To kick off our milestone 15th anniversary, the Texas Freedom Network is bringing Arianna Huffington — one of the most influential women in the media — to Austin for a special event at 7 p.m. on Monday, May 3. The founder of the popular and influential online news site Huffington Post will share her analysis of the current political climate as well as the far-reaching effects of the resurgence of political extremism, including the damage done by the far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education.
We expect a large crowd for this must-see event in Austin. Click here to purchase tickets for what is sure to be an engaging evening. You can also purchase tickets over the phone at 512.322.0545.
Of course, there’s the question of whether hers is a GOOD influence overall….
I’m not sure the purveyor of anti-vaccine denialism, homeopathic woo, and new age quackery is particularly the right person to comment on our SBOE’s conflicts with sound science.
Gonna have to pass.
Has this been up since April first? This is a joke, right? Can she bring Deepak Chopra with her?
Not a good choice, given the Huffington Post’s war on rationality when it comes to medicine, particularly its antivaccine stance:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=473
In fact, this is a choice as bad as when the AAI chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award.
TFN scores a big fail on this one. You can do better than this TFN. Is it really that hard to get good speakers with intellectual integrity?
Oh, well… So much for sending you folks a donation.
You have GOT to be kidding. This woman is everything you’re fighting against, except on the other end of the aisle. I’m not wasting my money for this dangerous purveyor of nonsense credibility with a pro-science organization, much less driving to Austin for the travesty.
What an affront to your backers! Why Huffington??? What has she contributed to freedom or free thought or anything at all that TFN has promoted itself as holding important and has sought public support for? Huffington promotes new age woo vaccine as a cause of Autism/denialism and magical thinking that is no better than any other religious fanaticism. What next at TFN, seances for donations?
If you were looking for influential women why not;
Ugenie C. Scott an American physical anthropologist who has been the executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) since 1987. She is a leading critic of young earth creationism and intelligent design and has stood up to the lunacy in the Texas textbook attack for your side. Or maybe, oh I don’t know, someone real from this list:
Ruzena Bajcsy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley In 1979 Bajcsy helped create robots that could sense and respond to their environment. She now heads an innovative institute where researchers develop smart low-power sensors that both compute and communicate. Bajcsy believes the sensors will be “the next revolution in technology.” They can monitor energy consumption in buildings, watch for forest fires, or keep tabs on people by, for example, calling 911 if a person with Alzheimer’s disease wanders from his home.
Jacqueline K. Barton Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology Barton discovered that DNA conducts electric current but not as well—or not at all—when its tight organization is disrupted by damage from certain chemicals or mutations. That finding should allow researchers to look for mutations, using chips made of strands of DNA attached to gold on silicon wafers. Barton is investigating whether nature has developed tactics to cope with such damage: “Are there important sites that are insulated? Where are electrons funneled? This makes us think about DNA in an entirely new way.”
Anna K. Behrensmeyer Research Paleobiologist, Smithsonian Institution Behrensmeyer has spent almost three decades at Amboseli Park in Kenya watching animals disintegrate and fossilize as she researches taphonomy—the science of burial. “There is a bias in the fossil record caused by all of the factors that determine whether or not something becomes a fossil. Did it have hard parts? Did it die in the water where it could more easily be buried and preserved?” That bias, says Behrensmeyer, gives us only a relatively small window to the past. “My work tries to illuminate what we can see through that window.”
Elizabeth Blackburn Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California at San Francisco Each time a cell divides, its chromosomes shorten slightly. To protect vital genes from being lopped off, chromosomes are capped with telomeres, blocks of DNA and protein. Telomeres are maintained by telomerase, an enzyme discovered by Blackburn (see story Why science must adapt to women) and biologist Carol Greider. In most healthy cells, telomerase production eventually ceases, telomeres whittle down, and the cell dies. Blackburn’s research has shown that in cancer cells, the enzyme never shuts off, and cells become immortal: “Telomerase is reactivated in about 90 percent of tumors. It is a great favorite of cancer cells,” and thus a target for new drugs.
Sarah Boysen Professor of Psychology, The Ohio State University Boysen’s colony of 11 chimpanzees are often as rambunctious as a class of preschoolers, and her research shows they share another trait with toddlers: the ability to do simple arithmetic. The chimps can add, subtract, understand fractions, and associate Arabic numerals with the quantity of objects they represent. “We attribute to the human mind the ability to put information together in novel and innovative ways,” she says. “But there are other minds on the planet that can spontaneously create new ways to process information and solve problems.”
