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In the midst of the full-frontal politics that now passes for the nominating conventions of the two major political parties in the United States comes a modest opportunity for sober reflection by the candidates on some crucial but oft-neglected issues – policies dealing with science and technology. The opportunity comes courtesy of a group called ScienceDebate, which in 2008 and now in 2012 succeeded in eliciting from the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates their responses to a set of questions broadly constructed around science and technology policy. CSPO co-director David Guston gives his thoughts on the answers of the two candidates.

After the fourth murder of an Iranian physicist, G. Pascal Zachary looks into the history of government scientists during times of tension.

Elisabeth Rosenthal’s latest article in The New York Times Sunday Review is the latest rehash of one of the oldest debates surrounding energy—the ongoing flap over where to site the technologies needed to transport energy from where it is produced to where it is consumed. What is particularly striking in this debate is how locked in this debate seems to have become around what Rosenthal calls “a reality that Americans seem determined to forget: Large-scale energy is typically produced in remote places and inevitably needs to be transported to the populated areas where it is used.”

In this Soapbox post, CSPO Associate Director Clark Miller discusses the Department of Energy's little secret... that it is not and has never been the nation’s lead agency on energy policy.

Jen Fuller (PhD student in ASU's environmental social science program) and Sharlissa Moore (research associate at CSPO and student in the HSD program) review President Obama's energy policy outlined in the State of the Union. 

In honor of Super Bowl Sunday, graduate research assistant Rider Foley discusses the threat of severe brain injury brought upon through impact sports.

When I ask my students whether it is okay for them or others to overstate the possible outcomes of their research in order to get funding, a large number of them say they are comfortable with it.  They are taught by their mentors that this is a necessary, if sometimes unfortunate, marketing technique.

What should be the role of science fiction (SF) in informing how we develop and govern science and technology? Some SF is just for fun, some SF explores what it means to be human under different circumstances, and other SF imagines strange new worlds, including new kinds of humans, new kinds of machines and new kinds of worlds. SF is also cited by many scientists and engineers as an impetus for their career choice. But are there other ways that SF should do more to try to guide society?

We've all read, and many of us have agreed with, the impassioned pleas for moratoria on, or at least caution towards, emerging technologies such as nanotechnology. But it turns out you can only read so many calls for moratoria before they start sounding alike. This Soapbox, using a Mad-lib format, will allow you to create your own news release calling for an emerging technology moratorium.

My biggest realization on our trip to South Africa was the idealism associated with participating in a cutting edge science like nanoscience. I found that by and large, the scientists, in particular South African nationals and other Africans, seemed inspired by the idea that they were contributing to the emergence of a new South Africa that could become globally relevant.

This summer I presented the results of my study about the potential contributions of nanotechnology to the agricultural sector. One of my classmates from Ghana made a very intriguing comment: he said that nanotechnology seems like a promising technology for the ag sector, but was concerned that farmers in Africa have enough problems to worry about without transferring new technologies and that nanotechnology could even aggravate their current problems of food security. I did not have, at that moment, a convincing answer to give him.

Towards the end of our field work, Team H2O (the subset of our delegation focusing on water applications of nanotechnology) got a look at rural poverty in South Africa. I have already blogged on urban poverty in South Africa and the need for redesigning innovation to engage with it. Rural poverty appears to have some similarities and some differences.

It’s all too common in the USA that scientists must pay hundreds of dollars to have their research published.  But imagine getting paid to publish instead of paying to publish.  This would be a dream for American academics. In other countries, getting paid to publish isn’t a dream. Rather it’s a beautiful reality. 

Learning about nanotechnology here in South Africa has meant learning a lot of new acronyms. I was surprised the other day when a scientist mentioned two familiar acronyms that, at first, seemed somewhat out of context in a discussion about nano in South Africa. But it turns out that FIFA and NIH are extremely important abbreviations when it comes to what influences this scientist's research, and how South African research funds can leave the country.

The CNS Thematic Research Cluster on Equity, Equality, and Responsibility spent the first two weeks of July conducting fieldwork on how nanotechnology research and development in South Africa can benefit the poor, including people like Pastor Julius, his wife, and the 22 orphans for whom they care in township of Barcelona.

