After running the most technology-dominated presidential campaign in history, it’s only logical that Obama would keep the trend going into his new administration. And by all accounts, he has every intention of doing so: The Washington Post reports that the president-elect and his transition team are gearing up (pun fully intended) to “create the first truly ‘wired’ presidency.”

So far the major cyber-moves include consolidating the list of over 10 million supporter e-mail addresses gathered during the campaign, planning the transition of Obama’s 95-person “new media” campaign staff into an expanded White House operation, and biggest and flashiest of all, the launch of the president-to-be’s official Web site, change.gov. It’s self-billed as “your source for the latest news, events and announcements so that you can follow the setting up of the Obama administration,” and so far it contains a forum to share your election day stories, a newsfeed, and lo and behold, a blog! Take that, anti-blogites—if it’s good enough for Obama, it’s good enough for us.

So is this the era of the blogger-president? Can we expect Web cams in the Oval Office and Twitters from cabinet meetings?

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• A new administration, a new direction, and maybe—just maybe—a clean divorce between science and political ideology.

• And of course, the debate has already started: Who will Obama pick to head up the EPA?

• Meanwhile, we’re zooming straight into a “health care perfect storm.”

• Which makes it all the more admirable (or crazy, or excessively symbolic) that Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Steve Kagan has elected to go without health insurance as a gesture of solidarity towards his uninsured constituents. Stay healthy, Steve!

• China demands international action on climate change—let’s just hope they practice what they preach.

• And not to judge or anything, but videos like this one certainly don’t inspire confidence.

• The “net energy” debate gets serious. Is the whole thing a load of bull? We’ll leave it to the experts to decide.

Yesterday we noted that dear old (and still around) President Bush was working overtime to pass environmental regulations—many of which would harm, not help, said environment—before he’s shown the proverbial boot. But to be fair, not every rule he’s looking to enact is bad: The Washington Post reports that one in particular may even be crucial in conserving some our most vital underwater ecosystems. The plan is to restrict or ban fishing and mineral exploitation in two huge areas of the Pacific.

No surprise, his attempts to do some good are being met with resistance, to the point where the scope of the original plan, which included the preservation of four potential “marine monuments” has already been whittled down. And leading the anti-conservation charge is none other than friend-to-corporations-everywhere Dick Cheney, who argues that the restrictions will hurt the economies of nearby regions like the Northern Mariana Islands.

The ocean areas in question, called “treasure troves” of biodiversity, are described by the Post as follows:

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You’d think that recent news about autism—i.e., the increasing amount of definitive evidence proving it’s not linked to vaccines—would be vindication for Paul Offit, the prominent pro-vaccination advocate and medical director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. As you might recall, Offit sounded off earlier this year on the Hannah Poling case, offering an opinion that led to all sorts of name-calling and borderline hysteria.

Now, it appears, the hysteria has made a sharp right into psychosis. ABC News reports that Offit has been receiving death threats (as in, more than one) from anti-vaxers. On a recent “Today Show” appearance, Offit revealed that “the threats [he] received included a ‘phone call from an unidentified man who mentioned specific and private details’ about Offit’s family.”

And he’s not the only one: Flu vaccine advocate Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, describes the following:

“Among the most egregious things — I got a letter once railing against my involvement in vaccines and hoping that something serious would happen to me and hoping that something serious would happen to one of my children,” he said. “I had people come to the door of my home and harass my wife and kids, so I no longer have my address listed in the phone book.”

And at one point, Poland said, someone broke into his lab and attempted to hack into his computers. As a result, Poland’s lab is now locked down for security purposes.

Granted, leaders of anti-vax groups respond that they’ve also been the victims of harassment, with taunts like “baby-killer” hurled their way.

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Nothing puts a damper on an historic world-mobilizing event like a steaming heap of pollution. As 80Beats reports, the nation’s current and least favorite—no, really, we’re not just saying that—president is using his last days in office to enact a virtual bonanza of legislation aimed at letting industries like coal-mining and commercial fishing wreak (even more) havoc on the environment.

Via the the Natural Resources Defense Council, here’s a description of one of the proposed rules, which exempts factory farms from requiring permits that limit water pollution:

Creates a loophole allowing facility operators to avoid permits by claiming they won’t have a discharge.

