Science Education & Policy

25 years ago, the United Nations laid the foundation for children's rights and protections - at least as part of international theater. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most ratified human rights treaty in history but three members, Somalia, South Sudan and the United States, have not signed it even though the Reagan administration wrote most of the verbiage. Why not? After the many modifications it underwent, it could make disciplining a child a jail offense and requires sex education. Since America is one of only a few dozen nations that actually honors treaties it signs,…

The Lacey Act, introduced in 1900 by Republican Congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa, was originally designed to stop illegal game across state borders but was then expanded, notably by President Ronald Reagan, to include illegal logging and breaking the laws of foreign governments. It has has had enforcement missteps - four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, which was a violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforced, yet they were sentenced to 8 years of imprisonment each because judges are no longer allowed…

Oh, no, wait – it's the 21st century! Carl Guderian By Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia It’s official: men are better writers than women. The news came as something of a shock to a hardened feminist such as myself, but a quick survey of prescribed and suggested texts set for senior English in most Australian states demonstrates this is a fact routinely taught to teenagers in school. Almost 70% of the texts on the Victorian Certificate of Education English curriculum are by male authors, according to Megan Quinlan, manager of The Stella Prize, the literary organization named…

Recently, I enjoyed the opportunity to solve and implement a simple web interface problem. The result would not be considered profound or unique by Internet professionals, but nonetheless, it certainly is a powerful application of basic web technologies that allow the seamless flow of information making each of our lives richer and more efficient. Most importantly, I started from scratch and figured out how to do it. The project was to interface with the FAA live feed of current data and status for airports across the United States and take the user's airport of…

The belief in Washington, D.C. political circles is that if kids have no choice, they will eventually eat whatever they are given. And they will grow to like it. Does that work? In some instances it does, which is all the validation that culturally estranged people need to continue with a social experiment. The mistake they make is using the number of kids who take the food they are given and assuming that eventually it means the kids will eat it.  Probably not, suggests a new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study, at least unless the government starts going into homes…

Finns are not more liberal about education because kids don't have to wear shoes, they are really conservative - the last country in Europe to create mandatory education and their spending on it is small. There is no need to pay more money to teachers so they can pay union dues so union employees can pay lobbyists to lobby the Education Department to use more federal taxes to redistribute it to schools. Education is by rote. They only go to grade 9. Why not extend it to make kids even smarter? It costs too much. They don't spend a lot of time on social justice, they spend it on education.…

Professor Anne Glover, the first Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission, has been sacked.  Well, not technically, the European Commission is simply not extending her position. That is diplomatic speech for 'there are a lot more anti-science Europeans voting than there are researchers and they really do not like you.'   We first wrote of Glover early in 2007, when she was Chief Scientific Advisor for Scotland and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at Aberdeen University. She had been a voice of reason when it came to science policy so when she got…

There may be disagreement about whether or not telling teenagers to not have sex works but that could be due to puberty. In younger kids, cookie abstinence works just fine. Even the Cookie Monster can get kids to eat fewer cookies, and cookies are kind of his thing. Deborah Linebarger, an associate professor in Teacher and Learning at the University of Iowa, studied a group of preschoolers who repeatedly watched videos of Cookie Monster practicing ways to control his desire to eat a bowl of chocolate chip cookies. "Me want it," Cookie Monster sings in a video, "but me wait." Linebarger found…

The Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan was released in June of 2014 and is seeking public comments until December 1st so if you want to yell about liberals or Big Oil, you are running out of time. The plan is like most government policies, they picked a number out of thin air and will tell businesses to meet the standards or close up shop. The government lost a gigantic amount of money subsidizing legacy solar power technology and have realized that the only way solar can be viable without funding actual basic research is to make everything else expensive, so existing power plants have…

When Ebola was the latest rage in mainstream media (that would be last month - poor people in Africa are so October of 2014) National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins was quick to capitalize on it - they could have had a vaccine by now, he claimed, if only funding had not been flat since 2004. Science blogging was, naturally, quick to blame Republicans and The Sequester and whatever else would get Democrats to the polls in the run-up to elections.  Except none of that was actually true. The sequester was the president's idea and if science was important, he would not…