The headline reads 'Cracking Open the World Bank.' Above, a graphic shows ethereal streams of 1s and 0s issuing from a vault, its heavy door slightly ajar. The story below tells of a revolution at the World Bank. This global institution, long attacked as arrogant and inept, seems to be getting with the times. The information age heralds its future as open, digital and democratic. A closer reading, however, cautions against such a hasty conclusion.

We know that nanotechnology can build a golf club that will extend your drive by a few feet, but will it help the poor in South Africa? The CNS Thematic Research Cluster on Equity, Equality, and Responsibility is conducting fieldwork in South Africa, interviewing scientists, researchers, policy officials, NGOs, corporations, funders, government employees, and local people to find out how nanotechnology is being researched, developed, and used and possibilities for the future of nanotechnology as a transformative technology the way cell phones seem to have become.

A recent issue of Science magazine features a news article about seven scientists in Italy who are facing manslaughter charges for not predicting the danger of an earthquake that killed 308 people. The scientists were part of a risk committee of earth scientists who testified that incipient tremors were not evidence of an oncoming earthquake in 2009. While it may be presumptuous to actually put scientists on trial for a failure to dialogue with decision-makers, this puts into question the implicit “social contract of science” that has justified basic scientific research since the end of WWII.

To an increasing extent, social movements such as those ongoing in Spain –and elsewhere in Europe and the world- are becoming a conscious opportunity for exploring new paths for democracy. These explorations seem not to be the result of any technological fate, but rather a feat of sociotechnical change, with some concrete antecedents.

You may have not heard about it yet, but you´ll probably hear about it soon: there are civil protests going on in Spain, and they’re getting bigger and louder each minute, on and offline.

Journalists and public administrators need to get better at understanding complex socio-technological systems—and they need to get better fast.

The U.S. seems to have found a strategy for fighting wars without putting too many American lives at risk. While the substitution of boots on the ground with unique technological capabilities in the air seems to be a solution tailor made for the times, the betting on complex technological capabilities began long time ago--most precisely after the Second World War.

The internet looks different in different places. We think of it as this universal resource, but it’s not. Its ethereal contents change depending on where you are physically and politically. I’ve been experiencing this a lot on my last few international trips.

Entergy Corporation’s latest tactics in its fight with the State of Vermont reminded me today why the energy industry in the United States has such a bad reputation with the public. It’s an approach and a reputation that the industry needs to work hard to change if the United States is going to make a successful transition to sustainable energy in the coming years.

The potential implications of human enhancement comprise one of the main reasons why I’m at CSPO, so I was excited and a little worried when the trailer for the movie Limitless appeared.  Would Hollywood do justice to the topic, or would they make yet another trite cautionary tale?

I‘m getting surgery soon – nothing heavy duty, just a hernia.  So I arranged to see my GP for a pre-op physical a week in advance.  The surgeon’s assistant assured me that my doctor would receive the necessary instructions.  All I had to do was show up – which is one reason why I did not open the thick envelope I received in the mail from the surgeon’s office.

Check out the article by a climate survivalist from the February 27, 2011 Washington Post.  (I’m going to go out on a limb and treat the article as if it’s not a satire or hoax, but maybe the joke’s on me.)  The author describes how he’s buying solar panels and generators and laying in food and supplies and putting extra locks on his doors and windows in anticipation of the coming climate apocalypse....

I just got back from HeatSync Labs, where the local hackers are taking their eyes off of 3D printing, near-space missions, tesla coils and cylon Roombas and working on something a little closer to home:  themselves.

For most of my adult life I have looked out at the world from massive cities. Recently, however, I moved to rural Western Massachusetts. I am using this time of transition from metropolis to hamlet to reflect on what I will affectionately call “the progress narrative.”

The kind of gentle scholarly discussions I encountered in the Middle East would almost certainly never be held among Western Christians with such a difference in ideology.

Among the many cultural myths surrounding the relations between science and contemporary China, the notion of a ruthless totalitarian state that unscrupulously persecutes their own scientists and the pursuit of science, is not alien to an average American ear.

Because of my religion, I was faced with some additional risks by embarking on this exciting journey to the Muslim world.  Before departing, I was warned to conceal my Judaism in various ways, ranging from simply covering my Israeli passport stamps, to even wearing a cross and pretending to be Christian.

Today I saw something I hadn't seen yet – a construction crane that was moving.  There are construction cranes everywhere in Dubai, but it didn't dawn on me until today that I hadn't seen one moving yet.

