During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
Is your cell phone a known carcinogen? Do cell phones give you cancer? Well, the precautionary principle contends unless you can prove cell phones can't give you cancer, then they are a concern. Fortunately, the precautionary principle isn't overused by everyone (though when it is, the politically like-minded dismiss it as policy disagreement and not being anti-science) but any time you have an anti-science hotbed, it will get trotted out.
It makes environmental activists crazy, in that 'believe scientists when science agrees with us but scientists are out to kill us when science doesn't agree' kind of way, but a large study of U.S. adults found that the more science they knew and the more independent they were, the less they were worried about climate change.
Being in media, it's easy to get inundated with convincing opposing data and so it's easy to understand why it can be confusing for the public who don't have hours each day to sift through it all. Over a decade ago, for example, people were concerned that American students tested poorly against students in Asia. No Child Left Behind, which established education performance standards for states, therefore had terrific bipartisan support when it was instituted - it passed 384–45 in the House and 91-8 in the Senate. Educators were that convincing in their concerns that students were losing ground worldwide.
Question: Quick, what is the fastest way to make the term "false equivalence" appear?Answer: Contend that whatever side of the political spectrum the person you are talking to is on is more anti-science than the other side. Or even equal.The Left is More Anti-Science than the Right
Imagine if a journalist sent their story to former Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney to 'check the facts' - what would the outcry sound like from other journalists and the public?
Cornelius McGillicuddy, Sr., better known as Connie Mack, once said that pitching is 75 percent of baseball. He was speaking from experience, not data, and looks can be deceiving, as people who think a curve ball move two feet can attest, but science is about understanding the world according to data, and that includes baseball. The data say he is wrong, according to a new analysis by a University of Delaware professor. Pitching is just 25 percent of a team's success.
The least convincing argument for government-run schooling is that it provides a 'social' experience for children. Anyone who attended school has horror stories about the behavior kids learn from the social environment at schools and, if you are a parent with a school age child, you might even worry about it more than be relieved.Single-sex schools would seem to relieve some of that pressure, just like some women or some men feel better at a single-sex exercise facility. Advocates of single-sex schools contend that there may be brain differences between girls and boys that benefit from different teaching styles, though neuroscientists have found no brain differences linked to different learning styles.
A poll on Mashable, unscientific but a talking point anyway, found nearly 75-percent saying they "hate" the Facebook news feed changes.
It isn't often I will agree with Club Sierra...I mean Sierra Club - if you have ever been to their offices you will know how easy it is to confuse the terms.They spend so much time latching onto whatever cause will generate donations it's hard to know if they believe in anything, much less science, and it can make you nuts. Like Greenpeace, their baffling 'trust scientists when it comes to global warming but scientists are out to kill you with GMOs' stance is, in a nutshell, why progressives (not liberals, not Democrats, progressives) are so goofy in their anti-science beliefs.
In early July, Karolinska University Hospital issued a press release about a successful trachea transplant using synthetic tissue. It got mainstream media coverage and it was interesting, I thought, but evolutionary and not revolutionary. We had covered a Lancet paper on much the same thing in 2008. But in the course of a correspondence with a media rep she noted something important; not only was this not a traditional transplant, this was not even one where an organ was decellularized and recellularized with the patient's stem cells, it was created for the patient and in just two days.That meant no immunosuppressive drugs, at $20,000 per year, and no morbidities due to their side effects.
People may complain about tax breaks for successful energy companies but the one thing worse is spending real money on lousy ones. Yet it has happened because advocacy is taking precedence over science.The recent Solyndra LLC collapse is not the first time this has happened, nor can it be blamed solely on the Obama administration simply due to his zeal for alternative energy - the Department of Energy began the loan guarantee program in 2006 when there was a Republican Congress and a Republican senate and in 2005 the wasteful ethanol subsidies and mandates were put into law.
Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that causes urethritis and pelvic inflammatory disease. Before AIDS, this was what you got for having promiscuous, unprotected sex with many anonymous partners in a consequence-free environment (a period known as "The 1970s" yet often assumed to be the '60s) and when you contracted it you took some antibiotics and then it was back to Studio 54.
