Science & Society

Not all students returning to school this month will be up to date on their vaccinations and a new paper in Gender&Society by Jennifer Reich,a professor of Sociology from the University of Colorado Denver, correlates it to the class privilege of their mothers. It's no secret that anti-vaccination hotbeds correlate to income and other lifestyle choices. Put a pin in a Whole Foods store in California and you can find a hotbed of anti-vaccine sentiment in the parking lot and surrounding neighborhood. In America, red states have overwhelming vaccine acceptance while blue states are where the…

A look at 634 couples found that the more often they smoked marijuana, the less likely they were to engage in domestic violence.   The scholars attempted to clarify inconsistent findings about domestic violence among pot-smoking couples that primarily has been based on cross-sectional data (i.e., data from one point in time). Looking at couples over the first nine years of marriage, the study found: More frequent marijuana use by husbands and wives (two-to-three times per month or more often) predicted less frequent intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration by husbands.…

Parents are more likely to be concerned with strong violence than smoking in a movie. Daniel Imfeld/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA By Simon Chapman, University of Sydney In an era when cinema attendance is in continual decline, the United States Surgeon General’s proposal that all movies depicting smoking should be rated R is a particular form of silliness. The Surgeon General estimates that giving an R rating to movies with smoking would reduce the number of young smokers in the US by nearly 18% and prevent one million deaths from smoking among children alive today. But these statements are based on…

For 'credence' services such as auto-repair, health care, and legal services, when more service providers care about the customer's well-being, society as whole may actually be worse off.    Why? Because the benefit to the customers for the service is difficult to assess before and even after the service. For example, when an auto mechanic tells a customer to make some repairs, the average customer is unable to discern the veracity of the recommendation. The risk of not doing repairs is unknown until a breakdown, if any, occurs. But if repairs are undertaken, their value may never…

The American Heart Association has drafted a policy recommendation on the use of e-cigarettes and their impact on tobacco-control efforts and says that because e-cigarettes contain nicotine, they are tobacco products and should be subject to all laws that apply to these products.  Writing in its in-house publication, Circulation, the association also calls for new regulations to prevent access, sales and marketing of e-cigarettes and for more research into the product's health impact.  Yet their website encourages nicotine chewing gum and patches, so this new statement is a bit of a…

Source: IPA By Kerrie Foxwell-Norton, Griffith University It’s tempting to view The Australian’s latest broadside at the ABC as just another salvo fired between our nation’s two biggest media organisations. But the coverage, based on an Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) report analysing the ABC’s coverage of energy issues, also serves as a fascinating case study of how we should define bias in environmental journalism. The IPA is a think-tank broadly identified with the most conservative elements of the public policy debate, and its findings were given prominent coverage in The Australian.…

Shall I compare thee to a novel? No. Tim McFarlane/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA By David Sweeney, Glasgow School of Art For the second year running, the Edinburgh International Book Festival returns with Stripped 2014; a strand dedicated exclusively to comics and graphic novels. It has even commissioned its own graphic novel – a dystopian vision of Scotland’s future called IDP:2043 – as a centrepiece. But this absorption of comic books into a culturally highbrow setting should not go unquestioned. A few years ago I attended a public interview featuring David Simon, creator of the critically acclaimed…

According to a paper to be published in Perspectives on Politics, authors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page claim, “if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.” Picture source According to the paper by Gilens and Page: In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized…

A volunteer group of citizen scientists set up to safeguard communities around the 'Throat of Fire' Tungurahua volcano in the Ecuadorian Andes is saving lives, according to a new paper. More than 600 million people live close to active volcanoes worldwide. Living safely in those dangerous areas requires effective communication among volcanologists, risk managers and vulnerable communities and the paper looks at 35 volunteers called 'vigías', which was set up 14 years ago in the wake of renewed activity at the historically deadly volcano.  The Spanish word 'vigía' means watchman, guard,…

Christine de Pisan instructs her son, Jean de Castel, c.1413. Source: Wikimedia Commons By Juanita Feros Ruys, Senior Research Fellow and Associate Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Centre at University of Sydney Are you a helicopter parent, hovering around your offspring at all times? Perhaps “snowplow” or “free range” is more your style. Or maybe, you should give medieval parenting a shot. Much of the advice on raising children in ancient texts still resonates today, though not all of it. A great number of pre-modern – medieval (c.500-1500) and early modern (c.1500-1800) – advice…