What is it like to be a former center of international commerce and political power, next to the now globally known city of Dubai? ... While in Dubai, references to Sharjah usually were prefaced by ‘it’s a much more traditional and conservative place…’  We wondered what this really meant.

Unfortunately, many Americans are wary of Islamic cultures because of media influences. However, Dubai is truly a safe haven for people of all cultures. Dubai incorporates some of the best aspects of many different cultures in one city....

Over the past few months I have told a number of people that I’d be leading a study abroad program on sustainability in Dubai.  Nearly everyone I spoke to responded, “You have to go to Masdar City.”  Evidently every person I know had seen the New York Times’ front page article on Masdar City....a laboratory for developing sustainable technologies.

The expected culture shock passed me by.  It hits me once in a while that I am in the Middle East but most of the time I feel as if I'm somewhere close to home.

My job as a professor on this study abroad trip is to help students better understand how to build a sustainable world.  I am afraid that I am struggling with this mission.  Why you might ask?

Over the next week and a half or so the CSPO Soapbox will be filled with short blog postings from Dubai.  Mary Jane Parmentier and I have brought a dozen ASU students to the United Arab Emirates for a study abroad program on Culture and Sustainability in Dubai.

I recently read an article about urban design and the ‘zero-friction society’ that made me think of Phoenix. Why not kill two birds with one stone and reflect on both?

There is some irony in the fact that, as I was on my way to the Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting, I was accused of risky behavior at the airport.

A friend of mine in Singapore believes my work on anticipatory governance of emerging technologies barely cloaks an ingrained hostility to science.  Science is science, she thinks and, like Max Weber argues in “Science as a vocation,” democracy doesn’t have much place in it – unless it is perhaps through do-it-yourself approaches like garage synthetic biology.

This past weekend (Dec 3-4), I attended the “Transforming Humanity: Fantasy? Dream? Nightmare?” Conference hosted by the Center for Inquiry, Penn Center for Bioethics, and the Penn Center for Neuroscience and Society.  James Hughes and George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies give their blow-by-blow record of the conference, but I'd like to step back and provide an overview of the field, and its position today.

Every year the United States loses some of its competitive edge in science. Numerous studies show that our education system is woefully inadequate in ensuring that our nation’s citizens have a basic understanding of math, physics, chemistry, and biology and therefore render the vast majority of citizens unable to enter the scientific workforce. Such deficiencies make the United States increasingly vulnerable both economically and militarily.

In previous entries in Soapbox, on webcams and cyberbabies, the authors reflected on the challenges that technologies pose to contemporary humans in their attempts to achieve good – decent and/or happy – lives in common, for themselves and others. The proposed ways to face those challenges were tied to education. A somehow shared idea was that individuals should be, first, raised in specific ideas, values, and practices, such as civility, respect for others, etc., and, second, that they should be educated for thinking and approaching technologies in certain ways...

Several weeks ago, a colleague and I discussed what constitutes technological determinism and why it is problematic.  I argued that, colloquially, technologically deterministic arguments are often implicit and subtly erase human agency from social interactions with technology.

To tell you the truth, my biological clock exploded a long time ago, and I have no desire to reproduce. But after the explosion of weddings in the last couple of years, most of my friends are becoming parents. Inevitably, our conversations turn toward child-rearing, and linger around the host of anxieties that accompany the prospect of bringing new life into the world.

If I dedicate my life to seeking peace and justice through governance, how then do I define governance and how do the others I am working with define it?  To answer this question and find common ground of definition between opposing parties is a first step in the direction toward peace building.

A few years ago while attending an engineering education conference in Lima, Peru, entitled Engineering for the Americas, I was struck when the opening speaker (who was from Microsoft) used Tom Friedman's book The World is Flat to set the tone for the meeting.

I am on the phone with my younger daughter.  She says she does not want to talk about school today.  After much prodding I discover the source of her discontent; it is a math assessment test given that morning.

I recently read Neil Postman's excellent Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman offers a critique of the corrosive effect of television on American discourse, education and culture.... What does Postman’s theory imply when extended to the defining media of the 21st century, the Internet?

Here I offer my reflections on some of the highlights of the presentation by Dr. J. Storrs Hall of the Foresight Institute, entitled "Feynman's Pathway to Nanomanufacturing," and the panel discussion that followed, “How Do We Get There from Here?”  Discussions such as these are crucial opportunities to reflect on – and potentially shape – emerging technologies whose destinies are often left to be determined by “market forces.”

