Academics direly need objective, meaningful metrics to judge the impact their publications have on their field of expertise. Nowadays any regular Joe will be able to show many authored papers in their CV, and it will be impossible to objectively assess the relative merits of each and every one of them, if you are trying to rank Joe in a list of candidates for tenure, or just a research job at a University.
A week after the Science March, environmental groups have turned up the heat on politicians, hoping to use the famous DDT strategy (ignore scientists, get a politician to do the work) to get a ban on a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids (neonics), which are sprayed on seeds so that there is less environmental strain and food waste.
Despite being in use for decades, during which bee levels have not gone down, anti-science groups like Sierra Club, Greenpeace and Union of Concerned Scientists have continued to raise money promising donors they will get them banned. They have been using a variety of techniques to reach their target goals.
Imagine one person walks into a room and they are smiling and saying hello to everyone. Then imagine another person who walks in quietly, looks grim, and heads to a corner.
Rapper Kanye West once told the press he doesn't smile for photos because "it just wouldn't look as cool," and humanities scholars who have to write about something have written that the reason Dean became cool was because he didn't smile. But is it true?
A new study finds that
Americans waste nearly a pound of food per person per day. And at the top of it is fruits and vegetables. Way below those is dairy, and meat waste is almost a third of what fruits and vegetables are.
People who believe they "eat more healthy" than others - the organic elite and vegetarians - have a food fetish for fresh vegetables. And Americans are told by government committees and pyramids they should want to eat vegetables, so they buy them and then throw them out when they start to spoil. When is the last time you threw out moldy pizza?
All of the people who joke they have Asperger's or are "on the spectrum" as an excuse for behavior they know is simply annoying or weird are probably going to want to stop. It's going to be a lot cooler to just admit they are annoying or weird.
The reason is because
a new analysis in
Moleular Autism finds that Hans Asperger, the Austrian pediatrician for whom a mild segment of the autism spectrum is named, collaborated with Nazis and helped kill disabled children.
Homeopathy, a belief from 200 years ago that if you took something that mimicked the symptoms of a disease you could prevent a disease, or that extremely diluted water with a molecule of something will be curative, has never been shown to work in any clinical trial.
Nonetheless, some people swear by it, much as people believe other placebos. What to do if your doctor recommends it? In the United States, a doctor is ethically forbidden from prescribing a placebo outside a clinical trial, but it is known some do. And lots of folk medicine/alternative medicine/integrative medicine people will claim it works if you believe it works.
In 1907,Francis Galton recorded the entries from a competition where people guessed the weight of an ox. After analyzing hundreds of estimates the statistician found that while individual guesses varied wildly, the median of the entries was surprisingly accurate, within one percent of the ox's real weight.
Galton published the results and his theory of collective intelligence, the "wisdom of crowds," became part of the lexicon.
Advocates are claiming medical marijuana can help to fight the opioid epidemic but data show the opposite. Rather than being at lower risk, people who use medical marijuana may be at higher risk for non-medical prescription drug use.
Much of medical marijuana usage was always recreational and a new study in the Journal of Addiction Medicine finds that people who use medical marijuana have higher rates of prescription drug use - including pain relievers.
Does Use of Medical Marijuana Increase or Decrease Prescription Drug Use?
This is another of my posts to help victims of fake doomsdays. For the last three weeks we've had constant PM's and comments on Doomsday Debunked as a result of a viral hoax that pranked probably hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Many of them are young children still at school who came across it on social media, on twitter, Facebook, reddit or YouTube, or as a result of the sensationalist press.
Though we read a lot of claims about impending extinction, the biological reality is that we don't know anything about 99.9999999 percent of species that have ever lived. And then there are species only newly discovered that are immediately declared endangered because an academic only recently named them in a print journal.
