Physicists, rejoice! (Even more!)

Science magazine is reporting that Obama has chosen to nominate physicist John Holdren as his science adviser. The well-credentialed and -bearded Holdren is currently a professor of environmental policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as well as the director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. A top adviser to Obama’s campaign and world renowned expert on climate change, energy policy, and nuclear proliferation, Holdren is the second physicist to join the president-elect’s team, following Nobel Laureate Stephen Chu’s appointment as Secretary of Energy.

Related:
Cosmic Variance: Steven Chu Nominated to be Secretary of Energy

Image: AAAS

January 20 can’t come soon enough, but first let the crimes of the Bush administration be released and judged. Today’s chopping block head is Julie MacDonald, a former high-ranking official in the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service. According to a newly-released report from Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney, MacDonald successfully “tainted nearly every decision made on the protection of endangered species over five years” and even exceeded expectations by “exert[ing] improper political interference on many more rulings than previously thought.”

MacDonald’s priority, according to the report, was not so much the well-being of hurting species, but rather a particular political agenda (hmm, perhaps we see a pattern?) that led her to push through a host of rulings axing greater protection for endangered species. Seven of them were (thankfully) reversed by the department, but Devaney’s report found an additional 13 decisions that MacDonald skewed to fit her agenda, and two more that she “indirectly affected.”

MacDonald, a civil engineer with a master’s degree in management, resigned from her post in May of 2007 amid accusations that she’d “violated the Endangered Species Act, censored science and mistreated staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

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In case you haven’t picked up a newspaper in the past few days—or if you have, but the number of huge scandals has grown too big to digest in one sitting—a certain elite hedge fund manager by the name of Bernie Madoff has been accused of running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded hordes of the world’s most elite investors out of a possible $50 billion. The level and depth of fraud, as well as the amount of money involved, could make this the single biggest scandal in financial history.

So what path of psychology could possess someone to steal so much, so blithely and brazenly, for so long? How can white-collar criminals, who typically lack the sociopathic personality that accompanies more violent crimes, lie so much and so well to the point where reality (and astronomical sums of money) are lost?

Lauren Cox at ABC News spoke to one such (reformed) white-collar criminal to find out. Barry Minkow, who spent seven years in federal prison for a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme (which, by comparison, looks like pennies next to Madoff), had the following insight about the psychology that lies behind this level of ongoing criminal activity:

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You’d think that NASA might have some heavy incentive to make nice with the new president-elect. But instead, it appears NASA administrator Mike Griffin is doing just about everything in his power to give Obama’s transition team the proverbial middle finger. Via the Orlando Sentinel, Griffin’s current acts of un-hospitality include obstructing efforts to obtain information, dictating what NASA employees and civilian contractors can tell the space transition team, and insulting the team’s leader to her face. Charming!

No bad deed comes without a motive, and Griffin’s is clear: to make darned well sure that his pet project, the absurdly over-delayed and over-budget Constellation program, escapes the ax in the new administration. And worry he should: Now that the Bush “go forth and conquer” agenda for space (an agenda accompanied by liberal check-writing) are leaving Washington, there’s a good chance Obama might scrap large parts of the program.

When Griffin got wind of this possibility, he started in with the gestapo tactics:

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Mashing scientific evidence into a pulpy soup of agenda-laden misinformation seems to be a common theme for the modern GOP. The latest (and arguably most egregious) example is outgoing EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, whose reign has been dominated by a poverty of factual information, with hard science routinely twisted to suit political designs.

In a scathing profile in the Philadelphia Enquirer (via ThinkProgress), writers John Shiffman and John Sullivan delve into the cult of mediocrity that dominated Johnson’s time at the agency. The piece is filled with forehead-slappers like the following:

Perhaps one of the best insights into Johnson’s vision for EPA can be found in written testimony he submitted to a Senate committee this year. In the document, Johnson laid out his top 11 goals.

No. 1 was clean energy, particularly approving drilling for “thousands of new oil and gas wells” on tribal and federal lands. No. 2 was homeland security.

Environmental enforcement and sound science ranked ninth and 10th.

And that’s not even the worst of it:

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With the beatific cloud surrounding Obama’s win rapidly fading, one question finding its way into the public ear is whether or not the president-elect’s newly-won power might/could/will degrade the integrity he’s shown throughout his career. The idea certainly has precedent, with big names like Duke Cunningham and Ted Stevens offering textbook cases of Washington insiders squeezing every last drop of abuse from their power.

