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Everybody Must Get Framed

I guess nobody reads me, and everyone reads PZ, but I am astonished how many people, after my eight lengthy posts on the topic, dozens of posts by others who 'get it' and literally hundreds of comments by people who 'get it', still equate framing with spin. For instance, in his latest post criticizing Michael Ruse - and I agree with every word of the criticism which Ruse totally deserves - Larry sinks low in the last paragraph, conflates what Ruse does with Mooney/Nisbet stuff (I guess equating all your enemies-du-jour is a 'cool' rhetorical technique these days) and ends the otherwise…

Open Access Week: Principles for Open Bibliographic Data

It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development. I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…

Modern Humans and Neanderthals: Did they "do it?"

Or, to be less crude, did modern humans, having already evolved in Africa, interbreed with the local Europeans who were Neanderthals, and if so, did they produce fertile offspring ... and, did this happen in sufficient degree to have mattered at all to the genetics of later (but not necessarily living) people? In my opinion, the answer is, of course they interbred. There are many reasons to believe this if almost no way to prove it. Indeed, the evidence of this interbreeding is virtually nil. With every additional test of the interbreeding hypothesis using DNA, the null hypothesis of no…

Janet Hyde and Marcia Linn on the Psychological Similarity between Men and Women

In my previous post arguing for the relatively large psychological similarity between men and women -- in great contrast to the public conception -- I drew heavily on the work of Janet Hyde, a professor of Psychology at Berkeley. Now Janet Hyde and Marcia Linn have published an editorial and review in Science summarizing their work. Money quote: A review of meta-analyses of research on psychological gender differences identified 46 reports, addressing a variety of psychological characteristics, including mathematical, verbal, and spatial abilities; aggression; leadership effectiveness; self-…

Obesity, Inflammation, and Diabetes

This entry is cross posted from the the SITN Flash, a bimonthly publication written and edited by Harvard graduate students. You can find my piece, as well as archives of previous articles written by many graduate students at the Science in the News website. In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began tracking the prevalence of obesity in the United States. Since then, a clear trend has emerged: obesity is on the rise. The maps below compare obesity levels across the United States in 2004 and 2008: It's clear that the number of people with obesity is growing, and has been as long we…

Futurecrime: jailbreaking your credit card

This is an adaptation of my shortlisted entry to the 2013 Future of Money Design Award. The brief was to design a crime that would exist in a cashless economy. The judging took place at the Consult Hyperion  Tomorrow's Transaction conference. I didn't win, but I enjoyed working on the idea and it was nice to make it to the final three, so I thought I'd share it here. Note that this is a work of fiction, although it contains many true elements. EDIT: Since writing this, a lawsuit has been filed against a Pennsylvania McDonald's restaurant that insisted on paying employees via a fee-laden debit…

Modern Humans and Neanderthals: Did they "do it?"

Or, to be less crude, did modern humans, having already evolved in Africa, interbreed with the local Europeans who were Neanderthals, and if so, did they produce fertile offspring ... and, did this happen in sufficient degree to have mattered at all to the genetics of later (but not necessarily living) people? In my opinion, the answer is, of course they interbred. There are many reasons to believe this if almost no way to prove it. Indeed, the evidence of this interbreeding is virtually nil. With every additional test of the interbreeding hypothesis using DNA, the null hypothesis of no…

Birds in the News 144

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Orange phase Dusky Lory, Pseudeos fuscata. Image: John Del Rio. [larger view]. Birds in Science News Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have wondered why some lineages have diversified more than others. Over 20 years ago, Jeff Wyles, Allan Wilson, and Joseph Kunkel proposed that big brains might favor adaptive evolutionary diversification in animals by facilitating the behavioral changes needed to use new resources or environments, a theory known as the behavioral drive hypothesis. When these authors…

Gay marriage and interracial marriage

My thanks to Ed Darrell for pointing me to an article by Peter Gomes in the Boston Globe. Gomes is the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard. Of the recent court cases involving gay marriage, he writes: We have seen this before. When the courts eventually invalidated long-established laws sanctioned by church and society that forbade interracial marriage, the so-called "miscegenation" laws that obtained in many parts of this country within living memory, the courts that did this were invariably maligned as interventionist, arbitrary, and…

On Class and Skills and Education

In a comment to yesterday's post about the liberal arts, Eric Lund makes a good point: The best argument I have ever heard for doing scholarship in literature and other such fields is that some people find it fun. I single this out as a good point not because I want to sneer at the literary disciplines, but because with a little re-wording, this could apply to just about anything. The best reason for studying any academic subject is because it's fun. This is, as I alluded to in a later comment of my own, a significant source of tension for Delbanco's book and a lot of other arguments about…

