Science and assuming your conclusion

This week's "Science Journal" column in the Wall Street Journal discusses a dramatic shift taking place recently in the field of Alzheimer's Disease research.

According to the columnist, Sharon Begley, research into Alzheimer's has been dominated by one particular theory about what causes the disease:

Proponents of the leading theory of Alzheimer's have been in pitched battle with scientists who have other ideas about this awful neurodegenerative disease. For more than 20 years, the leading theory has held that sticky blobs in the brain called amyloid plaques cause Alzheimer's. Because that idea has numerous problems, doubters argued that the plaques might be innocent bystanders to the real, "upstream" culprit. If so, targeting the plaques, or the rogue protein called beta-amyloid that forms them, would do nothing to help the 4.5 million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer's.

You might think this debate would play out with each side conducting research, in a "may the best science win" approach. But as I've written before, many scientists whose work challenges the amyloid dogma have been unable to publish in top journals, and their grant proposals, "go down in flames," as Mark Smith of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine told me. "Among the major journals and funding agencies, the attitude was, 'if it isn't amyloid, it isn't AD.' "

A remarkably similar phenomenon -- only worse -- has been taking place in the field of global climate research. Over the past ten years or so, the idea that the Earth is in the grip of a catastrophic period of human-induced global warming, caused by one thing and one thing alone: the burning of fossil fuels. Anyone who conducts climate research, at this point, is essentially required to start with the premise that this is true. Research papers that don't support the global-warming hypothesis are seldom published and almost never funded, and researchers who disagree with the hypothesis are branded "the denial machine" (Climate Science Watch) as if there were some vast right-wing conspiracy against the obvious "inconvenient truth" of massive global warming.

In an Orwellian turn of events, the National Coalition Against Censorship's "Knowledge Project" has come out against "actions that suppress and/or distort research findings." There certainly is some suppression and distortion going on, in the area of climate research, but it's not what the NCAC thinks it is. On the contrary, it's the skeptical climate research that's being suppressed and/or distorted, while the stuff that makes for better headlines ("Warmest Temperatures in the last 1,000,000 years," etc.) gets trumpeted by the mainstream press worldwide.

This is dangerous. Scientists are supposed to do research, investigate all the relevant phenomena, then publish their results and let the chips fall where they may. When you start requiring scientists to start with a certain restricted set of premises before they can get their research funded, you end up with bad science.

I've argued repeatedly that global climate is a complex phenomenon not explainable merely by studying a carefully selected subset of data designed to support a politically popular conclusion. We may well be influencing global climate by burning too much carbon -- that's a strong possibility. But dismissing skeptics as "the denial machine" does nothing to further our understanding of what is and what is not going on with global climate.

Urb's Blog

No, as a matter of fact, you don't deliver!

For several years -- ever since we lived in Illinois, in fact -- we've had a mailbox at The UPS Store, which used to be called Mail Boxes, Etc. It's a great place to get your mail -- it's secure, so no one can steal your mail (and with it, your identity); they give you a key, so you can get in when the store is closed; there's always someone there to sign for packages; and they provide a lot of other services, like packing, fax sending and receiving, and so on. Bottom line: we'd rather get the mail there than at home.

There's just one problem: when you move, the US Postal Service refuses to forward your mail. That's right -- they do not forward it, even if you submit a change-of-address card and clearly indicate your old and new addresses. I have no idea why this is so -- my sister, who works for the Postal Service, doesn't know, either. But for some reason, the US Postal service -- a public agency, staffed by Federal employees and partially funded by the taxpayer -- refuses to forward the mail of its own customers who exercise their right to use a private mailbox store.

Back in 1999, when Meg and I moved from Illinois to Arizona, this caused me some pain, in the form of a ding in my credit report. Several months after we moved, I pulled into a gas station and tried to charge some gas with one of my credit cards. The charge was refused. Funny, I thought, this card certainly isn't maxed out -- but I just pulled out another card, paid for the gas, and went on my way.

Later, when I called the credit card company to ask what was up, they said, "Oh -- our records show that you haven't paid us in several months, so we cancelled your card. You owe us $72.00," or some such amount. I sent them a check for the unpaid balance -- but by then, it was too late to avoid an adverse entry in my credit report. Which is still in there, because it takes seven years for entries to scroll off your credit report.

The reason for this oversight was simply that I hadn't received a bill for that credit card -- because the Postal Service hadn't forwarded the bills they'd been sending to my old address at the UPS Store -- and, because I forgot to call the credit card company and give them my new address (which I must have done with my other cards), I never got the bill. And got my credit rating dinged up as a result.

This time around, when we moved from Arizona to Rhode Island, I was very careful to make sure I got all of my credit card addresses updated -- directly with the companies involved -- and made arrangements with our old UPS Store to collect our mail every couple of weeks, stuff it in a box, and mail it to our new address, since the Postal Service was not going to forward it. This is fine, provided we remember to tell every single person, company, and other entity that might care that we've moved, that we've moved. In the case of Coconino County (where we own a five-acre parcel of land), we almost didn't get our property-tax notice this fall -- because although I stopped by the county office in person to give them our new address before we moved, they nonetheless sent the notice to our old address. Fortunately, it happened to get to our old UPS Store before the last train left for our new address (even the UPS Store will only forward your mail for a certain amount of time, unless you pay for another three months' mailbox rental, which seemed rather pointless, since we have no intention of going back to Arizona).

All of which is a roundabout way of asking, why -- by what right -- does the Postal Service get off thinking it's OK to refuse to serve its own taxpaying customers by forwarding their mail? There is no earthly reason why they can't forward it -- after all, the UPS Store mailbox address looks like any other street address with a box or apartment number. For some reason, though, postal regulations allow them to say, "Sorry, if you're using a private mailbox, you're out of luck." I say a big "Phooey" to that. And if Congress ever decides to give serious consideration to privatizing the post office, the bureaucrats responsible for the current non-forwarding policy may regret being so customer-unfriendly.

Urb's Blog