Science & Society

1. On Wednesday, May 15th, the House Committee on Natural Resources: Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife will hold a Legislative Hearing on H.R. 2532: To protect grizzly bear populations, and for other purposes, in the Longworth House Office Building 1324. We'd like to solicit an article examining how serious the issue is.   Fee: $100  2. On Thursday, May 16th, he USDA will release its annual report estimating the number of colonies producing honey, yield per colony, honey production, average price. The data for this report were collected from a stratified sample of all…

There is renewed controversy about a pesticide called chlorpyrifos and like most science issues it has come down along political lines; Democrats, who have almost all anti-science activists but ironically also a lot of science academics under their umbrella, want to ban it, while Republicans, who have a lot of industry and private sector scientists under their umbrella, say it should continue to be regulated but not banned. Even in the White House the stances have been predictable. The Obama administration, which relied a lot on work by Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action…

U.S. Right To Know, an industry-funded trade group that was created to harass and intimidate scientists, has teamed up with a few academic allies to promote 129 Freedom of Information Act requests they submitted related to Coca-Cola.  To harass scientists as effectively as possible, they make requests overly broad so they can claim to "reveal" some suitably cosmic number, in this case 87,000 documents. In reality, they barely got 5 that said anything they could spin and to get even that handful, hundreds of thousands were all first parsed at taxpayer expense, and such targeted harassment…

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was once a serious, revered organization with the somber task of tackling what environmental factors caused what cancers so that we could eliminate them.(1) And they did. Their decisions for the first 20 years were rock solid - there is no debate now that cigarettes, smog, and alcohol will kill you, especially if you routinely have high doses.  When California chose to abdicated its science policymaking to a French group, there were concerns that its power might be abused but they were dismissed because there was no indication…

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC is promoting a doomsday shortage where America is without 47-122,000 physicians, over a third of them being general practitioners, by 2032 and say it is due to the “graying” of America, both among providers and the public. This is a market survey written for a trade group, it is designed to create a sense of urgency and get more money for their members, but the numbers are not wrong.(1)  While in the next dozen years there won't be a huge spike in kids, young people today are even abstaining from sex at record levels, there will be a…

Biased against Women and Black People? That is what the Harvard Implicit Association test  (IAT)showed me.  I took them more than once and this was the overall result.  As a SMALL part of a large collaboration that may put hardware into space, I was invited to take this test in preparation for a diversity workshop.  Since I could not attend the conference, I thought it wise to send these results out to the group.   Some may feel like these tests only target straight white males to malign them as racist and sexist.   The IAT could also show one is biased…

Environmentalists may hate science but they love to ignore inconvenient truths about alcohol - namely that it is a toxic carcinogen the way they wish BPA, atrazine, fracking, vaccines (insert whatever they are raising money on this week) could be. Though the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared alcohol a class 1 carcinogen long ago, right along with smog (PM10) and cigarette smoking, alcohol is the only one that gets awards so if you want to give yourself cancer for Earth Day/Lenin's birthday (1), I'd like to suggest tequila, because Tequila Herradura was recipient of…

These days, anybody with an internet connection can be a publisher. That doesn’t make everybody a journalist. This distinction has become more important than ever in light of two recent events. One was the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The other was a proposal by lawmakers from Georgia, the Peach State, that looked more like an export from the Georgia that was part of the Soviet Union: a so-called “ethics in journalism” act that would have imposed onerous new requirements and potential civil penalties on reporters. As soon as news broke of Assange’s potential extradition to the…

By oversimplifying the complex human story of how big science done by big collaborations like Event Horizon Telescope, the mainstream media got many things wrong.    The task of the media is to inform the general public.   So, while they do have to simplify complex topics they also have to faithfully represent them.   Social media reflects the level of understanding created in the average person by both our educational system and the major media. Being a adjunct prof at community colleges teaching introductiory to intermediate level courses this was not…

By oversimplifying the complex human story of how big science done by big collaborations like Event Horizon Telescope, the mainstream media got many things wrong.    The task of the media is to inform the general public.   So, while they do have to simplify complex topics they also have to faithfully represent them.   Social media reflects the level of understanding created in the average person by both our educational system and the major media. Being a adjunct prof at community colleges teaching introductiory to intermediate level courses this was not…