After Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration issued a directive requiring airlines to immediately make major changes in their operations.
Whether TSA's actions were legal (or should have been illegal) is an interesting question. What is more immediately interesting is that the directive itself implies a higher concern about the appearance of safety than safety itself. Nothing in the directive would have prevented Abdulmutallab from bombing Flight 253 or prevent a similarly equipped terrorist from blowing up an airliner tomorrow.
Last week, unknown hackers broke into the computer at the University of East Anglia's (UK) Climate Research Unit, downloaded a trove of emails and other documents, then posted them on the web for all to see.
We'e blogged here and here on H1N1 ("swine") flu. Saturday's Wall Street Journal includes a Page One story about the shortfall in supply, noting that the vaccine is cultured in eggs and the yield has been much lower than predicted.
After the jump to page A4 and near the end of the story, another explanation is provided: The federal government chose an inefficient vaccine delivery method in deference to the anti-vaccine movement.
In a recent post we noted an apparent factual inconsistency: Vaccine opponents are often described as being motivated by religion and animus toward science, but the most public vaccine opponents do not appear to have these characteristics.
We've found more data showing that opponents of childhood vaccines are predominantly located in wealthy, liberal communities.
The Washington Post's Rob Stein reports some interesting information useful for estimating the magnitude of this risk. Elsewhere in today's Post, others argue that people have a moral obligation to be vaccinated. The moral argument hinges on the fact that vaccination reduces risks to others, but this is complicated by the fact that most of the "others" in question are people who choose not to be vaccinated.
Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey published a commentary on August 11 opposing the health care legislation proposed by the Obama Administration and Democratic congressional leaders. The op-ed followed an interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Katy McLaughlin, These articles ignited several rounds of controversy. Some Whole Foods customers organized a boycott. Whole Foods created a discussion group on its web site. The Wall Street Journal editorial board criticized the boycotters and published multiple letters to the editor (here, here and here), then a long Saturday interview by Stephen Moore, a member of the editorial board, defending Mackey and giving him a platform to expand on his views. Another letters to the editor followed.
We draw readers' attention to Mackey's opinions about the American diet expressed in the second Journal interview. These opinions appear to have significantly informed Mackey's thinking on the issue, but it not clear how they relate to his proposed alternative and they have not been part of the controversy.
Wall Street Journal's "Numbers Guy" Carl Bialik writes in an August 7 blog post about the claim made by Sky Andrecheck that baseball would be no different if the numbers of balls and strikes were reduced to three and two, respectively:
Specifically, writing on Baseball Analysts, [Andrecheck] presents data suggesting that a game where three balls earned a batter a walk but two strikes ends his at bat would have very similar outcomes to what we know as baseball, but get to those outcomes a lot faster — and with fewer pitching changes.
Andrecheck commits an elementary statistical error and he incorrectly assumes that at-bat data are true.
The summer G8 meeting is over, and the press is reporting that leaders were unable to reach agreement on climate change. For example:
Reuters: "G8 leaders failed to persuade India and China to join a push to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent by 2050," and "a G8 deal to reduce its greenhouse gas emission by 80 percent by 2050 was thrown into doubt within hours of being announced."
Wall Street Journal: "The world's richest and its largest developing economies made a little progress in bridging the gaps that divide them Thursday, agreeing on the ultimate goal for climate change negotiations, and a relaunch of stop-start trade talks that have dragged on for eight years."
New York Times: "The world’s biggest developing nations, led by China and India, refused Wednesday to commit to specific goals for slashing heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting the drive to build a global consensus by the end of this year to reverse the threat of climate change."
However, the G8 leaders were able to reach an agreement that scientists are in charge of climate change policy-making and that the benefits of mitigation far outweigh the costs.
A careful look at parts of EPA's proposed endangerment finding show the causal chain that the Agency believes is scientifically sufficient. This causal chain has interesting implications for air pollution policy more generally.
EPA's proposed endangerment finding asserts that greenhouse gas emissions from US mobile sources cause or contribute to public health harm. However, the Clean Air Act distinguishes between "public health" and "welfare." EPA proposes to count some welfare-related effects as public health effects.
It is a fact of physics that vehicles with greater mass do better in collisions. Wall Street Journal automotive columnist Joseph B. White explores this trade-off from an odd perspective -- one in which he seems to wish that it it weren't so.
On June 11 the World Health Organization decreed that the recent outbreak of (A)H1N1 influenza ("swine flue") qualified as a "pandemic." According to reporters for the Washington Post, WHO delayed making this decision long after it technically met its established definition. The reason for delay is that policy officials no longer liked the definition and were concerned that a declaration of a pandemic could lead to panic.
