Science Education & Policy

The following outlines the steps of a proposed research flow for technical engineering students: I. Situational analysis – this includes needs assessment and rationale of the project study. II. Statement of the Problem - this specifies the problem that emerged in the situational analysis. III.Benchmarking – this includes literature search and actual accounts/observations of similar problems and their solutions. Solutions include specifications. IV. Proposed Solution – This is an innovative solution that may arise from benchmarking or from the researcher’s theories. V. Design and…

Over 700 women in the US die per year from (sometimes unknown) causes that involve pregnancy or childbirth and the same Republican Congress we are often told doesn't care about pregnant women just devoted $60 million to finding out why it's happening. Good for them.  The bill defines a "pregnancy-associated death" as death while pregnant or with a year after. A  "pregnancy-related death" is while pregnant or within a year after from any cause related to the pregnancy unless it's accidental.  It still needs to go through the Senate before the end of their session but that money…

The North American Free Trade Agreement won't see its 25th birthday. The United States, Canada, and Mexico have signed on the dotted line for its replacement, The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement. The debate fell outside usual positions. Free trade is the hallmark of Republicans, they say, but they seemed to be unhappy with NAFTA. Democrats, in the old days, were protectionist about American workers, yet their criticisms suggested they wanted to keep manufacturing jobs in Mexico and for Canadian farmers to have a good deal in the U.S. while America got penalized in Canada. What gives?…

A new analysis links urban planning decisions - the freeways and local schools outside cities that made the suburbs possible - from decades past as why right-wing populism exists.  They created their correlation by looking at voting trends up to 2010 in in the Toronto area and matched them to people moving out of the city. As the desire for a yard and a house increased, politicians began to consider people who want more comfort and convenience. And now a humanities scholar contends those people are now right-wing populists, in a creepy kind of left-wing frame, but the reason…

Many trial lawyers hoping for new revenue streams suing over increased regulations woke up disappointed Wednesday morning, as were politicos and journalists hoping for a stern rebuke of President Trump.  There was no Green Wave, nor was there a Blue one. Yes, Democrats won back the House but for a mid-term election with members retiring that was so predictable no major poll had it any other way. The change instead was downright mild. In 1994, President Clinton got hit far worse, as did President George W. Bush in 2006 and especially President Obama in 2010. By comparison, President Trump…

The midterm elections are widely expected to usher in this century’s “year of the woman” – an explosion of women entering government. Massachusetts will likely elect its first black woman to Congress, Arizona is poised to send its first woman to the U.S. Senate, and fully 50 percent of Democratic congressional nominees this year are women. But California – a policy trendsetter that in 1993 became the first state to be represented simultaneously by two women in the U.S. Senate – won’t be making history this year when it comes to women. All of California’s 53 House seats are on the ballot,…

So you're planning ahead for your next trip to a remote location, and you try to make sense of those TripAdvisor listings. Great tool - there's a bunch of there around, but let's focus on that one here. It allows you to type in your preferences, location, restrictions, and it dumps a list of facilities together with easy access to the reviews of previous customers. How could we possibly live without it, twenty years ago?Now, the point of this article is to make sure you can USE the data you are able to get on the web. I use to say "there's not such a thing as too much information", but then I…

One hundred years after the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918, global health leadership stands at a crossroads. The United States continues to expand its policy of isolationism at a time when international cooperation in health could not be more important. The state of pandemic preparedness and the necessary steps for protecting the people throughout the world was the topic of The Scowcroft Institute for International Affairs’ 2nd Annual White Paper. As pandemic policy scholars, with two of us spending the majority of our career in the federal government, we believe that it is essential to…

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is part of the World Health Organisation, which is part of the United Nations, but it is really its own agency that shares little in common with WHO. Whereas WHO wants to save lives, IARC has taken to using statistics to scaremonger trace chemicals by conflating hazard and risk. So if high doses, 10,000 exposures of a chemical all at once, might be linked to cancer by looking at statistics, their flawed methodology, where five orders of magnitude are considered equal, will cause them to declare even 1 exposure a hazard.  And though…

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) branch of the United Nations has added 24 new sites to the World Network of Biosphere Reserves, bring the total number to 686.Biosphere reserves are sites hoping to couple conservation of biodiversity and human activity by promoting use of natural resources - which is a fuzzy term for fuzzy sustainable development practices. The new biosphere reserves are (in alphabetical order of countries): Arly (Burkina Faso) – Situated in the West African savannah, this biosphere reserve presents a wide variety of natural…