Science & Society

If the government promises every home a great gardener, most people recognize they won't get a great gardener at all, they will probably get someone who couldn't get a better job while the lawn service they used to use is priced out of reach. There has always been disparity in health care, but that was aggravated when President Franklin Roosevelt instituted wage caps during World War II. Companies who wanted to compete for quality workers could no longer offer more money so they offered "benefits." Like health insurance.  Somehow that health care benefits relic survived after the sugar…

After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded body in France that looks for statistical links between food/chemicals and cancer, they made a switch in their policies regarding participation; an epidemiologist who had ever consulted for industry could no longer vote on what to label a carcinogen. Even though it was hypocritical - epidemiologists working for trial lawyers or environmental groups were recruited - few inside IARC objected. Nor did anyone think they might. Environmental groups have manufactured an ethical halo so well that even…

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have become buzzwords often debated within the United States, sometimes controversially perceived as a redistribution of opportunities. However, in a global context—such as in the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) project, led by the European Space Agency and NASA—DEI adopts a unique significance. Here, it is about creating a welcoming and safe environment for all qualified researchers from across the globe. This involves not only ensuring participation but fostering genuine collaboration across diverse cultural and social landscapes. …

Penny stock peer review - sell science to each other under the stock rises enough they all cash in There used to be a joke about selling swampland in Florida, and the concept later migrated to small capitalization (penny) stocks. The idea was to gather a group, take a plot of land or a small stock and keep selling it at higher prices to another member of the group, driving up the valuation. Swamp land in Florida or stock in a chain of three office supply stores became valuable. When the useless land valuation got high enough, the company holding it went bankrupt and the bank was stuck with…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a lawyer who leveraged a name that was essentially beatified by Democrats into a lucrative career trying to promote corporate conspiracies about cell phones (cancer!), GMOs (cancer!) and vaccines(everything else!) and he had some success. Thanks to his efforts raising money for Obama his name was floated as head of EPA at the end of 2008, but even a president-elect who was on the fence about vaccines causing autism and had advisors who believed in UFOs and that girls can't do math told Obama that RFK Jr. was too kooky.(1) He hasn't changed much, he will still say…

As the century turned, the science community began to become critical of a once-honored field; epidemiology.  If you are not familiar with it, it is people who correlate causes to outcomes. They don't show it, they usually are not scientists, but they look for links and then if those look interesting scientists will follow up on it. This was an occupation once so conservative and evidence-driven that they were the last to accept that heart disease and cancer might have a hereditary factor. When epidemiologists showed that smoking causes lung cancer the data were so overwhelming and…

If Google image search results overwhelmingly returned results showing men, that would be evidence that ending gender bias still has a long way to go. In the bias community, results showing women are the same thing. And the authors of a new paper say female and male gender associations are more extreme among Google Images than within text from Google News; text is slightly more focused on men than women, this bias is over four times stronger in images. The problem can't be Google, Google News is just a search for way to search reputable outlets for news events. Science 2.0 is in Google News.…

White people are more likely to confront those who post racist content on social media. On surveys, at least, but on surveys very few people say they are anti-science, or even anti-vaccine. Not from 1998 to 2021, when coastal cities dominated vaccine exemptions, and not from 2021 on when middle states do. In both cases the argument is they support science but products need more testing, and they are anti-corporate. Everyone is against racism on a survey, and many are more likely to oppose it as long as they are behind a keyboard, but this survey had an interesting wrinkle; the reason white…

The Hill published a cell phone conspiracy theorist. Sorry, "epidemiologist", which in the Clinton administration was the same thing. His presidency was sort of a Golden Age for anti-science Boomers. He wiped out real FDA oversight of supplements, so those are now a gigantic parasitic industry, he generously funded the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, so by now we've spent $2 billion to know acupuncture still doesn't work, and he told USDA to create a special section of government for an official "organic" seal - one whose label would be controlled by organic…

University of Kentucky political science Professor Stephen Voss, who was plagiarized by Harvard President Claudine Gay, said it was no big deal. It was even expected she would use his work without attribution? He seems to think so. “It would have been quite natural for her to borrow ideas from me." He didn't tell me that personally. I instead cited the source. Like you are supposed to do. It ain't that hard. She could have done it but did not, and yet he has no issue with that. He seems to be more upset that her plagiarism is going to lead to more investigations of humanities scholars'…