Word: scientist
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Sweeps even has its own terminology: "stunt casting", which pulls a high-profile star in for a short cameo or story arc. In 2003, former Superman Christopher Reeve briefly appeared on Smallville in 2003, playing a scientist examining the young Clark Kent. A show "jumps the shark" when its ratings stunts smack of desperation. The phrase was inspired by a a three-part Happy Days special in 1977 in which Fonzie jumped over a shark pen on water skis; fans point to it as the specific moment the show started its decline. (Jumpingtheshark.com is devoted to analyzing ratings stunts...
What's the problem? For starters, Levitt and Dubner begin their chapter on climate change by citing the concerns over the risk of global cooling, which were held briefly by some scientists in the early 1970s - that's a common trope for climate contrarians, who say that if concerns over cooling turned out to be false, maybe the same thing will come of the current worries over global warming. They go on to question the accuracy of today's climate models, and by extension, whether we should really be concerned about potentially catastrophic temperature increases over the coming century. They...
Levitt makes for an awfully diffident imperialist. When half of this year's economics Nobel went to a political scientist, he wrote that "the prize is moving toward a Nobel in social science, not a Nobel in economics." But his belief in the power of economic methods remains strong. "For me, being anchored in the data is the most important thing," Levitt says. "It's about applying data in an unemotional way to emotional issues...
...which showed up this year in Moon and Surrogates. Plus the literal underclass and upper-class strata of WALL•E. And not to forget the bereft father, twisted by family tragedy, from last week's Law Abiding Citizen. "If you lose your son like this," a fellow scientist tells Dr. Tenma, "and you don't go crazy, you're not a human being." Tenma doesn't plot the ingenious murders of everyone in Metro City, the way the father does in Law Abiding Citizen; he simply, and more plausibly, averts his heart from the child he has created, because...
...being debated in Congress. If that error in calculation goes unfixed, a future increase in biofuel use could end up backfiring and derailing efforts to control global warming, according to the paper. "Biofuels can be an important part of the portfolio of climate-change activities," says Steve Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund and a corresponding author on the second Science paper. "But we have to make sure we incentivize the right way, or we could end up with perverse outcomes." (Watch a video about the environmental cost of biofuel in Indonesia...