Science Education & Policy

At UN climate change negotiations, human rights is increasingly the focus. 350.org, CC BY-NC By Matthew Nisbet,  Northeastern University Senior officials representing nearly 200 countries will gather in Lima, Peru today for the final stages of United Nations-led climate change talks. The meetings, which began December 1, are intended to lay the final groundwork for a major international agreement to be reached a year from now in Paris, France. Key issues, however, continue to divide countries. The US prefers that nations make non-binding commitments to lowering greenhouse gas emissions,…

Psychology lacks the methodological rigor of science, but bold claims are popular in corporate media and so they become paper of consumer belief. One recent popular claim is that being bilingual is a cognitive advantage. The claims are so popular that you will have a hard time getting published in psychology journals if you debunk them.  Writing in Psychological Science, scholars suggest that publication bias in favor of positive results of the bilingual-advantage  hypothesis are skewing the overall literature on bilingualism and cognitive function. Whenever publication bias…

A new article  in the Georgia Law Review details the relationship of two U.S. Supreme Court cases, their impact on freedom of expression, and how they relate to blogging and citizen journalism. Corporate journalists have long held that they have rights that prevent them from being penalized for their work - Rolling Stone magazine recently engaged in sloppy journalism about a rape allegation. They did no fact checking, interviewed no one except the person alleging there was a crime, and yet ruined smeared college students at a fraternity without hesitation. Those young men have little…

If you ask a female doctor why she didn't go into physics, she is not going to tell you it's because there are more men in physics and that is intimidating. Instead, she will say it's because she wanted to help people or she liked medicine. Yet a number of sociological claims insist she doesn't really know why she chose not to go into physics, and it may instead be because of subtle self-bias or stereotype threat.  Can you just ask people and get an honest answer? It depends. The federal government has spent billions of dollars trying to get women and certain minorities into Science,…

If you have talked to ranchers or people who live near wolves about being able to shoot them without landing in prison with a mandatory Federal jail sentence, the response is clear: Wolves have to be controlled. If you talk to urban activists or people who hike on state game lands a few weekends a year, wolves are cute and anyone who shoots one should go to jail. Yet that is not the real issue, according to the authors of a new paper that used surveys as their evidence. They believe the reason for the rancor is fear of wolves or the urge to care for canis lupis. It's simply social…

Physician attitudes towards mental illness can reflect the general public's prejudice. Dariush M/ Shutterstock By Adam Brenner, UT Southwestern Medical Center Mental illness is a major public health problem in the United States. Suicide alone takes the lives of 38,000 Americans each year, more than double that from homicide. Medical and surgical patients who also have mental illness often experience worse outcomes. And yet, in the face of these glaring challenges, we struggle with an ongoing shortage of psychiatrists. Psychiatry, as it happens, is not a popular specialty among medical…

Credit: EU By David Glance, University of Western Australia The Parliament of the European Union last week voted to call on member states and the European Commission to investigate the operation of search engines in Europe to ensure “a balanced, fair and open Internet search structure”. Although the official text of the resolution doesn’t mention Google specifically by name, the message was clearly aimed at the company that claims 93% of the European search market. The Parliament called on the EC to “consider proposals aimed at unbundling search engines from other commercial services”. The EU…

Diet is not only a matter of personal choice. Clay Caviness, CC BY-ND By Stanley Blue, University of Manchester and Elizabeth Shove, Lancaster University Diseases linked to smoking tobacco, a lack of exercise, drinking alcohol and eating unhealthily are on the rise, even though we have more information than ever before on the risks involved. All indications are that these so-called “lifestyle” diseases are defeating efforts to persuade people to make the right choices; maybe it’s time for a different approach. We make the case for a new style of “practice oriented” public health policy, a…

New age ways of teaching where the children guide their learning rather than the teacher are perhaps not as effective. Shutterstock By Kevin Donnelly, Australian Catholic University Seventy teachers from the UK were sent to Shanghai to study classroom methods to investigate why Chinese students perform so well. Upon their return, the teachers reported that much of China’s success came from teaching methods the UK has been moving away from for the past 40 years. The Chinese favor a “chalk and talk” approach, whereas countries such as the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand have been moving away…

L'Aquila is still in repair. Roberto Taddeo By Lawrence Torcello, Rochester Institute of Technology It has been five years since an earthquake hit the Italian city of L’Aquila leaving 309 people dead. In the aftermath one public official and six earthquake scientists were charged with multiple counts of manslaughter. Each defendant was sentenced to six years in jail. It is commonly believed the scientists were condemned for failing to predict the earthquake but, in truth, the case was about communicating risks to a vulnerable population. The defendants were accused by the prosecution of…