Yearly Archives: 2014

How to be properly scared about climate change: A talk by Greg Laden

Climate Change, Uncategorized

Monday, the 20th, I’ll be in Saint Cloud. More information here.

Details:

On October 20,2014 the Central Minnesota Freethinkers are proud to present a program by Greg Laden, noted writer about climate change, evolution, science education and more at National Geographic, Science Blogs and other venues. His presentation will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall in St. Cloud at 7:00. The admission is free and the program is open to all who wish to attend.

While trained as a biological anthropologist and archeologist and having research experience at many locations in the United States and in the Congo and South Africa, and, having taught at several colleges and universities, today he mostly engages in climate change related science communication.

He will explore the most current research about climate change, framed in the context of time. Global warming is often spoken of as something to worry about in the future. Different people may express concern about different things, or perhaps even a studied lack of concern about some of the effects of climate change. Much of this depends on the time frame of expected changes. For example, no one doubts that the vast majority of glacial ice on the North and South poles is doomed, but when will it melt? A common conversation item these days is the civilization-ending species-extincting “Methane Gun.” Is that a real concern?

In this discussion he’ll explore the time frame of climate change, look at the most extreme scenarios that people are talking about today, and evaluate them. Bring your favorite scare story and we can work out whether or not we should be scared, by how much, and when!

Adding a third party keyboard in iOS 8

Uncategorized, , , , ,

One of the great things about Apple is that they maintain tight control over the hardware/system/software triad that bad design can’t creep into your digital life and ruin your day. One of the bad things about Apple is that they maintain tight control over the hardware/system/software triad so you can’t always have what you want. If you’ve been wanting one of those great keyboard replacements that, maybe, your spouse has been using all along on her android, you can have it now on your iPad or iPhone after you upgrade to iOS 8

Go buy Swiftkey or Swype or whatever from the App store. Then go to settings, general, keyboard. There, you can select a new keyboard. You may have an option to “allow full access” … do that.

There you go.

Don't Panic. But, Dallas Patient Two Flew on a Commercial Air Flight

Uncategorized, ,

It is now known that the second infected health worker who had cared for Dallas Index Patient Duncan took a Monday air flight from Cleveland to Dallas-Forth Worth after she started to have a fever. It was a Frontier airline flight and it arrived in Dallas at 8:16 PM, was put to bet overnight, received normal cleaning, and resumed service Tuesday. There were more than 130 other people on that plane.

Chances are Ebola is not THAT contagious when it is just staring up. You really need those bodily fluids. There is almost ZERO chance that anyone was infected on that plane, or at the airport, or anywhere else.

“We will, from this moment forward, ensure that no individual monitored for exposure undergoes travel in any way other than controlled movement,” Frieden said Wednesday. He said the agency would work with state and local authorities to enforce this restriction.

So, OK then.

Good Morning, America. There is another Ebola case. UPDATED

Uncategorized, , ,

UPDATE: The first health worker to have been affected with Ebola in Texas may not be moved to Maryland.

From NBC:

Nina Pham, one of the two nurses who contracted Ebola in Dallas, is expected to be moved to a National Institutes of Health isolation unit in Bethesda, Maryland, a federal official with direct knowledge of the plans told NBC News on Thursday.

The transfer could happen later Thursday, but the official cautioned that plans were evolving. Pham, 26, was diagnosed with the virus on Sunday after treating Thomas Eric Duncan, who contracted Ebola in Liberia, flew to Dallas and later died.

The other nurse who contracted Ebola in Dallas, Amber Vinson, was flown on Wednesday to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. The Emory and NIH units are two of the four facilities in the United States that are specially equipped to handle Ebola.

UPDATE: The second infected health worker will be transferred from Dallas to Emory.

This is a second health worker, who reported in with at fever on Tuesday. The worker is one of the 76 who had been self monitoring, who were thought to be most likely beyond the most likely period for infection.

(This might be a good time to point out that while the CDC uses 21 days, which is probably usually good, one study showed that a small percent of individuals might develop the disease after 21 days following exposure.

Yesterday, Tom Frieden, head of the CDC, noted “CDC Director on Ebola: ‘Even a Single Infection is Unacceptable'” Also, yesterday, Dallas nurses complained about the situation at the beginning of the treatment period for the Index patient who died there.

