Science Education & Policy

Friends of the Earth, an activism group generally devoted to impeding science and progress, is excited that the Texas Clean Energy Project, a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Texas, has support from the Department of Energy that is set to expire. And fiscal hawks are right there with them, as part of the Green Scissors coalition. They want the Department of Energy to permanently withdraw funding from the facility after suspending it in February. What will Secretary Dr. Ernest Moniz do? I think it's obvious. The Obama administration is stuffed with anti-science activists, and his…

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has already been caught releasing proposals for early commentary to environmental trial lawyers and even republished Sierra Club talking points about Keystone XL, making them officially from the Obama administration. You may not be surprised. The modern EPA is stuffed with former environmental activists, being at Union of Concerned Scientists is practically a shoe-in for a government job during the last seven years. Yet those clearly conflicted EPA officials have never recused themselves from decisions, even when being lobbied by their…

A YouGov poll found that anti-GMO beliefs are a sign of being less educated. It is something the science community has always known but organic industry trade groups such as Organic Consumers Association, U.S. Right To Know, and SourceWatch try to claim the opposite - that the customers of their clients are super-smart. Ironically, for their strong affiliation with socialist groups such as DemocracyNow!, the rationale for claiming organic industry shoppers are smarter is because they are wealthier. It is clever use of population-level statistics to get people to spend more for your product…

These tips will help researchers for whom English is a second language, and who work at universities and research institutes where the international publishing culture is still young. The tips cover content, selecting a journal, writing, proofing and editing, and dealing with reviewer comments. I imagine that you are under pressure to publish in prestigious journals. Perhaps you have sent papers to the journal I edit, Technological Forecasting&Social Change, which is an SSCI-indexed journal with an impact factor of more than 2.0, and thus attractive in the eyes of your dean…

I was enthralled by reading the latest post by Greg Kotkowski on the Amva4NewPhysics blog. He has something to teach us all about how we should be rational and use our knowledge to address everyday problems, rather than follow the groupthink and be driven to take irrational measures.Have a look at it and let me know if you liked it!

Video games are a favorite activity of children, yet any affect on their health is often perceived to be negative. A new paper in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology looked for an association between the amount of time spent playing video games and children's mental health and cognitive and social skills, and found that playing video games may have positive effects on young children.  After adjusting for child age, gender, and number of children, the researchers found that high video game usage was associated with a 1.75 times the odds of high intellectual functioning and 1.…

The issue is not new. Scientific journals require articles to produce quantitative answers - of course, that's how you do science. And scientists usually rely on a formalism based on classical statistics to report those results: they report the probability of their data given some hypothesis. P-values, that is. In general, whenever you are measuring a unknown quantity, be it the mass of the top quark or the correlation between chocolate consumption and the rate of Nobel prizes in your country, you have a choice to make: you can use a Classical (aka "Frequentist") formalism or a Bayesian one.…

“For those of us who believe in science,you simply cannot ignore what the scientific community is saying almost unanimously.”             That tweet from presidential candidate Bernie Sanders could have made me #FeelTheBern. I’m a progressive and, at least if you believe the methodology of ISideWith.com, I side with Senator Sanders 95% of the time. I’m also a science advocate and I want to vote for a presidential candidate who both respects scientific expertise and wants to advance evidence-based policies. In our current “death of…

A new study reports that current rising temperatures already noticeably load the 'climate dice', with growing practical impacts. As a bottom line, lead author D. James Hansen argues in Environmental Research Letters that a carbon fee is needed to spur replacement of carbon fuels with clean energy. Why won't this make anti-science groups like Greenpeace and Union of Concerned Scientists happy? Hansen believes nuclear energy is part of the broad solution to less fossil fuels, which flies in the face of modern environmentalism, which dislikes nuclear and natural gas. The scholars plotted the…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program has widely varying effects on students, according to a series of studies released jointly by the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas and the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University. The studies address the effects of the Louisiana voucher program on the achievement and non-cognitive skills of voucher recipients, as well as broader effects on school segregation and public school students. It is the first evaluation to examine such a wide range of outcomes, or to consider the effects over the first two…