08/wn040408.html .  Earth survived this 
reckless adventure by experimental physicists, but could theoretical 
physicists be behind the financial black hole that's sucking up all of the 
world’s wealth?  The CBS News program 60 Minutes has warned repeatedly 
that mathematicians and theoretical physicists are being recruited by Wall 
Street Wall Street to concoct complicated financial "derivatives" that no 
one can understand http://bobpark.org/WN95/wn031095.html .  The current 
favorite, assembled by the geniuses in the financial products division of 
AIG, is the credit default swap, or CDS.  You can think of a CDS as the 
financial equivalent of an IED.  For this they got millions in bonuses?

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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