Science & Society

In the 21st century, it seems to be settled that quotas are a bad idea. By picking people based on a characteristic outside their ability to best do a job, it seems to be another term for discrimination.  Some countries have done it anyway. Mexico, for example, passed quotas to create equal gender representation in government but a new social studies paper concludes that the quality of female candidates did not go down, nor did women rely on personal connections more than men to get elected. The paper in Politics, Groups, and Identities is in direct opposition to critics who argued…

Less than 40% of the results of clinical trials conducted at leading academic medical centers were shared within two years of completion, finds a study in the British Medical Journal. Randomized clinical trials are the gold standard in terms of testing the efficacy and safety of drugs, devices, and treatment strategies, so disseminating the results is of vital importance. if a corporation does not share results, the product can never get approval, so the process is self-correcting economically, but academics consider themselves more ethical than the private sector, so the lack of willingness…

Radioactive isotope in your tea, blatant patent theft and manuscript theft by a peer reviewer? Yep, these are all real actions by scientists who have screwed over other scientists just to get ahead. Why? Because in science "There is no prize for second place". Even in space, do you even remember which crew landed on the moon second? Go on, try not to google it. (For the record it was Charles "Pete" Conrad and Alan Bean). Throw in the pressure of not being given a permanent job and/or being fired for under-performance, despite blood, sweat and tears (pretty much literally for most scientists…

Keeping the Gate is a "science and society" blog, which is to mean that it explores the relationship between science and society.  Journalists and producers play critical roles in regulating that relationship.  But the definition of journalism is changing as more and more people with compelling interests gain access to more and more channels through which to spin personal sentiments into the appearance of irrefutable fact.   Readers of Science 2.0 and Keeping the Gate will be interested to read a recent paper published by my colleague, Jay Jarvis, in the Winter 2016 edition of…

New government guidelines claiming a link between alcohol and cancer won't have a direct impact on drinking, but they do raise awareness of harm and so may alter social attitudes towards alcohol, according to an editorial in The BMJ. Professor Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge and a member of the committee that produced the guidelines, concedes there is no evidence about any impact of health related guidelines on behavior, including for alcohol, risk information is still worth a try.   In the week after publicity due to…

A new paper finds that China's new efforts to price carbon could lower the country's carbon dioxide emissions significantly without impeding economic development over the next three decades. But the authors leave out one important reason; the Chinese have never once been honest about their emissions, and with their economy in free fall the last thing they intend to do is start being environmentally responsible now. They bullied American President Barack Obama into limiting American emissions while insisting their own had to remain unchecked, and numerical models which find they can reduce…

It is 5 years since the potential of social media was considered limitless. Not only was social media revolutionary, but it was literally capable of bringing about revolutions such as the uprisings of the “Arab Spring”. There was no part of our social lives that platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn could not change. Concepts like having a “social graph” became generally understood, as was the ability of those graphs to determine what we bought, how we felt, who our friends were and where we would work. It was believed that social media would be with us from birth to death,…

I have often argued that the pro-life movement has a disconnect about actual life when it comes to science. I don't mean about the health issues of abortion or birth control, I mean about saving babies using science. They seem to think science should only help after a baby is born, exactly the opposite of the argument they make about the beginning of life during abortion debates. When I was a child, conservatives were the group most likely to be supporters of science, but by the 2000s it looked more like liberals were. This may be because in America, conservative and liberal have little…

"We can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts."--Naomi Oreskes "There is a tendency among public intellectuals who are entirely reasonable in some areas to descend into the promotion of pseudoscience in others.--Debunking Denialism, on Oreskes Climate change scientists and journalists are still boiling over Naomi Oreskes' denialism accusation from December, when in the wake of the global Paris summit the Harvard historian wrote an article chastising four eminent researchers, including former NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, one of the greatest proponents of global warming,…

Sexual Harassment in federally funded research should be considered a federal crime.   This blog post originates as a comment on this blog at Forbes  "Advice For The Reformed Harasser On Rejoining The Scientific Community" by Janet D. Stemwedel.   Her third point is way off and looks really bad in light of the fourth point.  I want to say I agree with the spirit and intention of this article and most of the points made within it.    (You know what's coming next.)  3. Have your defenders stand down.When you’re committed to your own rehabilitation, it’s…