Detective Deirdre Mengedoht was killed when a truck crashed into her police cruiser on Christmas Eve. Some local news outlets experienced difficulties covering the story. Read the rest “Fallen officer honored”

Republicans withdrew Trump's favored legislative plan to replace Obamacare on Friday, understanding that they lacked the votes to pass it in the House of Representatives. This despite the president's threat to leave Obamacare as law of the land if they did not give the American Health Care Act an up-or-down hearing today.

The GOP bill—a comically mangled "Obamacare Lite" stripped of everything people like about the original and little that they don't—held only a 17% public approval rating, according to a Quinnipiac poll. It attempted to please both conservatives, who want unfettered profitability for insurance companies, and GOP moderates, who are wary of killing quite so many poor people as this would entail.

Trump, however, made clear that he isn't blaming House Speaker Paul Ryan for its failure.

"I don't blame Paul," Trump tells me

— Robert Costa (@costareports) March 24, 2017

Run, Paul. Run!

Update:

The GOP's health care bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Health Care Act was scheduled for a House vote today, but was withdrawn just before. In an address, Speaker Paul Ryan said "we were close, but not quite there" and said that the United States would be living with Obamacare "for the foreseeable future."

Plane tickets never bought, EPs never recorded, mobile apps never to be made mobile, Kickstarter is littered with them. Now, Kickended tracks all of these projects into one sad repository.

With 8700 completely unfunded Kickstarters to sort through, the site gives you the choice of random campaigns or the whole depressing archive. It offer no commentary, because why heap abuse on people who've already seen their dreams crumble to dust? I don't even want to share my favorites because it almost feels meanly voyeuristic. While there are a number of dopes who just want people to buy them things with no return, there are also the well-intentioned yet clueless who imagined money would pour forth effortlessly, as well as your garden variety weirdos. And all that separates the dopes, clueless, and weirdos from the successful is about ten grand of other people's money.

Kickended [Silvio Lorusso] Read the rest “Kickended tracks completely unfunded Kickstarter projects”

Here's an issue we don't talk about enough. Every year, peer-reviewed research journals publish hundreds of thousands of scientific papers. But every year, several hundred of those are retracted — essentially, unpublished. There's a number of reasons retraction happens. Sometimes, the researchers (or another group of scientists) will notice honest mistakes. Sometimes, other people will prove that the paper's results were totally wrong. And sometimes, scientists misbehave, plagiarizing their own work, plagiarizing others, or engaging in outright fraud. Officially, fraud only accounts for a small proportion of all retractions. But the number of annual retractions is growing, fast. And there's good reason to think that fraud plays a bigger role in science then we like to think. In fact, a study published a couple of weeks ago found that there was misconduct happening in 3/4ths of all retracted papers. Meanwhile, previous research has shown that, while only about .02% of all papers are retracted, 1-2% of scientists admit to having invented, fudged, or manipulated data at least once in their careers.

The trouble is that dealing with this isn't as simple as uncovering a shadowy conspiracy or two. That's not really the kind of misconduct we're talking about here. Read the rest “Fraud, failure, and FUBAR in science”

I love both the idea and the lessons behind this project writer Mike Adamick took on with his daughter during her winter break from kindergarten.

Emmeline wanted to know what life was like underwater for the crabs she and her dad caught in San Francisco Bay. So the two of them brainstormed and figured out a way to answer her question. Together, they built a "crab cam," using an iPhone attached to a crab net.

The results were underwhelming.

But here's the awesome thing. Instead of throwing in the towel, Mike used the experience as a way of showing his daughter was scientific inquiry is really like. Sometimes, your experiments don't work. And, when that happens, you go back to brainstorming, figure out how to improve the experiment, and try again. Because that's the awesome thing about science: Even failure teaches you something.

In the end, Mike and Emmaline were able to improve their experiment, and Mike turned the whole thing into a really sweet and funny video. Great work!

Video Link Read the rest “The crab-cam: Charming video of father-daughter science project”