Adopts a scheme that allows facilities to avoid certain environmental enforcement. For instance, if an operator certifies that the facility won’t have a discharge, environmental authorities will ignore enforcement action, even if the facility discharges to the nation’s waters.

Rejects improvements in technology that would reduce harmful bacteria and other pathogens contained in animal waste, missing an opportunity to prevent water pollution and threats to public health.

Well, guess he figures he’ll drink only bottled water after leaving the White House. (Good luck with that one.)

Chances are you’re not reading this, because you’re standing in some epic line at a polling place. Or maybe you’ve brought your iPhone, and you’re surfing the Web to pass the timed. Either way, the polls are jammed, lines are interminable across the country, and election officials, politicos, pundits, and just about everyone else are bracing themselves for the technological messes that are sure to ensue.

The good news, according to a recent report from Election Data Services, is that the number of ballots cast on electronic voting machines will drop today for the first time since DREs wormed their way into our lives. In the 2008 election, 32.6 percent of all ballots will be recorded on an electronic voting machine, compared to 37.6 percent in 2006.

Of course, 2006 wasn’t a presidential election year, particularly one with expected “record-shattering” turnouts. By comparison, 22 percent and 29.2 percent of votes were cast electronically in 2000 and 2004, respectively.

Then there’s the little matter of key swing states, including Ohio, Indiana, and Nevada—all of which are relying heavily on electronic voting machines.

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So, yeah, there’s this election tomorrow, in case you hadn’t heard. And if you need any more incentive to head to the polls, here it is: A study out of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh found that people with higher IQs voted more often, regardless of their occupation. The data came from a U.K. study begun in 1970 that has tracked the recent voting habits of about 17,200 people born that year.

They found that for every 15 IQ points above a score of 100, a participant was “38 percent more likely than average to have voted in the United Kingdom’s 2001 election.” In addition, “[p]eople who took part in a political meeting or rally in the last year, those who took part in a public demonstration, those who signed a petition, and those who were fairly or very interested in politics had higher mean intelligence test scores at age 10.”

But did IQ make any difference in which way people voted? Any mention of this question in the past has usually been enough to incite a frothing frenzy. Here’s how ABC News summarized the latest findings:

“Childhood intelligence is associated with…support for political ideologies that are based on ecological sustainability and social liberalism,” conclude the Intelligence study authors. For example, voters were 32 percent more likely to vote for the UK’s more left-wing Liberal party over the Conservative party for every 15 IQ points they scored above average as children. They were more likely to be tree-huggers too, voting more often for environment-oriented parties.

So the smarter you are, the more you like trees—we report, you decide.

Related:
RB: Election 2008: Everything You Need to Know to Avoid Being Disenfranchised
RB: Voting in America: Let the Pre-Game Mess Begin!
RB: Voting in America, Redux: You Can’t Vote Here, But You Can Vote in Space

• Get in touch with your inner polar bear—and kick some climate change a$$.

• Attention: Cruddy voting machines = cruddy news for voters.

• The Economist smacks down pretty much the entire science journalism establishment. Don’t worry, we won’t mention how you weren’t exactly first in line to predict the financial crisis.

• We love voter databases (even if they don’t love us). Unfortunately, Ohio’s might not even make it through a single fraud check. Ask us how shocked we are.

• Man v. the Internet: Did the Web hinder (or help) the financial crisis?

• Obama’s groundbreaking Web campaign: “Controlled chaos” (that looks like it’ll work).

• And if you’re looking for last minute Halloween costume ideas, look no further.

With less than a week before showtime, the polls are already jam packed. But the real stars of the eleventh hour are the undecided voters, who still (incredibly, miraculously) haven’t made up their minds. And apparently they’re more numerous than one might think, with one in seven voters saying they might go either way, according to a recent poll.

But are these vacillating voters really still deciding? Or could their minds have already formulated a choice, without their even realizing it? University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek suspects the latter is true, and has partnered with colleagues at Harvard and the University of Washington to test whether humans form mental associations that differ from what their conscious recognizes.

