Of the many flawed things about the 1990s Kyoto Protocol, like exempting China, India and Mexico and letting France and Germany pick the target date (1), one of the biggest flaws may have slipped under the radar: recommending small dams instead of larger ones.Granted, there wasn't a lot of science in the Kyoto agreement so it's no surprise that the information on dams was wrong also, it still shakes the faith of the public in policymakers and affirms the belief that all of them are instead engaged in the scientization of politics.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22567023http://www.nature… the United States is now back at early 1990s levels of CO2 emissions, thanks to a switch to natural gas in the energy sector and a moribund economy, that doesn't apply to Asia. The middle class in China alone has a population that exceeds the entire USA and they all want, and are getting, cars and air conditioners and a better life and the emissions to go along with it. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise but warming, the telltale sign of climate change, has not.Since 2000, global warming has tapered off and virtually no one in the climate science community predicted that could happen.
If you think a university education is expensive, you might want to blame the government trying to create voters for its party by giving away something for free - in the early 1990s, Congress decided that since a college education meant higher lifetime earnings, giving everyone a college education would mean everyone got rich.Only colleges got rich - but a decade before that, the government wanted to give colleges more money too. By allowing them to patent technology from research created with government grants, it was postulated that college tuitions would remain low. That didn't happen, but they may spike even more if a farmer's case against Monsanto wins in the Supreme Court.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, the 'food police' that sued McDonald's to try and have toys removed from Happy Meals, (and unsurprisingly helped create a "nonpartisan" group that immediately declared 32 Democrats "flawless" due to their willingness to ban things without evidence in the last election) is spearheading another effort to blame obesity on soda.
3 years after the Obama administration released its Women in America report, lamenting the wage gap in women, they have done nothing at all to rectify it, including in the White House itself. There are some places were it is more overt than others. Engineering, for example, pays women more equally than anyone, though women in academia insist engineering is male-dominated. Environmentalism has far more female representation and pays women even less than the 75% number that gets thrown around.Lots and lots of reasons are thrown out there but tread cautiously if it comes up. No matter what you say or how you say it, someone will accuse you of mansplaining or being duped by your own white male privilege.
John R. Block, U.S. secretary of agriculture from 1981 to 1986, knows a thing or two about food. And he doesn't like the "black marketing" being done by the organic industry to imply nonexistent benefits and also traditional food harm. Proponents are basically selling food homeopathy.But it's a $35 billion a year business so their marketing machine is clearly doing something right.
As former NSA director Michael Hayden learned on an Amtrak train last year, anyone with a phone can become a livetweeting snoop.But why use a person when you can use a lamo? Two artists, Kyle McDonald and Brian House, have built Conversnitch for less than $100. It resembles a lightbulb or lamp and listens in on nearby conversations and posts snippets of transcribed audio to Twitter.
In the Wall Street Journal, Science 2.0 columnist Amir Aczel tackles the biggest question of all; how to reconcile religion and science when people on the fringes of each are doing the best to declare war on each other.He notes that 51% of Americans don't believe in the Big Bang. Startling, yet if we ask that 49% that do believe in it how it actually worked, they have no idea. They just have faith in science.
Teaching is somewhat of a thankless job. One group tells you not to 'teach to the test' while another blames you when international test scores show American kids are in the middle of the pack.Well, American kids have always been at the middle of the pack, for as long as there have been international tests. And yet those apparently dumb kids from the first test in the early 1960s, who were almost last on standardized tests, have led the world in Nobel prizes and science output. Those kids grew up to be the people who now lead the world in adult science literacy.So it's time to give teachers a break this Teacher's Week.Do you have what it takes to be one? Here is how to find out.
Academics share one thing with the corporate world - most people want to climb the socio-economic ladder.A post at an elite university like Oxford or Caltech is the crowning achievement of a career — but some believe it will also improve the quality of their work, by bringing them together with other top-flight researchers. Plausible, but Albert-Laszlo Barabasi shows in a study published in Scientific Reports it isn't the case. He's not green with Ivy envy, he is from Harvard.