There was a briefing in Dallas.

During the briefing, it is confirmed that this new patient was involved in care for the Index patient.

We’re a great hospital, we always have been, we want to get this right, we fell really bad, we’re doing fine, etc. etc. (that was the hospital representative)

Teams have swooped in and started cleaning common areas near the new patient’s apartment, neighbors have been or are being interviewed.

The patient lived alone and with no pets. Inside cleaning and cleaning of the car will happen later today.

Question for hospital rep: Does a second case indicate systematic institutional problem. Answer: No. We know what we are doing and handling it and we are looking at everything.

Was this person a nurse? We won’t tell you that.

Question: When did this patient come forward and get a blood test in relation to yesterday’s press conference? Answer. Hipaa.

Question: There are three isolation rooms at the hospital. What will you do when you fill up? Answer: Working on that. Also, there are actually is more room than that, a little.

Question: Timeline? Answer, got confirmation about 1:00 AM. Then we started doing stuff, press release at 4:00.

Question: Allegations from the nurses?? Answer: I can’t comment. We have the proper protected gear.

Question (breathless): Are steps being taken to isolate the other workers? Answer. There are 75 hospital workers. They are asymptomatic, the are not contagious. Please try to avoid community panic with those questions (I paraphrase, he didn’t say that). When people get symptomatic they report in, like happened twice, the system is working.

By the way, the are not coming in to work.

Perspective:

On preparedness of the hospital. There is evidence that the Dallas hospital that treated Thomas Duncan was not prepared to handle an Ebola case, and initially, nurses were not well protected. It is also clear that the clean, crisp, rapid response we may have expected from the CDC was not there. However, it is probably the case that that hospital is now managing the two cases they have properly, and that the monitoring program for other contacts is good.

To me, this means that the repeated, near universal statement by the US health community that the US can handle Ebola was overstated. Let’s take a look at the overall problem. I previously divided the Ebola exposure problem into several phases. Here is an updated version of that:

1: An infected individual arrives in the US, becomes (or already is) symptomatic, and is not yet admitted to a hospital. At this point we rely on that person’s decisions to seek treatment. There can be several hours to several days of time of potential exposure, but even so, the person is ambulatory and less symptomatic, and probably is an infection risk but a low(ish) one.

2: The infected individual either becomes very sick and is brought to the hospital or self admits. At this point there is a risk of infection to other people at the hospital including other patients and hospital workers, as well as ambulance drivers, etc. During this second phase it is up to the hospital to quickly identify a possible Ebola case and isolate the patient, and start safe procedures for care. In the case of the Index patient in Dallas, this took several days (and the patient was sent back into Stage 1). This inadequacy conflicted with what the public was being told by experts. However, now that the very first actual case of Ebola emerging in the US happened, and those who were not expected to mess it up did mess it up, everyone is on their toes and the chances of a repeat of that are lower. The CDC has also developed an improved method of addressing this (their ready teams).

3: The infected individual is in an isolation unit and being cared for. At this point it is up to the hospital and the health workers to minimize the chance of infection of others, and those at risk are, theoretically, the health workers. In the case of the Index patient at Dallas, according to nurses who worked there, the risk of infection of health workers was not minimized fully at least initially, and it is even possible that risks beyond the care staff continued. Eventually, we assume this was fixed. But, the fact that two health workers have been infected does amply demonstrate that whatever was going on was not adequate, though at this point we don’t yet know in what way, or when, things were done improperly and we need to take the word of the same hospital and health system spokespeople that earlier assured us that things are fine. Since the system representatives have yet to fully acknowledge there were inadequate procedures or care, and describe that inadequacy openly, we really don’t know. I suspect they really have cleaned up their acts, because they are strongly motivated to, but we are starting to see the edges of an Orwellian response where information is being cleaned or withheld, sometimes under cover of HIPAA rules.

1: During the first three stages, exposure of others may happen, and those individuals need to be identified and managed. Individuals who do end up being infected during that period are now in Stage 1, but if there is an effective monitoring program, stage 1 is very short (hours?). Because the system is ready for secondary cases, stage 2 is minimized (or does not even exist), and the patient is now in Stage 3. In the case of Dallas, we can guess that the two patients who have cycled into Stage 1 (both health workers) are in Stage 3 and Stage 3 is being done properly.

