Arizona's science standards get a B

The Fordham Foundation has reviewed the science standards for each state.

Arizona gets an overall 72 of 100 points which rates a B--it must be graded on a curve. Evolution is not covered until high school, and gets only 2 of 3 possible points.

The breakdown:

A. Expectations, Purpose, Audience 7.8 out of 12
B. Organization 8.0 out of 9
C. Science Content and Approach 17.8 out of 27
D. Quality 6.0 out of 9
E. Seriousness 6.0 out of 6
Inquiry 2 out of 3
Evolution 2 out of 3
Raw Score 49.6 out of 69
Final Percentage Score 72 out of 100
GRADE B

Dispatches from the Culture wars comments on Michigan's rating. (3 out of 3 on evolution, but a D overall grade.) Pharyngula reports on Minnesota (2 out of 3 on evolution and a B, just like Arizona), and also gives a nice map showing which states have improved or gotten worse (Arizona has gotten worse).

Cory Maye: Getting the Death Penalty for Being Disrespectful of Authority

Radley Balko describes the case of Cory Maye, who had the misfortune to live in a duplex opposite a drug dealer named Jamie Smith:

Cops mistakenly break down the door of a sleeping man, late at night, as part of drug raid. Turns out, the man wasn't named in the warrant, and wasn't a suspect. The man, frightened for himself and his 18-month old daughter, fires at an intruder who jumps into his bedroom after the door's been kicked in. Turns out that the man, who is black, has killed the white son of the town's police chief. He's later convicted and sentenced to death by a white jury. The man has no criminal record, and police rather tellingly changed their story about drugs (rather, traces of drugs) in his possession at the time of the raid.

According to Maye's attorney, though the jury was initially sympathetic, they turned against her because in her closing arguments she suggested that God might not give them mercy in heaven if they showed no mercy to Maye. They further thought that he should be convicted because his mother and grandmother spoiled him and he was disrespectful of his elders and authority figures.

Maye is on death row in Mississippi.

Liar Detection

A University of San Francisco study found that 31 of 13,000 test subjects were able to reliably detect nearly all cases where someone was lying. This select group, called "wizards" by the experimenters, were "highly motivated and tended to be older." Groups that showed no special ability to detect lying included police, lawyers, and FBI agents. More at the BBC. (Hat tip to K. Daskawicz at the SKEPTIX mailing list.)

Looks like this study is from Maureen O'Sullivan, a colleague of Paul Ekman. There's a paper in press by O'Sullivan and Ekman called "The Wizards of Deception Detection" in the book The Detection of Deception in Forensic Contexts, edited by P.A. Granhag and L. Stromwall, 2004, Cambridge University Press; I found this reference at The Why Files.

ASU Professor Salaries Above Average

The Arizona Republic reports that tenure-track professors at Arizona State University made an average salary of $102,500, up from $98,000 last year. (The median salary in the state of Arizona, according to payscale.com, is $50,000.) ASU President Michael Crow's salary is $580,000, making him the 10th highest-paid public university head.

Yet it's the University of Arizona in Tucson that has had the foresight to raise over $1 billion in endowment funding, as part of a five-year plan that reached its goal 21 months early.

Added 12/16/2005: By contrast:

Depending on the type of work they do, computer software engineers in metro Phoenix earn an average $71,580 to $78,240, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the low end, that's 55 percent more than the median household income of $46,111 in Maricopa County.

And those are mostly jobs that do not have summer vacations.

Casey Luskin and William Dembski Dishonesty

I'd like to call attention to two recent articles over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The first is about Casey Luskin, blogger for the Discovery Institute. The second is about William Dembski, the "Isaac Newton of information theory."

In the first piece, Brayton writes about how Luskin has referred to Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education as "Darth Vader." Brayton quotes Luskin: "In the past I've compared Eugenie C. Scott to Darth Vader because she is full of internal contradictions, knows in her heart she's lying, powerful, persuasive, and most importantly, she travels around representing the dominating power (the Empire) and fighting the good guys. All in the name of ...well, I'm not exactly sure what her motivation is yet. It's certainly not truth."

Yet Luskin provides no examples of lies or ulterior motives, and has used false statements to argue against statements she has made. In one example: "I asked her why she thinks ID isn't science. She said it isn't science because it does not refer to natural law (a reference to Ruse's testimony which he later recanted)." Brayton, speaking directly to philosopher Michael Ruse, asked him if, in the face of criticisms from other philosophers about his position on the demarcation between science and non-science (e.g., see Larry Laudan's piece in Ruse's book But Is It Science?), he holds that Intelligent Design is non-science. As Brayton writes, "He replied that it is non-science because it does not refer to natural law. If Ruse has recanted, he appears to be unaware of it."

