Stop Trump? Never mention his name

Trump is an outstanding con man who follows PT Barnum's Law: just spell my name right.  As long as his name is in the news--whether the coverage is pro or con, good or bad--he is happy.  He tweets, and all the newspapers run them.  His Democratic rival for the Presidency talks about him all the time.  Sure, she criticizes him but that keeps his name in play, makes people sure he is important--why is she talking about him all the time if he is not important?
 To stop Trump, stop mentioning his name.  Refer to the Republican candidate for President, which rightly connects the party to its nominee.
Clinton should also emphasize her solutions to problems, especially foreign policy.  What goes on in Turkey, or Syria, or the Ukraine affects America directly and indirectly.
But right now, the campaign is not about ideas and solutions, it is about the Republican candidate.

Obama or Romney: who's the science guy?

Obama or Romney: who's the science guy?

My mother died of breast cancer when I was six. In the fifty years since her death, the federal government, working in partnership with organizations like the Lasker Foundation, has supported research that helped countless women recover fully. 

When I was six, I knew the only solar system revolved around our own sun.  Now astronomers discover new planets around distant suns almost daily, thanks to the Kepler mission funded by the federal government. According to Michael Turner, a distinguished cosmologist, these kinds of discoveries will likely lead to evidence for the existence of civilizations on other stars within fifty years. 

I have spent my career as a psychologist of innovation studying the thinking and collaborations that have lead to the transformative advances in science and technology. Small grants from the National Science Foundation allowed me to work with distinguished colleagues from multiple disciplines here at the University of Virginia and across our country to study the invention and development of new technologies and develop case studies to inspire our students. I am particularly proud of the students who come back to tell me about the businesses they have created.

I gave back to the National Science Foundation by working for two years as a Program Director.  My fellow Program Directors worked long hours to make sure taxpayers got a good long-term return on their investments in the future of science and technology.

One of my favorite responsibilities was working with colleagues from multiple agencies, Universities and non-profit groups on the National Nanotechnology Initiative, where federal investment has focused not only on discoveries and innovations but also increasing public awareness of and engagement with science so that as new materials, circuits and drug delivery systems are developed, and the public will be involved in deciding what products and systems should emerge. 

In this election year, the importance of federal funding for science may not be at the top of the list of reasons why who wins matters, but it should be. At a forum called Science Debate, both candidates were invited to respond to a set of questions about their science and innovation investment priorities.  In his response, President Obama said he wants to double funding to key science agencies to support scientists and entrepreneurs and train 100,000 new science and math teachers. The President briefly noted the importance of science and technology investments in the third debate. Sixty-eight AmericanNobel Laureates said "If you believe, as we do, that America's future is bound in essential ways to science and innovation, we urge you to join us in working to ensure the reelection of President Obama"

Governor Romney said he would “focus government resources on research programs that advance the development of knowledge, and on technologies with widespread application and potential to serve as the foundation for private sector innovation and commercialization. ”  He also indicated support for research and development funding in the third debate. However, Governor Romney did not provide any indication of the size of the investment he will make. It is reasonable to assume he would follow at least the outlines of the budget authored by his running mate, Paul Ryan (R, Wisconsin), who authored a a budget resolution in the House of Representatives that includes  cuts of 20 percent or more in discretionary domestic programs, including higher education, and scientific research. According to the sixty-eight Nobel Laureates, Governor Romney " supports a budget that, if implemented, would devastate a long tradition of support for public research and investment in science at a time when this country's future depends, as never before, on innovation.”

My colleague Roop Mahajan, Director of the  Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science at Virginia Tech, says creativity blooms at the intersections between disciplines, as is happening under this nanotechnology initiative. Under President Obama, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation are all engaged with the National Nanotechnology Initiative, creating new programs where teams from different disciplines can work together and across the public-private sector divide to solve challenges to our national security, public health and energy independence.

From cancer cures to catalyzing the Internet, public investment in science promises not only a better understanding of the origins of our universe and ourselves but also economic, health, and environmental benefits. Innovative partnerships that help bring together stakeholders across disciplines and in the public, private, and academic sectors can help turn scientific breakthroughs into economic realities. 

It matters whether we elect leaders who will continue investing in science and technology. I hope voters will keep this critical issue in mind when heading to the ballot box and press the candidates to articulate their science and engineering policies.

Michael Gorman was a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, and is a Social Psychologist of Science at the University of Virginia. This essay reflects only the views of the author and not of the University of Virginia or the National Science Foundation.

