Science Education & Policy

Since science is both corporate and political in the modern era (the private sector and government each fund about half of basic research in the U.S.), if you defend science you are implicitly defending corporations and engaging in politics. Whether you think one or the other is superior or more ethical is likely based more on how you vote than anything impartial. That was not always the case but Ernest Lawrence, whose name is now on both Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, ushered in the era of academic Big Science by understanding that if you did what…

This activity for undergraduate students research course aimed to test students' initial understanding of their research plan. It is expected to help them reflect further on their research topic so they may have a good grasp of their research plan.                 After discussing with the students the characteristics of a good research topic in class,  I asked them to come up with a research topic on their own, as an assignment.  The following meeting, my students were ready to submit their chosen research…

The Foundation for Economic Education, with the inevitable acronym FEE, aims to “promote new content and distribution techniques for free-market ideas.” Fee has “distilled ‘economic thinking’ into 12 key concepts.”  Let’s pray that the “distribution” fails and these concepts never reach America’s classrooms, because they’re all… well… wrong. FEE’s words in plaintext, with my rejoinders in italics: 1. Gains from trade: In any economic exchange, freely chosen, both parties benefit–at least in their own minds. This is psychological thinking, not economic thinking. The subtle implication…

While responsible people work to stave off humanity’s ecological suicide, many young nerds write unimportant apps to do “things their mothers used to do for them.” The Elon Musks of the world – those who prepare for the long game while financing it with innovative products for today’s market – are so rare as to be anomalies.  Today’s entrepreneurial scene suffers from a sick venture capital industry, a number of imponderable illogics, and, maybe, misplaced adulation from students and the public. Symptoms include:  “Frat-boy” start-up cultures that waste money and denigrate women…

This is yet another example of how outrageously bad Google News is when it comes to astronomy. I get asked this rather often, whether Earth is endangered by some distant planet or galaxy or black hole, by children or adults who have read stories in the sensationalist press that appear in Google News. This is a particularly outrageous one so I thought it would help highlight the issue to write a post about it here. To anyone scared by the story who is reading this - short summary, this planet is far away, orbiting a distant star and is not the slightest risk to Earth. Remember, children as…

If scientists and journalists want the politicization of science to stop, they have to be part of the solution, even if a guy they didn't vote for is in power. But now that he is, all the talk about "depoliticizing science" has been exposed as the farce that we always knew it was. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is run by a lawyer, Scott Pruitt, who in Oklahoma successfully challenged one of the sillier agendas during the Obama administration: the effort to support President Obama's tens of billions of dollars in solar and wind subsidies by penalizing natural gas. The president did…

A new paper claims that guns are only involved in 5 percent of suicide attempts but are 50 percent of suicide deaths. Despite everyone claiming to want to be data-driven about gun deaths, few are and this is no exception.   The activist group Americans for Responsible Solutions, founded by a Congresswoman who was shot by a criminal, says they want to enact waiting periods, for example. Those already exist. They advocate for Smart Gun technology, which sounds great. But it doesn't work. iPhone X users are about to learn how poorly supposedly Smart technology works. It's why no police…

The Trump administration is regularly accused by green activists in media as being opposed to science, but only the science they accept. On one recent policy decision the opposite is true and EPA is taking a stand against junk science by greens who had been unchecked before. That decision is related to the pesticide chlorpyrifos. Back in March, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt denied an activist petition to ban chlorpyrifos because it was being pushed based on a single study that lacked concrete data. It wasn't even toxicology or biology, it was instead just epidemiology - statistical…

President Donald Trump spent a great deal of his early days in the White House rolling back decisions made by his predecessor. That is the usual political stuff; President Barack Obama also did it to President George W. Bush. But there is one science policy initiative Trump has not touched so far — and shouldn't. That beneficial policy relates to modernizing how genetic alteration of organisms is approved. Currently, multiple agencies need to sign off on products that can prevent diseases or kill pests. The Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology, passed in 1986 and slightly…

Solar energy, with tens of billions in subsidies to keep it afloat, now employs more people than the fossil fuel alternative it is irrationally pitted against in media - coal.  Solar panels are fine for elites, just like organic food is - but like with organic food we shouldn't manipulate data to match our belief system. Unlike organic food, solar employment would collapse the minute the government-mandated cushion dries up, just like ethanol or wind, and the new administration is looking at money as money, not as ideology. When it comes to money as money, coal still generates it with 20…