Oh, and this story made me think of this comic. Applies perfectly here.

This is most likely a case of media hype driving public policy.
I heard a segment on NPR on this. Basically, it's just one study still in the very preliminary stages as studies go. Moreover, thee experts they interviewed said that there was no known biological reason why this would happen.
Given the amount of research into influenza, how to vaccinate against it, and how the bodies immune system responds to these vaccines, I think it's pretty safe to say that there won't be any medical surprises regarding the interaction between two such vaccines.

Until this is vigorously peer reviewed and at least another supporting study by other researchers is done, I call this a definite correlation (which we ALL know does not equal causation....right?).

This also ignores the tax compliance costs built into our current system. The deductions are not automatic, they have to be carefully planned for in most cases. How much time is spent each year by corporations considering the tax implications of a particular business move? And then how much overhead is there to doing the necessary paperwork to prove tax compliance in the event of an audit? It is an astounding amount of waste, and leads to companies wanting to do business where taxes are lower and simpler to pay than in the U.S.

Also, while deductions do bring the tax rate down, there is also the state and local taxes that business are hit with, and those associated compliance costs.

We have a horrible, horrible tax system. These issues also affect individuals as well as businesses, I'm just focusing on corporate taxes because of the silliness of the thinking that corporations pay any tax whatsoever. Their taxes and compliance costs are built into the price of goods that we buy and that they export to other countries.

Ummm.... what about the second highest corporate tax rate in the world ? It sits at about 39%. I think that just might have something to do with wanting to leave.

Corporate taxes are a joke. They just get passed on to the consumer anyway, and they make businesses less competitive internationally. But it is politically rewarding to go after the big evil corporations and for them to pay their way.

Really, and end to corporate taxes is a big reason why I strongly support the FairTax . It would no longer hide the taxes we pay, and special interests would not be able to carve out exceptions for themselves life they do all the time now.

Scientists are humans, just like anyone else. Frankly, I think 1.97% is pretty low considering it is the combined total of all "fabricated, falsified or modified data or results". Notice that all of those aren't quite equal either. "Tweaking" results to tease out the answer you want (while still unethical and damaging to scholarship) is not as bad as outright falsification. Especially since it is not always clear where the line is between "modifying data", and doing valid statistical analysis like throwing away outliers. Yes, there are standards for outliers, but they are not universal, and confounding factors can occur during the experiment that make ethical decisions more difficult (i.e. the tester didn't read part of the script right, test subject's cell phone went off during test, survey answer was ambiguous and hard to read, the list goes on.)

The reality is that no one study should be taken as fact in isolation. It should either be corroborated by existing evidence (i.e. - it shines a new light on existing theories without contradiction), or by similar studies validating the results, or both.

Nutrition is a perfect example. How many studies have come out in the past 20 years that directly contradict (or seem to) prior studies done in that area? If someone followed each new "discovery" intently, they'd be so screwed up in their eating habits they'd probably end up being malnourished. However, looking back over a series of seemingly contradictory studies, we can see patterns which we've been able to make more sense of. We now have a greater understanding of "good" vs. "bad" cholesterol and the idea that fats aren't necessarily the root of all evil, and many similar findings. We still don't know all the answers, but we know lots more than any one study told us. This is how research works. It is also why graduate students writing dissertations are required to include a large section on "related work" so that they can get the full appreciation for where their research fits into the big picture, rather than basing their entire hypothesis on just one study or finding which might be contradicted in the next conference.

Also, you can always assume away the effects of friction. It's great!

At least that's what my high school physics teacher taught me...

I seriously hope that was an attempt to be funny rather than revealing some "obvious" conspiracy theory.

It is just as easy to conclude (and far more likely to be true) that:

1. There are terrorists, but they either feel they have made their point and achieved their goal of causing terror and its associated overreactions or they are incapable of mounting a significant overseas attack, or unwilling to mount one that would not cause similar damage to 9/11.

2. The government is not outright lying about the terrorist threats, but is doing what it does best: protect itself.

If Bush had done nothing after 9/11 to increase security, he would have been crucified much sooner and in a worse way than he was. Even as it stands, very few people are embittered towards him for domestic defensive security policies, but for foreign offensive security policies. Politicians (and therefore government) have set up a system whereby they can remain blameless in the face of society crumbling around them. They could spend trillions more on homeland security and no one would be held personally responsible for any sort of public outcry except perhaps the president, who would still do his best to sidestep any blame. This is how the game works. Big, fat, bloated, wasteful, and expensive defensive strategies that allow lawmakers to hide behind the guise of being over-cautious will always win over strategies that involve personal risk through bold, decisive action that will likely be criticized by someone, somewhere.

So no, those are not "safe" conclusions, and expose some pretty hefty biases on your part.

Sadly I think you're correct. Ideally I'd say to cut the budget from the TSA and put it towards the national debt -- or at this point just towards putting our national budget in the black again. I figured that putting it towards another anti-terror project would be at least a bit politically viable. But, sadly, it is easy for the government to begin funding something and awfully hard to stop funding it.

