Science & Society

Jean Tirole's theories, capturing reality as an afterthought? IMF, CC BY-NC-ND By David Spencer, University of Leeds It’s that time of year again – when academic economics, thanks to the Nobel Prize announcements, is thrust into the public gaze. That the economics Nobel is mistitled and has quite a different status to the other Nobel Prizes is neither here nor there (the proper and rather unwieldy title of the economics Nobel is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”). The award of the 2014 prize, in the eyes of the academic economics profession and the…

Saturday, I launched my first Experiment.com project to crowd-fund my PhD dissertation research in science communication Louisiana State University. Robert Couse-Baker, Flickr.com. The goal of my research project is to understand how science bloggers choose what to write about. The role of science blogging and science bloggers is expanding and diversifying today. More Americans get their science news online and via social media than ever, and much of that is now coming from science blogs. And yet, relatively little research has targeted the practices,…

Country music's soaring popularity in the Northeast isn't so much a novelty as it is a rebirth. Image: US Navy By Clifford Murphy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County This past June, radio conglomerate Clear Channel (now known as iHeartRadio) announced it was converting Boston’s 101.7 FM to a country station. The story they told the Boston Globe was a familiar one: country had gone mainstream, and people in greater Boston were clamoring for it. The once-vaunted home to Boston’s alternative rock station WFNX is now WBLW – “The Bull” – playing the hits of Jason Aldean, Carrie Underwood,…

A family-focused intervention program for middle-school Mexican-American children leads to fewer drop-out rates and lower rates of alcohol and illegal drug use. .  High-school aged youth that participated in the Bridges to High School program when they were in seventh grade were more likely to value school and believe it was important for their future. They reported lower rates of substance use, internalizing symptoms such as depression, and school drop-out rates compared to adolescents in a control group.  Mexican-American youth have one of the highest high-school drop-out rates in…

A recent survey found that 50% of final year veterinary students in the UK don't feel confident discussing dental problems or doing oral cavity examinations of small pets. Most vets just dread the idea of seriously discussing feline dental procedures. UK veterinarians Rachel Perry and Elise Robertson have taken it upon thenselves to plug this educational and fee gap and have coordinated a ground-breaking two-part special issue of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery devoted to feline dentistry. They recruited a pool of international leaders in the cat dentistry, maxillofacial surgery,…

By Jay Rosen, New York University If extreme polarization is now an enduring feature of American politics — not just a bug — how does that change the game for journalists? I have some ideas, but mainly I want to put that question on the table. “Conflict makes news,” it is often said. But when gridlock becomes the norm the conflicts are endless, infinite, predictable and just plain dull: in a way, the opposite of news. This dynamic has already ruined the Sunday talk shows. Who can stand that spectacle anymore? A recent task force of American Political Science Association put it this way:…

There is no substitute for a hearing test, especially in an age group that doesn't self-report very well. Currently, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Bright Futures children's health organization recommends screening adolescents with subjective questions but that does not reliably identify teenagers who are at risk for hearing loss, according to researchers at Penn State College of Medicine.  "We found that you can't rely on the Bright Futures questions to select out teenagers at high risk for hearing loss who would warrant an objective screen," said Deepa Sekhar, M.D., M.Sc.,…

Voodoo Dolls, Gambling Monkeys and Zombies in Love sounds like a 1980s B-movie title, along the lines of "Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town", but it's actually part of the latest Wastebook from Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). If you didn't know that NASA built a $350 million launch pad tower even after the the rockets it was designed to test were scrapped, well, Coburn is here to help. They also spent $390,000 on a cartoon about global warming and $3,000,000 to try and figure out how Congress works. Those and 97 other funny or outrageous bits of spending waste are documented. He doesn't just go after…

When is an immigration crisis not an immigration crisis? When people who do not live where it is happening change the definition of an immigration crisis. A new paper from Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy examines historical immigration data, the "push" and "pull" factors currently motivating Mexicans and Central Americans to migrate to the U.S. and then attempts to explain why current undocumented immigration streaming across the Mexican border is not a crisis.  "In recent months, print and television journalists have presented the American public with a 'crisis' of…

By: Karin Heineman, Inside Science (Inside Science TV) – Who can forget the winter of 2013-2014? Record-breaking cold temperatures and heavy snowfall hit from the Rocky Mountains all the way to the East Coast. Although the majority of Americans still believe that global warming is happening, the especially blustery winter caused some people to question whether global warming is really happening. “Almost invariably we find that after any winter a drop off in belief in the existence of global warming," said Barry Rabe, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In a…