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.
A recent paper finds that vaccine disinformation is common on social media while a few years ago I had employees watch food documentaries on Netflix and write about their impression and the results in both cases are startling for people who don't realize the extent of the problem. Those with conspiracy theories about the modern world can now gain a worldwide audience, using social media and free markets.
If you were long concerned about Russians exploiting American media for their gain, you turned out to be right. But before they were meddling in American elections, they were meddling in American science. The Obama administration Director of National Intelligence warned that Russians were using offshore "donor advised" funds to launder dark money anonymous donations to activists opposing natural gas - Russia's top export. And they did the same thing with food, their second largest export.
A new study shows there is a reason USA Today is the most popular newspaper in America - they won't specify "laparoscopy" when "minimally invasive surgery" gets the point across to more people.While America leads the world in adult science literacy, that is still with under 30 percent of the population. To really reach the public, we need to use language that won't be a turn-off. Jargon may make us feel smarter, but it makes people who lack the vocabulary feel dumber, and that is a violation of smart journalism.
A U.C. Riverside environmentalist is sounding the alarm about your commute. Professor David Volz and colleagues hand-picked 90 commuter students who were given silicone wristbands to wear for five days. The goal was to find organophosphate esters on the wristbands, because some papers link those to harm in zebrafish and some epidemiologists will link anything to anything in humans. They found one, TDCIPP - chlorinated tris - at higher levels and speculate that it is oozing out of car seat foam and into our bodies.Just correlation, no testing
I got an email from an analytics group pitching an article about Valentine's Day movie results. It promised:"If you’re planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day by watching a romantic film you’ll probably end up watching Isn’t It Romantic, according to the latest" blah blah blah (which) "analyzed Google Trends data of IMDBs list of ‘100 romantic films for Valentine's Day’ to reveal which films were the most popular in February 2019.
A new paper by epidemiologists in Europe will overturn centuries of diet and health thinking; the thinking that eating too much makes people gain weight.Instead, the new statistical correlation argues, the weight gain is due to pregnant women who used cosmetics containing parabens, which triggered epigenetic changes in the babies, who then grew up to be fat. It is yet another thing you can blame on your mother.
When it comes to the political divide in America, the key difference in science is that academia has mostly Democrats while private sector scientists are mostly Republicans. There are big tents in a two-party system so a liberal New York cop will have nothing in common with a San Francisco progressive but they will both vote Democrat and this big tent philosophy covers science as well. Republicans are considered deniers of climate change and evolution while Democrats deny vaccines and agriculture, and the rest of the tent has to endure them.
Environmental Working Group, a litigation group devoted to food and chemical issues, is most famous for publishing its annual "Dirty Dozen" list to promote publicly available pesticide residues on food. While neglecting to mention that their organic industry clients are not tested separately.
In the early days of the environmental war on agriculture, activists claimed they were not against the science itself, they were anti-corporate. They didn't want a company in charge of the food supply.The argument resonated with a lot of people, including university scholars, so when the opportunity to solve the vitamin A deficiency issue in the developing world became available with genetic engineering, it was an independent group of scholars that developed a GMO rice with higher levels of beta-carotene. They made this Golden Rice available for free.
A new analysis used Alaska Department of Fish and Game data and fish estimates from 2007 to 2016 to quantify the number and value of Pacific salmon harvested from streams, rivers, and lakes in Alaska. They estimate that it's 48,000,000 fish per year, and that is without the recreational fishing catch and local communities where it's a food staple. The value is $88,000,000 per year.While $88 million is a fine industry it speaks poorly about those who protest farming and hunting while claiming to care about nature. Good luck going to a fancy restaurant without having a server note that the salmon you might order was wild.
Intelligence Squared recently had a debate on nuclear energy kicked off by Bill Nye, the famous Science Guy, and moderated by John Donvan.On the pro-nuclear side were Daniel Poneman, Deputy Secretary of Energy under President Obama, and Kirsty Gogan, co-founder of Energy for Humanity, while on the anti-science side was Gregory Jaczko, Obama's chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC), and Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.(1)What was missing? An actual nuclear physicist.Would you have a debate on vaccine safety without a doctor? A debate on climate change without a climate scientist? When it comes to nuclear energy, everyone is such an expert actual expertise seems to be irrelevant.
If you have never heard of the Journal of International Psychology, you are not alone.
