Each week, the students in the Microbiology and Immunobiology Department gather for a journal club, which consists of enjoying a free lunch while a peer presents a scientific paper. One week in November 2010, a fellow student presented a paper on bumblebee vision entitled “Blackawton Bees”. The choice of topic confused my colleagues and me, since none of us worked on anything remotely related to bee behavior. Everyone got ready to load up on free food and tune out the presentation.

What we quickly came to realize was that this paper – this published, scientific paper – had been written by third graders!^(a) While it wasn’t going to revolutionize the field or win a Nobel Prize, we were all extremely impressed by how these elementary school students were able to develop a hypothesis, design experiments to test that hypothesis, and draw meaningful conclusions from their experimental results. Even more impressive was the fact that the students had their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. My colleagues and I were thinking, “Wow, what a great way to learn science.”^(b)

Then the light bulb went off: Why not create a journal dedicated exclusively to publishing student research?

What developed is the Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI), an academic journal that publishes research projects undertaken by middle and high school students (though ambitious third graders are encouraged to apply, as well). Students perform basic research – whether out of personal interest, for science fairs, or as part of class projects – then use the science-writing guidelines on our website to compose an article based on their findings. Once students submit their work, we send it to three scientists in a related field, who provide the students with comments and suggestions on how to improve their research and the article overall. If these steps sound familiar, that’s because they mirror the same basic review process used in all scientific publications.

Writing and publishing original research is essential for success as a scientist, yet almost no opportunities exist for young students to engage with this process in a rigorous way. Science writing in secondary school typically lacks the structure and rigor found in professional publishing. Though there are hundreds of academic science journals, very few accept work from middle or high-school students, and none focus primarily on this group or provide the mentoring and support necessary to facilitate an educational experience. We try to strike the right balance between rigorous standards of scientific integrity and realistic expectations about what kind of science research middle and high-schoolers can produce.

Since we launched JEI in 2011, we’ve received over 40 submissions from students across the United States, and even a few from abroad. The articles that have made it through the review process and been published have focused on a range of topics. One of our first papers examined whether biodegradable plastic wrap was as good as non-biodegradable wrap for storing food.^(c) Another pair of students examined microbes in their households and tested the effectiveness of a 70% ethanol solution at eliminating them. Both of these experiments represent applications of the scientific method to everyday problems these young students are curious about.

My colleagues and I created JEI to educate students about the fundamentals of science research and writing and foster a community of young scientists. Submitting an article helps demystify the process of academic publishing to students who might not otherwise have access to experimental research. The review process connects students directly with professional researchers so they can envision what it’s like to work as a scientist. Eventually we hope to have enough publications on our website that other students can use these articles as a resource in their own investigations.

It’s critical for academics to step beyond the bench and directly mentor the next generation of scientists. Fostering an early familiarity with science is of vital importance in the U.S., where students are generally not prepared for the realities of a professional career in the sciences.^(d) By and large, the reception to JEI so far has been one of excitement. Educators have told us that they have been waiting for something like this to fill a void in science learning, and students have been enthusiastic about the prospects of learning directly from researchers and getting their own research published for everyone to see.

Despite vocal criticism of some of these policies as “nanny state” interventions, our research shows that most Americans support government action to address chronic health problems like diabetes, obesity, and tobacco and alcohol use. This is particularly true when such action takes the form of less intrusive interventions that nudge rather than compel people to make healthier choices.

Traditionally, public health efforts have largely focused on addressing communicable diseases or environmental toxins, for example, by requiring childhood vaccinations, containing the spread of HIV and foodborne illnesses, or banning leaded paints. The legitimacy of government intervention in these areas is based on the idea that communicable diseases and environmental toxins can put the public at risk. Today, however, many of our most significant health problems are noncommunicable illnesses like heart disease and cancer, often caused or exacerbated by personal behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise.

While addressing noncommunicable disease isn’t entirely new to public health, the emphasis on so called “lifestyle behaviors” represents a new frontier for the field, and raises the question of what role government should play in pushing people to change their behaviors and improve their personal health. Some advocates believe government has a responsibility to improve the well-being of its citizens as well as control healthcare costs. Critics suggest that government intervention in individual health and behavior is intrusive and an illegitimate use of public funds.

To better understand what the American public thinks about these questions, we conducted a survey of over 1800 adults.¹ We found that large majorities (70-90%) support government action to address noncommunicable diseases and behavioral risk factors like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and tobacco and alcohol use. When asked about specific policy proposals, people show greater support for less restrictive or invasive measures, and are less likely to endorse more coercive approaches.²

For example, more than 80% of respondents favor efforts to make fresh fruits and vegetables more affordable and laws requiring restaurants to post the amount of calories in their foods. A much smaller share of people (less than 40%) supports banning children from bringing soda and junk food to school or charging obese people more for health insurance.^(b) These findings suggest policymakers will likely receive greater buy-in from the public by continuing the current focus on using law to shape health environments and encourage better choices, rather than exerting direct pressure on individual behavior.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that a person’s political ideology predicts how likely he or she is to support these efforts. People who identify as conservative are less likely to endorse the general idea of government action on a range of public health issues, like cancer and obesity, and are also less supportive of many specific policy interventions. The same is true for respondents who believe that health is “strongly controllable through individual action.”

We were surprised, however, that we didn’t see large differences in support by geography.^(c) In particular, though New York City has been at the forefront of many new public health interventions, area residents are no more likely to support these interventions than people from other parts of the country (once we controlled for factors like age, race, and political ideology).^(d) This suggests that many of New York’s interventions could have success in other geographic areas.

What should these findings mean for policymaking moving forward? Our study shows broad support – perhaps broader than previously understood – for government action on chronic health problems, even among potential targets of interventions, such as people who are overweight or have diabetes. As a political matter, we find that policymakers will face the least resistance in advancing interventions that encourage rather than compel people to make healthier choices. The dilemma, however, is that the least coercive options may not always be the most effective.

