Science Education & Policy

If a doctor declares that they are going to another country on vacation to provide free medical care, they get a great deal of social currency from that. Ask a San Francisco doctor to travel to rural California to do the same and you'll be dismissed. A new article suggests paying them. It is not that rural doctors are bad, there just are not enough. In a heavily-regulated, high-tax, litigation-run state like California, it is hard for rural doctors to charge affordable prices and stay in business. Inability to create a product your neighbors can afford is not exclusive to doctors. America has…

This is a companion piece to “Enough: Toward A Sustainable Economics”  https://www.science20.com/fred_phillips/enough_toward_a_sustainable_economics-256755. Economic theory has centered on achieving efficiency. My own original field of Operations Research similarly focused on optimizing. Both “efficient” and “optimal” can be translated as getting the most bang for the buck. The most output for the least input. My earlier article proposed satisficing as an alternative to optimizing. Today we’ll look at flexibility and resilience as alternative ideals of economic performance. Why? Because…

Once per year, America goes through cultural spasms over international standardized tests. One group says only more money for government union employees will fix it while another claims young people are just dumber today while another claims that only dismantling education will restore America to its former glory. They all claim they are being critical because they care; "it's for the children." It really isn't, it is just politics. Sorry Boomers, you didn't lead the world in standardized tests. Neither did you, Gen X. Standardized tests were not your thing either, Millennials. They undermine…

The Joint Task Force between the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology have released two new guidelines for allergic reactions. The new recommendations are that calling an ambulance after use of an epinephrine auto injector  is not required if the patient experiences prompt and complete, and response to treatment. Paramedics should be called  for severe anaphylaxis, symptoms that do not resolve promptly, or nearly completely, or symptoms that return or worsen. The recommendation remains not to give…

The Israel-Gaza war touched off chaos on U.S. campuses. In a dramatic but frustrating session, a Congressional panel grilled the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn about their policies on student speech and behavior. Asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) whether advocating genocide would be a violation of university policy, Harvard’s president answered, “It can be, depending on the context.” This mush-mouthed nonsense, delivered apparently on advice of counsel, earned scorn for the Harvard prez, and a fist-pump for Stefanik. The other two presidents, and their lawyers, came off no better.…

When a pandemic is happening in real time, it's only possible to know in hindsight what was a successful mitigation strategy, what was hype to help a presidential candidate, or even what was suppressed for geopolitical interests. There is no question mitigation was good, but political and corporate media pressure to keep the world locked down and terrified into 2022 was always immunologically suspect. Many lives their lost due to the pandemic, some lost their lives because it was suggested people should not seek medical care due to imagery of COVID bodies stacked in parking lots, but a whole…

With rampant inflation, an economy whose only baffling bragging right is that it gained back 80 percent of the jobs lost since the Biden administration began, and mortgage rates increasing the most since Jimmy Carter was president, calls are on to subsidize more housing for the poor. It is an equity and equality mandate, proponents argue, but American Housing Survey data show otherwise. People are choosing to live in more expensive areas, even if the quality of living will be lower. Latino subsidized renters pay $110 more per month than white subsidized renters, while Black renters pay $75…

We're no longer surprised that so many people bow down to the Invisible Hand of economics, worshipping its messenger coins and notes, and attending its oracles, the Wall Street analysts. Adam Smith, the 18th-century originator of the invisible hand metaphor, took pains to affirm its workings should be tempered by moral considerations and should not be interpreted as the will of God. Those emphases have been lost. People who interpret the metaphor in supernatural terms, despite hearing that “You can’t take it with you,” thus appear to believe they can take it with them – amassing more…

If a school doesn't have a strong sports program, universities that have seen faculty and administrative salaries skyrocket have used the unlimited student loan debt program created in the late 1980s to fund growth. Yet a few years prior to that, a science fundraising option had also been made available. In 1980, Democrats passed the Bayh-Dole Act and it reversed long-standing policy that if a discovery was made using taxpayer-funding, it could not be privately monetized. It became possible for scientists who did applied work to start a company or sell a patent so a corporation even if the…

A crippling flaw in much epidemiology is that it takes survey results as truthful and then seeks to correlate that to some benefit or harm. It's why epidemiologists said butter was bad and trans fats were good, until butter was good and trans fats were bad. If you were gullible enough to buy quinoa, teff, or any other superfood, some influencer you believed had an epidemiology paper on their side. Guns and abortions are a lot more polarizing than food so the chances of getting the truth are even less. If government wants to restrict it or ban it, people who worry about that are not going to…