The religious right targets the NIH

Gauging from the moods around me, as well as my own mood, worse than simply a Bush victory are the reasons why so many people voted for him–especially, a deep cultural conservatism that has at is base an aggressive religiosity. Unlike much of my atheist, liberal cohort, my understanding of religion in America is multi-faceted. For every account of anti-gay, anti-choice, authoritarian and paternalistic assaults by the religious right, I can point to anti-death penalty activities by traditional Catholic and Protestant ministries, help for the homeless, and support for human rights causes around the globe. But it’s clear that the former have been focused on the institutions of political power while the latter have not, at least not since the civil rights fights of the 1960s.

Here’s something that’ll chill your bones. Though it’s been publicized in the past, in the wake of the new Congress, it’s now placed in a different, terrifying context–the politicization of NIH research by the far right. (via politicaltheory.info)

[Chris] Beyrer, a Bloomberg associate research professor of epidemiology, recalls a meeting, after the list came out, of NIH investigators and program directors: “At that meeting, a project officer stood up and said, ‘We have to tell you that there is a new policy at NIH, and the policy is that if any of the following words or terms are in your grant title or abstract, we’re going to send it back to you to take them out.’ Then she proceeded to list the words: sex worker, injection drug use, harm reduction, needle exchange, men who have sex with men, homosexual, bisexual, gay, prostitute. It was unbelievable. We were literally looking around the room, like, You’re kidding me. Everyone sat in silence. I raised my hand and said, ‘We’re proposing to do a training program in harm reduction throughout Southeast Asia. That’s one of our main activities over the next five years because the data tell us that injection drug use remains a problem and there’s more injection drug use transmission happening in this region. I want to do that. It’s the right thing to do. How do we proceed?’ And she said, ‘Don’t make me speak to you about this in public. There are spies everywhere.’ This is at NIH! This is the United States of America! This is not China! I spoke to her afterwards outside the room and she said, ‘Look, you can say what you want in the body of the grant. We don’t think anybody is going to get to that level. But the title and abstract are part of the database that’s searchable by these people, and we’re trying to help you avoid not getting funded.'”

Inuit Language Web Browsers

“Inuktitut speakers will soon be able to have their say online as the Canadian aboriginal language goes on the web. Browser settings on normal computers have not supported the language to date, but attavik.net has changed that. It provides a content management system that allows native speakers to write, manage documents and offer online payments in the Inuit language.”

From the BBC.

Censoring Ebadi

A report on the PRI/BBC radio show The World yesterday stated that the US Treasury Department will not allow Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, to publish a book of memoirs in the United States because it violates the laws about doing business with Iran. (The audio of the report can be found here.) It’s my understanding that the laws are designed to keep outlaw regimes from gaining financially from exports. But in this case the indiscriminate application of the law means that Ebadi cannot publish her work in America unless she first finds a publisher in Iran, which is self-evidently absurd. Furthermore, Americans are forbidden to offer editorial advice to writers in Iran, as well as Cuba and Sudan. You can read a few excerpts from Ebadi’s other works at Bad Jens, an Iranian Feminist Journal, here. Back in February, the scholar and political commentator Juan Cole was outraged that the Treasury Department was attempting to stop Americans from editing and translating newspapers from Iran, even though no money was involved. Cole’s distressing plea can be read here. Keeping critical information about Iran from Americans at this moment in history – particularly from dissidents and those fighting for freedom – is craven and disgusting, another example of Draconian Creep. Cole’s essay includes an email address to protest, if you are so inclined.

China’s Mobile Phone Novel

“Meet the one you met for thousands of years, in the borderless wilderness of the time, neither a step before nor a step behind. Be there right on time.”

From Qian Fuzhang’s “Out of the Fortress,” the world’s first novel written for text-messaging. More info here at textually.org, a site dedicated to SMS and MMS. This happened back in September, so apologies if this is old news to the tech crowd, but I thought it was pretty amazing. The New York Times described the novel as a “marriage of haiku and Hemingway, twice daily in 70-character servings.”

What the electronic betting markets are saying about the election and what does it mean?

Well, it’s 4:00 p.m. and the anxiety is building. The last time I felt this anxious was watching the Bush-Clinton election. Since then, polling has been increasingly displaced? supplanted? complemented? by betting markets with large numbers of traders, which try to aggregate, as it were, the wisdom of crowds. This election has seen people track how well the candidates are doing through the Iowa Electronics Markets, Tradesports.com and the like.

How these markets work and if they efficiently aggregate information are of course subject to debate, though most people seem to think that in these markets people are less willing to engage in cheap talk since they’re putting their money where their mouth is. I admit that I was more heartened by this afternoon’s Iowa Electronic Markets prices on election outcomes than by the early exit polls (also since I have no idea where these polls come from or who did these polls). And just now I was completely heartened by the price changes at tradesports.com on a Bush victory (falling) and a Kerry victory (rising). In fact, the move up of a Kerry victory by more than 52% by a tenth of a cent cheered me up further. Then I begin to feel like a stock trader in the 1990s.

Last the IEM was showing,

Iem_3

(click here for the latest IEM prices)

and tradesports.com was showing something similar; (here for the latest tradesports.com prices on the election.)

All excitement from price movements aside, the question of if and how markets predict elections is an interesting one. It’s premised on the idea that markets can aggregate information in settings characterized by many people with different sets of knowledge and that the aggregation in the form of prices represents the best information available. Here’s an article that addresses the pro side of markets in election bets, unsurprisingly from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber has a couple of posts that are more skeptical of the value or at least significance of these prices–here and here.

Also if you’re interested, the latest issue of The Economists’ Voice has some results from an experiment on election betting markets where contingencies (of the what if Osama bin Laden is captured in October-type) are offered, in a paper by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz.

How Technology Failed in Iraq

“On April 2, 2003, army lieutenant colonel Ernest ‘Rock’ Marcone led an armored battalion with about 1,000 U.S. troops to seize ‘Objective Peach’, a bridge across the Euphrates River, the last natural barrier before Baghdad. That night, the battalion was surprised by the largest counterattack of the war. Sensing and communications technologies failed to warn of the attack’s vast scale—between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi troops and about 100 tanks or other vehicles. The U.S. success in the battle was the result of superior tactics and equipment.”

From a totally intriguing new piece by David Talbot, “How Technology Failed in Iraq,” in MIT’s Technology Review.

Redskins and Republicans

The great Vikings wide receiver Cris Carter, now a football commentator, reminds everyone about the real reason why Bush will lose tomorrow:

Redskins and Republicans. There was bad news for both the Washington Redskins and the Republican Party. The Redskins’ loss means that the White House will have a new tenant because the incumbent party has lost every presidential election since 1936 that immediately followed a Redskins home loss.”

Well, you can breathe easy now. From Carter’s weekly round-up of football analysis at Yahoo Sports.