Science & Society

It's the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson's polemic, "Silent Spring", which means there will be no end to her 'impact'. Impact, of course, can be good or bad.  Carson is considered the rejunevator of the modern progressive movement and its anti-science, anti-progress and pro-environment focus. Carson inspired lots of environmentalists.  Carson also inspired lots of doomsday authors who saw that she made a difference in society.  Unfortunately, she also inspired a few scientists who now look at her through a political agenda and are nowhere near as critical of her work as…

Americans love tradition and there is no greater tradition than the idea that if you can't be fired, you will do better work. Okay, that is actually the antithesis of America, but in the late 1700s the US government made it possible to create a special class of employee - a tenured member of academia that would be free from cultural pressure, namely religious. http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/03/its-time-for-tenure-to-lose-te/ Obviously, cultural pressure still exists today: Good luck finding Republicans and minorities with tenure. You simply don't get tenure until you survive an academic, cultural…

What is sure to happen, since 50% of science funding is politically controlled, is that a giant wave of new PhDs will get teary stories on the floor of Congress and outraged Senators declaring that X project would have saved Y if only the researcher had gotten funding. Science is a meritocracy. Sometimes fewer women, fewer young people, fewer everything will get funding in some fields. As long as they aren't being prevented from getting funding, fixing a problem that doesn't exist leads to lousy science. And so does diluting the field with a bunch of people to make the area more important.…

And there is the beauty and the ugliness of it. Politicians, especially the ones you vote for, don't need to give you more funding because you are not going anywhere. It's the same mentality the WWE uses about its fans. They know the die-hards are not going to walk and the die-hards are not going to walk away from academia either. You're not even going to vote for anyone most likely to support increased funding, if they have the wrong letter after their name.  'The smark is the one person the company knows will be watching the show every week, no matter what. They're buying the licensed…

Before I begin, to the general science public who visits Science 2.0 (some 300,000,000 in 12 years, so thank you for supporting independent science media!) - this article is of no value to you, unless you like "inside baseball" discussions of why people do the thing the public visits here to see them do.  A recent report by the American Academy of Arts  &  Sciences delves into how people find science, and a big way people find science is online. Zoos, museums, various events, those are all great (I have even had Science 2.0 appear at wine tastings, so if you want a print-…

In 2006, when Science 2.0 began, it felt like the world was ready for a writing network composed of scientists. There had already been two attempts, one failed and one wildly successful, albeit more focused on cultural issues than science. The reason it felt time was because the public didn't trust journalists, who were (and are) often overtly partisan while scientists didn't trust journalists because they were (and are) often wrong. Why not make scientists the journalists? I argued that the science audience not did care about as much about the beauty of the narrative and the punctuation and…

The use of social media is ubiquitous in today's culture. A recent Pew Research report found that, among 18 to 29-year-olds, over 90 percent use some form of social media while essentially 100 percent of young Americans (ages 18-29) have mobile phones, 94 percent of which are smartphones.  Both social media and mobile devices obviously offer benefits, such as enabling people to be more connected,  but while potential social harms such as online bullying are well-known, the long-lasting risks associated with substance use and subsequent social media posting gets less coverage.…

On The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (which you can view a video of below, because podcast doesn't mean what it used to mean) Senator Bernie Sanders pledged to release government information about aliens. He says it's an issue for his wife. It's also an issue for Democrats. When I wrote Science Left Behind with Dr. Alex Berezow in 2011 there was a lot we had to leave out. Why, I had wondered in articles in 2008-9, did our Scientist In Chief in President Obama surround himself with UFO believers, a vaccine denier, and a guy who thought girls couldn't do math? Well, there are a lot more beliefs…

In 2016, Americans seemed to have waning trust in science. Back then, only 21 percent had "a great deal of confidence" in science(1) even though American adult science literacy leads the world. Science has been doing something right in the last few years. That number is up over half, to 35 percent.(2) What changed? The administration? Republicans can argue President Trump made "evidence-based" policy part of the lexicon, cutting off programs that didn't have proof showing they were helping the public and making EPA more transparent. Democrats can argue trust in science has surged because…

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4 If not Latin, then what? Please see the links at the foot of this page for my previous articles on the Voynich manuscript. Only a few people claim that the language underlying the Voynich Manuscript is Latin. However, there are very many people who claim, without proof of an alternative, that the VM is not latin. The "stars" are plants. The illustrations in the VM are self-evidently the work of an amateur. It would hardly be surprising, then, to discover that the text is also the work of an amateur. The set of symbols certainly does not fit into any…