Science & Society

There is a lot of concern about food waste and it may be due to leftovers that never get used but it probably isn't the bulk of Americans - 92 percent of people eat everything. Obviously that can be bad for people in other ways if people put a lot on their plate. "If you put it on your plate, it's going into your stomach," says Cornell University Professor of Marketing Brian Wansink Ph.D. Wansink and co-author Katherine Abowd Johnson analyzed 1179 diners and concluded that we're a Clean Plate Planet. Although diners were analyzed in 8 developed countries, the US, Canada, France, Taiwan, Korea…

In the 1990s, it was claimed that minorities were less likely to get home mortgages 30 years after anti-discrimination laws were added to specify housing, so policies were instituted requiring justification when people were denied a home loan. As a result of widespread loan liberalization, everyone was able to get loans and there was a resulting mortgage loan crisis after the core of the system was revealed as flawed. Today, there isn't much way to allege racism in getting loans but sociologists now find that black Americans are 45 percent more likely than whites to go back to renting. The…

When you get something for free, how much complaining can you really do? Apparently quite a bit, in the UK, according to a new report. There has been a large increase in complaints, which may be due to wider social trends rather than localized issues. A large number of complaints did not progress because the issues raised could not be identified, which suggests that the General Medical Council (GMC) is getting complaints due to a wider complaint-handling system and culture but they are outside its scope. While the report does not point to any specific causes for the increase in complaints, it…

Kidney donations have been in decline and a study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN) says it has discovered why; it's cheaper to get a kidney than to give one.   For their study, Jagbir Gill, MD, MPH of University of British Columbia in Vancouver and his colleagues divided the US population based on the median household income level of residents' zip codes, and they examined the rates of living donation between 1999 and 2010 in high and low income populations.   The researchers found that lower income populations consistently had lower rates of living…

A new small-scale sociology survey finds that the more a woman self-identifies with her profession, the more paid hours she works and the less time she spends with her children, though childcare balance is more equal between a couple.  Yet the more a woman identifies herself with motherhood, the less time the father spends with the children. And while the more a man self-identifies as a parent the more time he spends with children, this had no impact on the amount of time the woman spends on childcare – regardless of her self-identity.   The paper from Cambridge University's…

Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, Robert Harding Chair in global child health and policy and Co-Director of the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto says in BMJ that criminal sanctions are necessary to deter growing research misconduct. He says the fact that research fraud is common is no longer news, but a review by PubMed in 2012 found that 67% of research article retractions were "attributable to scientific misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud". An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday discussed the effort by NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins to…

Until a week before basketball player LeBron James returned to the NBA team that drafted him as a rookie, the Cleveland Cavaliers, owner Dan Gilbert had a scathing letter on his website criticizing James. Many fans had thrown out his jerseys. Suddenly, after so much acrimony, James returned him, two championships and four playoff runs to his credit. What happened? Gilbert caught the boomerang. Maybe you should also. According to two papers dealing with organizational behavior and human resources management, organizations of all types are beginning to recognize and embrace the value of…

While older people wonder if modern connectivity behavior is leading to a lack of coherent thinking, they tend to forget previous generations worried over that too - because the next to come along couldn't use a slide rule. A new study has found that, in younger workers, short breaks that include non-work browsing - Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) - can potentially improve attention to work tasks. Concentration during workplace tasks is of the upmost importance; however, it declines over time as mental resources are expended, with cited research from the study finding that subjects…

In today's Wall Street Journal, I have an article discussing recent problems in peer review. It's big news when a journal busts a 'peer review ring' that had manipulated its way to 60 papers sailing through peer review that then had to be retracted. Prior to that, Nature retracted a paper on stem cells that was obviously flawed - and everyone but the peer reviewers knew it. The issue may be news but it's not new. Everyone in science has joked about gaming peer review, I wondered in Penny Stock Peer Review why it did not happen more and I speculated it is because most scientists are honest.…

You never see them in calendars, but there are obese firefighters - and they don't get told to lose weight by their doctors. As we all know, there are many healthy obese people, the notion that BMI is some magic button for diabetic and cardiovascular health has long been debunked. Regardless of their appearance, firefighters are trained to do a job. Can't pass training and you don't get to do the job. Yet firefighters do have high rates of obesity, compared to the nature of the job, and like the general public, heart attacks kill more firefighters than doing their job will. For that…