Making America into a democracy

600,000 people in DC do not have a Senator or Congressional representative. They do not live in a true democracy.
But they are not the only ones. The rest of us have to live in Congressional districts apportioned by the political parties to ensure their hold on power. Instead, Congressional districts ought to be apportioned by an algorithm that factors in population increases, and these decisions ought to be supervised by a non-partisan commission. Then we would have districts that represented the diversity of views in America, and we would be more likely to elect politicians who could listen.
But that is not enough. All of us who vote (and that should be every American) should resolve to turn off the TV every time a campaign ad for any party or candidate or group comes on, and to vote preferentially for candidates that meet directly with voters and hire minimal campaign staffs. Look for people who are willing to serve in Congress but would prefer not to.

The black magicians

Back in the wild and crazy sixties, I used to read Carlos Castaneda, who invented a universe in the American Southwest and told it was real, which made me suspend judgment and wonder if it could be? (Try books like a Separate Reality to figure out for yourself).
One of his best metaphors was that the people who know us--especially the ones who love us--are black magicians. Each of us shapes others selves, molding them into our image of what they want us to be.
When you think of something you ought to do, you typically think of someone's face, of what they will say if you don't get it done--you can imagine their response, even have a dialogue with them (much of talking to oneself is this sort of dialogue with imagined others).
This process becomes true black magic when others tell you not just what you need to do to advance a project, meet a deadline, help a friend, but when they connect it to who you are: "I thought you were the kind of person who always meets deadlines" or "Would put a friend's need above your own" or "a hopeless loser who always lets me down". Sometimes people actually utter cliches like these, but often they are hinted by indirect language and nonverbal cues. (In another blog, I will tell you the way to undo the black magic).
Love is the most wonderful and desperate example. People often fall in love with an imagined other, and when all their black magic fails to create the person they imagined, they abandon the relationship.
Love does mean having to say you are sorry, sometimes. Love does mean wanting to help the person you love avoid traps and pitfalls. But love also means seeing them for who they are, at a particular moment--and loving that real person, not in spite of their 'faults', but because of them--because she or he is wonderfully, desperately human.
Being a parent means being in love with a self that is changing, that will be totally dependent on you for more years than the child grown to boy or girl wants to admit. Here the razor's edge between love and black magic is particularly sharp--but breathtaking to dance along. Your child needs someone who loves them for who they are--even as you set limits, correct behaviors, insist that you also have rights as a parent. I remember one day when I was irritated with my eldest and I said (less eloquently than I am writing here), "Philip, I have a right to be irritated with you, to be crabby around you, and you have the same right with me, but never doubt for a moment that I love you." The child should always be able to fall back on that ocean of love, even as you are struggling to set clear limits so they will grow up safe--knowing the limits move as they grow, knowing they will leave home and (in the case of my lads) fly afar--with that ocean of love always there--strong enough so that even after I die, they can still fall into it.
Parenting is not black magic--it is diapering a wind that needs to be nurtured and made strong so it can blow everyone it touches some good.

Of Human Imagination

My mother spent two years dying of cancer in a bedroom upstairs in our house. I said good-bye to her every morning when I went to kindergarten. When the cancer got worse, I could only kiss one side of her mouth.
I wanted to be a ‘space scientist’, by which I meant an astronomer. I grew up in DC where it took me years to identify the Big Dipper, because I could only see two of its stars through the light pollution. I liked the stars because they were so orderly—they showed up reliably in certain places at certain times. It seemed possible to understand and predict the motion of the stars.
The people around me, on the other hand, were a mystery. In college, I read about Harry Harlow’s studies of rhesus monkeys, where he raised some without real mothers. The motherless monkeys did not understand how to behave around other monkeys.
I was one of Harlow’s motherless monkeys. Other people were sending me signals, but I couldn’t read them. Perhaps that is why I became a psychologist instead of an astronomer.

Each human being is a universe. We can imagine worlds, things that might be, futures that could not be—that defy all physical laws. In our imaginations, we can fly, live forever, find the perfect lover, torture our enemies—be the hero of our own story.
Imagination can be deadly—can keep one person from seeing that another lives in a universe of dreams, hopes and aspirations, too. On September 11, 2001, a few fanatics turned airplanes into missiles. These terrorists were living in an imagined world, in which killing of this sort was virtuous, in which they would go to their version of heaven.
Perhaps if we understood that each time we pulled a trigger or set off a bomb, we were destroying a universe as beautiful and sophisticated as our own, we would hesitate. But of course, if we have been taught to hate ourselves, to regard ourselves as worthless, then what does it matter?

I was in a hotel lobby one evening many years ago, at a convention—displaced from friends and family in that impersonal space that could be anyplace. A man stumbled out of the bar, smoking—a habit I abhor--slouched in a chair and fell asleep. He was nicely dressed, but clearly homeless in a sea of affluence. My ordinary response would have been irritation, perhaps a little pity—but as I saw him, something reminded me that he was a baby once, and suddenly I felt sorrow—not just for him, but for all of us, and what we had become.

"Whosoever saves a single life, saves an entire universe." (Yad Vashem award)