Our research also suggests that the policymaking process itself can be key to public buy-in and compliance. Among the belief measures we tested, the strongest predictor of support for interventions was an individual’s perception that “people like me” can influence government priorities in public health. Policymakers should take public opinion on health issues into consideration because people are more likely to comply with regulations they view as legitimate and are also more likely to view efforts as legitimate if they feel they have a say in the process.

Despite the author’s quick assertion that this “does not mean global warming is a delusion” and that global average “temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1 degree Celsius above their level in the first decade of the 20th,” Rush Limbaugh used the article as proof that “global warming is a hoax.”^(a) The National Review added that “the new climate deniers are the liberals who… have managed to miss the biggest story in climate science.” Scientists have offered clear explanations in the past for the lack of change in average surface temperature measurements and scrambled to clarify the complexities of the models that The Economist ambitiously tried to explain. Yet Ed Rogers of the Washington Post warned of “Obama and the Democrats’ attempts to control our lives via climate change policy.” A serious effort to explain the complexity of climate science was transformed into a contest of rhetorical destruction invoking politics, religion, fears, and conspiracy theories.

A Different Perspective on the Debate

Why is this so? Why did a scientific issue like climate change become so toxic, so caught up in what we call “the culture wars”? It is because the social debate around climate change is no longer about carbon dioxide and climate models. It is about values, culture, worldviews, and ideology. As physical scientists explore the mechanics and implications of anthropogenic climate change and try to convey their results to a skeptical public, they must recognize that their work is being evaluated by a population where upwards of two-thirds do not clearly understand the scientific process and fewer are able to pass even a basic scientific literacy test.^(b) In discussing this issue, people hear far more than science. They hear an engagement with deeply held values and beliefs.

While frustrating to those in the physical sciences who expect their work to be judged by peer review and not public palatability, this response is something that social scientists can help us understand and address. The fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science can help explain the cultural, cognitive and political reasons why people support or reject the scientific consensus that both the U.S. National Academies of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science officially state exists.

Social scientists are a relatively new voice in this public debate. To date, the academic perspective on climate change has mostly taken the form of physical scientists identifying and describing the problem and economists and policy experts developing potential solutions. These efforts have often been somewhat abstracted from messier questions about how the public views the issue of climate change and how they will respond to potential solutions. Social science offers valuable tools for answering these questions and understanding how to cultivate broad-based support for meaningful action on climate change.

The Source of the Schism

Recent social science research illuminates why climate change has joined issues such as evolution and stem cells in moving beyond the realm of science to become a social and cultural flashpoint. In a process that legal scholar Dan Kahan labels “cultural cognition,”¹ people are influenced by group values and will generally endorse the position that most directly reinforces the connections they have with others in their social groups.^(c) New information and ideas are filtered through people’s existing belief systems, cultural identities, and values. Thus, for some people the phrase climate change evokes ideas of environmentalists pushing a radical socialist agenda, distrust of scientists and the scientific process, more and bigger government tampering with the market, and even a challenge to their belief in God as master of the earth. Others hear completely different connotations: the natural outcome of a consumerist market system run rampant, belief that scientific knowledge should guide modern decision-making, a much needed call for regulation to curb market excesses, and even the potential for breakdown of civilization as we know it if we fail to act.

Understanding the role of culture and cognition in shaping public opinion on climate change is important because a connection between a position on the issue and one’s cultural identity is very hard to break. For example, multiple studies have shown that political party affiliation is the strongest correlate with belief in climate change.^(d) This, to me, is the most visible sign of the cultural dimensions of the issue.  Efforts to present ever increasing amounts of data, without attending to the deeper values that are threatened by the conclusions they lead to, will only yield greater resistance and make a social consensus even more elusive. Opposing sides are debating different issues, seeking only information that supports their position, disconfirms the opposing view, and demonizes the other side. Think of the news sources that people trust most to get a sense of the schism that is forming.  Who do you trust more: Fox News or NPR; Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh?  Each of these sources project and represent different belief systems and worldviews, and thus different positions on climate change.^(e)

The cultural logics that underlie each group of beliefs form the crux of the debate and, as opinions drift to more polarized extremes, develop into a dangerous schism. As the divide grows and extreme opinions dominate the conversation, discourse and the potential for compromise disintegrate.² While one side sees the future of the planet at risk, the other sees freedom and economic growth being threatened. The two sides are not so much competing as they are talking past one another, and a functioning democracy is not possible under such circumstances.^(f)

Breaking the Deadlock

There is hope, however. Decades of social science research as well as more recent work that connects that research to the climate change debate can help us wade through the vitriol and understand why climate change has joined sex, religion, and politics as topics you don’t mention in polite company without fear of a heated and divisive debate. For example, there is a large body of literature in dispute resolution and negotiations on how to engage in value-laden debates.³ This literature offers techniques for moving away from distributive win-lose configurations and towards “mixed motive” consensus-based discussions that are based on both the issue’s scientific and social dimensions.^(g) Two examples valuable for the climate change debate are discussed below.⁴

Focus on broker frames. Effective advocates draw on the language and narratives of the group they are communicating with. Examples and frameworks that align with people’s existing worldviews can help them consider controversial issues in a new light. Categorizing climate change as primarily an environmental concern may only inspire action among people for whom this category is relevant, or worse, create resistance in those for whom this category is anathema. In response, advocates are increasingly using different broker frames to emphasize the economic, religious, psychological, sociological, developmental, and political implications of climate change. Potential broker frames include:

