Science Education & Policy

The 'education is terrible' trope made the rounds again last week, along with the predictable 'abysmal' charge leveled at teachers and students and attempts to keep America ahead in a globalized competitive landscape. The Center for Geoscience Education and Public Understanding at the American Geosciences Institute doesn't want to be left out, so their report "Earth and Space Sciences Education in U.S. Secondary Schools: Key Indicators and Trends," offers baseline data on indicators of the subject's status and find that that school districts and other organizations fail to assign the Earth…

In the wave of articles, blog posts and Tweets that are addressing the impact of the shutdown on science, no one has asked the obvious question: If the president care about science so much, why doesn't he care about science? I have argued that science should be considered a strategic resource, no different than food and oil - yet the President who declared he was going to "restore science to its rightful place" has done nothing of the kind.  Sure, he made a token effort at lifting a small part of the federal funding limitation on human embryonic stem cell research but the fact that…

We've become a nation of defensive medicine. Health care is expensive not because of drug companies or overpaid doctors or malpractice premiums, but rather the largest cost for health care is administering tests to check off boxes and prevent legal problems in a future lawsuit that may never come. No medical organization recommends the prostate-specific antigen test for older men, but many primary care doctors continue to administer it even to those over age 75. In a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston…

U.S. medical schools have made significant progress to strengthen their management of clinical conflicts of interest but a new study concludes most schools still lag behind national standards. The Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) study, which compared changes in schools' policies in a dozen areas from 2008 to 2011, reveals that institutions are racing from the bottom to the middle, not to the top. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of medical schools still lacked policies to limit ties to industry in at least one area explored, including gifts, meals, drug samples, and payments for…

In 1968, after CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite formally came out against the Viet Nam war, President Lyndon B. Johnson was apocryphally to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” For the first Democratic President in this century, that might apply to the celebrity gossip show TMZ, who upon learning that the NASA website was down due to a budget not being passed, mocked the administration’s blaming of it all on Republicans, stating, “Ann Romney: She’s the reason we’re not able to make sure there’s still not water on Venus right now.” Americans and much of the media,…

Scientists should be good at judging the importance of the scientific work of others - it's a peer review culture - but a new paper instead says that scientists are unreliable judges of the importance of fellow researchers' published papers. They're better at it than you. But still pretty bad at it, according to the authors. Prof. Eyre-Walker and Dr. Nina Stoletzki analyzed three methods of assessing published studies, using two sets of peer-reviewed articles. The three assessment methods the researchers looked at were: Peer review: subjective post-publication peer review where other…

A new paper analyzed organizational change in state health-related departments from 1990 to 2009. The researchers discovered that in many cases states kept the same organizational structure in place during the 20-year period, even though consolidating public health departments with Medicaid departments did occur with some frequency. 27 states had housed the two functions together at one point in the 20-year period. And when they did so, the funding allocated to the public health department remained unchanged. The authors conclude that the results help allay concerns that when such…

If you visit the outside of a meeting regarding biology and policy today, you are sure to see protesters who all insist that they should be voting on the science.   They have reached their own consensus and their consensus is that biologists are just tinkerers who are out to create a scientocracy not bound by morality or ethics or anything beyond the cold pursuit of violating nature. While consensus still means the same as it always meant in science, to the public it now means voting and the votes of the public count just as much as that of a scientist. Climate scientists have to take…

Consumer confidence in the safety of foods and beverages sold in the U.S. has dropped over the past five years according to survey results conducted in May/June of 2013. Among a national sample of 2,100 adults, only one in six express a "great deal" of confidence in food safety.   By comparison, in 2008 approximately 25% of adults expressed a "great deal" of confidence. The safety of imported foods is now the most pressing concern, followed by concerns about: exposure to pesticides on foods exposure to food-borne pathogens (e-coli, salmonella, etc.) use of antibiotics or growth…

The biggest threat to vaccine acceptance is not distrust of science, misinformation campaigns or deficit thinking among the public, but rather the failure of government and institutions to use evidence-based strategies, says a new paper. Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Psychologyand director of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School, uses the the introduction of the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine to illustrate how inattention to the insights from empirical study of science communication puts the value of decision-relevant science itself at risk. In 2006…