Science Education & Policy

If we want to maximize creativity, tying cash to creative output is a bad idea. tanakawho/Flickr By Dan Hunter, Swinburne University of Technology Imagine you were asked to write a law that encouraged creativity. What would it look like? Whatever your answer, it’s pretty clear that it wouldn’t look like copyright. Which is weird, right? Because copyright is supposed to be the law that spurs creativity. The problem, it turns out, is that the central features of copyright are directly opposed to the things that support creativity. Creativity is a tricky thing to understand, and we have very…

Let 'er rip! Simon James, CC BY-SA By Siobhan Weare, Lancaster University Every year thousands of new laws are introduced. Some of these are well publicized and debated, such as the recent changes to the rules on pornography, but others slip under the radar. Many are quite important though, and affect all kinds of people. Here are just five of the laws introduced in 2014 that you may have missed. You might find they affect you after all. Tighter leash on dogs On May 13, changes to the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act came into force, in response to a number of high profile cases of dogs attacking…

Do doctors make too much money? It depends on who you ask. The public perception is that doctors now overcharge for services to account for the cost of government paperwork while government routinely picks a fee they will pay based on what doctors charge. And the government pays less for Medicaid than Medicare. What expanded dramatically under the Affordable Care Act? Medicaid. For simple procedures,  primary care and immunization services, a doctor treating a Medicaid patient has been paid 59 percent of what is paid by Medicare and this has meant a need to limit the …

Management students entering my thesis prep course without having been involved in research before, or taken a probability course, reliably make these mistakes. Many students go on to do empirical quantitative theses, meaning that their misconceptions about sampling and analysis will come back to bite them. For the benefit of future classes, and of alumni who need reminders: 1.    Random does not mean haphazard or accidental. Asked what ‘random’ means, students reply ‘no pattern,’ or something of that nature. Your sample ain’t random just because you say it’s random! Show how…

Though the U.S. government is touting claims that it has created an economic engine better than at any time in the 20th century, the reality is much different and a large part of the reason why Congress has lurched to the opposition party of U.S. President Barack Obama. If people have been unemployed for so long they can no longer get unemployment benefits, the government frames it as that they went back to work. And we have been engaged in a culture war on business, everything from nuclear energy and natural gas to manufacturing of every kind. Silicon Valley works because it came into…

What rising sea level? Peter, CC BY-SA By Mark Maslin,University College London There are many complex reasons why people decide not to accept the science of climate change. The doubters range from the conspiracy theorist to the skeptical scientist, or from the paid lobbyist to the raving lunatic. Climate scientists, myself included, and other academics have striven to understand this reluctance. We wonder why so many people are unable to accept a seemingly straight-forward pollution problem. And we struggle to see why climate change debates have inspired such vitriol. These questions are…

Everyone needs to understand the basics of science to participate fully in the democratic process. shutterstock. By Jonathan Garlick, Tufts University. Science isn’t important only to scientists or those who profess an interest in it. Whether you find fascinating every new discovery reported or you stopped taking science in school as soon as you could, a base level understanding is crucial for modern citizens to ground their engagement in the national conversation about science-related issues. We need to look no further than the Ebola crisis to appreciate the importance of science literacy. A…

In all of the money and outreach trying to convince more Americans to become scientists, what is most often left out is we train lots of scientists that we then force to return home, where they become competitors to America. The origin of the student visa versus work visa problem we now face was a cultural mythology that was created, stating that companies would somehow pay foreign STEM graduates less, in defiance of state laws, federal laws, and ethics, unless they were forced to hire U.S. citizens. Because of that, union lobbyists got the American work visa process tightened up, in the…

A longitudinal study has found that while higher income children eat worse at school, low-income kids eat healthier than at home. While the political controversy rages over federal efforts to manage local school lunch programs, more data on who has actually been helped by the program over time is needed.  The results in Preventive Medicine showed that fruit and vegetable intake was higher among low income adolescents on days when they consumed meals at school. The opposite was true for high income adolescents who consumed fewer fruits and vegetables when school was in session,…

Reductions in government healthcare spending in the European Union (EU) increase maternal mortality rates, suggests a new paper in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG). Maternal mortality is defined as the death of a woman during pregnancy, childbirth, or within 42 days of delivery from direct obstetric causes.  The new analysis looked at the association between reductions in government healthcare spending and maternal mortality across the European Union (EU) over a 30 year period, from 1981 to 2010, based on data from the World Health…