Science & Society

The IRS and the Recording Industry Association of America share one thing in common; if they ever actually collected all of the estimated money they claim they are owed, they could buy a small country with it. With the RIAA, they always made piracy projections under the assumption that every illegal download imaginable was a lost sale and the IRS believes every business and resident exists to fund their coffers.  One recent claim is that billions of dollars are lost to "round-tripping", where an investor moves money offshore and then invests with the offshore money in US equity and debt…

Depending on how a topic is framed, people quickly change their minds when the discussion is about medical liability. If the scenario is presented as 'Doctor X was incompetent and did Y' the perception is that incompetent people should have to pay but when the scenario is presented as unlimited lawsuits crippling health care, people feel like we need tort reform. Most people believe that malpractice insurance is the biggest problem after infrastructure costs and employees, but that isn't so; the biggest cost that gets passed on to consumers and health insurance carriers is defensive medicine…

If religiously-motivated terrorists attack, they may claim it is an Act of God. You had better hope your insurance company does not. To insurance companies, an act of God is any event not influenced by man and minimum coverage often does not include it. Because of the fuzzy nature of those definitions, there is specific terrorism insurance. But after Muslim fundamentalists hijacked and crashed planes on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism risk insurance quickly became very expensive or unavailable. Congress reacted by passing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, which provides an assurance of government…

Want to find the flaws in a study? Ask a competitor, just like you would ask a competitor about the flaws in an iPhone or any other product. And if you really want to see griping about the flaws in a study, ask someone who happens to believe just the opposite.  When a paper comes out that uses the exact same terminology as studies that advocates happen to like, conservative scientific verbage like using the word "possible" is touted as a weakness and they will insist there is no "clear" correlation. When culturally contradictory papers are published, we are told cross-sectional studies…

Global health funding hit an all-time high of $31.3 billion in 2013, five times greater than in 1990, but its 3.9% growth from 2012 to 2013 shows it is at least slowing down a little, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Health Affairs. As funding from many bilateral donors and development banks has declined, growth in funding from the GAVI Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, non-governmental organizations, and the UK government is counteracting these cuts. Global health…

The mandate for health insurance isn't just raising the costs for the health care of almost all Americans,  it will also alter costs for several major types of liability insurance, according to a new RAND Corporation report. Automobile, workers' compensation and general business liability insurance costs may fall under the Affordable Care Act, while costs for medical malpractice coverage could be higher, according to the study. Researchers say the changes could be as much as 5 percent of costs in some states, but caution there is considerable uncertainty surrounding such estimates. The…

Scholars from the University of Pittsburgh and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center are associating binge drinking in both adults and teens with liking, owning and identifying a certain kind of music. The weak observational results are published in Alcoholism: Clinical&Experimental Research and are certain to cause a buzz in mainstream media because the finding is based on a national randomized survey of over 2,541 people ages 15 to 23 and says that musicians who make alcohol brand references in popular music are to blame if kids get drunk. Of the 2,541 participants who…

Want to turn a liberal into a conservative? Present the prospect of a racial minority becoming the overall majority in the United States, according to an analysis of Pew Research data. White Americans across the spectrum move more toward the conservative end of the political spectrum, according to a paper in Psychological Science which suggests that increased diversity in the United States could actually lead to a wider partisan divide. Of course, it depends on the minority. Legal immigrant minorities are overwhelmingly more conservative already. Psychologists Maureen Craig and…

This is a TV show which will be more appreciated in ten to twenty years than it is now.   The nation may not be as ready as we would like to hear this content from any host much less one like Dr. Niel D. Tyson. "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" has settled at a two week plateau in the ratings on Fox where it has a respectable 4.01 million viewers.  For a documentary on network TV up against pure entertainment programs that is pretty good.    It has been written here on science 2.0 that we may have expected to much.  If we thought Cosmos would change the world, then sure…

What makes a good blood donor? A willingness to welcome anyone who enters the room, it seems, and names like Don Juan, Napoleon, Gucci, Azur, and Marissa don't hurt either. “I chose them for their hematological characteristics, but also for their good disposition. We didn’t want cats that would be stressed when handled or that needed excessive sedation,” said Dr. Marie-Claude Blais, Professor at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. Where they are housed, the five cats (four males and one female) can climb to the top of their trapeze and out into the yard through a cat…