Science Education & Policy

In the 1990s, utility regulations promised to do for electricity what it had done for airline travel and telephone calls - reduce costs by 90 percent for consumers. California instead did what government had done to cable television costs; used over-regulation so that only the largest companies could survive the political phalanx they created. In the early 2000s, a California Governor was recalled because he refused to use an executive order to mitigate the energy crisis government over-regulation had created. PG&E, the largest government-chosen utility, was banned from owing its power…

You may not know it, but the US Department of Agriculture does; if there is detection of an antibiotic in an animal off to the processing plant, the entire railcar full will be destroyed. On the other hand, if you never use antibiotics for a sick animal, you are being inhumane and jeopardizing a whole herd. Yet it has become common in this century for premium food marketing executives to sign off on ridiculous claims like they are “raised without antibiotics” while, like "grass-fed" and "free-range", shielding themselves because legally it is a simple marketing designation, as with "certified…

With the development of the new generation of large language models (ChatGPT, Bard, etcetera) we are seeing the first hints of an accelerating pace in the progress of artificial intelligence. These innovations may turn out to be good for humanity (with all problems we have already identified, bias, misinformation, work displacement, etc.), but their possibly exponential (and more-than-exponential) rate of change is something we cannot fathom, and is in and of itself the source of large risks.As my friend David Orban likes to put it, these are "jolting technologies" - jolt is the third…

What often-debilitating condition affects up to 75 percent of women and has long been ignored by the US healthcare system? The answer is uterine fibroids. The neglect disproportionately affects black women, who are younger at onset, have more severe symptoms, and are more likely to require surgery and hospital stays. The secret scandal is that, while there is a minimally invasive fibroid treatment option, most doctors only offer their patients complex, invasive surgical procedures such as hysterectomies. These procedures require up to six weeks of recovery time and end the patient’s…

In the early days of changes in laws to products like alcohol, some people below the new legal threshold were still able to get it. It was impossible to arrest everyone selling illegally, and there was a certain freedom argument many made, i.e. why can I shoot a Nazi in Europe but not buy a beer in the US? That's where e-cigarettes are now. A decade ago, while valuable for smoking cessation and harm reduction in smokers, it was also the Wild Wild West in retail. All they had to do was buy a 50-gallon vat of liquid nicotine and sketchy merchants could set up shop near a school. And too many…

I) An article recently published in Nature concludes that the percentage of disruptive scientific findings and patents is much lower than it was a few decades ago. The term “disruptive” designates something groundbreaking that abruptly changes a trend; the opposite of “disruptive” is “continuist,” which means to maintain the concepts without changing anything essential in our understanding of things. Is anyone surprised by this? In the article referred to, a paper is considered “disruptive” when it changes the citation dynamics and is more frequently cited within a certain time…

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a great deal of weakness in the federal government's ability to control, much less prevent, any diseases at all. The concern had grown during the last decade, when it began to take 6 weeks for CDC to inform the public that lettuce was tainted with E. coli but found time to invent concerns like prediabetes and a vaping epidemic. When another coronavirus pandemic broke out, the third in 17 years, the government was so in love with its own bureaucracy they refused to send out COVID-19 testing kits early on until a hospital proved to the CDC that the patient needing…

During the Trump administration, it was discovered that the Obama administration had let Chinese efforts to manipulate US academics go unchecked while highlighting that the Russian government was funding domestic environmental groups in order to subvert US national gas and agriculture - energy and food being Russia's chief exports to Europe. Sure enough, once Russia had blocked out the US - science bad in Europe, solar good - they turned the screws in Ukraine knowing France and Germany were too reliant on "organic" food and conventional energy from their eastern neighbor to do anything more…

Open letter to Space Colonization Enthusiasts. It is natural for enthusiasts who are keen on space colonization to think we need no protection for Earth. After all settlers on Mars in science fiction stories rarely run into issues. Even when they find life on Mars, somehow it is never hazardous for Earth. However science fiction is a product of the author’s imagination and is never predictive. Even hard sci. fi. gets some things right and some things wrong. But we are in a world now where what used to be science fiction is becoming reality and it may not be quite as the visionaries saw it.…

Policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) have increasingly led to the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. Here we put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression, many of them in scientific environments. The last 30 years have witnessed radical changes in academia. The politics and ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) have gradually come to influence or even dominate what can be talked about, researched and taught at…