• U.S. economic competiveness. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu identified Chinese advances in clean energy technology as this generation’s “Sputnik moment”.
• National security. The elite retired officers who make up the Military Advisory Board at the non-profit research organization CNA categorized climate change a “threat multiplier”.
• Health and quality of life. A commission convened by top medical journal The Lancet called climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21^st century.”
• Social equity. Pope Benedict XVI framed climate change as an issue of respect for human dignity and for creation.
• Conservative values. Liberal think tank the Center for American Progress linked climate change with the high value placed on natural conservation by Republican Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.^(h)

Employ climate brokers. People are more open to arguments made by individuals they consider to be members of their cultural community. They often immediately discount and tune out claims from divisive figures, like Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh, who they view as being on the ‘other side’ of the partisan divide. The best climate brokers are individuals with credibility on both sides of the debate, particularly the right, since Republicans on the whole are more skeptical about climate change than Democrats. Politicians and pundits as well as advocates from the business world, the religious community, the entertainment industry, and the military can effectively reach audiences who may distrust anyone more closely associated with the left.

The Way Forward

It would be naïve to assume that a reconfiguration of the form of the conversation alone will yield a social consensus that climate change is real, that it is caused by humans, and that we should do something about it. Indeed, one major reason that climate change has become so culturally divisive in this country is because action threatens the interests of powerful economic and political groups. These groups have devoted substantial resources to challenging the validity of the scientific community and its research.

This political reality confounds the debate and creates obstacles to a social consensus, but it does not change the trajectory of the discussion nor the tactics to be employed. The weight of scientific evidence is massive and growing, though inevitably incomplete in explaining such a complex system. As Paul Edwards, author of A Vast Machine, explains, “The science of climate change is like a jigsaw puzzle with a few missing pieces. We don’t know everything, and real mysteries remain. But the overall pattern is clear and very unlikely to change dramatically, even if we find out that one or two of the pieces are out of place.” The current challenge on climate change is a social one: explaining the pattern that this complex jigsaw puzzle reveals to a skeptical public that is more concerned with the tangible and salient issues of a downturned economy, high unemployment, an uncertain retirement, and rising health care costs. Given the weight of these concerns, science alone will not compel people to act.

At the end of the day, climate change presents an existential challenge to our contemporary worldviews and only by shifting those perspectives will we fully embrace the change that is necessary. It means accepting that we, as a species, have grown to such numbers, and our technology has grown to such power, that we can alter and manage the ecosystem on a planetary scale. This is an enormous cultural shift that alters our conception of the environment and the responsibilities that come from our newfound place within it. Yet it is a necessary shift if we are to develop the will to act on climate change.

She spoke with Footnote about some of the projects she’s helped create, and how academic research can be made available and accessible to a broader audience.

How did you first get involved with Creative Commons and what attracted you to the project?^(a)

I learned about Creative Commons (CC) through a coworker at McKinsey. His classmate from law school was the executive director (and only employee) of the project. At the time, I had made a short film and was trying to figure out how to put music in it. I learned that I needed to have the copyrights to any music I put in the film, which seemed really burdensome and confusing. How was I going to find copyright-free music for my film? So when I heard about Creative Commons it made so much sense—how great would it be if there was a pool of open music that anyone could use! I was interested in technology and art so it seemed like a great fit. I was indoctrinated into the world of open access at CC and it has informed my subsequent projects. From there I started AcaWiki and the Peer 2 Peer University, two grassroots open education projects.

Can you tell us a bit about Acawiki and the mission behind it?

The mission of AcaWiki is to make academic papers more accessible both physically and intellectually. Most academic papers are trapped behind a paywall, so ordinary citizens cannot access papers unless they have a university affiliation or want to pay $35 per paper. This is really sad because it creates an unnecessary bottleneck between cutting edge research and the citizens and organizations who can benefit from it. Oftentimes, this research is publicly funded by the same people who cannot access it.^(b) The second goal of Acawiki is to make academic works more intellectually accessible to people. Academic articles are often long and technical, but in many cases the essence can be simplified so the main point is easily accessible to people. Because there is no copyright on an idea (just on the written work), summaries of academic papers can be written and distributed legally.

Academics are privileged enough to be able to spend time coming up with new learning which is meant to benefit society. That said, one piece of the pipeline is broken—the last mile where the information should be delivered to people who can use it.^(c)

What are some other barriers to the broad dissemination of academic knowledge? How can we address these obstacles?

I see three barriers: the two already mentioned in terms of paywalls and intellectual accessibility, and the third in terms of application. Academics spend time doing research without necessarily thinking about how their work can be applied. I think more people working in some middle area—between academics and the field—can help a lot. Businesses, communities, and citizens could benefit from an organization or group who does some thinking about how research can be applied to common problems that are faced in the world. This group can help figure out how to translate academic content for public citizens, and also offer academics ideas from the real world that would be worth their attention to investigate.

What interest do scholars have in making their findings publicly accessible, both in terms of distribution and presentation?

Scholars are not given many incentives to make their work publicly accessible. In most cases, the journal makes you sign a copyright form (where the scholar essentially loses their copyright) and universities often don’t have the money to make open access work.^(d) The work-around is to write a summary of the academic paper and put it online so people can easily find it.

The focus on journal article publication for career advancement definitely hurts open access projects. The hope would be to create a different set of incentives that are stronger than what we have now. For example a scholar may get more citations in an open access journal, and that can affect how well he or she does when reviewed for tenure.

It is time to reflect on the persistent themes that characterized the campaign and locate the election in relation to the parties’ trajectories in recent years. Identifying those themes might explain, better than pundits’ fascination with demography or with politics as a game of imagery and maneuver, the reasons why the president was reelected by a larger margin than many analysts predicted.

