Articles by Duane D. Freese
Cold Comfort
Last week, two separate House hearings on climate change provided a study in contrasts -- one filled with controversy and anger, the other with mostly good feeling, except by those who didn't show up. At the first hearing, held by...
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Bingeing on 'Doing-Good'
"Simplify, simplify, simplify," admonished 19th Century writer/philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Considering his roots, you might think The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) would take a bit of his advice before giving its own advice about how to deal with...
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Science In the House of Pain
Editor's note: On July 19, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing on "Questions Surrounding the 'Hockey Stick' Temperature Studies: Implications for Climate Change Assessments." Those studies, under the lead authorship of paleoclimatologist Michael
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Likely, But Implausible
"That's likely, but implausible." If that statement makes sense to you, then you might seek career summarizing science panel reports, or even working as a science writer for Nature or a major newspaper. For you would be well versed in...
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When Collaborators Have Chemistry
A "landmark" treatment; a "new paradigm" of separate companies working to produce a single drug: "proactive collaboration" between the Food and Drug Administration and drug developers. That's how FDA Acting Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach described the developme
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The First, Refuge of Scoundrels
"No doubt administrations tend to confuse what is embarrassing politically with what is essential for national security -- the Nixon administration perhaps more than most," Henry Kissinger observed in his memoir Years of Upheaval in a section about the Pentagon...
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Technology and Politics as Metaphor
A former college roommate of mine, who did a lot of pot smoking during the 1960s, once complained to me years after college, during one of his job lapses, that the Ford Foundation was bugging him. If I knew what...
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Hockey Stick Shortened?
"We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" -- Phil Jones in a reply to climate skeptic...
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Portfolio Poppycock
Timing is everything. And the critics of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant national mortgage market makers, think the political timing could hardly be better to enact strict limitations on their operations. But the economic timing for the critics'...
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Terror or Tradeoffs?
So, 17 Canadian residents and citizens -- not foreign operatives -- are arrested with three times the one ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer used in the Oklahoma City bombing. The arrests complete a string of more than 30 dating from...
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