From the UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING and the department of “tribal science”, comes this press release that is generally true, until you look at general science’s bastard child, climate science, and some of the ugliness and oppressive activism and tribalism that surrounds that branch of science.
Science builds bridges, not walls, diplomacy experts tell UA audience
From eradicating weapons of mass destruction to the scourge of malaria, speakers at a UA conference — including a Nobel laureate, ambassadors and advisers to secretaries of state — know firsthand how science can build trust where politics cannot
In times of diplomatic turmoil and combative negotiations, scientists and engineers will continue solving problems and seeking the truth, speakers affirmed at a recent University of Arizona summit on science diplomacy and policy.
“When others deny climate change, ask for the evidence,” said Norman Neureiter, a former staff member in the White House Office of Science and Technology and the first science and technology adviser to a secretary of state. “It is scientific evidence that is essential for setting sound policies. Science is how we know the truth, how we understand the natural world. It is not an ideology.”
Neureiter was involved as an interpreter in private discussions with scientists on nuclear weapons testing with the former Soviet Union in the 1960s and as a participant in semiconductor negotiations with Japan in the late 1980s. Scientists and engineers played a critical role in reaching final agreements, he said.
Neureiter spoke at a panel on February 21 to kick off the conference, which focused on climate change and water sustainability in the Americas. The conference was co-sponsored by the UA College of Engineering, Office of Global Initiatives and other programs and chaired by Kevin Lansey, head of the UA Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.
More than 130 students, scientists, engineers, foreign diplomats and local residents attended the panel at the Tucson Marriott University Park.
Sharing Knowledge, Seeking Common Ground
“We have a responsibility to share our knowledge with people in countries throughout the world, whatever our diplomatic relationships may be,” said Peter Agre, recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He has led scientific delegations to Cuba, North Korea, Iran and other countries that have strained or nonexistent diplomatic relations with the U.S.
Agre, director of the Malaria Research Institute at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, shared stories and slides from his research programs to eradicate malaria in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and other African nations with authoritarian regimes.
“These countries are rich in terms of minerals, but they bear a staggering burden from malaria, which kills approximately 400,000 children each year worldwide,” he said.
He offered a rare glimpse inside North Korea, which he has visited three times as the head of AAAS delegations to teach students, meet scientists and facilitate research collaborations at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.
“We shared stories about our research and hopes for our children and our grandchildren,” said the former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Friendships can make a difference.”
Agre met with Fidel Castro as head of a U.S. scientific delegation to Cuba in 2011. “There were obviously many things we disagreed on,” he said, “but Castro understood that science would play an important role in advancing Cuba’s economy and lifting its people. That was one thing we could agree on.”
In 2012 he led a AAAS delegation to Iran. “Overall, it was a very positive visit,” Agre said in an article for AAAS. “Our meetings with faculty and students were always positive — it seems to me that we all have a lot to share…. From a scientific viewpoint, the doors are certainly open.”
When tensions did arise, the delegates focused on constructive science engagement.
“We weren’t there to apologize or criticize; we were there to talk about science and to find common ground,” he said.
Premier Ambassador of our Time
Thomas R. Pickering, vice chairman of a consulting company and former U.S. ambassador to seven countries — including the Russian Federation and Israel — and the United Nations, had to cancel his planned trip to Tucson to participate in the panel. So his address about his storied career spanning six decades was delivered via video.
In introducing him, E. William Colglazier, a former science and technology adviser to secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and the honorary chairman of the UA conference, called Pickering the “premier and most well-connected American ambassador of our time.”
Pickering, a participant in some of the most consequential diplomatic developments of the 20th and 21st centuries, considers the Iran nuclear agreement an important contribution to science diplomacy.
“This agreement might become the international gold standard for reaching agreements with developing nations,” he said. “It calls for surveillance from uranium mining extraction to disposal of spent fuel rods and ensures 24/7 knowledge of what is happening in the Iran nuclear program. It highlights the need for acceptance to compromise, on both sides, and could be an important guide for future negotiations with developing countries.”
