Trump lied about science

The Trump Administration and the Environment - Heed the Science.

Science-based policies and regulations have resulted in tremendous gains in environmental quality and reduced the population’s exposure to harmful pollutants (Fig. 1). In the United States, the gains have been driven by major laws that were passed and amended by Republican and Democratic administrations alike (Table 1). For example, the 1970 Clean Air Act (CAA), signed by President Richard Nixo...

Standing up for science in the era of Trump.

"I Lied About the Trees", Or, Defaults and Definitions in Knowledge Representation

Over the past few years, the notion of a “prototype” (e.g., TYPICAL-ELEPHANT) seems to have caught on securely in knowledge representation research. Along with a way to specify default properties for instances of a description, proto-representations allow the overriding, or “cancelling” of properties that don’t apply in particular cases. This supposedly makes representing exceptions (three-legg...

Who Tweets about Science?

Twitter is currently one of the primary venues for online information dissemination. Although its detractors portray it as nothing more than an exercise in narcissism and banality, Twitter is also used to share news stories and other information that may be of interest to a person’s followers. The current study sampled tweeters who had tweeted at least one link to an article in one of four lead...

Computer Science: Not about Computers, Not Science

This paper makes two claims about the fundamental nature of computer science. In particular, I claim that—despite its name—the field of computer science is neither the study of computers, nor is it science in the ordinary sense of the word. While there are technical exceptions to both claims, the nature, purpose, and ultimately the crucial contributions of the beautiful discipline of computer s...