Month: August 2014

Anna Clark sees it as a real possibility:

The Republicanization of the rural areas is just one of the problems that Midwestern Democrats face. The decline of industrial unions, the aging of the population, the relative lack of immigrants, and the out–migration of African Americans and young people all portend challenging times for the region’s Democrats. If Republicans claim more of the region’s 117 electoral votes, the national consequences could be bracing: A lasting conservative shift in the industrial Midwest would nullify Democratic gains in the Sun Belt. Swinging states like Michigan and Wisconsin (which together have 26 electoral votes) into the Republican column would offset Democratic gains in Arizona and Georgia (which together have 27 electoral votes). With a total of 44 electoral votes, a red triptych of Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin would best a blue Texas (38 electoral votes). Absent some leftist intervention, the Party of Lincoln might well come home to the region where it was born 160 years ago.

Andrew Levison takes a closer look at Democrats’ struggles with white voters. He marshals evidence that it’s distinct from the Democrats’ challenges in the South:

The traditional post-war image of the white working class is of workers concentrated in large Northern industrial cities like Detroit, Akron, Buffalo, and Pittsburg. But Beginning in the 1970s, many industries moved from the major cities to smaller towns to avoid unions and seek a more friendly “business climate,” while at the same time many white workers (like those in construction) who still worked in urban areas moved to the urban fringe for lower cost housing and to escape urban, metropolitan culture for a more “country” way of life. Today, two-thirds of white workers live in small towns, the urban fringes around metropolitan areas, or rural areas; only a third remain in central cities or suburbs.

He points out that “white working class support for Obama declines as one moves from large metro areas to less urban settings”:

This also shouldn’t be a surprise: The GOP’s base lives in small towns, the urban fringe, and rural areas. But it has tremendous implications for Democratic strategy. The party could “write off” white working class in the South and still win many elections, but it’s impossible to write off working Americans in all of the Red States or in all non-urban areas and still have a stable and enduring Democratic majority. Instead, such a majority will require increasing white working class support for Democrats in these areas.

Stem-cell biologist Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, saw his career go off the rails last month when two papers he co-authored with visiting researcher Haruko Obokata were retracted by the journal Nature. The retractions were issued after it came to light that Obokata had manipulated data and plagiarized some of the research. On Tuesday, Sasai hanged himself:

Yoshiki Sasai, 52, was found in a research institution next to his workplace by a security guard on Tuesday morning and was pronounced dead at a hospital two hours later.

Sasai might not have been responsible for Obokata’s misdeeds, but the scandal ruined him nonetheless. To Michael Eisen, Sasai’s tragic end illustrates some big problems with how the scientific community handles misconduct:

Obviously, fraud is a terrible thing. Nothing provides as deep an existential threat to the scientific enterprise than making up data. But as bad as it is, there is something deeply ugly about the way the scientific community responds to misconduct. We need to deal swiftly with fraud when it is identified. But time after time I have watched not only the accused, but everyone around them, be treated with such sanctimonious disdain.

Imagine what it must be like to have devoted your life to science, and then to discover that someone in your midst – someone you have some role in supervising – has committed the ultimate scientific sin. That itself must be disturbing enough. Indeed I remember how upset my father was as he was trying to prove that fraud had taken place. But then imagine what it must feel like to all of a sudden become the focal point for scrutiny – to experience your colleagues and your field casting you aside. It must feel like your whole world is collapsing around you, and not everybody has the mental strength to deal with that.

Jane Hu blames this on a warped academic culture that pushes scientists to publish too quickly and, in some ways, incentivizes fraud:

Overall, academic fraud is rare, which makes it all the more shocking when a major case is uncovered. To the public, it may seem mind-boggling that scientists would go to such lengths to deceive. In an ideal world, scientists work together to make incremental discoveries that add to the body of knowledge in a field and are recognized for quality work. In reality, the world of science can be cutthroat and isolating, with little oversight. Stem cell research is certainly not the only research field with a fraud problem, but it has all the right elements to motivate dishonesty: It’s a cutting-edge field with the potential to discover treatments for human diseases; it attracts highly competitive people who are all scrambling to make the next big discovery; and that discovery must be made, written, and published before any competitors can catch up. Add to that an academic culture that places ever-rising pressure on researchers to churn out publications in order to land jobs or tenure—especially publications in high-impact journals like Nature and Science—and you begin to see why researchers resort to cutting corners or massaging their data.