It has been a few days since I returned from the IHEST meeting (see Blogging from France posts). Upon reflection, I realize that it was a number of firsts for me. It was the first time a foreign government invited me to speak. And it was the first time I was translated in real time during a talk. But the thing that stands out most in my mind is that it is the first time I’ve ever spoken to an audience largely comprised of government officials.

As Jameson Wetmore and Mark Brown were recently in France and evoked the Débat Public initiative, I would like to make a very short historic of Grenoble, using Brice Laurent’s work as a model of perspective but going back further in this town's history.

I think it was in the spring of 1988 that I visited Washington, D.C., to explore the potential for moving from academic science into public policy.  I had set up an informational interview at AAAS and was sitting in their library waiting for my meeting to begin.  After browsing the shelves for a few seconds, and guided only by karmic randomness, I pulled down a book called Lost at the Frontier, by Deborah Shapley and Rustum Roy.

There is certainly a place for consensus conferences as they can play an important role in identifying potential social issues early in the development of a technology. But it is interesting to think of them as just one tool in a larger toolkit that can generate productive discussion for building a better future.

I’m on the train leaving Arc-et-Senans, heading back to Paris to fly home .... There is certainly a lot to read and do and talk about. Among other topics, the IHEST affiliates are deeply involved with questions of public involvement in sociotechnical controversies, even more than I expected.

Part of me feels pretty dejected.  I came all the way from Arizona, too!  Why is Benny getting all the attention?

Intellectual pyrotechnics before 10 a.m. isn’t for everyone, but I thought it was an excellent way to start this third day at the IHEST summer school on science and public debate.  Is there such a thing as the public? Well, think of God, said the morning’s first speaker.

The notion of speech designates "not someone who was speaking about a mute thing, but an impediment, a difficulty, a gamut of possible positions, a profound uncertainty." Neither humans nor nonhumans "speak on their own," as traditional epistemology suggests, but only through various mediators.

There was a fair amount of frustration in the air today. A number of talks stressed the idea that the public does not trust scientists the way it used to. The lament was that this turn away from science means that scientists lose some of their legitimacy and the useful advice given to policymakers does not receive the priority it deserves.

The trip from Arizona to the site of the IHEST Summer School required a cab from Scottsdale to PHX, a plane from PHX to Charlotte, another plane from Charlotte to Paris, Charles de Gaulle, a cab from CDG to the Lyon train station, a 2-hour TGV trip to Dijon, and an hour cab ride to Saline Royale, along the way crossing nine time zones in just under 23 hours of travel. Needless to say I’m experiencing a bit of jet lag.

Until fairly recently, many considered technocracy as much a part of French culture as pan au chocolat and café au lait. I had one each of the latter at the train station in Paris this morning, on my way to the Saline Royale, in the countryside between Dijon and Lausanne.... The first talk this afternoon, by Jacques Bouveresse, a philosophy of science professor at the prestigious College de France, consisted of an extended discussion of Bertrand Russell’s views on science and democracy.

From October 2009 to February 2010, the French government attempted an experiment.  Arguing that public input was needed to help shape the direction of nanotechnology in the country, the National Commission for Public Debate decided to organize a series of 17 local public discussions around the country, from Strasbourg to Orleans.

Heading home from work, I decided to exit the Metro three stops early and drop in on an alumni meeting at George Mason University, my alma mater.  After successfully establishing my ‘relic’ credentials (I was there when the school of public policy was merely an institute and housed in two trailers), I was asked: “Were you here when Fukuyama was here?”

Sam, not quite three and a half, was stomping through the street-side puddles of an Arizona spring.  In a playful mood, too, I called out the warning, “Watch out for puddle gators!”

For some time now, we have seen images of monsters emerging from the sea, close to the Gulf of Mexico. These teratological phenomena seem to be the bastard children of Earth´s fluids, mass production, consumption & media, sociotechnical systems, biology, and human guilt.

Everything we do has some element of risk.  The real issue is whether the costs of minimizing or eliminating the risks outweigh the benefit.  The recent closure of airspace over Europe dramatically illustrates this point.... The same attempt to eliminate low probability events has also characterized the UK (and other) government responses to recent terrorist incidents.

On February 12, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden announced the appointment of a special assistant to the president for disability policy. By selecting the associate director of White House Office of Public Engagement, Kareem Dale, to this post, Obama became the first president in United States’ history to have a special policy advisor overseeing disability issues.

