Science & Society

Costs of natural hazards are at historically high levels, and show an increasing trend, which is expected, because wages and inflation go up every year, but estimates are almost meaningless. When estimated damage gets high-profile media claims, like in New York City after tropical storm Sandy, the costs unsurprisingly match those and even allow for a generous overrun. Damage estimates are more guessing than science and that, along with competing political constituencies, prevents realistic precautions - New York environmentalists object to common-sense improvements regardless of the damage…

Learning Lessons From Yesterday It is well said that people who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them.  History can teach many valuable lessons if only we are willing to learn.  Never forget, though, that history started a femtosecond ago.  More realistically we can say that yesterday is now history. My point is that even when we do not know the cause of an event we can still avoid its repetition if we take a rational view of the whole picture.  The recent loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is a case in point.  We don't know what went wrong on…

During the 2012 US Presidential election, both political parties were tripping over themselves to claim they cared about small business, either by sabotaging them with more costs in the way of health care on one side or by constantly giving breaks to giant multinational corporations that small businesses could not get on the other. In reality, the politicians and pundits had clearly spent their years signing the backs of checks rather than the front of them, because the top priority of small business owners is not intangible social engineering, it is cash flow and survival. Fairness is not…

In the latest episode of Cosmos we got some history regarding how science has tried to converge on the age of the Earth. With that, we also got another jab at religion. Why use yet another religious contrast from hundreds of years ago to show the awesome power of science now? Is there so little actual imagination in their Ship Of The Imagination?(1) Just like with the age of the Earth, it's hard to know for sure, we only know there is a range of choices and can narrow it down as we get more data. It's a short bit and so less grievous to our intellectual senses than the 25 percent of episode 1…

If some drug-addled sociopath shoots up a movie theater or an elementary school, there is lots of speculation about the cause. In frustration and helplessness, people search for a magic bullet - things they can ban - to keep it from ever happening again. In European countries, at least the ones where guns are banned, and in some parts of America, guns are that magic bullet. Actual statistics don't bear out that guns are the safety issue. Scotland, England and Wales lead the civilized world in violent crime, they just have fewer murders using guns, and people are unable to protect themselves…

Where science and religion conflict most Americans choose religion. According to the AP-GFK poll most  Americans lack confidence in the greenhouse effect, the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth, the theory of evolution, and the big bang theory.   This article could be called why having a TV show like Cosmos matters, or no wonder it's ratings aren't much higher.  It isn't instead let us look at the numbers and worry about the state of science literacy in this country.  This is the table from page two of the poll results.   I see that the scientific findings which…

Canadians may seem polite to outsiders, that maple leaf on a backpack says pacificism all over the world, but they are apparently quite hard on their kids. A Canadian Medical Association Journal articles says that almost one-third of adults in Canada have experienced sexual abuse, child abuse or been exposed to intimate partner violence, such as parental, step-parental or guardian violence in their home. Child abuse has been linked to mental disorders and suicidal ideation (thoughts) or suicide attempts. The authors looked at data from 23,395 people from across Canada who participated in…

The term "tween" is a marketing colloquialism for a child who is between the ages of 8 and 12 -not quite a little kid but not yet a teenager. A pre-adolescent. This demographic watches more television than any other age group and is thus considered a lucrative market for advertisers. Tween television programming often consists of the following: "teen scene" and "action-adventure" , which a pair of academics say is shaping stereotypes in tweens rather than reflecting what kids want to watch. The humanities scholars, Ashton Lee Gerding, a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at…

77% of Americans prefer summer over winter and while we know what temperatures actually were this past winter, what people think they were in a recent Harris Poll is something else. When it came to the temperature, 88 percent of Midwesterners and 84 percent of Easterners say it was colder than normal. 71 percent believe it was while only 18 percent felt it was colder than normal. 45% in the West believe it was warmer than normal. When it came to precipitation, 77 percent of those in the Midwest, 73 percent in the East and 49 percent say there was more rain or snow in their area. In the West,…

2,234 adults surveyed online between March 12 and 17, 2014 by The Harris Poll reveal that people are concerned about the environment - but may not be doing much about it. And over 80 percent avoid labels like “green”, “conservationist” and “environmentalist”, which shows that environmental corporations have lost a lot of credibility among the public.  However, parents with younger kids are more concerned than childless people, though they are only slightly more likely to tell others to be more environmentally responsible. Women are more likely to indicate encouraging others to be…