It is not the atmospherics of their campaigns, but the substance of Obama’s and Romney’s stated goals and programs, the ideals they championed and the directions in which they wanted to take the nation, that reveal why the president’s message resonated with a majority of American voters. The candidates and their parties presented two competing and ultimately incompatible visions of America that have deep roots in our nation’s history. Most Republicans distrust government, particularly the federal government, and put their faith in free enterprise. Most Democrats, as they have done for a century, consider government regulation of the economy necessary to protect the most vulnerable Americans.

Although campaign observers warned repeatedly during the months preceding the election that they did not sense the energy or the commitment of Democratic voters that they found so striking in 2008, members of many groups – including ethnic and racial minorities, unmarried women, poor people, and Catholics, Jews, and liberal Protestants – ended up turning out in large numbers and voting for Obama by equally large or even larger majorities this time.^(a) Why?

In his victory speech on election night, the president struck the same chords he has been sounding since he addressed the throng in Grant Park four years earlier – the same chords, in fact, that he struck when he burst into prominence with his address to the 2004 Democratic Party nominating convention in Boston: unity in diversity, conciliation and compromise, and policy making conceived as experimentation rather than the veneration of supposedly timeless truths. Obama conceives of governance as an endless process of trial and error in which programs are understood as hypotheses to be tested, not as dogmas to be followed regardless of the consequences.

Obama opened his victory speech by declaring that “the task of perfecting our union moves forward,” and this focus on the future rather than the past has distinguished him not only from Republicans but also from many Democrats trapped in an equally unhelpful nostalgia for an America that never was. From the beginning of his career in public life, Obama has shown a willingness to question the inherited assumptions of his own party and to incorporate ideas from his opponents. But since 2008 that willingness, rather than making him a more attractive president, has made him a target for partisans located at both ends of the political spectrum.¹

Deep divisions have marked the United States since its birth. With the exception of the Civil War, tragically necessary to end the disastrous blight of slavery, those divisions have not prevented the nation from moving forward, usually in fits and starts, to address new problems with imagination and innovation. Early challenges included forging unified commercial and transportation networks, and public-private partnerships of the sort Obama extols were essential to achieving those goals.² When expanding cities eclipsed small towns and new industries transformed the nation’s economy, waves of government regulation, inaugurated by progressives and then extended by New Dealers, proved necessary to rein in the excesses that accompanied those changes.³

The regulated capitalist regime of the post-World-War-II era, marked by unionized labor and steeply progressive income taxes that diminished overall economic inequality, brought middle-class prosperity to unprecedented numbers of Americans even as it continued to exclude millions of others, particularly African Americans and Hispanic Americans. De-industrialization and a flattening of tax payments have destroyed that world over the last three decades, and low-paying work in the service sector has proved a poor substitute for jobs either shipped overseas or assigned to robots who require no benefits and never go on strike.⁴ Democrats and Republicans’ fundamental disagreement about the best way to address these developments and the role of government in doing so was a key theme of the election.

At the parties’ summer nominating conventions, their leaders made clear just how stark their differences have become. The Republican Party platform extolled the individualism of self-reliant entrepreneurs, almost to the exclusion of everybody else. In his speech accepting his party’s nomination, Mitt Romney proclaimed that “the real world of business,” the world he knew from experience, “is what the president doesn’t seem to understand. Business and growing jobs is about taking risk, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always striving.”^(b)

Government, Romney implied, only gets in the way of “the genius of the American free enterprise system,” which is “to harness the extraordinary creativity and industry of the American people with a system that is dedicated to creating tomorrow’s prosperity rather than trying to redistribute today’s.” High among his priorities was his desire “to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish,” and he promised to “champion small business, America’s engine of growth.” Government regulations – and especially the specter of Obamacare – threatened the precious freedom of entrepreneurs.

Mitt Romney Speaking at the Republican National Convention in Tampa

Democrats, by contrast, insisted on the importance of community, not only in their convention speeches but in the two campaigns that attracted the most attention (and generated the largest contributions): Obama’s bid for reelection and Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for the United States Senate in Massachusetts.⁵ In Obama’s words on election night, “while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.” Whereas Republican candidates had pledged to “take back our country” from the shadowy, unnamed aliens who had seized it and from the president whose citizenship and religious identity many persisted in denying, Democrats celebrated the growing diversity of Americans’ ethno-racial identities and sexual orientations. President Obama declared that “for the United States of America the best is yet to come,” precisely because the nation has become an ever-changing kaleidoscope of peoples and cultures.

Another striking difference between the two parties in 2012 was the stridency of the Republicans’ rhetoric. In his concession speech, Governor Romney celebrated a world in which strong men act and women applaud, and he made little effort even to gesture toward any values that all Americans share. Although magnanimity obviously comes more easily in victory speeches, the president on election night thanked every American who voted for either party, acknowledged Republicans’ love of country, and pledged to talk with Governor Romney “about where we can work together to move this country forward.” The president challenged the persistent claims that the presidential campaign was “small, even silly,” and noted, correctly, that the stakes were big and the differences between the two parties real and important.

Obama countered the relentless divisiveness of the Republican strategy by reaffirming his own commitment to the profound significance of elections, a dimension masked by most journalists’ blow-by-blow accounts: “Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions,” and in any political campaign the noisy collision of “deeply held beliefs” inevitably “stirs passions, stirs up controversy.”

But rather than blaming his opponents for that antagonism, as many commentators on the left and resentful Democrats have done, the president instead contended that these “arguments we have are a mark of our liberty” and reminded Americans that people elsewhere struggle “for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots.” Moreover, he declared, as he has repeatedly in the last eight years, that all Americans share many of the same aspirations for the nation: fine schools, technological innovation, a robust economy, and a strong military that ensures peace rather than waging endless war.