As Brayton notes in the same piece, when he's made charges of dishonesty against William Dembski, he's backed them up--and he's done so yet again, showing that Dembski has continued to misrepresent the work of Douglas Axe. In a 2000 paper, Axe did work which focused on a particular gene which confers resistance to certain antibiotics. As Brayton summarizes the paper, "it showed that this particular enzyme could retain most of its function even if it was hit with a major mutational event that resulted in changing as many as 10 of its amino acid residues simultaneously, could retain some of its function (and thus still be capable of selection) even if a mutation resulted in as much as 20% of its total amino acid residues being substituted simultaneously, and that if 40 mutations happened simultaneously, it would stop functioning."

Dembski, however, summarizes it this way: "But there is now mounting evidence of biological systems for which any slight modification does not merely destroy the system’s existing function, but also destroys the possibility of any function of the system whatsoever (Axe, 2000)."

Brayton points out that Matt Inlay criticized Dembski for this misrepresentation on The Panda's Thumb back in February, and that Inlay has shown that Dembski has known this is a misrepresentation for at least two years. Brayton concludes:

Dembski has crossed over a line at this point, I think. I don't think it's any longer possible to maintain that he is merely an ideologue undergoing cognitive dissonance, or that he's just engaging in wishful thinking of the type we are all probably prone to when defending ideas we have a personal stake in. He is now simply lying outright, and he has to know that.

Zombies Attack George Bush

This Joe Dante movie on Showtime sounds worth seeing.

Best argument for supporting the Goldwater Institute I've ever seen

I've attended a few Goldwater Institute events, such as hearing P.J. O'Rourke and Ben Stein speak, but I've never actually donated money to them. In my opinion, they're too supportive of the Republican Party in Arizona. Seeing this Len Munsil piece railing against them, however, is the strongest argument in favor of doing so that I've seen.

Munsil's an anti-porn crusader who used to be editor of Arizona State University's State Press back when I was an undergraduate. He refused to print a letter I wrote criticizing factual errors in an editorial he wrote about the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), specifically his claim that X-ray lasers do not involve nuclear explosions. He invited me to his office to discuss his decision, but still refused to print my letter or a correction to his erroneous statement. That made me believe he was dishonest, and seeing the arguments he's continued to make since that time has only confirmed my opinion. He typically argues by assertion, not with evidence, as you can see repeated in the piece linked above.

He was extremely exercised by the fact that Republican Governor Jane Dee Hull signed a bill to repeal Arizona's laws against sodomy, oral sex, and cohabitation on May 8, 2001.

More on HIV/AIDS Denial and Eliza Jane Scovill

Dr. Trent McBride refutes the major points of the criticisms of the coroner's report by Mohammed Al-Bayati regarding pathology, and Dr. Nick Bennett addresses the clinical issues.

Lottery winner tragedies continue

The body of Virginia Metcalf Merida, winner with her husband of a $65.4 million Powerball jackpot with her husband in 2000, was found dead in her 5,000 sf geodesic dome in Newport, Kentucky. She had apparently been dead for days before her son found her body Wednesday. She and her husband, Mack Wayne Metcalf, split up when they won the jackpot, and he died in 2003 at age 45 without "starting fresh" in Australia as he had planned. (Instead, he moved into a replica of George Washington's Mt. Vernon home in Kentucky.)

Jack Whittaker, the West Virginia millionaire who won the largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history in 2002 ($314.9 million, Powerball), had his granddaughter die of a drug overdose in his home, was robbed of $545,000 cash while unconscious in a strip club, had his home and office robbed, was arrested twice for drunk driving and once for assault, and was accused of groping women at a racetrack.

Rotten.com has a lengthy list of lottery winner troubles here.

UPDATE (September 15, 2007): The Arizona Republic has an update on Jack Whittaker--his wife has left him, he's been involved in 460 legal actions since his win, he has no friends, everyone is always asking him for money (or trying to steal from him, often successfully), and he says he's going to be remembered as "the lunatic who won the lottery" rather than, as he desires, "someone who helped a lot of people."

America is Safer

The Department of Homeland Security has awarded a $36,300 grant to prevent terrorists from using bingo halls in Kentucky to raise funds for their activities. The money will go to the state's Office of Charitable Gaming to provide five investigators with "laptop computers and access to a commercially operated law-enforcement database."