Rare Opportunity for UA Students
“It is incredible for undergraduate students to be able to interact with such important scientists and policy experts,” said Estefanie Govea, who has a UA bachelor’s degree in political science and is pursuing a second bachelor’s in environmental and water resource economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “Unless you are well-connected, most undergraduates miss out on great opportunities like this.”
She is one of several UA students, most in the College of Engineering, who served as rapporteurs and will write conference proceedings to be submitted in the AAAS journal Science & Diplomacy and ensure that all conference presentations are posted online.
During the Wednesday evening panel Q&A, speakers expressed apprehension about how the Trump administration’s travel bans and proposed budget cuts might hamper scientific research and innovation.
“America up until now has been a haven for thousands of scientists and scholars who have come to the U.S. to escape persecution and conflict elsewhere,” said Neureiter, an adviser at AAAS. “They have made huge contributions to America’s technical and scientific excellence.”
He added, “I have serious concerns about threatened cuts in various government department budgets. America must not fall behind in scientific research, engineering and innovation. These disciplines are vital for the future growth of the U.S. economy and for the health and well-being of the American people.”
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This high-ranking ex-bureaucrat believes that some people are denying climate change? He needs to get out more – either that, or book an appointment with a psychiatrist without delay, because that is mad talk.
That may be correct. But science is how we know the truth only if we ourselves actually do the science that produces knowledge of the truth. If we leave it to others to do the science for us, we are also leaving it to them to know the truth for us and that is not possible. Leaving it to others to know the truth for us is to take a trip into a world of make-believe, not knowledge. And when we’ve taken that trip all we are left with at the end of it is precisely the ideology that we have learned along the way. But we still have no more knowledge of the truth about reality than we started off with. The truth about nature can only be found in natural reality; it doesn’t exist in make-believe.
Pat Frank’s hilarity is the evidence of self intoxication through fervently pursued cognizant dissonance.
Pat since you haven’t ever actually formally worked in instrumentation and systems analysis, it’s fine with me you don’t understand the ridiculous nature of belief in the modern synthesis.
Pat you’re under the impression it’s possible for entropy to be reversed without an outside force. This is thermodynamical law: and the fact evolutionary ‘theorists’ claim to have surpassed it isn’t realistic.
You can’t create ever higher complexity in our natural world without an outside intelligent force doing it.
You can create it to a point: that point assigned by charge differential: but there’s no such thing as explaining your way out of it. The synthesis of life mandates a preliminary cause. There’s no objective reason for life to want to replicate itself. There’s no objective reason for life to invent itself.
Regardless of the supposed legitimacy of claiming ‘then what of the original intelligence? When and where does it come from?’ it is NOT authentic application of any real scientific postulate.
Evolution supposes the laws of thermodynamics for no reason whatever, created the templated life forms found on earth.
No reason, just first life invented itself.
No reason, just life then improved on itself.
No reason, just life then continued this improvement,
for millions and millions of years.
No reason. For even a single one of these life forms. It all just invented itself, and schemed along through some creeping, eternal violation of entropy. Since you’re not a trained working systems analyst maintaining complex systems it’s understandable you think all that shit’s remotely possible: that you believe the laws of thermodynamics just step aside so you can feel smart. But it isn’t that way. There’s no such thing as a bank of several thousand transistors that suddenly reverted and healed themselves and then created more of themselves until they invented an entire new sensor type – nasal, auditory, optical etc – just – no reason. Just did.
No what you’re doing is projecting that you’re as smart as the men telling you it’s impossible for something to violate entropy like that for ten minutes much less several hundred million years, without a guiding intelligence.
You belief in radiocarbon dating’s absolute veracity is nothing short of stunning. Objects are regularly dated at millions of years old rock – with hammers, padlocks, vases, etc embedded in them.
Your – Pat I’m gonna use this maybe rhetorically but – not really pat your ignorance of the faulty nature of radio-carbon dating is nothing short of willful self deception. EVERYONE interested in instrumentation knows of the SCORES of objects found embedded in otherwise obviously, solid rock: solid coal.- radiocarbon dated in the cases of the stone, MILLIONS of years old – and they’re obviously from the 1800s, the last couple thousand years at most.
On and on down the rote of “thou shalt not be found wrong utterly or thy bullshit is wrong, utterly” list, violating reality based observation’s warning bells again, and again.
