Science & Society
Previous expansions in Medicaid eligibility by states were not associated with an erosion of perceived access to care or an increase in emergency department use - so why are so many now complaining that no doctors will take Medicaid?
The problem is compounded by the fact that low-income uninsured adults in states that opted not to expand Medicaid eligibility as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act appear to have more health-related issues than those uninsured adults living in states that expanded public insurance coverage.
A multi-institutional team led by researchers at the…
Sweden, the country with the second highest prevalence of type 1 diabetes in the world, could actually have 2-3 times more adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes than previously estimated, according to new findings in Diabetologia.
Current estimates in Sweden are based on the Diabetes Incidence Study in Sweden (DISS), which has been around since 1983. The DISS is one of very few registers to record data on adolescents and young adults and therefore findings from the DISS study have had implications for diabetes research and care in many countries. Dr. Araz Rawshani of the…
When the second working group
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fifth report March
31, its unexpected emphasis on the positive may have been more than a
reflection of better efforts to deal with the impacts of a warming planet. It
may also have been smart marketing strategy.
The IPCC’s press
release focused heavily on “opportunities” in its headline. Working Group
II Co-Chair Chris Field provided several quotes for the release that sounded
downright rosy.
“We definitely face challenges,
but understanding those challenges and tackling them creatively can make…
Sometimes errors happen, sometimes fraud happens. Sometimes methodology is suspect.
If there are potential problems in the scientific literature the choice is to discuss it privately (with the expectation that the issue will be appropriately handled) or post grievances (and even accusations) publicly. Haruko Obokata of Riken Institute in Japan came up with a groundbreaking way of making stem cells easily (you won't find it on Science 2.0) and it was called a 'Copernican revolution' in biology that promised to take stem cells out of the realm of hype and into applied heart research. It was an…
The
television docudrama Cosmos: A Space-time Odyssey is in
free-fall, having dropped in the ratings for the third straight week
after a somewhat tepid debut. TV By the Numbers reports that
only 3.91
million people watched the fourth episode of the series, down
from (an already mediocre) 5.77
million who watched the pilot.
This
might seem like a problem for Fox Entertainment. After all, it’s
devoting timeslots on multiple channels to the show. The company
won’t disclose exactly what the production cost, but it had to be a
pretty penny – the New
York Times reports the network tapped over a…
Hank |
A decade ago, a well-orchestrated political campaign against Republicans in general and George W. Bush in particular turned everything into an anti-science issue. Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which is run by a former Democratic staffer, was front and center in that effort, even drafting a popular 2004 petition saying Bush "has continued to distort and suppress science" which was dutifully signed by a bunch of people who were never going to vote for a Republican anyway.
More recently, the Obama administration has distorted and suppressed science related to Keystone XL, the…
20 years ago there was widespread concern about the impact of video game violence. "Mortal Kombat" created a gore filter so parents could turn that off, "Postal" had, unsurprisingly, someone committing mass killings emulating the rash of government union workers shooting people, which gave birth to the 'going postal' idiom. "Night Trap" was banned due to its use of full-motion video related to the murders.
Today, it is common for video games to be discussed if a mass shooting occurs. Though mass killing instances have not changed in 40 years, gun ownership is way up, and the other…
In what they are calling the most thorough analysis to date of studies on school bullying, the psychologists who authored a review on the topic in Annual Review of Psychology say that K-12 schools' efforts to curtail bullying are often disappointing and that, unlike public perception, bullying tactics like verbal aggression and exclusion are used by boys as often as girls
The authors say that the most comprehensive programs are effective but they require substantial commitment and school resources to be successful. An assembly once per year does nothing at all. Instead, other studies have…
There are recurring calls to make scientists more social. Scientists have already accepted government control of academic research and now fellow academics and some in the bureaucracy want to task them with communications and outreach also. A few even want to make their science outreach rather than their science output a factor in promotion and tenure.
Yet that is in defiance of what we know about the qualities that make a great scientists and still we see calls to add more of it. Peter Higgs, for example, recently claimed that he would not have been able to complete his Nobel-prize-…
People who have worked in both academia and the corporate world claim that the bias in academia is worse - which sounds odd, given the nature of academia. But statistics bear that out. Undergraduate representation of political views and handicapped people, for example, matches the general population, but once you reach the graduate, staff and faculty levels in colleges, diversity for people who are outside the political super-majority or who are handicapped disappears.
But even if you are part of the in crowd, it seems being a parent can take you right back out.
Parents have reported…