Science Education & Policy
Health costs saved or gained, like all claims about what did not happen, are made-up metrics, so we can either accept or not accept the notion that 4 million criminals are now going to have free health care and that will cost us less money than if they didn't have health care and that caused them to commit more crimes and then get health care.
Politicians coming up on a mid-term election have to take their health reform victories where they can get them and the work led by Marsha Regenstein, PhD, who is a professor of health policy at
the George Washington University School of Public Health…
Hank |
While former Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is a fine scholar, he seemed to be lost when it came to drafting a federal energy policy that was evidence-based.
It's easy for an academic to postulate that $9 a gallon gas will be 'good' for us but when it comes to managing a national constituency, including a lot of people who will be ruined by expensive gasoline, there has to be some real thought before actions are taken. Government is not a sandbox.
His obsession with mitigating CO2 rather than building a better energy program was my primary concern when he was hired as the person responsible for…
The Affordable Care Act has a lot of costs and requirements that don't seem to make sense - requiring that plans include maternity coverage for post-menopausal women and single men comes to mind - and adding social workers into health care teams would seem to be another example of that.
Not so, said former Harvard Pilgrim Health Care CEO and current gubernatorial candidate Charles D. Baker Jr., keynote speaker at the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work Forum "Health Care Reform: From Policy to Practice", who believes that the social workers in his audience were going to bring an…
Anyone who has had to deal with Hospice for a loved one has to been impressed with the level of compassion and concern and caring they bring.
But they are not all the same, and a paper in JAMA Internal Medicine finds a way to create a little bit of class warfare about that.
In 2011, 51 percent of hospices were for-profit. That's much different that the 5 percent that were for-profit in 1990. What does that really mean? The biggest misconception among the public is that for-profit is bad and not-for-profit must be good. They both have to make a profit. United Way does not pay its CEO $…
If China wants to save .009 of its population by 2050, they need to implement UN tobacco control policies, including surveillance and monitoring of tobacco use prevalence, creation of smoke-free environments, treatment of tobacco dependence, tobacco consumption taxation and other price controls, enforcement of heath warnings on tobacco packages and marketing bans.
If the Communist party in China wants to be overthrown immediately, they will do just that, because there are hundreds of millions of smokers there, and the Chinese government is the world's largest tobacco product…
Hank |
A Washington state referendum to put warning labels on genetically modified foods, I-522, failed in the last election, but a new effort is more clever - they want to warn the public about Frankenfish and are couching it in an effort to simply make the public aware if it's farm-raised or caught in the wild or, oh yeah, a TRANSGENIC ABOMINATION OF NATURE.
As many in the science audience know, the AquAdvantage fish has been the victim of a spectacular anti-science governmental fail for over a decade and a half. If you think the left or right is more anti-science, you can use this fish -…
The fifth international school of Science Journalism will be held in the small town of Erice, in Sicily (Italy) between June 9th and 14th. The event is organized by the INFN, and I wish to publicize it here also because I will give a contribution there.
The general theme of the school this years is "The Digital World: Computing, Networks, and Us". From the "About" tab in the conference site:
"The ways in which the paradigm of the WWW on the one
hand and the availability of huge computing facilities on the other have
opened possibilities in a variety sciences, technologies and social…
Americans don't like to talk about social class, we threw out the British because they believed an act of birth made them superior. In America, no class is better than any other - we are the only culture that thanks a waiter for interrupting our conversation at dinner in order to slosh water all over the table refilling a glass.
Psychologists from Northwestern and Stanford writing in Psychological Science ("Closing the Social-Class Achievement Gap")say social class needs to be part of educational discourse. They contend a one-hour intervention closed the persistent academic achievement gap…
Hank |
Research and Development (R&D) has become something of a dirty word throughout a giant swath of the Science, Technology, Engineering
and Math (STEM) community. Academia is
where it's at, the saying goes, and basic research, learning for the sake of learning
with no defined public benefit, is what scientists are told they must do if
they want to be real scientists.
Technology will be fine, it is assumed. Like gifted students who find their
school programs cut, the belief is that American technology will be find a way
to be dominant.
But we can see that lead is slipping fast. The…
Hank |
In the endless war on pharmaceutical companies, there is a consistent refrain; the US Food and Drug Administration is too slow to approve new drugs unless it approved drugs too quickly and the product hurt someone. Mainstream media highlight the complaints of doctors and patients that some drug or another is available in Europe or Asia but not here and then on another page delights in a lawsuit about how evil the company was for making a drug which carried risks.
Safety is important or it isn't and we often default to the precautionary principle which says it is. Thus it feels odd to have…