Science & Society

In a COVID-19 world, you may not want to visit a doctor but that doesn't mean you have to avoid seeing one.  A new RAND evaluation recommends that clinics even hire a telemedicine coordinator to head their efforts and that they consider offering telemedicine services to patients from their homes.   It can happen with with modest investments in new staff and technology and can even help expand patients' access to specialized medical care. But sustaining gains created by expanded telemedicine will require more-generous reimbursement policies from payers or ongoing revenue from other…

Scientific publishing is not known for moving rapidly. In normal times, publishing new research can take months, if not years. Researchers prepare a first version of a paper on new findings and submit it to a journal, where it is often rejected, before being resubmitted to another journal, peer-reviewed, revised and, eventually, hopefully published. All scientists are familiar with the process, but few love it or the time it takes. And even after all this effort – for which neither the authors, the peer reviewers, nor most journal editors, are paid – most research papers end up locked away…

In many groups, everyone seems to agree more or less all the time. Meetings are dominated by a few individuals or even one while everyone else plays along - until you talk to people individually.   Why does such meeting inertia happen? For some, voicing disagreement is difficult. Some may want the meeting to be over, so piping up five minutes before it is scheduled to end brings rancor that has nothing to do with the content. Some may want to just get along. Others believe that the process is working so nothing needs to change. Yet if you ask leaders they will tell you "it…

From July 24, people in England will have to wear a face mask when inside shops, as well as on public transport. This brings England in line with many other countries that have similar rules already in place. Once mainly used in hospitals and science labs, masks, visors and disposable gloves are now a feature of everyday life. As a result, sales of these items are through the roof. This is cause for concern for many of the world’s poor, not just because protecting themselves is harder and more expensive in the face of a surge in demand, but because many will find themselves at risk of being…

In an open letter published in Harper’s Magazine, 152 writers, including JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood, claim that a climate of “censoriousness” is pervading liberal culture, the latest contribution to an ongoing debate about freedom of speech online. As we grapple with this issue in a society where social media allows us all to share extreme views, the Victorian writers offer a precedent for thinking differently about language and how we use it to get our point across. How limits of acceptability and literary censorship, for the Victorians, inspired creative ways of writing that…

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo for quite a while.  While I have not read it I did watch a very long presentation by DiAngelo on the book which has to be the next best thing.  She is a brilliant presenter, and anyone be you Kyle Kulinski or Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro should at least watch her talk about it.   DiAngelo’s basic thesis is that White people in the Americas find it difficult to talk about the historical and systemic racism that has shaped live in the Americas.    That system is, as she put it, one which placed white people (Anglo or Hispanic…

There are more women getting degrees in the life science, social science, and pre-med fields, while more men graduate in engineering and physics. Some contend that is gender bias introduced at a young age, but since education is 70 percent women it is difficult to charge them with sexism against females.  Regardless of why, whether it is just that women prefer fields like medicine, where they can help people instead of doing theoretical physics, the data show fewer women than men get degrees in overall Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. Recent survey results…

Flat earthers are a thing in 2020.  Here is a simple do at home proof it is round given a large enough area of apparently flat land. Take a tripod like one would use for a camera and mount a laser pointer on it.  Lasers have the feature of being very well collimated, so their light does not die out in the same way as that from an ordinary light.   Point it at a paper target, attached to a car, and mark where the light falls.  It can help to point a camera at the paper target and record as this happens.  Drive, you will have to drive to get far enough away, 10…

Are insects facing survival challenges? Of course, the evidence in support of reasonable concerns is overwhelming. The important questions are: how serious is the decline; is it accelerating; what are its causes; and how can we address them? Those are not the questions the media have been asking over the past three years, as a spate of Armageddon-like studies has been hyped by breathless reporting in such mainstream outlets as CNN, the Guardian and the New York Times. They’ve uniformly maintained the insect Armageddon was already upon us, and the culprit identified: modern agriculture steeped…

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were shown to be a bureaucratic mess when the coronavirus pandemic hit - refusing to send coronavirus tests unless hospitals first proved proved patients had coronavirus, then sending faulty reagents - and academic epidemiologists often seemed to be just making things up, but one area came through nicely; academic medicine. Medicine, along with the life sciences and social sciences, are areas where women dominate in graduates but because leadership positions are often held for lengthy periods, when it comes to the top levels the…