To do this, the researchers used the Implicit Association Test, which has been up and running for a decade now and has logged around 7 million responses. Since the 2008 presidential race began, the team has tested more than 25,000 voters on their implicit preferences concerning the two candidates. Of that group, around 4,000 (15 percent) declared themselves undecided. But the test results for a significant number of these so-called undecideds showed a clear implicit preference for Obama or McCain. Here’s how the team summarized their results:

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One week left ’til Election Day 2008, and voter turnout is expected to obliterate records. Of course, whether those record numbers of voters turn into record numbers of counted votes remains to be seen. In addition to the smorgasbord of disasters that could befall your vote before it gets tallied, the first hurdle will be voter registration, creating a gatekeeper you’ll have to pass just to get in the door.

Chances are, your voter registration information has been entered into a computer database run by your state. And chances also are that it’s been entered wrong—no, seriously, it has. As a result of all this error and confusion, just about everyone is worried that legions of voters could be turned away at the polls. Even the Association for Computing Machinery is getting in the act, stating the following in press release:

Experts from ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) will be monitoring and analyzing the reliability of registration records and voting equipment around the nation as Election Day approaches.

ACM’s report on VRDs [voter registration databases] includes 99 high-level recommendations to help states establish best practices for computerized statewide electronic databases…For example, the ACM report recommends that when driver registration databases are used for eligibility checks, they should apply only to screening voters, not to automatically enrolling or de-enrolling them.

Yes, great idea! Call us when it’s implemented in 2012.

Of course, in the irony of all ironies, NASA is making sure that any Americans currently in orbit are able to vote from space, courtesy of a secure electronic ballot uplinked by the Johnson Space Center. This year, two men aboard the International Space Station plan to cast their ballots from 220 miles above the Earth. Let’s just hope they’ve been reading the news.

Related:
RB: Voting in America: Let the Pre-Game Mess Begin!
RB: Lose Your House, Lose Your Vote, Lose Your Self-Esteem
RB: Advocacy Group May Have Registered Phony “Voters.” But Does It Matter?
RB: Be Very Afraid: Online Voting Systems Fail Even for Political Bloggers

Here at Reality Base, we’ve taken great pleasure in covering the irreligionist arguments of anti-theist writer Christopher Hitchens. We’ve also delved into the world of GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin, whose ruminations on science have been most…interesting. So when we saw that the former had taken on the latter today in Slate, on the subject of none other than science, we were about as thrilled as anyone with a 401K could be these days.

Hitchens takes the well-heeled (literally) candidate to task for recently denouncing fruit-fly research as a wasteful and unnecessary—not to mention “un-American,” since some of the research took place in France—expense. Fruit flies, or Drosophila, will likely ring a bell for most readers—as they should, since they’re one of the great laboratories of all genetics research. As Hitchens points out, the fly can be easily grown in a lab and is a valuable research tool because it lives for a very short time, breeds vigorously, and displays plenty of genetic mutation in each generation. He writes:

[S]ince Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature “issue” of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent.

He then goes on to lambast Palin’s reported belief in creationism:

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In the final stretch before Nov. 4th, both the Obama and McCain camps have been hurling their efforts—not to mention cash—at key battleground states like Ohio, Colorado, and Florida. Most of the money has gone towards a near-nonstop rotation of TV and other ads, many of which consist of shoveling as much BS on your opponent’s head as possible in 30 seconds.

The ad game is all part of the conventional election wisdom, which goes something like, “Drown out the other guy’s messages with your own, and you’ll snag the voters.” But as it turns out, the barrage of competing ads may actually be having the opposite effect: A new study found that the more bombarded people are with different political messages, the more confused and ambivalent they become. In other words, all those clogged airwaves in Michigan and Ohio may be upping the chances that voters stay home on election day.

The study’s data consisted of surveys from the American National Election Study in 2000—which, as you’ll likely recall, was a particularly messy/disastrous/laughable example of politics in action. That year, the University of Michigan ran the survey, which included interviews with over 1,800 voters.