Further – your claim that this system is somehow inefficient isn’t something you can even indicate. You made referral to the “sloppy God” claim not sounding authentic – in other words, God doesn’t have permission to create a simulator that functions the way this one does.
But you can’t answer the problems this presents. Why can’t he and we all know – it’s actually “why can’t THEY.”
What makes you as a skeptic of the concept of this being intelligently created, able to critique a system of gods, who can create life and make it work in OBVIOUS – OBVIOUS violation of the FUNDAMENTALS in thermodynamical law – entropy itself is violated through life’s existence, in any form, alone. Particularly at a ceullular level, – you’re already way, WAY beyond the obvious reason this can’t happen on it’s own: it’s a violation of charge differential driven dynamics.
But back to whether these gods could have your permission to create life the way they have.
What is your valid excuse for the massive templating of all life? In any free evolutionary magic where things ‘evolved’ in continual violation of entropy itself, growing more and more complex and fragile for no reason at all, –
what’s your excuse for the obvious and ubiquitous templating of the chordata and even everything using the simple four compound DNA mechanism?
I’m a systems analyst. I maintain some of the most complex things mankind has ever invented, and live in an era where there is literally,, hardly an instrumentation type I don’t understand inside and out. My job at times has had me physically handling many, many of them; working on them or assuring their compliance with the standards for their deployment.
You forget that – as an analyst I have all the time known – how to analyze your claims. About how these late-comers to humanity, the Adamics – don’t have access to some special niche of understanding.
But every time a disinterested observer trained in checking your story vs those of creationists, your story is always the one which proves to be the propped up crock of thermodynamic law violating sh** it really is.
Who told me that the section of spectra we see, is just a tiny portion of all the available spectra around mankind? Atheists? Or the Adamics when they repeatedly stumbled in out of the wilderness saying “I was visited by a man like creature who spoke as a man speaks and he told me that – he can see me and I can’t see him. He told me that I am one of the ones who run this and make this and that I am down here to get experience, – left out in the cold to die.”
Atheists didn’t invent that story and tell me about the endless spectra out there that make my part comprise 4% of it all. Creationists told me that.
Creationists invented the instruments,
Creationists invented the space age that surrounds the instruments,
Creationists invented it all. This is the Christianic interplanetary space age.
Atheists had men living in a cave eating ticks out of the family’s ears as an evening pastime.
We know this because Creationists also invented the University system and sent Atheists to check.
The verdict is clear: till these Creationists got here you lived in a cave. ATHEISTS VERIFIED THIS FACT in the UNIVERSITIES the CREATIONISTS CREATED, so the ATHEISTS can CHECK.
You can’t ever escape the fact that your challenge that the gods’ simulator is sloppy or somehow errant is based in your own fear of your existence.
See Pat there’s only one reason to create any kind of simulator with so much pain and sorrow and temporary joy.
That would be because when you’re perfect you never feel pain, you never hunger, you never feel lonely and it’s never dark when it should be light.
People play the simulator because when you are perfect and unkillable, life gets boring as hell.
People come here for the same reason they play online games. To undergo the benefits of a realistic experience without there being a long term cost for crashing the vehicle: the human being we inhabit.
You as an atheist and worhiper of the kookville that is evolutionary ‘theory’ – it has to be science to be theory and science has to obey – the laws of thermodynamics so it’s not really a theory –
as a worshipper you can’t escape ANY of the arguments against your supposition that the record looks like real evolution, and that there’s no ample reason for such an intense experience by a species of creatures that learned to make these animals, briefly controllable or at least, inhabitable.
Why invent an intense, briefly painful, temporary simulator? Because it’s safer to learn that way. End of your bullshit about ‘why?’
“It’s sloppy.”
Says who? You can’t figure out it’s impossible for entropy to simpy defy itself till an elephant, a hawk, a man and an octopus, all have a similar eye structure.
Just a few brief ‘we don’t need to crack a book to check this’ observations about the KooKViLLiaN nature of evolutionary ‘Har Har’ ‘theorists’ and your beliefs.
Prolix drivel.
E. Mendes:
What’s your argument?