At a later time, if there are too many additional cases, the revamped and updated Stage 3 response may break down again due to lack of isolation facilities. The authorities seem to be aware of this possibility.

We don’t have a lot of control over what happens during Stage 1 for newly arriving patients, though the system has demonstrated that it can handle Stage 1 for those of known risk who are in a monitoring pool. But for the system to be like various spokespeople claimed it was, a great deal of effort has to be put into training, procedure, and dispersal of equipment. Dallas demonstrates that for a hospital that should have been ready, this was not the case. But, the CDC response, of having ready teams (like we learned from movies and literature to be how the CDC operates, in fiction!) should make the transformation from inadequate response to adequate response more likely if there are other cases.

Many thousands of people in West Africa have gotten Ebola, about half have died. Our problems here in the US are tiny. But, everyone is concerned about the possibility of spread outside of West Africa. One consequence of the small leakage that may occur being handled poorly is a stricter response in the form of travel restrictions. This would have multiple negative consequences. The Dallas Index patient got past the system, but the international travel problem is being tightened up a little (we have no idea if that is adequate). If infections beyond Stage 1 continue to happen, as they have in the US and Spain, people will demand a closure of borders. And, perhaps, that is what should happen.

Timing of infections vis-a-vis the Index patient

Ebola is thought to manifest in as little as four days after exposure, with most cases showing up prior to 17 days after exposure, but as late as 25 days, using very liberal estimates of exposure time. The Dallas Index patient, Thomas Duncan, was cared for in the hospital staring on September 25th, and died on October 8. The most recent secondary infection was identified last night, so let’s round up and say that was 7 days after possible exposure. If we assume for the moment (we have no basis for this, this is a rough guess) that the first half of that care period was as suggested by nurses being handled inadequately, and the last half was managed well, to split the difference, perhaps the most likely period of exposure ended around the second of October. So, perhaps today is about two weeks post dating likely exposure. So, a roughly optimistic guess would be that the chances of another health worker ending up with Ebola is not small for the next three or four days. A fully pessimistic estimate is that we have ten or so days over which this could happen. Stay tuned.

Was the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Prepared for Ebola? Probably not.

Uncategorized, , ,

This is breaking news as of Tuesday PM. According to the nurses at the hospital, no, not initially. Anonymous nurses have claimed via their union:

-Patient Zero was left for several hours in a place with up to seven other patients, not in isolation. When a senior nurse attempted to insist he be moved to an isolation unit she was met with “hostile” responses.
-Blood samples were transported through the hospital tube system instead of hand carried.
-Nurses were not entirely covered with protective wear. The gear they had left their necks exposed. To remedy this they were told to wrap tape or gauze (not sure) around their necks.
-People were going in and out of isolation areas without protective equipment.
-Medical waste was not properly handled, with hazardous waste piled nearly to the ceiling as there was no plan to dispose of it.

The hospital has not responded.

Elect These Four Californians: Lois Capps, Heidi Hall, Mike Honda, Ted Lieu

Uncategorized, , , ,

This is an endorsement by Climate Hawks Vote, which I support.

Climate Hawks Vote is delighted to endorse in four California Congressional elections, joining our prior endorsement of Scott Peters (CA-52, San Diego). In order purely alphabetical, they’re Lois Capps, Heidi Hall, Mike Honda, and Ted Lieu.

Lois Capps (CA-24, Santa Barbara) has earned our endorsement by being a tireless advocate for action on climate. She has the second-highest score among all Democrats in the House of Representatives on our scorecard measuring leadership. Her climate resilience ideas, in particular, have been adopted by the White House. We especially appreciate her passion in connecting the dots between climate change and two issues important to her constituents: public health and the Santa Barbara coastline.

Heidi Hall (CA-01, Redding and far northern California) says: “The greatest threat to our national security, public health and long-term economic growth is climate change.” The region is being hit hard by climate change – homes in Weed were recently lost to wildfire while Shasta Dam is shockingly barren. Yet her opponent, a first-term Republican of the tea party variety, denies basic climate science, voted to shut down the government, and flirts with the state of Jefferson. Heidi’s pragmatic approach includes keeping her district in the state of California. Imagine that.