President Obama’s Victory Speech on Election Night

The president did not shy away, however, from identifying the fundamental differences between the two parties that the campaign brought into relief. He stressed the dangers of inequality and global warming that Republicans denied. He invoked the virtues of generosity, compassion, and tolerance that Republicans – especially but not only in their Tampa nominating convention – cast aside in their litany of praise for independent entrepreneurs. Yet the most notable feature of Obama’s victory speech was also the most familiar. Despite the chorus of Democrats urging him to get tough and despite acknowledging that disagreements will persist, he implored members of both parties to face “the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward.”

How did Obama expect to proceed? By building on the “common bond” that links Americans, the shared commitments to liberty and justice not only for “job creators” – the “makers” rather than the “takers” in the Republicans’ preferred formulation  – but for all of us. Obama directly repudiated Romney’s denigration of the “47%”^(c) by underscoring the point he made at the end of his acceptance speech in Charlotte this summer, a claim that recurs in his rhetoric as often as its mirror appears in Republican discourse: “America’s not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe.”

President Obama Speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte

The most distinctive feature of America, Obama insisted on election night, is not its wealth or its military, its universities or culture, but “the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations. The freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights. And among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great.”

The contrast between the Democrats’ drumbeat of unity and togetherness and the Republicans’ equally insistent stress on individualism can be blurred in accounts by tough-minded analysts who focus on the maneuvers of the campaigns’ “ground games” and the different demographic characteristics of the parties’ voters. Of course those factors mattered. Focusing on them to the exclusion of the substantive differences between the parties, however, only reinforces and deepens the sense that American politics is nothing but a shallow shadow game between marketers and strategists rather than also a battle between competing visions of the United States.

The current Republican vision isolates heroic entrepreneurs as the sole embodiments of the American dream. The Democratic view incorporates the struggles and failures as well as the successes of everyone striving to make it in an increasingly ruthless environment, a world in which competition has replaced compassion and every job is tenuous. In that world, many of those with power can see themselves as entitled to their privileges rather than lucky to benefit from the accumulated capital amassed by earlier generations and sustained by the efforts – often invisible to the wealthy – of those of their contemporaries on whom their comfort depends.^(d)

The closing remarks of the two election-night speeches confirmed the gulf between the parties. Governor Romney concluded by saying he would “earnestly pray” for President Obama, implying to many of his listeners that only God’s mercy could redeem such wrongheaded and straying sinners as the voters who rejected him. Obama, by contrast, reiterated the idea that has been at the heart of his writings ever since he was a young community organizer converted to Christianity by the powerful example of religious believers and the inspiring words of a Protestant preacher: hope. Despite all the “frustrations of Washington” and all the “roadblocks” ahead, Obama declared that he has never been more hopeful about the future of America. He was not urging “blind optimism” or “wishful idealism” but the deeper resolution of Christian realism, “that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.”

What sustains that hope? For Obama it is the continuing struggle of Americans for equality and inclusion regardless of creed, color, or – now – sexual orientation, the stubborn belief that “you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try” because, as he put it in his ringing conclusion, “we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states,” precisely the formulation he offered way back in 2004.^(e)

President Obama’s Victory Speech on Election Night

A wide gulf separates Obama’s message of inclusiveness from Romney’s last-ditch effort to rally the shrinking tribe of white men (and the wives who love them) by demonizing everyone else.^(f) Yet we must remember that Romney appealed to just under half of American voters. The split in the electorate reflects more than just changing demographics or the principles of behavioral economics shrewdly deployed by the Obama team to get voters to the polls, important as those are. It points also toward the deep and persistent conflict between the bare majority of the electorate that views politics as problem solving and celebrates the growing diversity of America, on the one hand, and the still large minority that sees politics as the site of a continuing war between an older, increasingly brittle world view centering on received truths and the continuing exclusion of ideas and people considered alien to their constricted idea of the American way.

The president’s reelection signals the majority’s endorsement not just of him but of his values; the narrowness of his victory serves as a sobering reminder that nearly half of the American people do not share his vision of an America open to experimentation and inclusiveness. Voters last November ensured that divided government will continue. Although the Senate remained Democratic, Republicans parlayed a decade of gerrymandering by state legislatures into a substantial majority in the House of Representatives. Opinion polls repeatedly demonstrate that significant majorities of voters stand with the Democratic party on issues ranging from taxing the rich and sustaining government spending to abortion and gun control. However, the dynamics of Republican party fundraising and primary campaigns continue to dictate that the most intransigent and ideologically attuned candidates will be returned to Congress from the safely Republican districts of the South and the Rocky Mountain states.

Since the election we have witnessed more rounds in the increasingly dissonant battle between these competing ways of thinking. In the wake of the Newtown shooting, many conservatives have reiterated their conviction that the nation’s problems can be addressed only by individual citizens taking the initiative, which in this case means defending themselves by carrying concealed weapons. President Obama captured the stark difference between that individualist perspective and his own at the memorial service to honor the dead. His remarks echoed the principal themes sounded throughout his campaign: care, concern, and a shared commitment to the common good.

Implicitly rejecting the gospel of individualism and explicitly invoking the Christian ideal of love from the first sentence of his Newtown speech to the last, the president pointed out that “all the world’s religions begin with the same question: Why are we here? What gives our lives meaning? What gives our lives purpose?” His answer underscored the values that animated his campaign: what matters is not the defiant self-reliance that makes us wary of all obligations but “the love that takes us out of ourselves,” the “acts of kindness” that bind people to each other.

In his most recent speeches, including his Second Inaugural and his State of the Union, the president has reaffirmed longstanding commitments. He has called for increased funding for education from preschool to community college, a substantial increase in the minimum wage, immigration reform, and gun control. In his second term Obama faces many serious problems, including persistent unemployment, economic stagnation, ever-growing inequality, and accelerating climate change. However, as demonstrated by the recent failure to halt the blanket cuts in government spending mandated by sequestration, his most daunting challenge will be more amorphous. If he is to make progress toward any of his goals, he must convince the almost fifty percent of the electorate that voted for Governor Romney and those who returned a majority of Republicans to the House of Representatives that they should reconsider their political ideas.

