Science & Society
While almost everyone agrees that the American health system was not perfect - high quality, but some could not afford it - the solution may not have been more government spending, since government was not spending money all that wisely well before 2009.
Take one data point: Medicare breast cancer screening. You are not for breast cancer, right? No one is. Yet while breast cancer screening costs for Medicare patients skyrocketed between 2001 and 2009, there was no earlier detection of breast cancer.
Lots more taxpayer spending, no more value. But if you had objected to it, you…
There is a subset of academia that contends it lacks diversity. They have a point. While at the undergraduate levels there are lots of handicapped people, minorities, women and even Republicans, by the time grad school is finished there are fewer of all of those and at the tenure levels, not much diversity at all.
Even in medicine, where lots of women in the private sector juggle prosperous careers and families. In its academic counterpart, there aren't many women at all, and that may be costing academia valuable research talent.
The reason is obvious. Though academics claim they want to do…
Hank |
Not the JVC peer review ring, an actual gambling ring. Credit: China Daily
It's something of a mild joke in science circles - you can figure out who is peer-reviewing your paper by looking for the common author in the citations you 'missed' in your submission.
It was only a matter of time before peer review cabals became an actual strategy somewhere.
Why did it take so long? Growing up in Florida, there were ancient tales of developers buying up useless land, selling it to a friend, selling it again to other friends, then the final person takes out a loan against it and defaults and they…
Doctors cringe at the idea that patients may come in with specific information they got from the Internet; an athlete may do something good and the Wikipedia entry will say they are the greatest American since Abe Lincoln, while the entry for Science 2.0 says it was invented by a Wired writer in 2012.
But Wikipedia is absolutely enlightened compared to the misinformation that goes around on Twitter and Facebook. Every day some new graphic or claim about health and politics is invented and shared without any fact-checking of any kind.
But people like that. They last thing they want is…
There is a belief that someone decides to try a cigarette, reads a warning label, and then never does. This belief is perpetuated by the industry that has built itself around taxing and penalizing cigarette companies and taking that money to lobby against cigarettes.
It is the perfect business model because it does not work, and so there will always be a market.
Every once in a while, psychologists will do some surveys and provide a paper reaffirming new ways to make sure anti-smoking efforts are always funded but never succeed. In this case, by saying warning labels just need to be…
New York City residents think everything is about New York City. A NYC storm automatically becomes a Super Storm, the population between the Hudson River and the San Francisco Bay bridge are assumed to be mutant church Republican zombies, they even think it's hotter in the city than everywhere else.
On that last part, they may be right. There has long been a belief in the "urban heat island" (UHI) effect, which makes the world's cities warmer than the surrounding countryside. In an analysis of 65 cities across North America, researchers found that variation in how efficiently urban areas…
Metaphysical thought processes are more deeply wired than hitherto suspected
WHILE MILITANT ATHEISTS like Richard Dawkins may be convinced God doesn’t exist, God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might not exist.
Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.
While this idea may seem outlandish—after all, it seems easy to decide not to believe in God—evidence from several disciplines indicates that what you…
All across the world, there is one thing babies share in common; their size, if they are born to healthy, well-educated, well-nourished mothers.
Obviously there are wide disparities in the average size of babies at birth and that has significant consequences for future health, as small for gestational age babies who are already undernourished at birth often face severe short- and long-term health consequences. In 2010, an estimated 32.4 million babies were born already undernourished in low- and middle-income countries, which represents 27% of all live births globally. This is closely…
In 1978, I was just beginning my career with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). I worked in the southern Sierra Nevada range as the Assistant Forest Manager at Mountain Home State Forest, a 4800 acre state forest surround by national land. Mountain Home’s northern and eastern boundaries abutted the newly designated 304,000 acre Golden Trout Wilderness Area (GTWA).
Our neighbor, the federally managed 1.2 million acre Sequoia National Forest of the United States Forest Service, was struggling to transform the Golden Trout Wilderness Area from primitive to…
Many American Indians do not like "Bering Strait theory" because of how it is misused by non-native non-scientist. This is my attempt to set the record straight. The Bering strait migration of the paleoindians is a law of nature supported by evidence from the old and new world. It is a part of the theory of human evolution, from African hominids to Homo Sapiens Sapiens. African H. S. Sapiens then migrated to and replaced all other species with 1 to 2.5% admixture with at least two and maybe three archaic yet closely related species [1][2]. Every shred of DNA evidence…