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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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A few months ago, before Monsanto and DuPont realized Proposition 37 may have been started by anti-science crackpots but it was not going away and I was one of the few critical of it, I would have predicted GMO warning labels to win by 66% - because that is the percentage of Democrats in California and while Republicans get attention in science media for being 'anti-science' due to global warming, the actual anti-science positions that are dangerous are bastions of the left.
Since it is almost the end of election season we will also see the end of the meme from Environmental Working Group and other anti-science organizations about genetically modified organisms.

Okay, we won't see the end of that at all.  If you are an advocacy group, you don't raise money by noting the positive things about science, you have to try and scare people a little.  So Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace, Environmental Working Group and others accept the science consensus on global warming, because it says we are doomed, while denying the science consensus on energy and food because denying those things gives them another way to say we are doomed.

In his 2009 inaugural address, President Barack Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place,” in addition to making the government more transparent and accountable. Millions rallied to his cause. Four years later, how has he done?

Unfortunately, not well. On a whole host of issues, Obama has placed politics before science. We will examine just three of them: vaccines, the BP oil spill, and “Cash for Clunkers.”

Obama vs. Vaccines

Nate Silver, a sports statistician, made waves when he accurately projected the results of the presidential election in 2008.  So a few days go when he predicted that President Obama was 75% likely to win when polls only showed the candidates were about even, it set atwitter those people who think statistical models of polls are meaningful.  They were vindicated, the age of scientific projections had arrived, in a baseball cap.

They thought that because they don't understands polls or statistical models.
ViviTouch is a kind of 'artificial muscle' that seeks to make video games feel more real. The technology behind it is electroactive polymers, developed by Bayer subsidiary Artificial Muscle of Sunnyvale, right up the road from me.

It's basically a new sort of motor that converts electrical energy into movement, to go beyond the  traditional haptic interface people expect by now.  Motor? Well, that is the CEO's terms. It's an actuator made of a thin polymer film but electroactive polymers are cooler than traditional actuators, generators and sensors because a ViviTouch-enabled device lets you 'feel' explosions, flying and even uppercuts like you were meant to, they say.  So if you like getting an uppercut, this is for you.
In 2008, I was as excited as anyone about the chance to correct some public relations mistakes made by the Bush administration in the nascent years of blogging.  Obviously some of the 'Republicans are anti-science' stuff was because when you are far left, even the middle looks like the right, but Republicans had done no favors to themselves by 'taking the bait' on topics like hESC research.  What had been a reasonable, bipartisan position on human embryonic stem cells in 2001 (traditional conservatives were actually all for it, more religious types among both Democrats and Republicans were not) became a simple partisan divide when it was revisited two more times and Bush shot it down despite Republicans overall being in favor of it.