Study authors (and swing state voters) Luke Keele of Ohio State University and Jennifer Wolak of the University of Colorado, Boulder compared the survey results of voters in battleground versus sure-thing states, measuring levels of ambivalence based on the number of positive and/or negative items that the respondents listed about both Bush and Gore. The idea was that if a voter thought the two candidates were equally good/bad, it was a sign of that voter’s ambivalence. Keele and Wolak then cross-checked their results against the amount of TV each voter watched.

And the results?

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Even with all the melee over hockey moms and plumbers and fake registration cards, technology has been a dominating story in this campaign. The candidates have used it, and benefited from it, in varying degrees (campaign ads in video games may take the cake), and the Web has taken its place as a major game changer in American politics. But there was always the lingering downside: Just as the Internet can build you up, so can it rip you down.

Now, CNN has a report on the measures the candidates are taking to mop up the rumors, attacks, and lies that bubble like oil through the airwaves—and yes, there’s a lot of them.

In fact, this campaign has seen the highest number of Internet smears in history—hardly surprising given the continually-increasing reach and scope of the medium. So how do these intrepid (and extremely overworked) political staffers manage to scour the reaches of the Internet and counter all the garbage thrown at their candidates?

A source inside Obama’s campaign spoke to DISCOVER, and explained the Democratic team’s strategy as follows:

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Voter fraud can happen more easily than we think (along with just about every other form of election fraud). In the past few weeks, the McCain camp has been hammering away at the voter fraud issue, specifically targeting the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a nationwide advocacy group that has made recent headlines for its vigorous campaign to register new voters—the vast majority of which happen to be poor or working class, and Democrats.

For the $16 million ACORN has poured into the 2008 campaign, the agency has achieved some impressive results: The tallies indicate that it added 1.3 million new voters to the rolls. Of course, whether those 1.3 million registrations actually correspond to 1.3 million human beings is under investigation. In Las Vegas, investigators raided an ACORN office and seized documents based on claims of registration fraud, and authorities in other states are also taking a closer look at the agency’s practices. Allegations are flying around that ACORN employees filled out hundreds, or possibly even thousands of registration cards with fake names, or the names of prison inmates. One man is facing questioning for allegedly registering to vote 10 to 15 times through ACORN (though assuming all the registrations were for himself, and he only votes once, his actions are hardly a crime).

Cue the self-righteous blustering about the perilous state of democracy, which have been countered with charges that the investigations are really just a means of disenfranchising minority voters.

Meanwhile, ACORN is rushing to restore its reputation with a PR blitz including a press release that states the following:

According to [voting rights] experts, spreading fears of fraudulent voting—which happens less often in the U.S. than death by lightning—is done to discredit voter registration efforts and justify restrictive laws that place additional barriers to full participation for all Americans.

For the record, around 90 people per year are killed by lightning in the U.S. Investigators are looking into at least 2,100 possible bogus voter applications in Indiana alone—not to mention thousands more in Ohio, Michigan, and Nevada. So there goes that theory.

But how often does voter fraud [as opposed to the alleged registration fraud] really occur? And if ACORN did in fact fudge registrations, what are their chances of actually getting away with casting fraudulent votes?

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Everyone is losing this year. Whether it be the Lehman CEO or the evicted homeowner or the aging employee with a napalmed 401K, no one—not even the supercalifragilistamega-rich— is coming out of this unscathed. But given the present and future of across-the-board pain, it’s worth looking at which industries and interests should be salvaged, or at least partially shielded from damage.

Famed paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey is already on the offensive, telling reporters during a speech the University of Arkansas at Little Rock that the economic crisis would be “just devastating” to scientific research. He fears that as the philanthropists, foundations, corporations, and governments that fund scientific research watch their coffers empty, money for grants, endowments, and other research efforts will fizzle. Starting in 2009, donations for research and exploration will be “hugely hit,” he predicts.

Environmental researchers and activists are already worried that climate work could be tossed aside in favor of more immediate (but not necessarily less worrisome) concerns. It’s not a stretch to predict that other scientific fields will be hit as well—and that the halting or delaying of research could be as big an aggregate loss as the mortgage crisis and Dow immolation combined.

Related:

Reality Base: High Gas Prices = Good; High Gas Prices = Bad
RB: Lose Your House, Lose Your Vote, Lose Your Self-Esteem
RB: DISCOVER’s Science Policy Project