But does power really lead to a change in personal perspective and morality? Not necessarily, according to a study in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers, led by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, found that “power tends to shield people from outside opinions, leaving them to rely more on their own insights”—which, when the leader is legitimately insightful, is a positive result.

The team based its findings on college students who’d been primed to feel either powerful or powerless, through techniques like completing sentences that included “power” words, such as “authority,” “executive” and “control,” or words unrelated to power, such as “automobile” and “envelope.” Each group was then given creative tasks, such as coming up with product names or drawing hypothetical aliens. In most cases, participants were shown examples beforehand. Those who had been “primed for power” presented “more unique ideas that bore no resemblance to examples given.”

All of which is well and good. But does it translate to presidential politics?

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One of the more fascinating—and troubling—undercurrents of the conservation movement is that it has a clear, unalterable lid: We want to conserve species and their habitats, but not at the expense of our own well-being. In other words, when it’s them v. us, the furry critters will get it every time (a phenomenon handily illustrated by just about every creature movie).

Now, as Michael Wall reports in ScienceNOW Daily News, this man-beast conflict is coming to a dramatic head in Nepal, where villagers have undergone an extensive campaign to rebuild degraded forests in an effort to restore the dwindling tiger population. The giant cats—or what remains of them—have been shoved for years into smaller and smaller spaces in between villages, fields, and roads.

To keep the species from perishing entirely, for over a decade the Nepalese government has been working to expand the tiger reserves. Local communities have also joined in, managing the recovering forests and learning to allocate now-smaller resources like firewood and livestock grounds. In fact, the program has been a near-model of conservation in action, with the tiger parks giving back portions of their revenues to the sacrificing communities.

The only party that isn’t complacent in this whole affair, unfortunately, is the tigers. With their numbers on the rise—and the number of humans surrounding them not decreasing—they’re attacking people in record numbers.

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• It’s no surprise that Americans are losing sleep (though the label “sleep epidemic” is a bit extreme). So cue the comprehensive guide to insomnia treatments.

• The implosion of media spares no one: CNN cuts science and tech unit, bloggers mourn.

• Greening Mexico City? If it happens, color us impressed.

• Michigan legalizes medical marijuana, but patient’s can’t use it ’til April. Ah government bureaucracy.

• The Facebook virus is coming! The Facebook virus is coming!

• Is the Bureau of Land Management holding a “fire sale” for Utah’s oil-and-gas drilling leases?

• Um, duh. Seriously, is this even a question?

This month in DISCOVER, Mark Anderson has a feature story on the medical controversy surrounding shaken baby syndrome (SBS). The crux of the debate is this:

On one side of the courtroom, representing mainstream medical opinion, are those who believe shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is a valid diagnosis. They say that decades of clinical experience and criminal confessions—in which a parent has admitted to shaking a child with symptoms of SBS—bolster their case to the point of near-certainty. On the other side, a growing number of skeptics are now claiming that the evidence for the syndrome rests on dubious medical ground with questionable biophysical models supporting it.

The confusion centers around the trio of symptoms that lead to an SBS diagnosis: bleeding between the brain and skull, bleeding behind the retinas, and brain swelling. Conventional medical wisdom holds that some or all of these mean a baby is suffering from SBS. But a growing number of skeptics say the symptom list could come from any number of other sources, from infections to diet to a fall.

While the final medical verdict is still up in the air, the issue highlights the tricky—and potentially devastating—fallout when medical uncertainty headbutts the legal system. SBS presents a clear dilemma: If a baby has it, the “fact” that the baby’s death or injuries were caused by SBS is in and of itself evidence that a parent, caretaker, or other handler intentionally committed a crime.

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It looks like the U.S. military’s fears about Twitter being a tool for terrorists may not be so far off base. The Washington Post reports that the attackers who wreaked havoc in Mumbai last week used Blackberries, GPS navigators, CDs full of high-res satellite images, and “multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track” to carry out their siege. They also spoke to each other using satellite phones and kept tabs on their fellow terrorists by watching live TV reports in the hotel rooms they occupied.

The use of technology was so sophisticated and extensive that one security expert in New Delhi told the Post,

“The terrorists would not have been able to carry out these attacks had it not been for technology. They were not sailors, but they were able to use sophisticated GPS navigation tools and detailed maps to sail from Karachi [in Pakistan] to Mumbai.”

