Atrios is right (again, but in a different context): it is not necessarily illegal to read the Bible out loud in a public school.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – A Pennsylvania school district violated the free-speech rights of a parent who was prevented from reading the Bible to her son’s kindergarten class, an attorney for the woman said on Monday.

The parent, Donna Busch, has filed a lawsuit against the Marple Newtown School District near Philadelphia, claiming her constitutional rights were breached when a school principal stopped her reading from the Bible in a class last October.

Busch, of Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, attended her son Wesley’s class as part of “Me Week,” which gave parents an opportunity to read aloud from their child’s favorite book.

Busch planned to read Psalm No. 118 but was told by the principal the reading would violate the separation of church and state, according to the suit filed earlier this month.

This is a case where church and state are simply supposed to be separate, not actively hostile. If the principal, or one of the teachers, were to read the Bible as a part of a regular school event (and not just a course that studied the Bible as literature and mythology), that would be completely inappropriate. But an individual parent has the right to come in and read what they like, even if they are clearly just trying to cause a stir. There really should be some straightforward set of guidelines that is handed out to all school officials who are faced with these issues — we shouldn’t have to go to the Supreme Court every time.

Of course, it would be just as okay for a parent to read from Why I Am Not a Christian, or any similar text. And I presume Ms. Busch would agree.

Buckets of money being offered to young physicists by the Templeton Foundation. I’ve sort of removed myself from the running, leaving the door open to other enterprising youngsters who might want to enter the competition.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Julia Loving
215/789-2207, loving@metanexus.net

Over $100,000+ IN AWARDS OFFERED TO YOUNG PHYSICS RESEARCHERS
Prizes for bold and creative ideas, insights, innovations and inventions in physics.

PHILADELPHIA, USA…The Amazing Light Young Scholars Competition offers more than $100,000 in cash awards to “young” physics researchers under age 40 who are creating innovations in physics, inventing powerful new instruments for probing the nature of reality, developing new insights and inventions, and formulating bold and innovative ideas in physics. The competition is one part of a high-level international symposium, Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery that honors Nobel Laureate Charles Townes, inventor of the laser. The symposium will be held October 6-8, 2005, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Eighteen finalists will be invited to the symposium for presentation of their research. In addition to having all travel and conference expenses paid, nine will receive cash awards-three 1st prizes at $20,000, three 2nd prizes at $10,000, and three 3rd prizes at $5,000. The deadline for submitting entries is June 30, 2005; entries require a cover letter, abstract, short paper (2,500 words), and biosketch, submitted to young.scholars@metanexus.net . All details for entering the competition, including judging criteria and a downloadable PDF are available at the conference Web site www.foundationalquestions.net/townes/ysc.

Entries must align with one of three topical areas:
1. Research yielding powerful new insights and innovative concepts based primarily on quantum mechanics
2. Research yielding profound new insights and perspectives toward answering “really big questions” in astrophysics, cosmology, and physics-related interdisciplinary research areas engaging with biophysics, physical chemistry, electronics, quantum computing, etc.
3. Technological innovation linked with new deep physical insights generating powerful, innovative new physics-related technologies and specific inventions

Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery is focused on exploring and advancing the future of innovative research in physics. The major themes for the three-day symposium were inspired by and derived from Professor Townes’ ideas and questions explored through his lifetime of research. In particular, the program will focus on the challenge of producing powerful new technologies that-like the laser for which Charles Townes won the Nobel Prize-may generate opportunities to open up whole new domains of advancement in experimental physics. Conference attendees will include distinguished research leaders from around the world whose work is focused on the challenges of exploring the deep structure of reality and the technological potentialities for investigating nature in the coming decades.

Amazing Light is hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and other corporate and foundation contributors, and administered by Metanexus Institute. Some Young Scholars Competition prizes have been sponsored by Research Corporation of Tucson, Arizona. In addition to the Young Scholars Competition and the three-day symposium, the Amazing Light project also includes the Amazing Light Laser Challenge Web site competition, the publication of an academic volume arising from conference proceedings, a gala celebration honoring Professor Townes, and the launch of a major multi-year research project into foundational questions in physics and cosmology. Details of the project, including registration information, are available at www.foundationalquestions.net/townes.

Good catch over at Pandagon — the Associated Press doesn’t know what to make of those scary atheists.

Just how tolerant of Christianity and other religions are the atheists?

“We don’t hate Christians,” said David Fitzgerald, 40, an insurance broker and member of San Francisco Atheists. “People in this country are free to believe in whatever they want.”

Nonetheless, during the Saturday night movie, the crowd booed and hissed when a photo of Pat Robertson was displayed on the screen.

Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and a former U.S. presidential candidate, is a leader in the efforts by some religious groups to return America and its government to Christian values.

Fitzgerald offered no apologies. “Robertson and other theocrats scare the hell out of us,” Fitzgerald said. “They want to turn a democracy into a theocracy. Even Christians are afraid of that.”

Jesse says what needs to be said. So does David Fitzgerald, for that matter. But still — “nonetheless”? Booing Pat Robertson is supposed to be incompatible with tolerating religious belief? Is tolerance supposed to demand a positive judgment of any religious person, no matter how odious?

And I like how Robertson is identified, for those who don’t know him, as “a leader in the efforts by some religious groups to return America and its government to Christian values.” Why not say that Robertson is “a leader in the campaign to blow up the State Department“? Really, he’s given us so much source material for colorful descriptions. He’s a leader in the campaign to, you know, tolerate other religious beliefs:

“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don’t have to be nice to them.”–Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, January 14, 1991

Don’t forget his strong feminist credentials:

“NOW is saying that in order to be a woman, you’ve got to be a lesbian.”–Pat Robertson, “The 700 Club,” 12/3/97

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” — Pat Robertson, fundraising letter, 1992

A leading Constitutional scholar:

“There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.” –Pat Robertson, November 1993 during an address to the American Center for Law and Justice

And always with an eye to protecting the children:

“I think we ought to close Halloween down. Do you want your children to dress up as witches? The Druids used to dress up like this when they were doing human sacrifice… [Your children] are acting out Satanic rituals and participating in it, and don’t even realize it.”–Pat Robertson, “The 700 Club,” 10/29/82

I guess, when you’re as accomplished as Pat, it’s hard to be summed up in just a few words.

Via a list of links (Volokh to Prawfsblawg to Pub Sociology to Andrew Gelman), we are led to a study that addresses one of the crucial pressing issues of the contemporary academy: how (or why) do some people get good teaching evaluations? Answer: by giving good grades and by being sexy. Here’s the abstract of the paper, by Felton, Mitchell, and Stinson:

College students publicly rate their professors’ teaching at RateMyProfessors.com, a web page where students anonymously judge their professors on Quality, Easiness, and Sexiness. Using the data from this web site, we examine the relations between Quality, Easiness, and Sexiness for 3,190 professors at 25 universities. For faculty with at least 10 student posts, the correlation between Quality and Easiness is 0.61, and the correlation between Quality and Sexiness is 0.30. Using simple linear regression, we find that about half of the variation in Quality is a function of Easiness and Sexiness. Accordingly, these results suggest that about half of the variation in student opinion survey scores used by universities for promotion, tenure, and teaching award decisions may be due to the easiness of the course and the sexiness of the professor. When grouped into sexy and non-sexy professors, the data reveal that students give sexy-rated professors higher Quality and Easiness scores. Based on these findings, universities need to rethink the use of student opinion surveys as a valid measure of teaching effectiveness. High student opinion survey scores might well be viewed with suspicion rather than reverence, since they might indicate a lack of rigor, little student learning, and grade inflation.

Now, I admit I haven’t read the paper itself very carefully. And I’m always reluctant to criticize credentialed experts in fields outside my own (really, I am). But this abstract doesn’t fill me with a great deal of confidence.

First, the data come from RateMyProfessors.com. You’re kidding, right? Perhaps there might be some sort of selection bias in the students who take the time to fill in entries on the web site? More importantly, the authors seem to take for granted the existence of a priori categories of “easiness” and “sexiness,” and claim that their existence is distorting the sought-after measure of “quality.” It seems not to occur to them that, for example, sexiness and quality might correlate because they both are caused by some third external factor. Or that a class might be subjectively rated as relatively easy, not because the grade distribution was actually higher, but because the students came away with the feeling that they had really understood the material. Or, most likely of all, that students found certain professors to be sexy because they were good teachers. Effective pedagogy, you don’t need me to remind you, is hot.

(And no, I don’t have an entry at RateMyProfessors.com. But my teaching evaluations are pretty good. Draw your own conclusions.)

From yesterday’s New York Times. (Thanks to George Musser for the tip.) You’ll read about it elsewhere, I imagine. But the message bears repeating.

In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates’ Deaths

By TIM GOLDEN
Published: May 20, 2005

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar’s face.

“Come on, drink!” the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. “Drink!”

At the interrogators’ behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

“Leave him up,” one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

Think about that last sentence the next time someone talks about ticking-time-bomb scenarios.

Different responses (e.g. from Jane Galt, Bitch, Ph.D., Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Brad DeLong) to this New York Times series on social class. Personally I was struck by the graphic on How Class Works. If we take the column on the class value assigned to various occupations at face value, it would appear that “Astronomers and Physicists” are the fifth most classy (if you will) occupation we have, out of a list of about 440 possibilities. Woot!