Mike Honda (CA-17, Silicon Valley) has been a stalwart on climate change among other progressive causes. He’s authored a core bill, HR 4461, requiring climate change education – a happy contrast to those red states whose textbooks question science. And he’s tied a tech-savvy Smart Electronics bill to climate change. He’s spoken out for a carbon tax and against Republican efforts to gut the EPA. He’s being challenged by a technology mogul who promises to represent the businesses of Silicon Valley; but Mike represents something far more important, people. His leadership on climate is demonstrated by the fact that he’s among the top 10 members of Congress on our very tough leadership scorecard.

Ted Lieu (CA-33, coastal Los Angeles) is running in the seat held by the retiring Henry Waxman. In backyards and in living rooms throughout the South Bay and Westside of Los Angeles, Ted has promised to make climate change his top issue. He’s voiced opposition to export of coal to Asia. And he’s floated the idea of an AB32 (California’s landmark global warming law) at the national level. The debate Congress should be having – whether California’s exemplar leads the way or whether to embrace a cap-and-dividend or carbon tax – stands in stark contrast to the asinine “debates” being put forth by current House leadership. We expect great things from Ted.

Liveblogging CDC Ebola Briefing October 14th

Uncategorized

Live blogging.

Dr. Tom Frieden talking.

Don’t say “hand in glove!”

What the are doing in Dallas:

1) Site manager on the site in Dallas every hour of the day, checking protective gear use.

2) Enhanced training, including by experienced nurses with Ebola experience.

3) Limit number of care staff so they can be more expert.

Have been hearing concern from health care workers everywhere, working to minimize concerns.

Working to prepare all nurses and docs in all ER’s to ID Ebola, asking “where have you been in the past month/21 days”

Infections more likely to spread from someone not diagnosed.

Establish CDC response team to arrive within hours to any site where Ebola pops up. Equipment, management, expertise. I think most people thought they already had that but I guess not. They’ll assist in all aspects.

Also, for training, ramping up webinars, etc.

DALLAS CONTACT STATUS

Nurse remains in stable condition. Not severely ill now.

Index had 48 contacts, past 14 days, 2/3rds of risk period, highest risk period passed, decreasing likely that they will develop.

For the nurse only one contact. (because of active monitoring and not messing up)

Since nurse developed infection, possible other people who cared for Index patient could have been exposed… they are not in the 48.

ID’s 76 individuals in that group, all will be monitored daily for fever.

Relates his personal experience with thinking he might have Ebola; acknowledges freak out effect.

Now Dr. David Lakey, commissioner, TX dept of state health service.

14 days since first US case diagnosed.

Visited hosp. yesterday, visited CDC and state epi team, local health dept, and two emory nurses (brought in for training, checking system)

Reiterates 48 contacts past critical period.

One Patient 2 contact no symptoms.

Watching Nurses dog, the dog is fine.

Everyone remain calm. We’ll quickly announce any Ebola+ results. Those with self monitoring are all now on active monitoring.

QUESTOINS

NYT: How many of 76 were health care workers. Answer: all of them, all care takers for Index. (48 outside contacts, 76 or more possible in hosp contacts with him or his blood. still looking for more of those contacts)

ABC: Once a patient at some hosp is diagnosed, why not transfer them to a better facility. Ans: They might be.

NBC: Nurse had been certified in crit care 2 months ago. Is that enough experience. Ans: May not have mattered, we don’t normally treat Ebola (paraphrasing). Wish we had our response team we later thought of in place first. But from now on we’ll do that.

PHONE Question: CNBC: are you concerned about health care workers being concerned that they won’t come to work. Ans: we are concerned about htat, and about patients avoiding hospitals or clinics. We are trying to spread more knowledge about what to not worry about while at the same time doing a better safer job.

PHONE CNN. Clarify the 48 are unlikely to get Ebola. Ans: Yes, most cases would have happened by now, 21 days is on the safe side.

Newsweek: What has CDC learned from W. Africa from orgs like Doctors without borders. Ans: We work closely with them. African environment and US environment are different.

PHONE: CBS Dallas: Have you identified the breach in protocol. Ans: No. We review everything that occurred, nurse has helped a lot with this. We don’t always know what happened. Asks Lakey if he has ifo. Lakey: Have not identified a specific error. Looking closely.

So they don’t know. SO maybe there wasn’t one!