He must persuade those Americans convinced that the federal government is their enemy, and that nothing matters more than their own personal freedom, that they should renounce those beliefs and adopt instead a different way of thinking. As he made clear in his remarks on March 1, the day the budget cuts took effect, the president continues to believe that Congress “will come to its senses” when the “common sense and practical approach” of the American people finally convinces Republicans in the House that simply cutting spending will not solve the nation’s problems and restore economic growth.

Commentators have noted for decades the incoherence of the public’s unchanging preferences for continuing with expensive government programs – none of which a majority of voters want to see cut – and their equally persistent unwillingness to pay for those programs.^(g) The president’s confidence that Americans will at last resolve that contradiction and apply sufficient pressure on Congress to break the current stalemate seems unshaken by the endless rebuffs he has suffered at the hands of his opponents in Congress. Like the belief he expressed in Newtown concerning Americans’ deep commitment to the values of love and kindness, his confidence in the electorate testifies to the unswerving hope he maintains in the face of banal selfishness as well as unspeakable evil. Several months into President Obama’s second term, that hope remains an act of audacity.

Instead of jumping onto the professor track after graduation, he took his academic expertise and co-founded Krossover Intelligence, a start-up that helps sports teams analyze their data and improve their performance. James talked to Footnote about why he’s passionate about understanding sports, how better analytics can help coaches and players improve their game, and how he puts his academic background to work in the private sector.

How did you get interested in studying sports from an academic perspective?

Thanks to the recent popularization of analytics in the sports realm, particularly by the book and subsequent movie Moneyball, a few researchers are starting to make sports their primary focus. I’m one of those people. Sports have always been a passion of mine. I tried all of them that I could, but thanks to my complete lack of balance and finesse, I was adept at none. Still stuck on being involved in some way, I started reading anything I could on strategy, coaching, etc., so that I could at least have an edge somewhere. Towards the end of high school, I came upon a recent flurry of analytically driven works by guys like Bill James and Dean Oliver, and I was forever hooked.

After finishing your Ph.D., why did you choose to go into the private sector rather than academia?

During my graduate studies at Wharton, I spent nearly the entirety of my time working on sports-related projects. Even my thesis, “Estimating Fielding Ability in Baseball Players Over Time,” spawned from a grant by ESPN to purchase sophisticated data on outcomes from batted balls in play. However, academia has few outlets for my work and, the longer I worked in this field, the more evident it became that academic skills and ideas need to be transferred over into the sports world. That’s why when Vasu Kulkarni, a former JV Penn basketball player and ’08 alum, shared an idea with me back in 2009 about bringing analytics and film breakdown to amateur sports, I jumped on the opportunity.

After nearly 4 years building Krossover, it’s clear that there exists a huge disconnect between the analyses preached by researchers like myself and those used in practice. The biggest factor causing this gap is the lack of understanding around noise or error. It does not take much training to learn how to estimate means or averages. Finding that estimate’s corresponding error rate or determining how much signal (that is, valid information) exists in the data requires more sophistication, something that academia has always been apt at providing. The biggest impediment facing the transfer of knowledge from academia to sports is not money or lack of interest in the sports industry, but the feeling among academics that sports comes with the connotation of “illegitimate research.”

Can you give us an example of how more data and better analytics can help coaches and players?

Take the basketball shot chart. This is a visual interpretation of every shot taken in a basketball game, where an “X” corresponds to a missed shot and an “O” corresponds to a made shot. The shot chart is not a recent invention; it has been around since coaches started mocking up plays on chalkboards decades ago and is heavily used by analysts and media outlets alike. The problem is that the shot chart suffers from a lack of context; that is, there are major pieces of data missing from that visualization to really inform the viewer what happened in that shooting instance (e.g. how far the defender was from the shooter, what type of shot was it). At my company Krossover, we have added an interactive element to the shot chart by allowing the coaches to bring up the video related to that shot, giving them proper context before jumping to a conclusion.

How does Krossover use the latest academic research to inform its work?

The best example is our new product sIQ, short for sports IQ. The original idea came from Ben Alamar, a professor at Menlo College who also helps NBA teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder with their analytics. He was inspired by previous work done on developing an athlete’s perceptual expertise, which is essentially their ability to predict subsequent events during a sporting activity. Researchers would perform a film-based simulation of a particular action that occurs in a game (like a tennis serve or a soccer penalty kick) and then ask players to predict the result of the action based on visual cues.¹ Working with the simulations eventually improved players’ on-field performance at those skills.

Professor Alamar took this principle a step further for basketball by using live film of NBA games to test potential draftees (i.e. players who are looking to make a jump into the NBA) on both their accuracy and their response time. He did this by simply showing the beginning of a clip and pausing it to ask a question like “Does this shot go in?” The idea is that players who were able to beat competition at the amateur level on pure athletic ability alone would perform poorly, while those with a more sophisticated awareness of the game would do better.

When my colleague and I heard Prof. Alamar talk about this concept, we immediately knew that this was a perfect app to build not only for professional teams, but for coaches at all levels looking for innovative ways to train their players. An interesting side effect of the app is that sIQ is also a lot of fun to play, as it plays off of an athlete’s sense of competitiveness. In addition, having so many athletes take the sIQ challenges provides us with mounds of data on how athlete’s skills evolve at different ages.

