Science & Society

A new study released today by Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) is the first comprehensive overview of how German businesses and households financed their renewable energy and energy efficiency efforts.  The Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) is an advocacy organization for alternative energy financed by billionaire hedge-fund manager George Soros.  The cost for Germany in the report: 37 billion euros, 1.5% of their GDP in 2010. German companies are running from alternative energy now so the German government is scrambling to call prior subsidies an investment. Therefore, they say…

People follow patterns. If you were projecting a future for New York City in the early 1980s, you would have rightfully anticipated a Kurt Russell movie where the city is walled off from the rest of the country because the crime problem was rampant. Homicide moves through a city in a process similar to infectious disease, according to a new study that may give police a new tool in tracking and ultimately preventing murders. Using Newark, N.J., as a pilot case, a team of Michigan State University criminal justice academics led by April Zeoli applied public health tracking methods to the city's…

The newest Access to Medicine Index, which ranks pharmaceutical companies on their efforts to improve access to medicine in developing countries, shows that the industry, led by GlaxoSmithKline, is doing more than critics claim. The Access to Medicine Index is an independent initiative that provides insight into what the world's leading pharmaceutical companies are doing for the millions of people in developing countries who do not have reliable access to safe, effective and affordable medicines, vaccines and other health-related technologies. It is published every two years. It…

Eugenics, once discredited as part of the first wave of social authoritarian progressives that trampled free will for women, handicapped people and minorities, is attempting a 21st century comeback.  Just the term 'eugenics' carries a lot of baggage, as if you couldn't tell by that opening paragraph; as I have said too many times to count, its endorsement by a Who's Who of liberal elite intelligentsia ended badly when that hard-left guy Hitler spoiled the party for everyone at Cold Spring Harbor and the New York Times.  And, while we do what we can to mitigate inherited diseases…

What do you get when you combine onerous government regulations that have increased exponentially, experimental climates that mean lots of products just may not work, and if they do work you get a product that will only be yours for a few years and during that time a whole bunch of lawyers will look for ways to sue you? You get modern biomedical research.  And a terrible climate for private investment. It used to be that drug development did nothing with academia; the glacial pace of university research was too slow for the private sector but increased regulation and skepticism of…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms recently parsed 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language (online) news outlets over a period of ten months and created data about what was contained.  Could AI qualitatively give people more interesting news? The results showed what you likely knew - online tabloid newspapers are more readable than broadsheets and use more sentimental language. Among 15 U.S. and U.K. newspapers, The Sun was the 'easiest' to read - comparable to the BBC's children's news program, Newsround - while they found the The Guardian was the most…

Marketing people follow predictable patterns; in order to sell something it either needs to scare people or make them feel good.  "This ain't your father's" X is a timeless perceptual classic, meaning it is not old-fashioned and conservative and boring like parents. So marketing groups are telling young people they are hip and cool adults if they buy an iPad or food in a pouch, but the reality is different; Generation Y people tend to live at home more than previous generations and they still rely on their mothers to do housework, a new study found. Associate Professor Lyn Craig and Dr…

When you think of modern conservation groups, you probably think of fundraising campaigns designed to scare people into giving money. They latch onto the latest doomsday cause, whether it has a science basis or not. What you don't often think of are conservation groups being part of a broader solution for responsible energy management - stepping outside the stereotype of vilifying the industries it turns out America would like to have more of, and being a friendly guide for energy companies that are, after all, living in the same space we all are and who are not actually composed of cardboard…

A new annual analysis has again attempted to determine whether society can achieve something similar to the a Rousseaunian social contract. In order to do this, the economists carried out an experiment that reproduced in a laboratory setting some of the important characteristics of the welfare state.  The conclusion they reached was that the redistribution of wealth that occurs does not come about as the result of consensus about mitigating the effects of misfortune on work, as occurs in a Rousseaunian social contract, but rather “is generally done because those who have less, do not…

A recent article addressing the subject of Nikolas Tesla, chose to focus on his opinions regarding eugenics.   One of Tesla’s most disturbing ideas was his belief in using eugenics to purify the human race. Of course, this statement is framed in the modern "correct" view, because it is clearly colored by the Nazi atrocities that followed those decades, and from which everyone invariably wishes to distance themselves. Unfortunately, I expect that this belief in eugenics is far more prevalent than most people would comfortably wish it to be (1). One of the 21st century's dressed up…