As I prepared to teach my course, Technological Catastrophes, in the Summer II session, I was faced with an all too familiar problem – how to incorporate in the course the latest such catastrophe, in this case the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

As (bad) luck would have it, I sat in a North American airport on my birthday, trying unsuccessfully to get to South America, and reading a copy of USA Today. Perusing its pages from back to front, I encountered an editorial on page 11A calling for greater reliance on instant replay technology in baseball and then found a story on page 2A about cloud whitening.

Even if we permanently shut down the oil wells in the Gulf and put a cap on carbon, do we know how to move forward in constructing a sustainable energy future?

As a social scientist I live for Census data.  I thrive on Census data and I wait with great expectation for the next round of Census data releases.

When I began my education at ASU, the school was, as many other schools still are, a traditional university.  The post-doctor’s dilemma at The New American university is, how does one market a new and better way of thinking and solving problems in an academic universe that has not yet caught up?

The same week that we listened to a lively conversation on the compatibility of religion with science at the CSPO Rightful Place of Science? Conference in May, my 5th grade son was playing (complete with a powdered, curly wig) Sir Isaac Newton at his school’s Living History Museum project.

Reducing emissions is an important thing to do, but arguments that we can address the problems of local communities anywhere by driving a Prius or purchasing offsets every time we get on an airplane are are simply wrong.

Recently, fatigued by trying to write a certain research proposal, I decided to explore the Phoenix Sonoran Bikeway going south: a bike trail that I have noticed is marked by special signs through the nicer neighborhoods in downtown Phoenix.

The former FEMA director under George W. Bush’s administration in times of the Katrina crisis, Michael Brown, claimed a few days ago in an interview he granted to Fox News that President Obama is using BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as an excuse to take political advantage of the disaster.

The politics of the current gulf oil spill come down to knowledge and action.  Who knew what, when, and what have they been doing about it?  Most of the media focus is on national politics – is this oil spill Obama's hurricane Katrina?

The question of whether volcanoes are Luddites is relative. A student of mine was fond of pointing out that in her native country of Peru, earthquakes are part of life’s routine and are not seen as emergencies or catastrophes at all.

Over the past week I have been surprised not just by the spectacle of disaster we have seen in the news but by the robustness of technological systems, in the sense of networks of actors and technologies and objects.

The volcano in Iceland has stopped hundreds of thousands of flights. Many people have had to stop, change their plans, look into other ways of communicating, improvise, and explore different ways of moving around - or indeed have been forced to not move around.

Some of my favorite reading, especially in the context of the health care reform debate, is authored by Margaret J. Wheatley.... I had the opportunity to think of Wheatley’s work a few weeks ago during a conversation with a 26-year-old doctoral student about potential impacts of health care reform on young adults, especially graduate students and those working part-time to support their education.

The United States recently made an important public policy change with the passage of the new health care initiative.  It passed, but not without the opposition mobilizing all of its resources to block it.  I wonder how things might have been different in this debate had we had a REAL enemy…

As we walked through the relatively new and extremely inviting Yaku Museum of Water in Quito, Ecuador, we were struck by the lack of visitors, this late winter morning in the middle of the week.  Where were all the school buses full of elementary age children with their teachers?

An interdisciplinary team of scientists and comedians have concluded that there is an enormous discrepancy between the amount of observed humor in the world, and the amount of humor predicted by fundamental physical laws and statistical principles.

I recently attended the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE).  APPE is a group comprised of applied ethicists and professionals who meet to share common concerns and insights.  I usually attend because APPE is the place where you are most likely to run into engineering and computer ethicists.  In most years there are only three to four sessions on these topics, which usually leave you crying out for more.  This year’s meeting was different…

David Morrow, Robert Kopp, and Michael Oppenheimer, in Environmental Research Letters, have called for establishing an International Climate Engineering Research Review Board – an IRB for efforts to engineer the planet. I concur.

I worry a great deal about the uncertainty and risks associated with geoengineering. But here I want to focus on something else: the faulty framing of the problem from the outset.

Geoengineering is the latest controversial science to show up at Asilomar – a conference site now famous for hosting the first meeting of biologists calling for self-regulation of recombinant DNA experiments in the 1970s. At a meeting in late March, 2010, scientists exploring geoengineering will seek common ground on standards for proper conduct of experiments with the Earth’s climate system.

