Science & Society

There's no way to legislate evil out of existence and mentally ill homicidal people are sometimes going to commit gruesome crimes. It has no cultural boundaries. The same day a mentally ill American attacked children in Connecticut a man in China did the same thing. While some are busy politicizing the issue to advance their agendas, society needs to take a renewed look at warning signs. Banning things doesn't help, since violent crime in the UK is highest in the developed world but guns are illegal. And while an 'assault weapons' ban existed in the USA, the Columbine shootings still happened…

While the overall population of Greece benefits from government services and doesn't want those to change, the people who pay the most also evade the most, says a paper.  If their estimates are accurate, at a tax rate of 40 percent the 28 billion Euros in unreported taxable income could be responsible for up to one-third of Greece's deficit in 2009 or almost 50 percent of the deficit in 2008, according to bank data on household borrowing, which finds that highly paid, highly educated professionals are at the forefront of tax evasion in Greece: doctors, engineers, accountants and…

The insurance industry and its $4.6 trillion in revenues isn't going to be caught unaware by climate change.  They are all about risk. Sometimes that can have unfortunate effects in the real world. In 2009, former Vice-President Al Gore talked at an AAAS conference and put up a slide showing climate change projections and no one could figure out where he got it.  It turned out the slide was from an insurer, not science data, and he removed the slide from later presentations. Hurricane Sandy is the most recent cited U.S. example of the kinds of increasing liabilities posed by…

Nuclear power is not mired in regulatory uncertainty because the science is unsettled, the overwhelming majority of scientists accept physics and the really overwhelming consensus of nuclear physicists accept the safety of nuclear power. Before you think, 'well, they would, wouldn't they?' keep in mind that climate scientists have far higher acceptance of global warming models than other scientists too.  We rely on the confidence of experts in fields to help guide policy issues on science topics. Yet while we vilify any skepticism on climate change models, an entire multi-billion…

2009 was sure a long time ago.  Back then, President Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than his inauguration speech. Exuberant voters ignored his vaccine-causes-autism believer, the many UFO-believers and the guy who thought girls couldn't do math on his transition team.  Even naming a Doomsday Prophet as Science Czar was cheered. No more. Today, he is only getting a lizard named after him - and the researchers even waited until after the election because they weren't sure how things would go.  They couldn't very well name the thing after Romney, voting…

Though a subset of culture is determined to make the world omnisexual, kids are not getting the message. It isn't that efforts aren't persistent.  A Swedish regulatory group chastised Top-Toy, the Toys"R"Us of Europe, and pressured them to change their "narrow-minded" ways. Not wanting to appear insensitive, or to get a big government crackdown for ignoring a 'suggestion' that has the force of government behind it, the company introduced gender neutrality in its 2012 Christmas catalog - to the delight of cultural militants who insist the world will be a better place if we just…

The average premiums paid by employer-sponsored family health insurance plans rose  from $9,249 to $15,022 per year between 2003 and 2011 - a 62 percent increase, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report. The new report by the advocacy group tracks state trends in employer health insurance coverage and shows that health insurance costs rose faster than incomes in all states.  Workers are also paying more out-of-pocket costs; as employer costs rose, employee payments for their share of health insurance premiums also rose, by 74 percent on average, and deductibles more than doubled…

University of Warwick economists say they can calculate the true value of  political lobbyists in American politics - quantifying the 'it is not what you know, but who you know' adage. Lots of former politicians and staffers go into lobbying - it makes sense, they already know people and have relationships, the same reason a sales organization hires people experienced in their field, rather than just any salesperson. What did they find?  In the case of lobbyists who worked as a staffer in politics, the revenue of the lobbyist falls by 24% when their former employer leaves…

In what is believed to be a historical first, someone named Dr. Rongxiang Xu has filed a lawsuit against the Nobel Assembly, citing libel and unfair competition. Xu is apparently the founder of "human body regenerative restoration science" and, since I don't want to get sued over something silly (though, anti-science crackpots, you are welcome to sue over the defamation you receive in Science Left Behind which, by the way, is a terrific stocking stuffer for the scientifically literate in your life), I should note that his bio refers to him as "a renowned life scientist and medical scientist…

Citizen science has been around as long as there have been citizens. And science. But with the rise of private- and government-controlled research, science is more of an occupation. Areas like astronomy and paleontology still get valuable contributions from 'amateur' scientists but for the most part when people think of science they think of highly-paid academics and corporate labs. Well, Sherlock Holmes was an amateur detective. In the 19th century being an expert in something without payment was genteel and being a cop was blue collar.  A generation before the world's most famous…