Science Education & Policy
So far, the Affordable Care Act and its mandate for insurance coverage has been a disaster. It isn't just that the website doesn't work, it's that the bulk of the people signing up for the program have simply switched from other insurance plans they already had, in order to get a subsidy. Relative to the population, very few people that wanted insurance were uninsured and so only about 11 percent of enrollments were actual uninsured people. It hasn't helped most uninsured people and without massive participation to offset higher costs, the insurance companies won't stay in: Aetna has left…
There is a looming drug crisis approaching and the results of a new paper about the FDA understanding of clinical trials is only going to make it worse.
Right now, the private sector conducts drug development and they are vilified by the media, the public and their competitors in government-funded academia. But drug development fails 95% of the time before getting to market, it costs billions, has to undergo rigorous testing and then has a short window for sales, during which time everyone complains that greedy companies charge too much. As a result of a hostile business climate and increased…
Conservationists and animal activists have created a mythology that poaching is mostly illegal hunting for trophies or something like ivory for decoration.
It's not the case at all, and that confusion is why anti-poaching efforts are about as effective as the 'War on Drugs' in America.
Poaching is primarily done to satisfy the alternative and complementary medicine markets, which are a quirky shadow business in America (the U.S. government's $120 million annual National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine - NCCAM - boondoggle aside) but in Asia, alternative medicine is…
A new paper claims that exposure to secondhand smoke at home or in the car increases the odds of children being readmitted to the hospital within a year of being admitted for asthma.
It seems like pretty obvious correlation-causation that more smoke of any kind would be bad for asthmatic kids but the paper says their new estimate should be used as data for more smoking cessation efforts, to reduce the likelihood of future hospitalizations.
The exposure was determined by measuring cotinine - an alkaloid in tobacco and a metabolite of nicotine (as you may have noticed, cotinine is an…
Hank |
In the introduction to Science Left Behind, I wrote about a bizarre effort by MoveOn.org-sponsored (think Tea Party, but of the left) progressives who helped gain control of Congress in the 2006 election to make good on their promises to Make America Green - and how in order to do so, they latched onto every pseudoscientific fairy tale they could, like replacing spoons in the Congressonal cafeteria with the kind made from corn.
Because they only listened to environmental claims, they didn't ask in advance whether the spoons melted in hot soup and the knives broke, meaning staffers were…
If we want to protect the health of women, government policies should require that both parents take maternity leave, says social epidemiologist Dr. Patricia O'Campo, director of the Centre for Research on Inner City Health of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, senior author of a new paper.
The conclusion was based on a literature review that looked at the influence of public policies on women's overall health and found that parental leave policies tended to reduce the physical and mental stress levels in women who, historically, held the majority of the burden of childcare and…
There are lots of female scientists in America, women get more Ph.D.s than men, yet in academia they also tend to leave more often because, the claim goes, academia lacks the potential for advancement and the family-friendly policies that the corporate world has.
Those arguments have merit. Unlike the corporate world, tenure jobs in academia never go away unless someone quits so as more women entered the faculty ranks, it didn't change the leadership at the top. While women today are over-represented in faculty and tenure hiring, that is only when new jobs open up, which happens less often.…
Chronic unemployment, dependence on government welfare and internal social division are the result of Canadian social welfare for natives - despite the substantial resources devoted, according to a new study. The work, jointly performed by the University of Alicante, the University of Granada and Laurentian University, was prepared by University of Alicante lecturer in sociology Raúl Ruiz Callado.
Data on an Oji-Cree aboriginal community called ‘Omushkego First Nation’ were analyzed. This community is considered a representative case for the descriptive analysis of contemporary…
Bullying has become a frequently discussed problem but most of the stories involve young people.
Less discussed is its prevalence in academia but a Rutgers–Camden nursing scholar is shedding some light on how it is becoming increasingly common.
Janice Beitz, a professor at the Rutgers School of Nursing–Camden, draws upon interviews conducted with 16 nursing professors who were the victims of social bullying in an academic nursing workplace. Beitz says that the participants described in detail instances in which they were slandered, isolated, physically threatened, lied to, or given…
An interdisciplinary group has called on scholars, government granting agencies, journal editors and reviewers to adopt stringent and transparent standards in order to give social science research credibility, substance and impact.
The authors note that vague methodologies and suspect conclusions has contributed to a distorted body of research that tends to exaggerate the effectiveness of programs that deal with important issues affecting millions of people including health, agriculture, education and environmental policy.
They cite as an example of flawed research a 2010 paper by…