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Having brought in a huge new audience at the end of last week-- partly through the "framing"/"screechy monkeys" things, but mostly because my What Everyone Should Know About Science post hit the front page on Reddit-- I figured I should take this opportunity to... Well, drive them all right the hell away again with a peer-reviewed physics post. Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced the papers I was going to write about, on experiments with qubits in diamond. They're probably on my desk at work, doing me no good at all. That's OK, though, because it would probably benefit from a little bit…

Complete Genomics back in action after 6 month funding delay

Complete Genomics is finally back on the road towards fulfilling its promises of $5000 human genome sequences, after delays in obtaining funding for a massive new facility pushed back its plans by six months. The $45 million in funding it announced this week will be sufficient to build the new Silicon Valley facility, which the company claims will have the capacity to sequence a staggering 10,000 genomes over the course of 2010. Complete Genomics is an unusual creature in the second-generation sequencing menagerie: instead of aiming to generate revenue by selling machines to researchers and…

A confluence of the anti-vaccine and "health freedom" movements at AutismOne in Chicago

One of the biggest examples of either self-delusion or lying that emanates from the anti-vaccine movement is the oh-so-pious and indignant denials that inevitably follow from its members and leaders whenever someone like me has the temerity to point out that they are, in fact, anti-vaccine. The disingenuously angry denials usually take a form something like this, "I'm not anti-vaccine; I'm pro-safe vaccine." (This is Jenny McCarthy's favorite variant of this gambit). Another variant is for anti-vaccine activists to claim that they aren't anti-vaccine at all; they're just "concerned" that…

"Naturopathic obstetrics"? Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Despite having found my niche long ago in the medical blogosphere as a skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine, not to mention a scourge of quacks and anti-vaccine activists (no little ego mine!), I rarely, if ever, write about obstetrics. It's always been one area of medicine that I've felt least comfortable with. True, there are some areas of O.B. woo, such as home birth ideology that directly contributes to the deaths of babies, and perhaps I should mention such incidence more often. They are, after all, just as egregious an example of ideology triumphing over science and harming…

Danish investigator Poul Thorsen: Custom-made for the anti-vaccine movement to distract from inconvenient science

Here we go again. If there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement, it's all about the ad hominem. Failing to win on science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other objective evidence, inevitably anti-vaccine propagandists fall back on attacking the person instead of the evidence. For example, Paul Offit has been the subject of unrelenting attacks from Generation Rescue and other anti-vaccine groups, having been dubbed "Dr. Proffit" and accused of being so in the pocket of big pharma that he'll do and say anything for it. I personally have been accused by Jake Crosby of a conflict of…

Day-to-day Labor: The Hazards of Low-wage Temping in America

by Elizabeth Grossman The news of increased hiring in the January jobs report has been greeted as a sign that the US might finally be emerging from the Great Recession. But a look at the kind of hiring that's been on the rise over the past few years raises important questions about the changing nature of the relationship between workers and employers - questions that have serious implications for occupational health and safety as well as workers' financial security. Reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that temporary employment is on the rise: In 2010 more than 27% of the 1.12…

Cleaning up scientific competition: an interview with Sean Cutler (part 1).

Sean Cutler is an assistant professor of plant cell biology at the University of California, Riverside and the corresponding author of a paper in Science published online at the end of April. Beyond its scientific content, this paper is interesting because of the long list of authors, and the way it is they ended up as coauthors on this work. As described by John Tierney, Dr. Cutler ... knew that the rush to be first in this area had previously led to some dubious publications (including papers that were subsequently retracted). So he took the unusual approach of identifying his rivals (by…

The invasion of well-meaning quacks into West Africa continues apace

Here we go yet again. I’ve been interested in the Ebola outbreak that’s been going on for months in west Africa for a number of reasons. First, it’s a bad disease, and this is the largest outbreak in history. over 5,000 people have died. Second, there’s been a lot of unreasonable fear mongering about the disease here in the US far beyond its actual threat level to the country. Third, of course, and perhaps most pertinent given the usual subject matter of this blog, is that the Ebola outbreak in Africa has been a godsend for quacks, cranks, and conspiracy theorists. There is no quackery or…

"When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, Sir?"