TIME: you wonder if you should have sent a team originally. Why? Ans: We did send a team, epis, to help with tracing, etc. We could have in retrospect sent a bigger more robust team and been more involved with hospital. Ebola is unfamiliar. Hospitals may even do unsafe things like using extra layers of protective equipment.

Phone question: inre 4 hospticals specialized with biocontainment. Why are there only four of them. If you transferred a patient there, how would it happen. Ans: The hosp with specialized facilities were created for totally unknown much scarier diseases that don’t exist yet. Ebola isn’t that bad if you do it right. Transporting is easy.

UNS: Some recover, some die, why? ans: We are not sure. Being healthy going in is better. Standard care makes a huge diff, doubles survivorship. Fluid balance. Also experimental treatments may or may not help.

Last question: Atlanta jour. cont: To what degree has team been sent at emory, has that become the model. Ans: Nebraska and emory have sound protocols, some are on site in Dallas.

Asks Lakey if he has concluding remarks. He says some stuff about how they are doing everything they can do.

Frieden final remarks:

1 we are focusing on supporting patient and hosp. in Dallas with robust expert team.

2 icreasing education and info to health care workers around the us

2.5 making a team to go anywhere needed within hours if there is another case.

3 working on contact tracing.

That concludes this liveblogging. Thank you very much you may return to your homes.

We Just Had The Warmest September on Record

Uncategorized, , , ,

We have been having a run of very warm months, and according to the GISS database, updated yesterday, September was the warmest on record, and the records go back to the late 19th century. This is global average temperature of the surface.

I’ll have more about this later, as other databases are updated. Sometimes one data set shows slightly different results than others, so it is good to look at them all as a group. Also, NOAA has not updated its climate watcher thingie yet.

If October, November and December turn out to be very warm as well, 2014 will end up being one of the top three or four warmest years on record, despite a somewhat cold start.

One liner to turn a column of text into a comma separated list

Uncategorized, , ,

You have the following list:

Firstline
Secondline
Thirdline
Fourthline
Fifthline
Sixthline

You want to turn it into something that looks like this:

Firstline,Secondline,Thirdline,Fourthline,Fifthline,Sixthline

All you have is a stick of bubble gum, a broken lightbulb, and a bash shell with the usual tools installed. How would you do it?

Here are a few suggestions.

perl -pi.bak -e 'unless(eof){s/\n/,/g}' textfile

This will produce a backup called textfile.bak and modify the original file.

A rather involved sed one liner could do it:

sed -n 's/.*/&,/;H;$x;$s/,\n/,/g;$s/\n\(.*\)/\1/;$s/\(.*\),/\1/;$p'

Using tr:

cat textfile | tr '\n' ','

There are numerous other possibilities. Free to make suggestions. Also, how would you reverse the process?

Science Online Died. Why?

Uncategorized,

Science Online was an amazing annual unconference that started a few years back and grew and became part of the reshaping of public communication about science. This year, the people running the conference started out with the plan to move the conference to a new venue, Atlanta, and last week abruptly announced that the conference would not happen and the ScienceOnline organization would be shut down. Those who paid the registration fee would be refunded.

A few science writers and bloggers are writing about how great ScienceOnline was and how much it will be missed, and some are providing a few comments about why it had ended. I won’t bore you extensive thoughts about how great the conference was (a little at the end). I’ve written about that before, and since I did not attend the last two, I’m not really in a position to extol its wonderfulness at this point. Besides if you are reading this you surely already know what ScieneOnline was and how great it was.

I would like to know, however, why the project shut down. This is not morbid curiosity. ScienceOnline was a big, vibrant, powerful, a meaningful thing in my profession, and its sudden and unexpected (to me, anyway) demise can’t pass without some analysis. If All the Scientists one Friday morning got an email saying the American Association for the Advancement of Science would stop publishing Science Magazine and shut down all operations by Saturday, they wouldn’t just say “Oh, that was nice while it lasted. Oh well.” They would be compelled to discover why an organization central to their profession would shut down. Well, the demise of ScienceOnline is like that, but a couple of orders of magnitude smaller. Frankly I find the lack of serious consideration as to why ScienceOnline shut down in the few posts that mention it to be odd. Spooky even. Happy Halloween.

Here are my random thoughts on the matter.