Rita Colwell Director, National Science Foundation Her day job “saturates” her time, but Colwell says she would feel “starved” without her research on cholera, now 25 years deep. “We took this elegant, interdisciplinary research involving molecular biology, oceanography, remote sensing, and clinical medicine and came up with a very simple technique to prevent the disease: filtering water through sari cloth.” That strategy, she found, reduces the number of cases by roughly 50 percent. “This is the kind of holistic approach we need to solve complicated scientific issues.”
Margaret Conkey Director, Archaeological Research Facility, University of California at Berkeley “There has long been a heavy bias toward seeing the whole human past in terms of male action,” says this expert in prehistoric art who encourages anthropologists to reinterpret ancient images and objects. “I have been trying to convince people that we can’t explain 20,000 years of material by saying it was all magic for the hunt.” She heads a team that surveys the landscape in southern France, searching for traces of the day-to-day lives of the cave painters.
Esther Conwell Professor of Chemistry, University of Rochester Half a century ago, Conwell’s research on how electrons course through silicon and other semiconducting materials jump-started the computer age. Now she studies the movement of electrical charges through DNA. “The motion of charge in DNA can lead to mutations that can be cancer producing. And the properties of DNA could be useful in assembling circuit elements in nano-electronic circuits.”
Gretchen Daily Research Professor, Stanford University The key to protecting ecosystems and preserving biodiversity successfully, says Daily, is to recognize the economic value of services that nature provides. “Ecologists used to be totally impractical in their recommendations to policymakers, while economists totally ignored the natural capital base upon which human well-being depends,” she says. Her work helped spur a revolution in conservation policy, uniting economists and ecologists. “I’ve been lucky to be part of a movement that produced new partnerships between them.”
Ingrid Daubechies Professor of Mathematics and Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University To analyze the signal of an image, sound, electrocardiogram tracing, or even a turbulent gas, one must break it down into simpler parts. The parts that scientists and engineers use are Daubechies’s wavelets—mathematical building blocks that are also used for data compression and encryption. “If you painted a picture with a sky, clouds, trees, and flowers, you would use a different size brush depending on the size of the features,” says the mathematician. “Wavelets are like those brushes.”
Persis Drell Director of Research, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Growing up, Drell, whose father is a theoretical physicist, met some of the most famous physicists of the 20th century, “and yet I was determined to be a mathematician.” Then a teacher in college made physics seem exciting to her. Now, using giant particle colliders, she studies elementary particle physics. “We’re trying to figure out what the world is made of at its most fundamental level. Because I have young kids, I think of it as finding the smallest Lego that you can make everything else out of.”
Mildred S. Dresselhaus Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, MIT Before her fourth child hit kindergarten, Dresselhaus deciphered the electronic structure of graphite, the lowest-energy solid-state form of carbon. The daunting problem had long scared off other researchers, which is why she chose it: “I wanted to be able to move more slowly, without so much competition.” Her other groundbreaking studies contributed to the discovery of buckyballs and carbon nano-tubes.
Sylvia Earle Explorer in Residence, National Geographic Society This oceanographer, diver, and developer of deep submersibles is systematically surveying U.S. marine-protected areas. For three decades, she has campaigned for public awareness of the need to protect ocean systems. “What we discover has to affect public policy,” she says. “If people understand how important the ocean is and how it influences our daily lives, they’ll be inclined to protect it, not just for its sake but for our own.”
Sandra Faber University Professor, UCO/Lick Observatories, University of California at Santa Cruz The orbital speed of stars varies with their galaxies’ brightness. That discovery, made by Faber in 1975, “showed that galaxies were made according to some kind of regular process.” She and other researchers later discovered that the process originated 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang, when density fluctuations created the seeds of galaxies. “We can look at the Milky Way and know that the roots of that structure go back to practically the very beginning,” she says. Faber also diagnosed the Hubble Space Telescope’s optical flaw and helped design the massive Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
Melissa Franklin Professor of Physics, Harvard University “I build things, and then I fix them when I build them badly,” says the experimental physicist, offering a deceptively modest description of her work. The objects she tinkers with are complex particle detectors, including the powerful proton-antiproton Collider Detector at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, which she used to spot the top quark in 1995.
Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic Professor of Neurobiology, Neurology, and Psychiatry, Yale University The persistent firing of neurons in the prefrontal cortex is the “glue of consciousness,” says neurobiologist Goldman-Rakic. “It allows one event in time to connect to another and forms our working memory.” Her pioneering studies show that when this circuitry breaks down because of, for example, fetal damage or substance abuse, our thinking gets derailed, and we’re easily distracted and confused. “The inability to keep a coherent line of thought is one of the cardinal symptoms of schizophrenia and other memory disorders like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and childhood attention-deficit disorder.”
Elizabeth Gould Professor of Psychology, Princeton University As a child, Gould wanted to be an artist, but she found “a great deal of creativity in science.” Her work has proved that the brain is not, as previously thought, full of a given number of cells that can never be replaced. Instead, throughout life, neurons sprout in the hippocampus, perhaps forging new memories, while others die from stress or wither from disuse. “Although I once was surprised to find that experience causes new neurons to grow, it makes perfect sense that the brain would evolve throughout life.”
Beatrice H. Hahn Professor of Medicine and Microbiology, University of Alabama at Birmingham About 70 years ago, a global pandemic that has claimed more than 60 million lives began after HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS in humans, jumped from chimpanzees to people. Hahn’s studies show that one subspecies of chimp—Pan troglodytes troglodytes, native to west central Africa—is the most likely natural reservoir of the virus. The “$50 million question,” she says, is why the chimps don’t appear to get sick. “The answer will provide critical clues as to why we do.”
Heidi Hammel Senior Research Scientist, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado Getting respect for the planet Uranus has become Hammel’s personal mission. “Textbooks describe Uranus as boring,” she says, “but that’s because the Voyager 2 probe flew by it during an uninteresting season.” Uranus is tipped on its side, with its rotation axis almost horizontal, so one half stays in total darkness and the other in total sunlight for up to 21 years at a time. “We are now seeing the northern hemisphere for the first time, and the seasonal changes are fascinating to watch.” She also keeps a close eye on Uranus’s cousin Neptune.
Lene Vestergaard Hau Professor of Applied Physics, Harvard University Hau was the first to bring light, which moves at a constant, breakneck pace of 186,282 miles per second in a vacuum, to a screeching halt. She did it within a cloud of sodium atoms cooled to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Although the beams of light can’t be seen under such conditions, their information is imprinted on the sodium cloud “as if we were writing a hologram. When we feel like it, we let them loose again and send them on their way,” says the physicist, who is trying to miniaturize the experiment.
Darleane C. Hoffman Professor of the Graduate School, University of California at Berkeley The very heaviest elements, those more massive than plutonium, are also the most elusive, with very short-lived stable states. Hoffman, who headed the team that first discovered plutonium 244 in nature, leads the search for those elements’ mysterious properties. Nuclear science, she points out, was started in large part by women, among them Marie Curie. “If anything, women were prominent because it wasn’t an established field, and so it was easier to break into.”
Kathleen Howell Professor of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Purdue University NASA and other space agencies have long relied on brute force—and a lot of fuel—to get spacecraft to their destinations. A more efficient technique, developed by Howell, plays off the unseen free energy in the solar system. “The gravity fields of the system’s different objects create natural pathways that a spacecraft can follow,” says Howell. The astronautical engineer and one of her grad students designed such a trajectory for NASA’s low-fuel Genesis probe, launched in 2001, which will collect samples of solar wind and return them to Earth in September 2004.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of California at Davis “All of my work is tied to the evolution of family relationships,” says the woman who started her career investigating why male langur monkeys sometimes kill the babies of other males (she found it’s an evolutionary strategy that increases their own reproductive success) and now focuses on infant care by parents and others. “Although I try to be objective in my science, what draws me to topics—female sexuality, maternal love, maternal ambivalence—is the need to understand something better about myself. ”
Shirley Ann Jackson President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute The second African American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics, Jackson says her science education informed her work as an administrator, first as chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now at Rensselaer: “I was educated to address complex problems by having an intuition about the answer and by learning to break the problems down into parts that can more easily be solved. So I view myself as both a visionary and a pragmatist.”
Deborah Jin Physicist, National Institute of Standards and Technology Jin’s colleagues first created the Bose-Einstein condensate, a super-cold new form of matter. She used magnetic traps and lasers to create a similar state with fermions. Fermion gas was teased down to less than one-third of a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, a temperature at which particles act like waves. The resulting quantum gas could shed light on how superconductors work. “These experiments,” Jin says, “are exploring the limits of how cold you can get in the lab.”
