Science Education & Policy

Children show a vastly improved ability to absorb knowledge when they are allowed to make some of their own decisions about what they want to learn. Testing, in other words, gets in the way – and worse. Indeed, as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation comes up for re-authorization this week President Obama has himself stated that testing should be cut down to “a bare minimum.” Testing was introduced by policymakers during the eighties as a way to measure how much kids were learning in classrooms. But now there is research that shows it is detrimental and that technology may offer…

Britain's House of Lords voted 280 to 48 to permit the use of three-person IVF - mitochondrial donation to prevent incurable mitochondrial diseases, which afflict around 4,000 children per year - on a case-by-case basis. On February 3rd, the UK House of Commons had already approved the exception to existing law. The technique has generated controversy because women with mitochondrial disease will be able to get a healthy mitochondrial DNA 'transplant' that would allow them to have children without fear of passing the disease along. To critics that is a slippery slope to 'designer babies'. In…

Will the FCC repeat past mistakes of regulating telecommunications as utilities? Shutterstock Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Tom Wheeler claims that his plan to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) under Title II of the 1934 Telecommunications Act is “rooted in long-standing regulatory principles.” That’s not necessarily a good thing. While the specifics differ by industry, economics research over the past half century has consistently found Title II-style regulation to be inefficient, harmful to innovation and, therefore, costly to society. The FCC is expected to vote…

If wind and solar companies want to continue to get government money, they should take a page out of the natural gas playbook - a new economic analysis found that just three state grants to support natural gas programs totaling $52.9 million generated $128 million in economic impact and 927 full-time jobs in 2014.  The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) administered the three grants: the Clean Transportation Triangle (CTT), the Alternative Fueling Facilities Program (AFFP) and the Texas Natural Gas Vehicle Program (TNGVP). The CTT and AFFP encourage the building of…

The discovery, development and approval of new drug treatments has been stymied. Bureaucracy, coupled with a short patent window and attorneys waiting to pounce, has led to increased interest in vaccines, which require a separate litigation process than just filing a lawsuit and collecting a settlement, or obscure diseases guaranteed to have high payouts - the home run strategy.  And the when the public is not reading about how an FDA-approved drug hurt someone, or reading how drug companies are paying off doctors to get prescriptions, they want every new drug to be generic the moment it…

Tobacco use has plummeted in the past few decades, due to high taxes, bans on advertising and generous contracts for public relations companies to vilify smokers - but there are still more than a billion people worldwide who regularly use tobacco, including many who purchase the products illicitly. Oddly, governments want to crack down on illicit cigarettes because they don't get the tax revenue from the products they tell people not to use, while they prepare more regulations on tobacco.  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration wants to tighten restrictions on tobacco products so they…

If you are a scholar and get on The Dr. Oz Show, you automatically become an expert in the minds of the public that watches The Dr. Oz Show - your peers might disagree. And when it comes to education "experts", it is hard to know if they are just reciting talking points created by education union lobbyists or even if they have a credible background in education and education policy, a new study suggests. We see experts who misrepresent American student test scores every time international standardized tests are taken, and it ends up being no surprise that the solution they advocate…

Advances in science are causing problems in courtrooms Petretei Despite what we see on television, forensic science is not always easy to understand or simple to convey to a jury, many of whom may not have studied science since they were in school. When a case fails in the courtroom, maybe because the scientist was inexperienced, or there were flaws in the science presented, it creates the potential for a miscarriage of justice – something to be avoided at all costs. This was illustrated recently in a violent crime case in the US when a court refused to grant admissibility to a particular…

The concepts of a single classroom study came about after my module, now a published book, Naming and Writing Simple Inorganic Chemical Formulas was piloted to see if modular instruction on inorganic no1menclature will work and eventually decide to implement the use of the said module with our students.Four (4) general chemistry teachers used the module as a self-study material for their students to learn inorganic compounds nomenclature. At the end of the semester, the teachers were asked about the module and the teachers affirmed its effectiveness. The study as a whole was not formally put…

David Bowie famously issued 'Bowie bonds'. Do artists have viable alternatives to copyright? EPA/Nils Meilvang Much of the creative work we value – whether it’s films, music, novels, or TV shows – requires a significant input of time and resources. The established method for raising the resources to fund such work is copyright – which gives creators an exclusive right to communicate their work to the public (with some small limitations). In its most familiar use, creators raise resources by selling copies of their work. The spread of computer technology that makes copying very cheap and easy…