The top ten would appear to be:

1. Physicians and Surgeons
2. Lawyers
3. Database Administrators
4. Computer System Administrators
5. Astronomers and Physicists
6. Chemical Engineers
7. Chemists and Materials Scientists
8. Network and Data Communications Analysts
9. Computer Support Specialists
10. Dentists

Okay, I admit that it was cooler before I figured out that we were lagging behind Database Administrators. (Although when I first typed it in, it came out as “Dadabase”, which would be cool.) Not sure how exactly one ranks these different occupations in terms of their class value, and it seems perhaps a bit subjective. But so long as we are well above chief executives (46) or actors (86), I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

By John Donne.

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide

Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,

Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call countrey ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,

Nor houres, dayes, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beames, so reverend, and strong

Why shouldst thou thinke?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,

But that I would not lose her sight so long:

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,

Whether both the’India’s of spice and Myne

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.

Aske for those Kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,

And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

She is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes doe but play us; compar’d to this,

All honor’s mimique; All wealth alchimie.

Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,

In that the world’s contracted thus;

Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee

To warme the worlde, that’s done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art every where;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

Here’s a remarkable picture I had never seen before, found at Josh Friess’s new blog and ultimately from Ed Hall. It’s a plot of the national debt versus time, adjusted for inflation.

The obvious here is so obvious that it’s almost physically painful: a long period of relative stability post-WWII, followed by a sudden period of rapid growth instituted by Reagan, which wasn’t halted until Clinton came to office, and was immediately resumed by his successor.

Whether or not a certain amount of debt is good for the economy is an interesting and complicated question. There are very good arguments, at the least, that you wouldn’t want to work your way all the way down to zero debt, as it would dramatically curtail our flexibility in dealing with the money supply. But the unavoidable fact is that eventually this debt is going to have to be repaid. When the tax-cutters talk about giving money back to people, they are lying. In truth they are continuing to spend the money, just on credit. If they really wanted to give the money back, they would cut government spending. But spending is fun, just like cutting taxes is fun, and it would take actual responsible grown-ups to resist either temptation.

Everyone talks about the status of women in science, nobody ever does anything about it. But this Friday, May 20th, here at the University of Chicago, we are going to — well, okay, we’re going to talk about it. But maybe some action will come out of it, who knows?

We’re having a brief symposium entitled Why So Few Women in Science? Defining the Problem and Taking Action. It’s just for the afternoon, starting at 1:00 and stretching to about 6:00, in the Biological Sciences Learning Center auditorium. We’ve assembled a topflight crew of experts to talk about different issues: Rachel Ivie from the American Institute of Physics to give an overview of the current situation (at least in physics and astronomy), Kimberlee Shauman from UC Davis to talk about how things have been changing through time, Londa Schiebinger from Stanford to talk about issues of bias facing women scientists, and Tim McKay (see, we believe in diversity) from the University of Michigan to talk about the particular steps that have been taken at UM to address the problems. We’ll finish up with a panel discussion, after which the road to greater progress will undoubtedly be perfectly clear. Thanks to Evalyn Gates for taking the initiative to actually do something.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing (and who isn’t?), there’s an interesting debate at Edge.org on “The Science of Gender and Science,” between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. Unfortunately, they focus on the annoyingly irresistible issue of innate gender differences, rather than discussing the broader forces affecting the status of women in science. But, given that, they are both well-informed, sensible, and entertaining, and give strong arguments for their respective positions — Pinker that innate differences are crucial in understanding the underrepresentation of women in science, Spelke that social forces are essentially to blame. You can read them and draw your own conclusions. (Having said that, I can’t resist mentioning that Pinker engages in some truly dazzling instances of circular reasoning and question-begging. I mean, the math SAT’s must be good measurements of ability because most of the people who go on to successful science careers did well on them? Hmmm….)

I threaten to slow down with the blogging, but apparently that only means that the amount of substantive content will decrease, not the frequency of posting. I did want to point to this completely unfair but nevertheless quite amusing comparison of George W. Bush to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hardly a sensible comparison (even if you leave out the photos of GWB with the binoculars), but it’s GWB who keeps inviting it, so there you are.

That link takes you to a somewhat uncharacteristic post at Cleveland Park Men’s Club, which seems to be more typically devoted to a discussion of meeting women at Washington, DC nightspots. Learn more from Kriston, who will also keep you updated on important discoveries at a related site, Washington Socialites. As a practicing theoretical physicist, I can very much relate to the demands this kind of lifestyle places on one.