Mary-Claire King Professor of Medicine and Genetics, University of Washington School of Medicine As a grad student, King showed that chimpanzees and humans are 99 percent genetically alike. Fifteen years later, she proved that breast cancer can be inherited. She has used polymerase chain reactions and genetic sequencing to reunite kidnapped Argentinean children with their families and also identified the remains of Americans missing in action and war crimes victims in Bosnia. “The remarkable thing about genetics is that you use the same way of thinking to identify disappeared children and the genes responsible for inherited breast cancer.”
Susan Lindquist Director, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT “There is much more richness to biology and the biology of proteins than we’d ever previously believed,” says one of the world’s leading experts on prions, the misfolded proteins that cause mad cow disease. Her work has shown that, like DNA, proteins can carry inherited traits through generations. “It has been said that you can’t understand biology until you understand evolution. I would argue that you can’t understand evolution or biology until you understand protein.”
Barbara Liskov Professor of Engineering, MIT Liskov’s work in data abstraction in the 1970s paved the way for writing far more complex and subtle computer programs. She was also a key figure in the development of applications that run on distributed collections of computers connected by a network. Now she concentrates on Byzantine fault-recovery programs, which protect sensitive data from malfunction and malicious attacks.
Margaret A. Liu Vice Chairman, Transgene, Strasbourg, France HIV mutates so quickly that it can outmaneuver traditional vaccines made from viral proteins or weakened viruses. Worse, a vaccine made from a weakened virus could prove deadly if the virus mutated and regained virulence. Liu’s work has shown that DNA may offer “the hope of better, more stable vaccines that can be rapidly produced.” DNA injected as a vaccine might signal the body to churn out proteins that protect against HIV by provoking an immune response to the virus.
Jane Lubchenco Professor of Marine Biology and Zoology, Oregon State University Dubbed “Calamity Jane” by one critic, Lubchenco is fearful about the state of the earth: “The oceans and other ecosystems are in very serious trouble, and we need to think about, treat, and value them differently,” she says. Although her specialty is rocky, intertidal-zone communities of life, Lubchenco has done landmark work assessing the impact of the human footprint on Earth’s ecosystems and calculating the economic value of nature’s services.
Shannon W. Lucid Chief Scientist, NASA Although she is preoccupied with framing NASA’s scientific vision, this former astronaut would go back to space “this instant” if given the chance. Until last June, the biochemist held the American single-flight endurance record—188 days aboard the Russian Mir space station. She says the voyage was never boring: “I was living two seconds away from my laboratory, so I could wake up in the morning, think, ‘What kind of exciting science can I do today?’ and immediately get to work.”
Lynn Margulis Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts at Amherst “People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous,” says the evolutionist, who argues against the conventional wisdom commonly but incorrectly attributed to Darwin that random mutations lead to new species. “Darwin didn’t know how species originate,” says Margulis, who thinks new species evolve from the symbiotic merger of organisms. According to her widely accepted theory, the fusion of early bacteria gave rise to the first nucleated cells. Further mergers produced their chloroplasts, mitochondria, and other cellular structures.
Polly Matzinger Head, T-Cell Tolerance and Memory Section, National Institutes of Health Matzinger argues that the immune system doesn’t respond blindly to foreign invaders but to the alarm calls of injured tissue. Her “danger model” suggests new ways to treat cancer and sustain transplants, as well as immunize newborns: “A few scientists still aren’t listening, but I’m not going to do the work to make them. The evidence is there.” She is now studying how the body decides what type of immune response to mount once it has detected a threat.
Marcia McNutt President and Chief Executive Officer, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute The first woman to run a freestanding oceanographic institute in the United States, McNutt oversees a staff of more than 200. She has a gift for encouraging scientists and engineers to work together: “In that way, we’ve developed some of the world’s best instruments and platforms for deep-sea research,” she says. “If we got bigger, it might break down the collaborative nature of what we do.” Although administrative duties afford her little time for research, she still manages to study submarine hot spots.
Cherry Murray Senior Vice President, Bell Labs’ Lucent Technologies Murray stays “kind of busy” overseeing a staff of more than 150 scientists and developing the research strategy for Lucent Technologies. But she also manages to squeak out time for cutting-edge work on colloidal systems—suspensions of small particles that don’t settle or dissolve in a liquid. Her studies probe the mysteries of phase transitions, changes from one state of matter to another.