Over ten years, 4,488 American service members died while on active duty in Iraq, along with nearly as many – 3,400 – military contractors (although owing to the inconsistent measures for documenting contractor deaths the true figure is likely many times higher).¹

These are conservative estimates, important not only for what they count, but also what they leave out: disease, long-term illness, suicide, accruing interest on government debt, and other harder-to-calculate costs are not included in the basic figures. But that doesn’t mean they remain unknown or undocumented. The Costs of War project aims to provide a comprehensive accounting of all costs from the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The statistics listed above are part of an ambitious, thorough report released to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War’s start on March 19, 2003.² In an interview with Footnote last year, project director Catherine Lutz explained the purpose of the endeavor: “After ten years of war, it really is imperative that we understand how much the American people and the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been paying for these wars… [and] take responsibility for that.”

The scholarly, non-partisan Costs of War project attempts to document the wars’ costs by bringing together the expertise of over thirty economists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians, lawyers, journalists, and humanitarian workers. This interdisciplinary approach takes more factors into account than conventional appraisals, adding depth and clarity to an understanding of wars’ toll in all its dimensions, from human casualties and economic costs to impacts on daily life in the region and civil liberties in the U.S. One example of the project’s nuanced accounting methods is its examination of the opportunity costs and tradeoffs of war spending, costs that Lutz explained are frequently overlooked.

Another factor that’s often unexamined is that some of the Iraq War’s primary costs have yet to kick in. As Lutz described in her interview with Footnote, “Wars, in a sense, are never over when they’re over. They go on for decades.” After ten years of war, 1 in 12 Iraqis remain away from their homes, having left the country or been internally displaced. The 2.3 million American soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have returned home to their families with physical and mental scars. It will cost the U.S. government $500 billion to care for Iraq War veterans over the next forty years, and up to $930 billion when veterans from Afghanistan are included. On top of the $2.2 trillion already spent or obligated for the war, the cumulative interest on the funds borrowed to finance the war could add up to as much as $3.9 trillion.

With so many kinds of costs to consider, the project’s work is far from over. Documenting the costs of the war in Iraq is more than simply a historical exercise, however. As Catherine Lutz explained in her interview with Footnote last year, it’s a way to “take responsibility” for what happened and identify lessons for future policymaking.

The truth is a bit more complicated than these headlines might suggest. The study in question, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), compares patterns of gene expression in human patients suffering from various types of acute inflammation (burns, endotoxemia, trauma, and sepsis) and the mouse experimental systems designed to model these diseases.^(b) Surprisingly, the researchers found that there was very little overlap between the gene expression changes caused by these diseases in humans and in mice. This disparity has troubling implications for drug development, as potential treatments are often identified via testing in mice. The disconnect may explain why nearly 150 drugs that showed promise for treating acute inflammation in mice had little to no effect when it came to humans.

The take-away message of the PNAS paper is that the current mouse models for certain inflammatory conditions do not mimic human disease and are thus unsuitable for identifying and testing potential treatments. These findings will have a profound impact on the study of acute inflammation, particularly for researchers using the mouse models described in the paper. However, despite what some media coverage might suggest, this work does not signal the end for the mouse as a model organism and does not negate the progress that has been made in understanding disease and testing drugs using other mouse models.^(c) Furthermore, focusing on the impact that one high-profile failure will have on the field as a whole reflects a lack of understanding of what mouse and other model systems mean to the researchers who use them.

The vast majority of biological science is carried out using different model systems, each of which is designed to answer a specific type of question. For studies involving the most fundamental biological processes, such as DNA replication and metabolism, the simplest single-celled bacteria and yeast have provided some of the most profound insights. Cultures of human cells have shown themselves to be well-suited to biochemical studies, but fall short when it comes to complex organismal processes. Mouse models are excellent for the analysis of complex physiological environments, but suffer from the fact that there are many subtle and not-so-subtle differences between mouse and human biology (as the PNAS paper demonstrates). Although each of these systems can provide valuable insight, as researchers, we know that the models are just that: models. The only perfect model of human disease would be humans themselves, but performing many kinds of research on humans is an ethical and practical impossibility.

As researchers, we are constantly trying to strike a balance between broad understanding and accurate representation. We use cell lines, mice, and other organisms to build conceptual models that allow us to make sense of the vast and complex set of microscopic processes that drive life. In biomedical research, the goal is to apply these conceptual models back to human disease. In some cases this is successful, and the result is promising new treatments and techniques. In other cases, the experimental and conceptual models prove to be off the mark and researchers must go back to the drawing board.

Knowing the limits of our models is just as important as understanding their successes. The PNAS paper, which shows that certain acute inflammation models are incorrect, is undeniably important in that it will redefine the direction of that field of study and lead researchers to search for new tools for examining the problem in humans. Although the study does not invalidate mouse research as an experimental approach, it will serve as a valuable reminder to researchers to be vigilant in ensuring their models are as relevant as possible to human disease. Mouse research will carry on, and it will continue to provide invaluable biological insight and a fertile soil for testing the therapies that many of us will be using ten years down the road.

What policymakers and the public may not realize is that the primacy of the dollar is also a cornerstone of U.S. military strength, and the decline of the dollar would weaken America’s superpower status. As policymakers address America’s long-term fiscal challenges by enacting decisions that will shape the economy for decades to come, they must keep in mind that they will also be determining the future strength of the dollar and, with it, the country’s military might.

