Science & Society
A statistical modeling paper has projected rates of obesity and overweight status in both male and female Europeans for 2030 and found that, when it comes to being fat, not all 53 Euro-region countries are equal.
The statistical model incorporated all available data on body mass index (BMI) and obesity/overweight trends in all 53 of the WHO's Euro-region countries. Their model "enables obesity trends to be forecast forward providing estimates of the dynamic epidemiology of the disease".
Definitions were based on the WHO's standard cut=offs - healthy weight (BMI ≤24.99 kg/m²), overweight and…
Can hurricanes cause stillbirths to rise sharply or is it epidemiologists torturing data until it confesses again?
A paper in the Journal of Epidemiology&Community Health says that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are responsible for up to half of all recorded stillbirths in the worst hit areas and the true fetal death toll may even be higher because of the displacement of people whose homes were destroyed. Well, they use the weaseling "may have been" that has become famous in advocacy claims for meaning 'we are claiming causation but we can't prove it so we will hint at it'.…
Would reducing smog lead to higher earnings?
Yes, say Columbia University professor of Environmental Health Science
Frederica Perera
and colleagues. They correlate reduced air pollution to higher IQ. When two curves need to match to create causation and correlation arrows, it's easy to do. What started going up in the early 1960s? American Nobel prizes. What went down? Air pollution. You can make the same argument with organic food. Kids of organic farmers have lower IQs than kids in Manhattan.
This association was created using older research which linked prenatal exposure to air…
Media has always been partisan but when it was only partisan one way, that was the norm. It was considered objective and impartial. In the US, there were social conservative Democrats who believed in national defense and liberal Republicans who supported labor. Who can really remember whether Thomas Dewey or Harry Truman was a Democrat or a Republican? They weren't very different, really. The media were conservative.
Eventually that was going to change and it did. In the 1960s, media turned the other way and that was how it stayed until the late 1980s. Conservative commentary really only…
Gang culture gets you one way or the other according to a new paper. Gang members are twice as likely to become both a victim and an offender of a crime than non-gang members.
Why? Single acts of violence often lead to retribution between gangs as a whole, according to David Pyrooz, an assistant professor in criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, principal author of the study.
"In other words, gang members are not distinctly offenders or victims; instead, gang membership is a common source of both forms of violence," said Pyrooz. "Today's criminal offender is…
Hank |
If you want to find a hotbed of anti-science sentiment, sure, you could go to a cigar bar full of Republicans and mention that the temperature outside must be up because of global warming - and you would get lots of predictable responses, but you would not get someone claiming you were on the IPCC because they remembered reading your name somewhere this one time.
If you want to see true cluelessness coupled with denial of science, even the Republican National Convention won't do it - you have go to sites about food that are run by anti-science groups.
The modern day Food Temperance movement…
It isn't just U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry insulting Jewish people, the whole world harassed, threatened and used abusive language toward Jews on an individual basis more in 2013.
But there was a silver lining; a 20% decline in violent incidents against Jews.
The annual report by Tel Aviv University's Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Moshe Kantor Database for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, in cooperation with the European Jewish Congress, highlighted the "severe escalation in anti-Jewish atmosphere," borne out by daily attacks on…
Hank |
He's not alone. An earnest young progressive named Ryan Cooper, who has dutifully written for all of the left-wing sites proclaiming to be more science-y, put his partisan cards on the table with This is a perfect example of why scientists don't vote Republican : When it comes to climate change, the intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement is stunning.
That makes no sense at all: Academia stopped voting Republican generations ago, when Ronald Reagan was president. He was the most pro-science president in history, basic research was one of the very few things he felt…
Privacy discussions of modern times have four pillars - and they are all weak, according to a new article.
There are four main arguments about privacy: (1) it is dead; (2) people don't care about privacy and modern youth care even less; people with nothing to hide have nothing to fear; and privacy is bad for business.
“These claims are common, but they’re myths,” says Neil M. Richards, JD, privacy law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “These privacy myths are not only false, they get in the way of the kind of important conversations we need to have about…
About 4,000 babies die in their sleep each year from due to suffocation and strangulation despite recommendations by the American Academy of Pediatrics that infants always be placed on their backs to sleep and that they share a room with parents but not a be
According to the study, these deaths from SIDS or SUID (sudden unexpected infant death) are seen more often among black families.
"We found that many infants are not placed to sleep on the back, and many still routinely share a bed during sleep," said lead author Eve Colson, M.D., professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine.…