(The title of this post is a quote from John Maynard Keynes.) Today I want to look at different responses to new information about global warming. I'll go first: In my archives I found a Usenet post of mine from 11 Aug 1988. In response to a suggestion that global warming was caused by waste heat from power plants, I wrote: Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all (if it's really happening---we probably won't be sure until its too late) caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad---burning fossil fuels could well be more…

Adapting In Place - Preparing for a Larger Household

There are ten children in my house, but six of them are phantoms. No, we haven't gotten a foster placement or heard anything new since the two weeks in August when we were asked to take two separate groups of five kids each. Both of those placements fell through, and there has been nothing since, which is sort of the problem. I have little patience with being expectant, whether pregnant or waiting for a foster placement, and the six (this is a totally arbitrary number that I'm using only because it represents the number of van seats, and thus the maximum placement we could take) "ghost…

Giant furry pets of the Incas

Another one from the archives. It's one of several articles I wrote in 2006 on obscure tropical rodents, was originally published here, and appears here with new pics and a few new details... If you've read Scott Weidensaul's excellent book The Ghost With Trembling Wings (2002), you'll recall the story of Louise Emmons and the giant Peruvian rodent she discovered. But before I get to that, let me say that The Ghost With Trembling Wings isn't about ghosts at all, but about the search for cryptic or supposedly extinct species. Think thylacines, British big cats, Ivory-billed woodpeckers, Cone-…

UC Berkeley Genetic Testing Affair: Science vs Science Education - guest post by Dr.Marie-Claire Shanahan

Marie-Claire Shanahan is an Assistant Professor of Science Education at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As a former science teacher, she was always surprised by the ways that students talked themselves out of liking science - and she decided to do something about it. She now researches the social and cultural aspects of science and science education, especially those related to language and identity. Marie-Claire and I first met online, then also in Real World when she attended ScienceOnline 2010, after which I interviewed her for my blog. You can check out her…

Two Stanislaw Burzynski's "success stories"

One of the strategies that Stanislaw Burzynski will undoubtedly use to "prove" in Eric Merola's new Stanislaw Burzynski movie that antineoplastons work in cancer will be to highlight "success stories." Last year, Burzynski apologists frequently pointed to a girl with an inoperable brain tumor named Amelia Saunders as a success story when the U.K. press widely featured her going to school in September but, very sadly, her family saw her tumor begin to progress again in December, ultimately resulting in her death about a month and a half ago. In the process, Burzynski did what he all too often…

Another Week of Climate Disruption News - December 29, 2013

Happy New Year!!This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Information Overload is Pattern Recognition December 29, 2013 Chuckles, COP20, Brulle, Retrospectives Potash, Accountability, Pricing Nature, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Abrupt CC, Extreme Weather, New Weather Solar, Climate Sensitivity, Temperatures, Satellites Oceans, Ocean…

Mercury and autism: Well, look at what the Geiers are up to now

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been a while since I've written a substantive post on the fear mongering and bad science that are used by activists to support the claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as preservatives in vaccines is the cause of an "autism epidemic." The closest I've come is using Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s credulous reporting and conspiracy-mongering, in which he uncritically parroted the claims of the worst of the mercury militia and arguing that his recent article in Rolling Stone uses the same sort of dubious and fallacious techniques, showing…

An appropriate topic for April Fools' Day

In the three years that I've been blogging, one thing I've learned about myself is that I'm not very good at coming up with good April Fools' Day posts. Yes, I have tried it before. For example, a couple of years ago, I tried to make everyone believe that I had gone soft on woo, that I had had a change of heart. No one was fooled, for even a moment, and if there's something a good April Fools' Day post has to have if it's going to be believable long enough for the "April Fool!" punchline to be surprising, it's a plausible story. Let's face it, Orac saying he's starting to groove on homeopathy…

Are Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop winning against skeptics?

One of the problems we as skeptics and advocates for science-based medicine face is that quackery and pseudoscience are legion. They are everywhere. Worse, in many cases, they can be a good business model. For example, back when Oprah Winfrey was peddling The Secret, the magical mystical belief that if you only want something badly enough, the universe will somehow provide it, and promoting Jenny McCarthy's antivaccine beliefs, skeptics were all over her. Many were the refutations of the nonsense that she promoted published in a wide variety of blogs, websites, and magazines; yet her brand…

