PUBLIC MARKS from multilinko with tag research

Ontario’s electricity smart meters could jump-start plans for a sprawling meshed IP network that will connect the entire province wirelessly, initially by Wi-Fi and, as the technology becomes more widely embraced, ultimately by Wi-Max. Lawrence Surtees, director of telecom and Internet research and a principal analyst at IDC Canada, believes every indication points to a sophisticated, nomadic wireless Ontario broadband network within five years. “There’s a huge, crowded field of interested parties out there. We’re seeing spectrums of (Wi-Max) bandwidth being snapped up by Rogers Wireless, Telus, Bell, SaskTel and Primus. In Canada we’re looking at potentially five national blocks of frequency,” said Surtees. With Intel predicting Wi-Max ubiquity by 2007-08, and mass commercial availability by the end of 2006, Ontario’s timeline for a smart meter network by 2010 is not unrealistic, says Surtees. “Clearly, Ontario Energy is looking at Wi-Max for the province’s smart meters,” he said. The Ontario Energy Board was issued a request for proposal by the Ministry of Energy to implement smart meters. When asked about the Board’s plan Ted Gruetzner, a spokesman for the Ministry, would give no details but said an announcement was due this month. In the meantime, pilot programmes have sprung up throughout the province, with FibreWired Hamilton deploying a hybrid of Wi-Fi and Wi-Max to support the Hamilton-Wentworth region.

When Donald Kennedy, a biologist and editor of the eminent journal Science, was asked what had led so many American scientists to feel that George W. Bush's administration is anti-science, he isolated a familiar pair of culprits: climate change and stem cells. These represent, he said, ''two solid issues in which there is a real difference between a strong consensus in the science community and the response of the administration to that consensus.'' Both issues have in fact riled scientists since the early days of the administration, and both continue to have broad repercussions. In March 2001, the White House abruptly withdrew its support for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and the U.S. withdrawal was still a locus of debate at this summer's G8 summit in Scotland. And the administration's decision to limit federal funds for embryonic-stem-cell research four years ago -- a move that many scientists worry has severely hampered one of the most fruitful avenues of biomedical inquiry to come along in decades -- resulted in a shift in the dynamics of financing, from the federal government to the states and private institutions. In November 2004, Californians voted to allocate $3 billion for stem-cell research in what was widely characterized as a ''scientific secession.''

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues—stem cell research, climate change, abstinence education, mercury pollution, and many others—the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus.

It's not news that the reign of Bush fils has been marked by an antagonism toward science and scientists unlike any since 1954, when Robert Oppenheimer had his security clearance revoked and Linus Pauling had his passport pulled. The many times this administration and its supporters have fudged or even lied about scientists and scientific research are well-known. Global warming, stem cells, cloning, sex, land use, pollution and missile defense come to mind.

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences. The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil. There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science? Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers.