Science Education & Policy

When did it become okay for the media to be anti-science and anti-agriculture? A CBC news story over the weekend calls into question the research relationship between academics and industry. University of Saskatchewan professor Peter Phillips has had his reputation attacked by the CBC for email communications with his colleagues and former PhD student at Monsanto. Phillips has a stellar 20-year academic career researching, writing and publishing about innovation, particularly in its application within agriculture. Sadly this story didn’t develop due to the CBC’s high-quality…

The IARC monograph program on Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks must be reformed and brought into the 21st century – or it should be abolished The World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) monograph program is an outmoded cancer classification scheme that has remained fundamentally unchanged since the monograph program was established in the early 1970s. In the intervening 45 years, scientific understanding of cancer causation has deepened and provided decision makers with an evolving appreciation of how effects seen in laboratory animals should be used to…

This  post is intended for students in general chemistry class.                   To assess whether or not an original  knowledge is scientific, one should look into the process of acquiring it. This process is the scientific method.  Scientific method also provides a process in solving a problem. Thus, we can define scientific method as a systematic process of inquiry for knowledge or to solve a problem. It should be noted however, that science is broad. It covers natural and social sciences. Natural sciences usually use…

The time of year for standardized state testing has arrived and if you have school-age children, there’s no way to avoid this topic. Everyone has strong opinions when it comes to the issue of “opting out,” so how do you decide what’s best for your child?   To help you make the best decision for your child, let me debunk some common parental concerns when it comes to opting out: Will opting out spoil my child or teach them to avoid responsibility? No. State tests are not real life situations and many parents and educators feel they are poorly constructed and developmentally inappropriate…

President Trump says he came to Washington to “drain the swamp,” and now his administration is looking for wasteful programs to cut. A great start would be pulling the plug on numerous federal “research” programs that, frankly, have been captured by Washington special interests. In fact, much of taxpayer-funded research serves ideological agendas—especially environmental activism—at the expensive of legitimate scientific inquiry. Consider a few examples. Housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the most activist governmental entities:  the National Institute of…

After a successful Women's March to protest statements made by President Donald Trump about women in 2005, and other issues, a group of science advocates got the idea for a similar "Science March" to protest the President's restriction on use of social media by the Environmental Protection Agency. And ostensibly to support science. More on supporting science in a moment, but first the EPA. It is a special animal. While we have often applauded the work of career scientists there, it has become increasingly known in the last two decades that there are "two EPAs." One has been doing…

Last December I took on a new challenge.  I was asked to speak to a large Canadian audience of agricultural producers about climate change.  ‘Bout time I stepped into a controversial area.  I’m used to getting hassles and public records requests from lefty food activists that think my acceptance of scientific consensus in genetic engineering is dictated by multinational corporations. Now I can get hassles and FOIA requests from the multinational corporations that think my acceptance of scientific consensus in climate is dictated by lefty food activists. Good times. Like just…

Technology development and use is one of the distinguishing human characteristics. Throughout history, technological developments have led to new opportunities and problems as civilizations progressed through periods where work focused on agriculture, organizational structures, trade, industry, services, and knowledge work. However, increasing rates of technological change, as experienced in information technology, have led to major qualitative and quantitative changes within project and educational life cycles. Although productivity has improved, information technology advances have also…

The latest performance tables for secondary and primary schools in England have been released – with parents and educators alike looking to the tables to understand and compare schools in their area. Schools will also be keen to see if they have met a new set of national standards set by the government. These new standards now include “progress” measures, which are a type of “value-added measure”. These compare pupils’ results with other pupils who got the same exam scores as them at the end of primary school. Previously, secondary schools were rated mainly by raw GCSE results. This was…

Why Science is Worth Studying. Excerpts from a very good book - Rustic sounds and other studies in literature and natural historyby Sir Francis Darwin,  1917 I found this book by Sir Francis Darwin to be both an absorbing and easy read.  Good science combines well with light humour, and Sir Francis Darwin achieves this combination in a masterly fashion. The reference to 'boys' reflects the times of Sir Francis Darwin: it should now be read as 'boys and girls', of course. I think that we all, who study science, hope to be the first to discover some exciting new fact - "But in science…