Adriana C. Ocampo Uria Planetary Scientist, European Space Agency In 1989, while examining satellite images of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, Ocampo Uria spotted the 130-mile-wide Chicxulub crater—the scar left behind by the asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. She continues to study the crater “to understand how this event could have not only caused a mass extinction but also how it affected the evolution of life.”
Mercedes Pascual Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan The complex systems models developed by Pascual help make sense of complicated, irregular cycles in ecosystems. Two years ago, the mathematical ecologist found that El Niño climate patterns can help trigger cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh. This summer, she and her colleagues compared cholera and climate records from the early 20th century with recent data and found that El Niño episodes have become more forceful drivers of disease outbreaks. It is the first quantitative evidence, she says, “for an effect of global climate change on an infectious disease.”
Maureen Raymo Research Associate Professor, Boston University The geologist’s controversial “uplift hypothesis” maintains that the rise of mountain ranges such as the Himalayas causes a reverse greenhouse effect and explains why Earth’s climate has chilled for 40 million years. She says “the weathering of mountain ranges scrubs CO2 out of the atmosphere, which can lead to global cooling. We have such a rudimentary understanding of the carbon cycle—which controls life on Earth—that anything we learn about it will help us understand future change.”
Janet Rowley Professor of Medicine, Division of Hematology and Oncology, University of Chicago Medical Center One afternoon in 1972, sitting at her dining room table studying images of the chromosomes of a leukemia patient, Rowley noticed that chunks from two chromosomes had swapped places. This swapping, or translocation, is now known to cause several forms of cancer. “It fuses together pieces of two genes that are normally far apart, creating a new gene that turns the cell malignant,” says the physician. “By knowing what those genes do, we can develop targeted drug treatments.” One, Gleevec, is already on the market.
Vera Rubin Senior Fellow, Carnegie Institution of Washington Rubin’s pioneering astronomy research suggests that some 90 percent of the universe’s mass remains unseen. She has watched galaxies spin and found that stars at the outskirts don’t creep slowly along as expected. Instead, they move quickly, pulled around by the gravity of dark matter. “If you are an observational astronomer,” she says, “it’s hard to study something that you cannot see, so we study things we can and hope they’ll lead us to a unique answer about what dark matter is. But we aren’t there yet.”
Geraldine Seydoux Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Johns Hopkins University Using the lowly worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, Seydoux is deciphering the earliest stages of development, when germ cells that become reproductive tissues first form—knowledge that’s crucial for understanding reproduction and may lead to cures for infertility. “This work also has a bearing on stem cells,” says Seydoux, “which of course have great therapeutic potential.”
Maxine Singer President, Carnegie Institution of Washington During her research career, this molecular biologist has investigated the organization of the human genome and helped draft the first safety guidelines for genetic engineering. Now, in addition to leading Carnegie, Singer has set up training courses for schoolteachers in Washington, D.C. “It is essential that children get science education when they are little, so they learn that science is fun and learn how to think about the natural world. By and large, teachers are just not equipped to do this.”
Susan Solomon Senior Scientist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration In 1986 Solomon decided to lead an expedition to Antarctica to investigate the newly discovered ozone hole over the continent. “I was a theoretician at the time and sat in my nice warm office with my keyboard. But I was young and foolish, and it sounded like a great adventure,” says the atmospheric chemist. Solomon’s research in Antarctica played a key role in proving that ozone loss was caused by man-made chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons.
Jill Tarter Director, Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, Mountain View, California “I have the best job in the world,” says the astronomer. “I get to use the tools of modern science and technology to try to answer a question humans have asked throughout history: ‘Are we alone?'” Tarter oversees construction of an array of 350 radio telescopes that will listen for a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. “While I keep champagne on ice, I realize it may be my granddaughter, or her granddaughter, who will succeed.”
Shirley Tilghman President, Princeton University Tilghman steals away to her molecular biology lab every Friday to study genetic imprinting, the strategy mammalian parents employ to further their competing reproductive interests. Tilghman says that fathers, “who have no investment in the nutrition of their offspring, want them as large as possible because large offspring survive better in the wild, while mothers want them smaller. So fathers silence genes that slow down growth, and mothers silence genes that promote growth. It’s like an arms race. What is optimum for the species is balancing those opposite inclinations.”
