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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday April 16 2017, @12:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-really-needs-independent-experts-anyway? dept.

Common Dreams reports

The Trump administration's anti-science bent has reached the Department of Justice (DOJ), with Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying [April 10] that the department is ending the National Commission on Forensic Science.

The 30-member panel was described by ThinkProgress as "a group of scientists, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other experts tasked by the Obama administration in 2013 with raising standards for the use of forensic evidence in criminal proceedings".

In its place, a senior forensic advisor will be appointed "to interface with forensic science stakeholders and advise department leadership", Sessions' statement said.

[...] "The reliance of law enforcement on questionable science and the overstatement of the reliability of that science has been a leading cause of the wrongful conviction of innocent people", said National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) president Barry Pollack on Monday. "The reason the National Commission on Forensic Science has been so important is that it includes leading independent scientists, allowing an unbiased expert evaluation of which techniques are scientifically valid and which are not. NACDL is terribly disappointed that even while acknowledging the crucial role played by the National Commission on Forensic Science, the Attorney General has chosen to disband it."

Additional Coverage:

Previous: Forensic Hair Matches: More Junk Science from the FBI


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:42AM (7 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:42AM (#494675) Journal

    All the technology that made america great has its roots in government scientific research.

    So what? Everything has similar roots (or is that cooties?) in any institutions that kick around for longer than a few centuries. So private enterprise and religion are similarly endowed. Even relatively minor things like tin mining or prostitution does. Money gets around and everything is tainted in the above extremely worthless way by how it was spread around in the past.

    Why should we care about the mythical taint of public funding any more than we care about the mythical taint of funding that originally came from prostitution?

    But since Reagan there has been a long steady decline in government funded research

    We can always look at real data than just make up bullshit. For example, US R&D as a percentage of US GDP hasn't changed significantly since 1983. And the US economy has grown significantly since then.

    That's because the kind of long-term research that produces previously unimagined scientific discoveries can't be represented on a balance sheet.

    And that's the kind of straw man that doesn't have a place in grown up debate about science. I think such arguments are used instead to defend the paying of some of our best and brightest, as well as a large bunch of bulbs that don't shine all that bright, to be useless. It's the abandonment not just of accountability and reason, but of the very tools of science itself.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:43AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:43AM (#494676) Journal

    We can always look at real data

    Sorry, here's the link [aaas.org].

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:51AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:51AM (#494677)

    We can always look at real data than just make up bullshit.

    Well, that's a good idea. So why is your very next sentence nothing more than made up bullshit?

    For example, US R&D as a percentage of US GDP hasn't changed significantly since 1983. And the US economy has grown significantly since then.

    The fact is, R&D has gone up but the rate of growth has been flat to trending downwards. [marginalrevolution.com] And that's because the R&D is focused on incrementalism that is intended to directly benefit the bottom line in the next quarter rather than investigating big ideas with no obvious immediate return.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:00AM (4 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:00AM (#494681) Journal

      The great irony is that public funding of science and risk mitigation for businesses is probably the primary cause of that declining effectiveness. I'll note that I replied to my post with a link that showed the near constant funding of R&D at the federal level (which let us note is a significant increase in inflation-adjusted dollars). If research isn't as effective, it's not because it's funded less at the federal level.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:50AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @05:50AM (#494694)

        The great irony is that public funding of science and risk mitigation for businesses is probably the primary cause of that declining effectiveness.

        Again with the making up of bullshit.

        I'll note that I replied to my post with a link that showed the near constant funding of R&D at the federal level (which let us note is a significant increase in inflation-adjusted dollars).

        And all of the increased spending went to computer science and math. [aaas.org] Nearly all of it to ASCI, the program to replace nuke testing in real life with super-computer simulations in order to maintain our stockpile. It was signed into law in 1995, which you can see in the chart is exactly when spending took off. The only other discipline to receive significant spending increases was "engineering" which no one with any understanding of the topic would confuse with basic research.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 16 2017, @06:37AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 16 2017, @06:37AM (#494706) Journal

          Again with the making up of bullshit.

          I notice a remarkable lack of support for your assertions, whatever they may be, from the link you provided. Perhaps less projection and more looking at the very evidence you provided?

          And all of the increased spending went to computer science and math.

          Which is why we see medical R&D way above any of that. It has almost the same color as the math/CS curve. For someone with at least a little knowledge of US research, one would have known that there was something wrong with the interpretation when math/CS (a notoriously low cost field of study) appeared to be the highest curve.

          Nearly all of it to ASCI, the program to replace nuke testing in real life with super-computer simulations in order to maintain our stockpile.

          An elaborate explanation for a curve that didn't exist? Classic confirmation bias. You might want to think about what just happened here.

          No matter how we choose to look at it, public funding in the US and elsewhere continues to grow while the effectiveness of that research continues to decline and private-side investment in basic research continues to dwindle. It's real convenient to claim that the problem is not enough funding, mental failwaves from the naysayers somehow holding us back, or some short term profit motive straw man. But there's no reason to expect this approach of just throwing money around to generate better science even over the course of many centuries. I'd say already that we have ample evidence that it isn't working including the earlier research on the declining effectiveness of research papers in various fields.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:57PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:57PM (#494912)

        that showed the near constant funding of R&D at the federal level (which let us note is a significant increase in inflation-adjusted dollars)

        How can we trust the "facts" of someone who gets "inflation" backwards?

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:41PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 16 2017, @10:41PM (#494986) Journal

          How can we trust the "facts" of someone who gets "inflation" backwards?

          I suppose you could think instead. Let us note here that the graph of federal spending was in dollars per GDP fraction and near constant for the last three decades. GDP for the US grows considerably faster than inflation, hence, from that graph dollar amount adjusted for inflation grows faster than inflation as well.

          I'll note this is the second time a graph in this thread has been significantly misinterpreted by an AC.