Things like this get me irked that we are spending billions upon billions each year on equipment, employees, and wasted time for all the added airport security since 9/11.
The fact is, is I were a terrorist I'd simply walk onto a bus or subway during rush hour with a bomb, like has been done in England and Spain. Effective, cheap, and little can be done to stop it. Not the same impact as collapsing two skyscrapers, but I seriously doubt any future plane hijackings will be successful since the rules have changed.

The overreaction to airplane hijackings is disturbing to me. The high school in my home town had a similar reaction to the Columbine shootings. They installed metal detectors at every entrance and hired extra security even though there had been little more than small knives confiscated at school, and never any real violence. Of course, there wasn't time to check people's bags properly, so it would have been trivial to smuggle something in anyway.
After two years at a cost of about 1.5 million per year, the metal detectors were taken out and the extra security measures scrapped. By then the public outcry for action had calmed, and no one wanted to be flushing 1.5 million down the drain every year.

I wish they'd do the same with the airport security. Lower it to a roughly pre-9/11 level, and spend the money elsewhere, like to keep nukes and dirty bombs out of the country.

I agree that this tag is a bad one. It implies that everyone in Utah was on board with this, but Huntsman alone stepped forward to kill it. As someone who is living in Utah at the moment, I can tell you that this got no press coverage here, except through (conservative) political commentators who agreed it was a BAD idea. I'm not sure how it got enough of a coalition to make it through the legislature, but it certainly wasn't by popular demand.

I do usually try to take a pragmatist view. It's hard not to, given the number of predictions that have been wildly off, particularly concerning technology over the past few decades.

For some great anecdotal evidence, look in the back of Popular science magazines where they print headlines from 25-75 years ago. There are doom and gloom ones (e.g. predicting '1984' type of developments) and overly optimistic (e.g., 'by 2000, we won't have to do housework because robots will be doing it for us'). I find that the truth is almost universally between the two extremes.

I also find that this view works extremely well when applied to the economy and politics as well (as in, Bush is not the devil incarnate in spite of numerous bad decisions, and Obama is not going to turn the nation into a socialist welfare state where we pay 60%+ in taxes -- nor is he going to fix our problems in the first 100 days of his presidency).

This view is especially helpful in light of discussions concerning exponential growth. It is easy to show trends that have continued for the past X years and then conclude that since numbers don't lie, this will continue for the next Y years. These arguments are easy to demonstrate and harder to refute (meaning it takes less technical knowledge to make them than to disprove them), making them widely used in persuasion.

Actually, that logic is flawed. The assumption that we will continue to see exponential growth forever in anything is pretty flawed, simply because of different laws kicking in. Look at trends in computer ownership, or TVs or anything else that hits its prime and hits it big. For a good while these things do have an exponential growth curve, but obviously that growth cannot continue indefinitely, or people would have to start buying two or three TV sets at a time every couple of days, and then the next week buy 3 TV sets every day, and then every hour....

This is the fundamental problem with extrapolation taken too far. The truth of the matter is that you have no idea what the curve looks like, regardless of how much data you have. It could be exponential growth for thousands of years, and then suddenly take a nose dive and drop back down close to where it started, or perhaps grow faster. Extrapolating too far is foolishness that happens far too often.
I've heard the discussion of converting all matter into computational elements, but a FAR more likely growth curve for computing power is not exponential, but sigmoidal.

Thus, I would argue that converting all matter into computational elements would be the asymptotic 'end game' of technology that we will never quite reach, but always be moving towards (though our progress will slow). Many growth patterns follow a sigmoidal curve.

It is truly sad that the space program is not at the forefront anymore. Lets consider the cost...
NASA 2008 Budget: $17.318 Billion
The federal government throws this amount of money around all of the time. Heck, lately it's almost a rounding error with all of the spending going on. To put this in perspective, $8 billion dollars is currently earmarked for "state and tribal assistance grants" in the new stimulus package coming out. (see this spreadsheet ).

What are the gains? When the Apollo program was running it caught the public's fascination. It made an entire generation of kids that wanted to be astronauts. It made "rocket scientist" become part of our nomenclature and synonymous with "really smart guy". And most importantly, it spurred an interest in engineering and the "hard" sciences (math, physics, chemistry). The knee-jerk response of today's youth is that these subjects are too hard and not fun enough. And so the US is losing engineers and knowledge workers and replacing them with massage therapists . How many people in 1965 thought that the best job in the world would be to work at NASA? How many think that now? (or for that matter, how many think that ANY engineering job would be ideal for them?)

In addition to inspiring the public to idolize something besides the latest Hollywood tabloid, the space program made numerous technological and engineering breakthroughs that we are still benefiting from tremendously today. The difficulties of doing even simple things under the constraints of space exploration force tremendous ingenuity and resourcefulness that the nation then benefits from as a whole.

I'm not a fan of the "Pay Wave" features on credit cards even. I don't especially like the idea of my information being transmitted from my wallet anyone in my immediate vicinity with a reader. Especially when the payoff to me is zero. I think "Pay wave" is a useless feature. Is it THAT hard to swipe a card instead of "wave" it in front of a reader? Then at least I don't have to worry about other people on a bus/subway/crowd who are close enough to steal my info without ever touching my wallet.
Given my distaste for this feature on credit cards, I sure as hell don't want it on my cell phone.

The real story here is the failure of businesses to work together to deliver a feature to consumers (many of whom would no doubt enjoy this feature).