Patty Jo Watson Professor of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis For more than 2,000 years, Native Americans forayed into the deep chambers of Kentucky’s vast Mammoth Cave system. Watson has spent four decades tracking their movements and sifting through their refuse: charred bones, and the seeds, nuts, and other bits of food in paleo-fecal material, establishing the best qualitative and quantitative data for an early agricultural complex in North America. She says the caves “are a universe of their own, with almost inexhaustible research potential.” She has also helped introduce the scientific method into archaeological studies.
Sheila Widnall Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT Blow a smoke ring and notice that in calm air, it undulates gently. Those wiggles are termed the “Widnall instability,” and, by discovering them, this scientist rewrote the book on fluid dynamics. “People began seeing such structures everywhere and had to find ways to incorporate them into their models of turbulent flow,” she says. Former secretary of the Air Force, Widnall leads a program at MIT that searches for ways to improve the efficiency of the aerospace industry.
Terrie Williams Professor of Biology, University of California at Santa Cruz Although Williams studies the physiology of large predators, from cheetahs to killer whales, she specializes in marine mammals. Her innovative use of video cameras and computer modeling has offered unprecedented insights into the behavior of species previously unobserved in their daily routines. She has shown that dolphins and other marine mammals spend a lot of time gliding rather than swimming to reduce oxygen consumption. The finding solved the mystery of how they manage to stay underwater as long and dive as deeply as they do.
Flossie Wong-Staal Chief Scientist, Immusol, San Diego In 1985 molecular biologist Wong-Staal and her colleagues were the first to clone HIV-1 and create a map of its genes, which led to a test for the virus. Today she looks for new drugs to fight AIDS and other diseases. Her most recent strategy for combating HIV focuses on understanding genes in humans that help the virus enter cells and successfully infect a host. Attacking HIV directly has failed, she says, “because the virus is a moving target and can readily develop resistance.”
Maria Zuber Professor of Geophysics and Planetary Science, MIT Using laser ranging, gravity measurements, and data from spacecraft, Zuber maps surface features and probes the interior of Mars, Venus, Jupiter’s moons, and our own moon. Her goal is to “figure out the processes that acted on a particular body in the past in order to make its surface the way it is now.”
There are hundred of people more aligned with reality that I would far rather ‘spend an evening with.’ Dump her and do something rational instead. You can tell her I suggested it.
TFN, I am VERY disappointed in you. Did you not do your homework on Arianna Huffington?
Robert Huckabee: An amazingly impressive list! What a shame TFN could not have secured one of these esteemed scientists as speaker instead of Arianna Huffington. What a loser compared to anyone on your list!
Well, I think it’s cool that Arianna will be flying in on Deepak’s magic flying carpet. Think of the savings in air fare! Very fiscally responsible, TFN.
Too bad TFN couldn’t snag Judge Jones.
Not only does Ariana promote quackery, but the website routinely censors comments that are against the current crackpottery – such as the antivax lunacy. Even if the comment is not insulting, but does refer to factual evidence the original poster does not like, you can find your comment disappearing down the drain. This woman is against everything rational and scientific there is – don’t take her (current) stance against the Religious Right as a sign she is a friend to reason, or to school kids. She embodies politics and emotions over truth and facts. I’d expected better.
@Robert Huckabee: Ditto…. and bravo.
What they all said. Especially Mr. Huckabee. That list is just wow.
As a native Texan, otherwise sympathetic with the TFN’s aims, I am very disappointed with the choice of Arianna Huffington as a speaker. She does not represent rational opposition to the religious right.
Wow, I’m late to the party…. but I can hardly think of a worse choice to speak for TFN.
There may not be a person alive that does more, every day, to damage science in the media. Sure, she is left wing politically, but also an utter nutter.
Biggest mistake made by TFN…. ever.
Maybe a pledge drive could be started to get TFN to drop Huffington as a speaker. I’d sure pay more to see her dropped.
Is this a joke? Is this some kind of April fools gag? I need to know if TFN is really advocating having a speaker who is as much a purveyor of anti-science as religious creationism/creationist?
Sorry. this looks bad. Let’s try harder next time to evaluate the guests to the party. I know the cause is a good one, but the idea here is pretty gastly.
Here’s a suggestion to replace W00-Woo Ariana – THE MYTHBUSTERS.
Jamie and Adam would sure fill the seats.
Sorry guys…
I’m on your side in a big way, the the comments above are right on target. Using Huffington to promote truth and freedom is like using gasoline to douse the fire.
Dumb move guys.
At least it’s nice to see the comments are more sensible than the TFN.
They need to fire their event organiser and hire anyone of the comment-authors here instead.
