Science & Society

Before Chomsky, there was Lippmann: the First World War and ‘manufactured consent.’ While the ‘manufacture of consent’ is an idea now mostly associated with Noam Chomsky, the phrase was actually coined by the US journalist and writer Walter Lippman in his influential book "Public Opinion" (1922) – a fact that Chomsky and Edward Herman, his co-author on "Manufacturing Consent" (1988), readily acknowledge.  Lippman contended that, because the world is too complex for any individual to comprehend, a strong society needs people and institutions specialized in collecting data and creating the…

Forensic science does not prove guilt or innocence. It never has and it never will. The next time you hear about DNA evidence, for example, proving the guilt or innocence of a suspect in a violent crime, rest assured that you are being misinformed. In courts of law, attorneys do the proving, not science. Science, after all, has no real value until a human being can use it to solve a problem or answer a question of importance. People prove things; science provides help. Yes, science may exist to provide some clarity in support of or in contradiction to an argument, but science itself does not…

Scholars analyzing the performance at a large technology firm examined the productivity in a 25-foot radius around their best performers and found that these workers did inspire better performance in coworkers - by 15 percent. Poor workers impacted their neighbors also, and even more. While “positive spillover” translated into an estimated $1 million in additional annual profits, "negative spillover" from so-called toxic workers was even more pronounced—sometimes having twice the magnitude of impact on profits as positive spillover. And toxic spillover happens fast. The good news for your…

Writers are going to find a way to make their work topical. The most important article I ever wrote (in my estimation), in the Wall Street Journal, came out about five weeks after I wrote it, and with a different lede. The news cycle had kept pushing it back but then a new event occurred which made it compelling and the editor saw the hook and had me redoo it, but the rest was evergreen facts. When I read an article in The Atlantic about science funding I had also the feeling that the writer already had an article accepted on it, but it sat there because other things got priority, and then…

Last month, Indonesia’s previous Minister of Research and Technology boasted that in 2019, Indonesia had overtaken Malaysia and Singapore in the number of published academic articles. However, scholars argue this ‘productivity’ is the result of a heavily criticised performance measurement system for academics based mostly on output and citations, instead of quality of research. The output-based performance review has also lead to rampant unethical practices among Indonesia’s research community including ‘data dredging’ - inflating sample sizes or tampering with statistical models - to…

Wildfires happen multiple times per year here in California, we even make light of it by joking "the mudslides will put out the wildfires" when the seasons turn.  Given that pollution surges due to fires are well-documented here, it would seem obvious that if pollution was going to cause more deaths, it would be during wildfire season. Yet that does not happen. Even using the somewhat ridiculous small micron particulate matter (PM2.5) only detectable with an electron microscope, as pollution, deaths have not gone up from pollution during wildfires. Not right away, not months later, not…

Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., of Berkeley is the kind of anti-science "truther" that even most west coast activists steer clear of, because he makes all of the social sciences look bad by association. Worse, he is a "social" psychologist, which for the last 20 years has been beset by fraud and retraction.  But at Scientific American, which has become the home of activist crazies, he fits right in. They have published a new polemic against the modern world, this time instead of claiming we are overrun by Frankenvegetables and only supplements and alternative medicine will save us they are giving…

Ku Kiai Mauna protestors have branched out from being concerned with the fictitious pollution of a nonexistent aquifer at the top of Mauna Kea on the big Island of Hawaii. Some who wear their brand have been making terroristic threats up to and including raising the possibility of suicide bombing. So far this is just talk.  Now they are also against a windfarm, a spaceport, and are protesting the support for Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) given by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.    Governor David Ige, and Mayor Harry Kim of Hawaii state and County respectively, need…

When papers came out stating that cutting back on red meat didn't make any difference in your real risk of getting cancer, because a normal diet did not cause any more cancer, it came under fire by critics who had spent an alarming chunk of their careers criticizing modern diets. And in corporate media, "come under fire from critics" is all you need to write an article that says what you want people to believe. Which is how BMJ was able to write a "teach the controversy" op-ed about papers published by their competitor, Annals of Internal Medicine. It's literally in his first sentence,…

Reporters have a duty to report what they find out after they verify that it has a certain degree of credibility.  To shine a light on the dark corners.  That is what the media did about the allegations against Dr Tyson.  I was a part of that process.  Given what was revealed by three women serious scrutiny was called for.  Without dispassionate news reporting that would not have occurred.  While it certainly brought no pleasure to anyone who covered that, Tchiya Amet, Dr Katelyn N Allers, and Ashley Watson, deserved and still deserve to be heard.  In the…