The quality of science is not strained

Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber illuminates another reason to support open access of scientific journals:

[O]pen access could, at least in the long run, contribute to closing the global inequalities in access to education. And it can also help to improve the quality of the papers being produced by scholars living and working in the South, which in turn increases their chance of being published in what we consider quality journals, which would be good not just for their careers, but also for global dialogues.

Pretend you’re a scientist in a developing country. You’re doing experiments in a lab where the electricity goes out regularly, you’re trying to stay up-to-date with other scientists’ work but you can’t afford to subscribe to the journals, and when you submit your own articles you don’t get published because your write-up doesn’t sound the right flavor of “professional.”

Open access wouldn’t solve all of your problems, but it would certainly help. Not to mention helping the rest of us, who need science to move forward based on everybody’s best thinking, not just the folks with lots of money.

Wow. Just, wow.

It’s hard to list all the things that are terrible about this idea:

A ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone who does not pay for a government smoking permit has been proposed by Health England, a ministerial advisory board.

The idea is the brainchild of the board’s chairman, Julian Le Grand, who is a professor at the London School of Economics and was Tony Blair’s senior health adviser. In a paper being studied by Lord Darzi, the health minister appointed to oversee NHS reform, he says many smokers would be helped to break the habit if they had to make a decision whether to “opt in”.

The permit might cost as little as £10, but acquiring it could be made difficult if the forms were sufficiently complex, Le Grand said last night.

The people behind this idea are surprisingly aware of (some of) its potential problems. Unfortunately, they don’t really see them as problems:

“Breaking the new year’s resolution not to smoke would be costly in terms of both money and time … [This] would probably have a greater impact on poor smokers than on rich ones, hence contributing to a reduction in health inequalities.”

Sounds like a great plan to me: Reduce inequality by introducing legislation that is systematically unequal in its effects. How could this go wrong?

The paper, written by Le Grand and Divya Srivastava, an LSE researcher, acknowledges: “Administratively it would require addressing the problem of the existing black markets and smuggling in tobacco; but this should probably be done anyway.”

Translation: “Implementing this would make the black markets worse and drive more economic activity underground, causing more danger for all involved, and this will in turn require still greater militarism from our law enforcement and spending even more of the taxpayers’ money, but hey, we were going to do that anyway!”

Mark my words: They’re coming for our Krispy Kremes next.

(Full article at The Guardian)

The question I most want to ask

To the Presidential candidates:

What executive powers will you relinquish on your first day in office? And how, precisely, will you go about relinquishing them?

The abandonment of habeas corpus and related rights is to me one of the most horrific and shameful developments in American history. Restoring those critical rights may be the single most important issue for our new president. That’s why I was heartened to see this endorsement from Habeas Lawyers for Obama:

When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo.

It’s not perfect, and who knows whether Obama will even be the nominee, much less our next president. But that’s the kind of executive power I’d like to see.

Travel back in time…

…to 1962, when even happy couples could not ensure that the size of their family would not exceed the time, energy, money, and care that they could provide.

This Planned Parenthood comic is emotional and vivid. It illustrates just how frightening and capricious the world could seem for people without access to or knowledge of reliable birth control.

Every child a loved and wanted child. It’s still the right goal.

(Via.)