Issues in Science and Technology articles from March 2006

Issues in Science and Technology archives from March 2006

New Orleans revival recipes.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... In "Rethinking, Then Rebuilding New Orleans" (Issues, Winter 2006), Richard E. Sparks presents a commendable plan for rebuilding a limited and more disaster-resistant New Orleans by protecting the historic city core and retreating from the...

Save the Kyoto Protocol.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... We agree with Ruth Greenspan Bell ("The Kyoto Placebo," Issues, Winter 2006) that global climate change is a problem deserving serious policy action; that many countries have incomplete or weak regulatory systems lacking transparency,...

Energy research.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... In "Reversing the Incredible Shrinking Energy R & D Budget" (Issues, Fall 2005), Daniel M. Kammen and Gregory F. Nemet rightly call attention to the fact that current energy R & D investments are significantly lower than those of the 1980s....

Remembering RANN.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... The article on RANN (Research Applied to National Needs) by Richard J. Green and Wil Lepkowski stimulated my interest and attention ("A Forgotten Model for Purposeful Science," Issues, Winter 2006). As said in the article, I became interested...

Transformational technologies.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... In "Will Government Programs Spur the Next Breakthrough?" (Issues, Winter 2006), Vernon W. Ruttan challenges readers to identify technologies that will transform the economy and wonders whether the U.S. government will earn credit for them. My...

River restoration.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Reading Margaret A. Palmer and J. David Allan on the challenges of evaluating the efficacy of river restoration projects ("Restoring Rivers," Issues, Winter 2006), it may be useful to recall the early challenges of regulating point-source...

Yes, in my backyard.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Richard Munson's "Yes, in My Backyard: Distributed Electric Power" (Issues, Winter 2006) provides an excellent discussion of the issues and opportunities facing the nation's electricity enterprise. In 2003, the U.S. electricity system was...

Tax solutions.(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... Craig Hanson's Perspectives piece, "A Green Approach to Tax Reform" (Issues, Winter 2006) is an excellent introduction to the topic of environmental taxes as a revenue source for the federal budget. The case for using environmental charges,...

Constraints continue in proposed R & D budget.(research and development)
March 22, 2006... President Bush's proposed budget for fiscal year (FY) 2007, released on February 6, calls for substantial increases in key physical sciences and engineering programs as well as big boosts for alternative energy R & D and the development of new...

President, Congress unveil innovation initiatives.
March 22, 2006... With his proposed ACI, President Bush has added to an intensifying debate on innovation policy now taking place on Capitol Hill. A variety of bills have been released, the most prominent of which is a package of three bills introduced by a...

Senators unveil discussion paper on climate policy.(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... In a marked change from the usual partisan congressional debate about climate change, Sens. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, released a joint paper...

A plague o'both your houses.(science and technology policy)
March 22, 2006... "A plague o'both your houses! They have made worms' meat of me." Mercutio knew what he was talking about. In Romeo and Juliet, it is not just his own life but also youthful love that is crushed by the blind animosity between the...

Don't "dis" Chinese Science.(science and technology policy)
March 22, 2006... Considering the worldwide attention being paid to the growing economic, technological, and scientific prowess of China, one would expect that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. Department of State would...

For what the tolls pay: fair and efficient highway charges.(PERSPECTIVES )
March 22, 2006... Hydrogen cars, expensive oil, fuel efficiency standards, and inflation frighten those interested in maintaining and improving U.S. highways. All of these forces could erode the real value of fuel taxes that now are the largest single source of...

Let the Internet be the Internet.
March 22, 2006... Now that the Internet has become a keystone of global communications and commerce, many individuals and institutions are racing to jump in front of the parade and take over its governance. In the tradition of all those short-sighted visionaries...

Import ethanol, not oil.(PERSPECTIVES)
March 22, 2006... To paraphrase Mark Twain, people talk a lot of reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil, but they don't do much about it. Rather than continuing to talk the talk, the United States has a unique window of opportunity to walk the walk. The...

Protecting the best of the West: the Bureau of Land Management must start taking its conservation mandate seriously.
March 22, 2006... Once considered the leftovers of Western settlement and land grabs, the 261 million acres of deserts, forests, river valleys, mountains, and canyons managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are now in hot demand. Pressure to open...

Environmental safeguards for open-ocean aquaculture: expanding aquaculture into federal waters should not be promoted without enforceable national guidelines for the protection of marine ecosystems and fisheries.
March 22, 2006... Because of continued human pressure on ocean fisheries and ecosystems, aquaculture has become one of the most promising avenues for increasing marine fish production. During the past decade, worldwide aquaculture production of salmon, shrimp,...

Federal neglect: regulation of genetic testing; Government needs to ensure that genetic tests provide useful medical information and that the test results are reliable.(Cover story)
March 22, 2006... U.S. consumers generally take for granted that the government assesses the safety and effectiveness of drugs and other medical products before they are made available commercially. But for genetic tests, this generally is not the case. At the...

Delegitimizing nuclear weapons: the United States should take the lead in making the use of nuclear weapons unacceptable under any but the most extenuating circumstances.
March 22, 2006... The most urgent national security issue facing the United States is the possibility that a nuclear weapon might be used against this nation as an instrument of war or terror. If we are to avoid such a catastrophe and its unprecedented...

Controlling Iran's nuclear program: the country's slow and indirect progress toward developing nuclear weapons cunningly skirts international nonproliferation rules. Careful diplomacy can stop Iran from achieving this destabilizing capability.
March 22, 2006... The world would be a more dangerous place with nuclear weapons in Iran. A Persian power with a keen sense of its 2,500-year history, Iran occupies a pivotal position straddling the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The country has the largest...

The U.S. energy subsidy scorecard: surprises abound. Tax subsidies outpace R & D spending. Solar R & D is well funded. Oil production is the big winner. Coal receives almost as much in tax subsidies as it does for R & D. Nuclear power receives much less than coal for R & D.(REAL NUMBERS)
March 22, 2006... In his State of the Union address on January 31, 2006, President Bush called for more research on alternative energy technologies to help wean the country from its oil dependence. The proposal was not surprising: After all, R & D investment has...

An antidote to sprawl.(Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America by Bruce Babbitt. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005, 200 pp. Bruce Babbitt, former Arizona governor and U.S. secretary of the Department of the Interior, proposes not so...

Regulatory diversity.(Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States by Sheila Jasanoff. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, 344 pp. Polling data from the late 1990s in Europe and the United States revealed curious...

Lost in space.(Defining NASA: The Historical Debate over the Agency's Mission)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Defining NASA: The Historical Debate over the Agency's Mission by W. D. Kay. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2005, 241 pp. In his first year as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) administrator,...

A dam shame.(Deep Water)(Book review)
March 22, 2006... Deep Water by Jacques Leslie. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, 352 pp. Jacques Leslie is a journalist, and Deep Water has a journalist's style. It reads well and tells a compelling story. The book relates first-person...

On the Nature of the Universe (after Lucretius).(ARCHIVES)(Brief article)
March 22, 2006... Tim Rollins, a conceptual artist and teacher, established an after-school art workshop in 1982 for teenagers whose schools classified them as learning disabled, dyslexic, or emotionally handicapped. The self-named K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) is...