One – apparent – contradiction of the scheme that Cameron sets up in the movie is that he is advocating a more “ecological way of life” while he is making use of the most advanced technological filming gadgets and techniques.

Can science help us resolve our ethical dilemmas? (Let us forget all the dilemmas that it creates... for the moment.) According to a recent New York Times op-ed by Adam Shriver, the answer would appear to be “yes.” Scientists have been able to isolate the gene for a peptide critical to the functioning of the anterior cingulate gyrus (where the mammalian brain perceives pain) in mice.

Over the past few months, policy failures in health care reform and climate change have stunned the world. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised. At the heart of both problems are “policy thickets” that must be untangled before significant progress can be expected. What do I mean?

Think about this for a bit… “I…. see… you”.  In my universe, we all take this line from “Avatar” to heart, intentionally living up to the conceptual depth of what is meant by really seeing another person, understanding and mutually edifying each other's experiences... In my universe this pleasant, enriching, fun form of Utopia has a fighting chance. In my universe, all is possible.

On my drive to work this morning, a sports radio talk show host warned his presumably largely male fan base that Valentine’s Day was coming soon.  Not to fear, he argued. If the holiday has caught you off guard, he claimed he still had the perfect gift that every woman would love.  He summed up his advice in two words: “power down.”

As I sat this past January in my hotel room at the base of Tungurahua volcano, listening to her active rumblings, I was both fascinated and apprehensive.  It gave me a new perspective on the purpose of our trip to Ecuador.  What do children in Tungurahua Province need to know about science?

These days, they say, military personnel in Virginia or Nevada make decisions about whether to launch predator-based missiles against specific targets thousands of miles away in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an extraordinary distancing of the fighter from the target.

I marvel at the lack of understanding of the timetable for and potential impacts of federal health care reform efforts by educated, interested and engaged people crossing my path.  With 25 plus years of health care administration and policy experience, I have learned (often the hard way) that all health care is state and local.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but somewhere in rural Arizona, residents are torn.  The opportunity of a much-advertised solar power plant means ‘future jobs and economic security’ to some…and to others it means ‘future water insecurity’.

I’m co-teaching a class this semester at the Law College, entitled “Governance of Virtual Worlds.” Similar courses have been taught at Harvard’s and Stanford’s law schools, but ours is the first that we’re aware of to take a graduate, interdisciplinary approach to the subject. We’ll be holding course sessions in World of Warcraft and in Second Life, a popular game and social virtual world, respectively.

In the years immediately following World War II, a debate raged among U.S. policy officials over whether to place nuclear weapons – and the technological production systems that made them possible – in the hands of the military. They decided no, instead establishing the Atomic Energy Commission as a civilian nuclear weapons agency. Their goal: to ensure democratic control over the production and use of this most dangerous form of technology. I wonder, today, whether the United States ought to ask the same question about technologies of human enhancement.

Thanks to the theft and publication of years worth of email from the Climate Research Unit (CRU), a major scientific center devoted to climate science, we now have an interesting picture of the at-times-questionable conduct of a number of top researchers in the field.

What kinds of people do we imagine inhabit the world?  This question came to mind as I was reading the Executive Summary of America’s Energy Future, a forthcoming report from the National Academy of Engineering.

So, would you say that the results of your research indicate that there is no need to worry about the release of silver nanoparticles from consumer products into the environment?  Hearing this from the reporter makes me incredibly nervous and aggravated.

These days, “November 9” is predominantly associated with the most recent event of global significance that took place on that date twenty years ago, namely, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This weekend, we must do something about saving time.  Most of the United States reverts to standard time on the first Sunday in November.  We have to reset and readjust in the present.  This prompts me to ask: do we need to save not just the present, but also the future?

Are lizards deficient because they are cold-blooded?  Are humans deficient because they don’t have wings?

October 20, 2009, is John Dewey’s 150th birthday.  Next month, November 24th, is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, a book that helped reorient Dewey’s allegiance from Hegelian “absolutism to [pragmatic] experimentalism.”

Two years ago, I sent out an e-mail to the CSPO community about my dismay at finding in my one-year-old’s “First Word” book at the time that the word “tractor” is, apparently, an incredibly important word despite the fact that < 2% of the US population still lives on a farm.

