Science Education & Policy

For more than a century, journalism education prepared young people for the role of full-time professionals employed by sizeable news organisations. But the advertising-based business model that sustained journalism is collapsing because of new technology, and jobs of the old kind are becoming scarce. The educational model, too, must change to accommodate the new realities. Traditional media – particularly print – are in decline as audiences move online and revenue streams follow them to platform giants like Google and Facebook. As a result, titles have had to close and journalists have…

An Illinois judge has overruled Governor JB Pritzker's mask mandate at least in the case of students who are party to the lawsuit.  It was denied being a class action and even admits that the collective bargaining agreements between teachers unions and school districts that call for mitigation efforts still stand.  From what I have been able to see at the two places I work and around Illinois Colleges and universities nothing has changed at all.   As a legal guidepost the Illinois state supreme court has found that the governor can impose an emergency health order…

The Supreme Court dealt another blow to federal overreach by the Biden administration but then rightly upheld vaccine mandates if an organization is federally funded. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, nearly all hospitals are federally funded. So a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule requiring vaccinations for health care workers at companies that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding, which is nearly all of them, is legal, while the overzealous attempt to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration requiring companies with 100 or more employees to force…

It is common in a polarized political climate to try and blame the other political party when missteps happen but most government employees are not political appointees, they are career bureaucrats, and sometimes care more about protecting their fiefdoms than in helping the public.  A good example over the last decade has been the Centers for Disease Control, which despite adding "And Prevention" onto their name does very little of either. You have read here about their penchant for manufacturing problems they can then go to Congress and ask for new funds to combat - a pre-diabetes…

Critical Race Theory like so much science, even social science, can be used for good or evil. Physics invented the atomic bomb which can destroy the world. Physics invented the nuclear power plant which can generate carbon free energy and help to save the environment. Chemistry and biology invented medicines that can save lives as well as bio toxic and chemical warfare which can take them. Somehow “CRT” is what people want to ban in part due to a total misunderstanding of what it is and what it is not. In the end I will show how I use these ideas to be sure I am being fair to the diverse…

According to the conspiracy theory all the authorities from Loudon County school the prosecutor and the police are so pro transgender that they would cover up a rape. Let me point out a few things that are inconsistent with this. Bear in mind I am not saying that no one was assaulted only that how this event is being used right now seems at odds with reality. Covering up a crime would cost a career, freedom, and lots of money in a lawsuit. Referring to the transgender girl / gender fluid male as just that would cost nothing. So they refer to the transgender girl as a boy and a male, no hint…

There is no question that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic of my lifetime. It has led to greater absolute US deaths than the Asian Flu of 1957 and the Spanish Flu of 1918, though obviously we are 2X and 3X the population, respectively, of those pandemics so in relative terms they remain way ahead. Where we also lead over the two other large US pandemics of the last 100 years is fear and misinformation. That is due to corporate media. Thanks to corporate media, an anti-vaccination movement that was overwhelmingly Democrats two years ago has now lurched to being Republicans. Thanks to media, the…

Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars work for which her PhD advisor, and the head of the Cambridge astronomy group won the Nobel Prize.  They could’ve awarded it to three people.  She did NOT need to be left out of it to recognize those two men.  The issue is not that they did nothing, but that what she did was at least as important if not much more important.  She has since won the breakthrough prize.  Also, the anti CRT side continues the moral panic du jour and I will discuss why the steel manned version of their argument also fails, as usual, by reductio ad…

Americans are inherently skeptical, and American adults lead the world in science literacy, so those two things combine to show up in debates about climate change and other sciences.   When you are literate and skeptical it is easy to know just enough to be wrong, when it comes to climate or nuclear energy, vaccines, and agriculture. The difference between the first one and the latter three is the political demographic that is skeptical about them. Politics infects everything. That is why the each side paints issues they embrace in black and white; you can't be skeptical, you either…

A new angle of attack on the teaching of so-called critical race theory is that it is racist against Asians because some writings on it say that they are “White Adjacent.” Since CRT is supposedly racist against White people it is then therefore also racist against them. The other argument is that it is racist against Asian people because their success show it is wrong.  Which is based on the myth and self-stereotypes such as those mentioned by Kenny Xu.  Asian American is not a euphemism for Chinese American they come from many cultures and have many different…