ScienceOnline was growing, and there was no significant event or change in the nature of the science communication community that would suggest that such a successful project would not be able to continue. I think it is reasonable to say that it should have continued and it should not have shut down.

There have been suggestions that ScienceOnline was ruined by Bora Zivkovic, the former principle of the operation. Bora was accused, tried, and convicted of inappropriate behavior and forced to resign. The nature of that inappropriate behavior is up in the air, in the sense that people have labeled it with various legally meaningful terms that don’t actually apply, questions have been raised in the same venue as some of the accusations about the veracity of those accusations, and the entire exercise was riddled with posturing, hard feelings, look-at-me-too antics, and a certain amount of bullying, variously coming from some of the dramatic protagonists working from many different angles. There is a Standard Line that goes with the Bora Saga, and within a few weeks of the breaking of that story (almost one year ago, I believe) every one knew the Standard Line. At that point you eitherr towed it faithfully, objected to it anonymously, because questioning it openly felt like it would lead to your own trial and conviction. That was a mess, but I don’t think it had anything directly to do with ScienceOnline closing, because one entire conference happened AFTER that event, and after all, despite the always entertaining ability for so many professionals who operate on the internet to act like middle school students, in the end, most people eventually pull on their big kid pants and get real. Two years after a person involved in a conference leaves the process, the conference can move on.

There have also been suggestions that ScienceOnline was ruined by so-called “Feminazis” who had gone after Bora or used that problem as a means to do their evil work. This suggestion has been made to my knowledge only sarcastically, with the indication that “oh, any minute now the MRA’s (Mens Rights Activists) will be accusing the feminazis of bla bla bla….” I mention this here only so I don’t have to insert it later in an Updated version of this post, because I am perfectly confident the accusation will be made if it hasn’t been already. This possibility is just as absurd of an explanation as the aforementioned “Bora Ruined It” hypothesis. It requires no more consideration. It has been brought to my attention that some have read this paragraph as a suggestion by me that “feminazis” ruined the conference. Clearly, I am saying a) that didn’t happen, b) the idea is out there and c) the idea is stupid. Which is what I said. But now I said it again. AND DON’T USE THAT WORD FEMINAZI

There are two material differences between ScienceOnline 2015 and the previous conferences. One is the venue. The conference has always been held in the Research Triangle, and Scio 2015 would be held in Atlanta. Maybe everybody hates Atlanta. Maybe the Triangle offered a unique palatial charm not to be found many other places. I’m sure that latter aspect is true, but I find it hard to believe that this would cause ScienceOnline to tranmogrify form the “Un Conference” to the “NoWay Conference.”

The second material difference is the registration fee, which I think had gone up to something like $400 (it may have been less than $200 a few years ago). Also, the student price was something like 20 dollars off that, which I regarded as cynical when I first saw it. This could be a real effect.

I have heard that most of the sponsorship dropped out. Some have said this is because they were mad at Bora, but that seems incredibly unlikely for a number of reasons, including his total lack of involvement in the conference. I would like to know why so many sponsors dropped out and what the impact of that was. It may have contributed to the very high registration fee. These two things together may have been a problem.

I also heard that while in previous years there was typically a long waiting list to get into the conference to begin with, this years the number of attendees was way down, far lower than the expected amount (in the 200’s range instead of over 400?). I’d like to see the exact numbers on this. This could be a cause of the failure of the organization and conference; if 200 people fail to give you $200, that’s a lot of moola you didn’t get. Or it could be an effect. All those people who don’t like Atlanta, didn’t want to miss the Charm of the Triangle, and didn’t want to spend twice what they spent in a previous year opted out. Or maybe they were just still mad a Bora and needed to be in a snit, or maybe they were mad at the Bora Haters and needed to be in a snit. Hard to say. My guess is that the price drove a lot of people away.

Added: I’m being told that last year’s conference sucked. I had also heard t was great. But the fact that some people think it sucked matters.