In 2003, Tommy Chong, a comedian  who made a career out of acting (and presumably being) stoned, got sent to federal prison for nine months for illegally selling beautiful custom-made blown-glass bongs ( “drug paraphernalia”) over the Internet.  I want to focus on the government rationale for busting Chong, because it pertains to many difficult social problems.

It is interesting that democracies seem particularly unwilling to engage their publics in meaningful dialogue. They’ll poll them, but not ask them to participate in fashioning a collective future. Perhaps it is a failure of legal imagination.

Answer:  Leonard Cohen, adulterers in Aceh, and Malcolm Casadaban. 

Question:  Who by fire?  Who by stoning?  Who by plague?

There exist a variety of ways for scientists to go about studying aging. Ever since the creation of the biology of aging as a field with the hope of addressing emergent problems associated with global population aging, this complex subject has triggered myriad scientific imaginations.

The importance of metaphor’s role in poetry, science and religion cannot be overestimated. Metaphor transforms seeing into “seeing as” and, as Thomas Kuhn and others have demonstrated, this is precisely how students learn to be scientists: perceptual associations are adjusted and cultivated to form new habits of observation and thought.

This summer, while interacting with villagers in the Western African nation of Ghana, along with a team of faculty and students from ASU, I was able to test one of the central tenets of Sarewitz’s and Nelson’s commentary published in Nature in December, 2008, that a successful innovation (policy) rests upon the wisdom to know which problem will cede to technological solutions and which ones will not.

The New York Times’ article of April 16, 2009, “Third-World Stove Soot is Target in Climate Fight,” is a piece that makes you want to throw up your hands in despair – why are the world’s poor invariably targeted as being responsible for global warming?

While the climate change policy has struggled beleaguered to the finish line, what will it take to actually spur an energy revolution? A revolution that is ripe with inventions and innovations penetrating the market, shaking up entrenched technologies, and changing the way we the people relate to energy?

We thought Tuesday would be free day at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, but that policy, it turns out, does not apply in August. To be honest, I can’t blame them, given California’s economic woes. Anyway, it felt good to pay my $4 to gain entry into this UC Santa Cruz facility dedicated to teaching about the sea, its inhabitants, and our relationship with them.

I was reminded this week of a great misconception Americans hold about technology... believing that the question is whether or not to regulate technologies. In the United States, we regulate all technologies.  Laws permeate our technological infrastructure, making it not so inappropriate that some scholars speak of the technological constitution of modern life.

The under-representation of women in science, identified by feminists, debated by epistemologists and presently confusing concerned policymakers is yet another evidence of science as a social activity, incorporating social beliefs and trends, ideological imperatives and political practices.

The House of Representatives has passed a massive climate change bill aimed at legislating a new, climate-friendly energy supply into existence.... The bill’s champions assume that, in response to an array of mandated carrots and sticks, nimble startup firms will be motivated to develop new clean-energy technologies.... Unfortunately, a crucial question remains embarrassingly unasked: Who is going to buy enough of these new technologies to establish a market that's large enough to meet our carbon reduction goals?

As aggravating (and common) as it is when scientists use illogical or unscientific arguments to promote science, it’s perhaps even more irritating when they employ bad or deceptive scientific arguments.

I have discovered that I like sports a lot more than I thought I did. So, beating the Arizona heat last weekend, I decided to catch a game on TV.

I write this during the cloudiest New England June in decades. Boston has seen more gray skies than any year since 1903, and average temperatures have dipped 13 degrees below what the Farmer’s Almanac predicted. Fortunately, there are encouraging signs.

The infamous physicist Alan Sokal, who gained a "reputation" in SSK and STS by his critical parody "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" published in Social Text in 1996, launched another assault on what he called "pseudo-medicine" in his public lecture "What is science and why should we care?," given on February 27, 2008 in London.

As Flag Day arrives on June 14, I have a confession to make. Outside of an endearing International Day ceremony at my girls’ school featuring brightly colored flags carried by elaborately dressed children, my patriotism has been strained in recent years. Yet now I am intrigued by the rhetoric of hope coming from the capital. While some may be wishing for less transparency to fortify their hope, I am encouraged by promises to restore the integrity of political life and to rethink progress.

Ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System demonstrated that up to 98,000 patients die in United States’ hospitals each year as a result of avoidable medical errors. With this mortal diagnosis for health care delivery, how can it be that subsequent meetings of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), the executives responsible for health care delivery institutions, continue to focus primarily on their leadership development and self-promotion?