TFN,
I’m very saddened by this choice of Arianna Huffington as a guest speaker for your 15th anniversary celebration.
I oppose the teaching of creationism and other superstitious beliefs, as well as the latest round of historical revisionism in schools not because they are far-right Republican, but simply because they are demonstrably factually incorrect. Children who are taught incorrectly and become accustomed to sloppy thinking and special pleading will face an uphill battle in an increasingly technological world to be able to astutely discern fact from fantasy, and be effective and productive members of society, having a direct economic impact. It matters not to me which party the negative influence comes from; it simply matters if it is correct or so ridiculously wrong that it would be laughable if it weren’t actually happening.
The Huffington Post is a hotbed of such muddled thinking. It doesn’t have to be merely pro-creationism or historically revisionist to be harmful; it is also harmful if it promotes anti-scientific nonsense, unproven medical treatments that either cause direct medical or financial harm, or indirectly in that it delays proper care and treatment. And amongst the myriad woo-pushers on the site, there is a large proportion of vaccine denialists on there, arguably the most dangerous of all of the anti-scientific, anti-reason-based nonsense being flung around today.
I really like the TFN and all that you have done through your tireless efforts to challenge the hegemony of Don McLeroy, Cynthia Dunbar, Terri Leo and their gang of reality deniers, but I am very dismayed that the corresponding behavior propagated by the HuffPo has been overlooked. Please reconsider.
You really should cancel and just deal with the fallout. Here’s an idea: Extend an invitation to PZ Myers and see if he’ll be her replacement. I bet he’d do it if he’s free. You probably already know he’s talking about this situation:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/04/tfn_makes_a_serious_tactical_e.php
Surely you jest… One of the biggest harms caused by the far right has been the infiltration of pseudoscience into public schools. And now you want to invite this pseudoscientist to remedy the problem? You’re just trading crap for crap. I expected better from the TFN, and I hope you will change your minds and regain my support.
why TFN why why
C’mon guys. You know TFN tries its best to do what is right. Unlike the Texas SBOE, which has made a living out of perpetual and unjustified failure, TFN can be allowed a human mistake every once in a while. Forgiveness y’all. Forgiveness.
By the way, just in case you were wondering, that weird accent of hers is Greek. It annoyed me for years until I was finally forced to look it up. The accent does not match the body—like Zsa Zsa Gabor speaking Chinese.
Speaking of public speakers. I would like to see TFN put on a public seminar with a panel of speakers (all nonfundamentalist Christian church ministers or academic theologians) who use their knowledge of the Bible and theology to debunk the Religious Right on everything from evolution to social studies to health care to Christian nation, and whatever else. Christian and nonChristian people need to know there is another side to the Religious Right arguments—a compelling side—a side David Barton and every other fundamentalist in Texas wants to keep hidden from the people of Texas. I say—let it all hang out and the Religious Right be da…
Having Huffington as a speaker is a tremendously bad idea unless she’s coming to announce her newfound opposition to woo.
Absent Huffington’s pending announcement of enlightenment (and remorse for use of HuffPo as a woo septic tank), TFN will deserve forgiveness for this error only if they cancel the booking.
Perhaps we should buy tickets (TFN is certainly worthy our money otherwise) and spend the evening asking very probing questions. One or two might be shown the door, but if a major fraction of the audience was in on it……
Seriously, this really should be cancelled. Please, bring in a pro-science speaker. Who’s next, Jenny McCarthy?
I’d like to say first of all I’m proud to see that I’m not the only one that objected. I wasn’t aware of the debate on her until I received an email on the 22nd asking me to join the party. And to PAY for the right to see someone that I despise, that stands against everything that I stand for.
I am a bit ashamed of TFN though, in spite of being proud of some of your members. The earliest posts here show objections as far back as April 5th but still you were ‘bragging’ about her at least as late as the 22nd.
I wish you had listened to the first objections raised. I wish even more that when I wrote an email in response to your email of the 22nd that you could have been bothered to reply. On the night of the 23rd I was forced to cancel my membership to your email list.
There’s still a lot of intelligent, capable people out there as is witnessed by how unified the opposition to her was. I just wish some of them had been running TFN instead of whoever actually is doing it. Until you stop trying to fight disinformation by offering another source of disinformation I can’t in good conscience support the organization. It’s your choice of course, I just wish I understood why. It makes no sense to me, why did you do it in the first place, and why did you ignore all of the objections? Why?