Since the end of World War II, the dollar has been the world’s dominant reserve currency, the most widely used currency for international monetary transactions, and the choice of the world market. It is held by countries around the world as part of their foreign exchange reserves used to meet their foreign currency payments and manage their trade balances.^(b) Being the world’s currency of choice provides the U.S. a number of economic benefits, particularly related to international trade, and assures it influence over the international financial system.¹ Continual demand for the dollar affords the U.S. a unique ability to float a large amount of debt at low interest rates and run a balance of payments deficit while maintaining autonomy from creditors.^(c)

A lesser known benefit of the dollar’s strength is that currency supremacy is a cornerstone of America’s military power. It allows the nation to fight wars at low political and economic cost as well as providing policy autonomy and strategic flexibility. States have a range of options for financing their military efforts, but each has its downsides. Borrowing compounds the cost of war through high interest rates; printing money can result in disastrous inflation; taxation combats high inflation and minimizes costs yet can be politically damaging; garnering money from abroad shields the public from the costs yet invites outside influence and fosters dependency. A state whose currency is in demand around the world, however, has access to cheap and stable finance from the international market even during wartime. This advantage has allowed the United States to fight long, costly, low intensity conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.^(d) These wars were the first in U.S. history to be funded entirely by borrowing. Perhaps even more telling, the financing of the wars coincided not with tax increases, but with the Bush era tax cuts.

Dollar supremacy not only secures the ability to fight low intensity conflicts, it also ensures America’s ability to fight high intensity wars abroad, an intrinsic component of American military primacy. The ability to run a balance of payments deficit ensures a reserve currency state can purchase badly needed goods from abroad to maintain forward bases, supply troops, and supplement civilian consumption during wartime. In times of war, exports often become severely limited because of decreased trade or a shift in production to military needs.  Meanwhile, the need to import goods to supply the war effort increases exponentially. Unlike other nations, reserve currency states can manage a trade imbalance like this without having to sell assets or take on large foreign loans.

A look at 20th century history demonstrates the connection between currency power and military strength. Going into World War I, the British sterling was the world’s reserve currency, but as the conflict wore on the power of the sterling waned as the dollar’s prominence rose.^(e) Yet the need for military supplies continued and, with their currency weakened, the British were forced to take on costly private loans, sell their American assets, and even cancel orders for supplies. This pattern was repeated during World War II, culminating in a $31 billion Lend-Lease loan from the U.S. to prop up the British war effort.^(f) After World War II, the sterling was no longer a primary currency, leading to a reduction in British military spending around the world and a diminished capacity to fight a war abroad. When it came time to finance Britain’s involvement in the Korean War, the country was limited to what it could fund through sterling and thus relied on the United States to fund a significant portion of its war effort.

The international monetary system has changed since the rise and fall of the sterling. The dollar currently enjoys even more prominence than the sterling did due to the end of the gold standard and the pricing of many commodities, primarily oil, in dollars. These differences have afforded the United States an even larger military advantage in the post-World War II era than its predecessor Britain. That said, the dollar has been vulnerable to the same pressures that faced the sterling. In order to finance the Vietnam War, the Johnson Administration borrowed heavily, resulting in a balance of payments deficit and decreased confidence in the dollar. Temporarily unable to exercise its top currency status, the United States was forced to change its war financing policy and raise taxes.

The ability of the United States to continue capitalizing on its status as the world’s currency of choice in order to support American military power could be nearing an end. Recent events, notably the 2008 financial crisis, the ballooning deficit, and calls from foreign nations for a new reserve currency regime, have brought the dollar’s dominance into question.^(g) Nations such as China are looking to restructure their reserve holdings to incorporate other investments with higher yields and reduce the prominence of the dollar.² Given the current reserve currency climate, if the United States were to enter into another costly conflict in the near future, the dollar might reach its breaking point and lose its status as the world’s reserve currency.

Though the dollar’s future is unknown,³ most economists and political scientists point to the sheer size and presence of the American economy in world markets and the lack of an apparent competitor to take the dollar’s place as indicators that the dollar will remain strong. While it is clear that the dollar will remain the primary reserve currency for the time being, if the United States values its ability to project its military power abroad, the dollar’s position should not be taken for granted. As demonstrated above, serving as the world’s reserve currency offers powerful advantages during periods of military conflict. Loss of reserve currency status would not just nullify these benefits; it could result in a decline in America’s superpower status.

The ability to transmit electric energy and impulses through wires has enabled basically every form of technology and communication at our disposal. As it turns out, however, humans were not the first creatures to find a means to conduct electric current. A recent report in the journal Nature describes a newly discovered species of bacteria that long ago beat us to the punch when it comes to long distance electron transport.¹

Previously, scientists had observed electric currents in marine sediment, but had no clear idea how electrons were conducted from deeper, oxygen-free regions of the sediment up towards the surface. A group of Danish scientists led by Lars Peter Nielson took sediment from Aarhus Bay and transplanted it to aquariums in a lab. In this transplanted sediment, they were able to identify the same electrical currents that had been observed in the wild. When they began sifting through this sediment, they found long filaments made up of thousands of what DNA sequencing would later reveal to be a new member of the Desulfobulbaceae bacterial family.^(b) When they cut the filaments using a tungsten wire, electrical conduction was blocked, demonstrating that these strings were facilitating the electron transport.

Using electron microscopy, the researchers looked more closely at the bacterial filaments and discovered an elegant and unusual structure: the normally smooth exteriors were covered with a series of ridges that were continuous from one bacterium to the next, running along the entire length of a filament. The researchers found evidence that these structures contain a shared, conductive periplasm that facilitates the transport of electrons from one end of the filament to the other.^(c) In doing so, these ridges allow the bacteria to create an electric current between the oxygen-rich regions at the surface of the seafloor and the oxygen-deprived regions further down in the sediment layer. The currents enable the bacteria to perform what is known as a redox reaction.² By forming cooperative, electron conductive filaments, this newly discovered species has devised a way to thrive in an environment where it has no business surviving.

As these bacteria have just been identified, there is little known about their evolutionary history. However, it is a safe bet that when humans first began engineering and placing long metal cables on the sea floor in order to transmit telegrams from one continent to another, we were placing those cables on top of bacteria that had developed their own electron conducting wires many thousands, if not millions, of years before.