Among the many complications it has encountered along its now 30-year march down the path of so-called “reform and opening up,” China is now projected to have a surplus of 20 to 30 million males by the year 2020.

I sing the honor of our fallen soldiers; and their final sacrifice on behalf of country, freedom, security; And technological innovation.

May is National Museum Month so I forced my 7-year-old son to accompany me to the Museum of Human Frailty. Housed in a restored factory building in a depressed mid-sized rust belt city in upstate New York, the MHF's promotional brochure describes the museum’s mission as helping "children of all ages understand their own emotional and rational contradictions and limitations."

There are few jobs more demanding, more confusing, or more closely scrutinized than that of a mother. How do mothers ever make sense of the constant deluge of expert and scientific advice? What can we do to help them, and what can they teach us about evaluating expert advice?

Swine flu has infected everyone in the United States. But it’s not swine flu itself that has been spreading like a pandemic – it’s the panic-stricken rhetoric associated with the disease.

Damn. I’ve temporarily disqualified myself from making the incisive and witty kinds of political comment that Dan Sarewitz and CSPO colleagues regularly make in these Soapbox articles, because I’m currently enjoying a 12-month secondment in a challenging policy role. What I thought I’d do instead is to relate some of the values that I see as fundamental to science-policy practice to the legend of ANZAC, an important part of Australia’s national psyche. This is timely because the 25th of April is ANZAC day here in Australia. Confused? Relax – this might all make sense in a moment.

The environmental movement has made great strides since this day 39 years ago, when Earth Day was first declared a holiday. Amidst the ebbs and flows of public attentiveness for environmental concerns, legislation has been passed and regulations implemented in cities, states, and the federal government to protect our water, air, ecosystems, species, roadless areas, ocean health, etc, etc.

I'm sitting in an airplane at 38,000 feet and young children are crying from rows in front and in back of me. If the Exodus was this loud, I might have stayed in Egypt. What would it have been like to be part of that mass, that throng of people? And their animals? And their camels?

We often forget that technologies are more than just a bundle of metal, gears and electronics. To provide us with any benefits, machines have to be woven into our practices and daily lives. There are few technologies that exemplify this better than the automobile.

Wednesday is April Fools’ Day. So as you’re stuffing snakes into peanut brittle cans, inflating whoopee cushions or winding your joy buzzer in preparation, CSPO types might take a moment to consider the legacy of the most “science and society-ish” practical joke ever.

Dr. Clive Svendsen at the University of Wisconsin has sought to use human stem cells as biological pumps that can be implanted inside the human body where they will pump out drugs to cure diseases. Dr. Charles Murtaugh at the University of Utah wants to insert stem cells into the pancreas to produce insulin so diabetes sufferers will no longer have to carry around mechanical pumps. The pumps will be inside, instead, using the body’s resources to operate as little biological engines.

As The New York Times pointed out in its editorial, limitations still remain on federal funding of stem cell research. The Times is right to argue for federal funding of this research, but they do so for the wrong reasons. It’s important to get the reason right.

A famous psychology experiment presented five-year-old children with a choice: take one marshmallow now, or wait twenty minutes and get two marshmallows. The children who chose to wait for two seem to be more likely to turn into more socially and intellectually successful adults than the kids who chose immediate gratification.

I once viewed science policy as an omnipresent and omnipotent but unseen force that guides via research funding. From my perspective there was little organization and no master plan, as research grants seemingly were awarded or denied at random.

In their recent letter to Science, Dave Guston, Dan Sarewitz and Clark Miller remind us that the claim that science and values can be kept apart in the policy world confuses the means of science with the ends of democracy -- a confusion that is dangerous for the health of both.

The strength, speed and agility of highly trained athletes, the guile and planning of genius coaches, the grit and determination of men working in solidarity toward a common goal – these are things that come to mind when we think of football. Yet geeks in laboratories have had a large impact on how the Big Game is played and experienced.

So yesterday Beyonce and I sang “America the Beautiful.” Oh, and did I mention the other 400,000 people on the Washington, DC mall who joined in? Yeah, fine, it’s a bit of a stretch to say “Beyonce and I” since actually I was watching her on the Jumbotron, and besides that her lips were about five bizarre seconds out of sync with the sound blaring from the speaker tower, but it was a wonderful experience nonetheless.