There is one major effect which feels to me like the most likely reason. I may get the following bit a bit wrong in detail, simply because I don’t know all the details, but my understanding is that Karyn Traphagen, Anton Zuiker, an Bora Zivkovic were the three driving elements in prior versions of Science Online (not counting last year) along with a few others. Bora was the most visible face, having been a community organizer de facto or professionally on the Science Internet for years. The three of them made Science Online out of nothing, crafted it, expanded it, made it an incredible success. Then they were no longer involved. Then it shut down. One could hypothesize that the new organizers, and I have no idea who they ended up being, simply killed ScienceOnline because they didn’t know what they were doing. I suppose that question should be asked, but I have no reason to think it. But I do know that a rather amazing, perhaps even unlikely, kind of event was generated by a handful of people, most visible Bora, with Karyn and Anton very much engaged, and it may be that the magic worked only for them. What that magic was I can’t say. Maybe this moment in time … the moment when ScienceOnline 2015 was cancelled, happened every year but Bora, Anton and Karyn simply trudged past that and made it happen anyway. Maybe at this point in time there was always a shortage of interest by the online community but then the Three Conferenceoteers got in every body’s face and made them excited about the upcoming event. Maybe the project always lost its sponsors at this point, but then Bora, Anton and Karyn would show up on their doorsteps, begging or dressed in funny kitten suites or doing whatever they needed to do to bring them back in the fold. This does not imply a lack of will or ability on the part of the organizers that shut down the conference, but rather, an amazing ability that probably grew and developed every year as the project projected, on the part of the original organizers, that was lost when they were lost.

Keep in mind that the transition wasn’t smooth, as I remember. Last year’s conference was still going to happen on the grounds of momentum alone, Bora left, and pretty quickly his compatriots did as well, staying involved for various lengths of time. A smooth transition over a few years of the major players is quite doable. A wholesale housecleaning is dangerous.

For my part, I appreciated ScienceOnline and I’d like to retroactively thank Bora, Anton and Karyn, and others who may have been involved, for making that amazing thing happen. It was inclusive across several dimensions (gender, age, ethnocultural identity, professional level, nature of field). It included art and science. It was unconferencey (though for me that was less of a draw, I’ve been attending unconference style conferences for some time). It had the Charm of the Triangle. It was not in Atlanta! It was a good conference. Thank you three for making that happen. It is a shame to see the project end.

(Quick note added: I now see Karyn is still very much involved but Anton as an advisor. Perhaps it was more Bora originally if my theory of losing the founders as having been important is correct.)

See this discussion.

Added: This is a good run down of possible reasons for the demise of Science Online. I haven’t seen anyone looking for “the cause” (I think most people in this community are beyond thinking so simplistically, we are science communicators and scientists after all) but most of the other points are worth checking out.

Solve the Climate Crisis – Reelect Scott Peters in California's 52nd

Uncategorized, , , ,

This is an endorsement by Climate Hawks Vote, which I support.

Climate Hawks Vote is delighted to endorse Scott Peters in California’s 52d Congressional District of San Diego for his strong climate leadership and for taking first place in our August 2014 survey. And his approach just may break partisan gridlock in Congress.

Scott Peters has a reputation as a problem solver. Climate hawks tend to fly on the left wing of the Democratic Party, but Peters has demonstrated that climate transcends political partisanship. He’s spoken out onsuper-pollutants, national security, and resiliency, all issues that should not be bogged down in partisan bickering.

Peters eked out a victory in 2012 in a swing district, and he’s facing a very tough reelection fight – DC pundits consider his race one of the few true tossups of 2014. He could have ducked the thorny climate issue. Instead, he stepped up to the plate in a big way once in office, taking on a leadership role in the House Sustainable Energy & Environment Coalition, authoring bills, and speaking out in the national and local press. That took political courage.

His courage is reflected in our scorecard, which measures leadership – not just votes – on climate. In the short time he’s been in Congress, he’s in fifth place among all Democrats in the House of Representatives, above stalwart climate hawks in Oregon, Vermont, and deep blue parts of California; the scorecard is cumulative since 2011.

Peters has also been endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce – the first time we’ve ever agreed with the Chamber! but that fact gives us hope: perhaps climate can transcend politics. We need to return Scott Peters and his problem solving approach to Congress.

Peters joins our list of fall 2014 endorsees including Shenna Bellows (Maine-Senate), Paul Clements (Michigan-06), and Gary Peters (Michigan-Senate). We’re backing up our endorsement with organization on the ground in this swing district. Our on-the-ground organizers helped Brian Schatz close the deal in the Hawaii Senate primary and helped Ruben Gallego defeat a coal-funded opponent in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District.