Meanwhile, civilians were making full use of available resources as well. Throughout the attack, the blogosphere, and particularly sites like Flickr and Twitter, was packed with extensive realtime coverage and updates from onlookers, residents, and potential victims trapped in hotels. And of course, afterwards, those affected were able to use the Web to share stories and vent emotions about what had happened.

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Newsweek reports that the children displaced by Hurricane Katrina who spent the longest amount of time in government-provided temporary housing—a.k.a. FEMA’s toxic trailers—are “the sickest I have ever seen in the U.S.,” according to Irwin Redlener, Children’s Health Fund president and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

The ailments, according to a study of 261 post-Katrina kids, range from mental health disorders to anemia, and are astonishingly widespread: Forty-one percent of the children are anemic—twice the rate found in minors in New York City homeless shelters—and 42 percent have respiratory infections and other problems likely linked to the excessive formaldehyde in the trailers.

As we’ve discussed on Discoblog, formaldehyde is a probable carcinogen as well as an allergen, and is used in many products, including the wood used to build these disaster homes. The formaldehyde gas levels in FEMA’s trailers were so toxic that Katrina victims began complaining of illnesses, including breathing difficulties, bloody noses, and even gas-linked deaths, almost immediately after they moved into them.

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When the fed is spending $7.4 trillion to clean up the wreckage, you know someone’s gotta take the blame. So who should shoulder it? Scientific American thinks at least some of the fault belongs with the physics and math whizzes who built the risk models that dug our grave.

In a byline-free editorial, the magazine traces our woes back to a 2004 meeting in which the SEC agreed to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves “needed for a rainy day.” This move provided the requisite billions that banks pumped into mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. And who created the structures for these impossibly complex schemes that caused the mass bank implosion? Wall Street’s band of “lapsed physicists and mathematical virtuosos,” also known as “quants,” who “both invented these oblique securities and created software models that supposedly measured the risk a firm would incur by holding them in its portfolio.”

Given that hindsight is 20-20, we now realize that all these models are really only accurate for a limited period of time, at a very narrow confidence level—meaning that whenever those conditions aren’t fantasy-scenario optimal, the actual risk can be enough to incite a global meltdown. Good to know!

So should we be tarring and feathering the brains who built the beam we used to hang ourselves? It’s hardly that simple, a fact that Sci Am acknowledges while still laying on the heavy guilt:

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• Just when you thought it was safe to put the abortion debate to rest: Bush tries to sneak in additional “protections” for hospital employees who don’t wish to perform the procedure.

• Practicing physicians aren’t the only ones on the take from drug companies; now it’s radio hosts as well.

• A new survey finds bad news for China’s soil—and its food supply.

• All that technology love can work both ways: Verizon employees are caught peeking at Obama’s private cell phone records.

• Could HIV prevention come in the form of a pill?

• And are “climate-smart chickens” worthy of their name?

• And finally, one of the best, and most honest, run-downs of what’s really happening with women in science.

How does President-Elect Obama love technology? Let us count the ways. Among the features the incoming administration is adding to its much-anticipated technology ramp-up is a video version of the weekly Democratic address. From now on, the president-elect will record the address on video, then his staff will upload it to none other than YouTube, as well as Obama’s Web site (for the first video, go here).

And fear not, technophiles—there’s more. From the Washington Post:

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.

Of course, not all of this techno-political bonanza is 100 percent original: The current administration’s Web site “offers RSS feeds, podcasts and videos of press briefings,” while the “site’s Ask the White House page has featured regular online chats dating back to 2003.” Granted, it’s pretty safe to assume online video clips of Bush didn’t garner quite the same enthusiasm.

Related:
RB: Obama Blogs? President-Elect Launches Web Site, Embraces Internet
RB: Politicians v. Technology: Obama, McCain Battle the Internet
RB: Obama Changes His View (Or, at Least, His Web Site) On Technology

• Transition! Transition! (Insert music here). So here’s the question of the day: Will Obama create a National Energy Council?

• Just in time for winter: A complete history of the flu through the ages.

• The military fought the whales… and won.

• What, “Global Warming Poobah” was already taken? Gore offered (but turned down) job as White House “Climate Czar.”

• We can’t decide if this is heartening (drivers are being safe!) or mortally depressing: California air pollution kills more people per year than car crashes.

• A soldier-blogger gets his moment in the spotlight—though the real question is, what does he think of Trooptube?