Erich von Däniken: Twilight of the Gods

[More blog entries about archaeology, astronomy, pseudoscience, skepticism, vondäniken; arkeologi, astronomi, pseudovetenskap, skepticism, vondäniken.] In this guest entry, German SciBling Florian Freistetter of Astrodicticum Simplex offers a translation of his report from a recent lecture by a spaced-out visionary. Now if only I could say that I've never been fooled by this sort of thing... A few weeks ago, on 17th October, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a lecture by Erich von Däniken with the title Götterdämmerung, "Twilight of the Gods". The great hall in Jena's Volkshaus…

Slumming around The DCA Site (TheDCASite.com), appalled at what I'm finding

Yesterday, I wrote about how anti-science pro-"intelligent design" kook extraordinaire Dave Springer (a.k.a. DaveScot) has taken to promoting dichloroacetate as a treatment for cancer and one website in particular, The DCA Site that claims to exist to "help inform people of the exciting research done on DCA [dichloroacetate] by scientists at the University of Alberta. In January 2007 a team of scientists at the University of Alberta published a paper in the scientific journal Cancer Cell describing the discovery that a simple, cheap molecule, DCA, worked to reactivate the apoptosis mechanism…

Atheism and Suspicion

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth... What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great…

NIH budget woes: Spin versus reality

As I mentioned before, I was at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting in Los Angeles last week. During the meeting, I happened to attend a plenary session talk by the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Dr. John Niederhuber, whose topic was the rather dire NCI funding situation. I've written about this topic before, both in general, in terms of my personal experience "sweating to the NIH paylines," to lamenting at how we as biomedical researchers are in essence treated as freelance money sources for medical schools. Coupling Dr. Niederhuber's talk at the meeting…

My (least) favorite geologic misconception

Modern geology is dictated by uniformitarianism as proposed by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, a book that rightly displaced the "armchair speculations" of catastrophists. In nearly any book about 19th century science, Charles Darwin, paleontology, or geology, the name Charles Lyell shows up at least once, even if only to state his connection with the idea of uniformitarianism. This important concept, often summarized as "the present is the key to the past," has often been described as triumphantly kicking catastrophist explanations out of geological science, researchers like…

Growing Up With Science...and Ethics

A few months ago, in practice for his first standardized testing (my three younger sons are homeschooled), Simon, my 9 year old (then in his last few months of fourth grade) took the New York State Regents 5th grade science exam from the previous year. He aced it. Actually, as long as Simon was taking it, his brothers wanted in too. Isaiah, his 7 year old brother (in second grade at the time) also aced it, missing only one question. Asher, my five year old youngest, in kindergarten, needed a little help sounding out the words, but when he was helped over the hard bits, also passed the…

Reading Diary: Sawyer, Turtledove, Bacigalupi and more

I'm just finishing four weeks of vacation, a nice break from the regular routine. No, I don't get the whole summer off because I work at a university. I do get four weeks of vacation every year and when you work at a university it just makes sense to take it all in the summer. Anyways, we didn't really go anywhere this year, for a variety of reasons. And hence, no summer blogging break, only perhaps a tendency to slightly lighter, summery blogging topics. And since we didn't spend much time at a secluded cottage with nothing to do but read, well, I didn't quite read as much as in previous…

The Richard Dawkins Incident

A couple weeks ago I referred to an incident involving myself and Richard Dawkins and allegations of creationist dishonesty and I promised to write up the whole story soon. Let me preface this by saying two things. First, I am, as should be obvious to everyone who has read any of my writings on this page, a staunch advocate of evolutionary theory and a dogged opponent of the attacks that creationists of all types make against it. I have spent many years actively fighting against creationism and defending evolution and I'm the co-founder of an organization that exists solely for that purpose.…

Wedding bells and wagon wheels (Development on the Front Range; Part I)

In May of 1861, George Henry and Sarah Church set out on their honeymoon, into an unfamiliar frontier. They loaded their cart with a variety of comforts, from a stack of homemade potato pancakes to Milton's Paradise Lost and a tome of "Grecian mythology." Then, hitching up their team of oxen ("Buck and Bright, Tom and Jerry") they headed west. Along the way, others told them to head back. Colorado was a bust, they heard. "There was no gold and no farming as it never rained." They wouldn't give up. Sarah looked at the bleak weather outside, where rain had been pouring for weeks. "It would be…

Donald Trump is not a "slow vaxer." He is an antivaxer.

If there’s one thing about the reporting of the 2016 election that irritated me, it was the massive underreporting of certain antiscience views held by the man who is now our President-Elect. Sure, there was coverage about his denial of anthropogenic climate change from time to time. Much less reported was his long history of antivaccine views, a history I’ve been documenting since 2007. I started documenting it again in September 2015, just before the first Republican Presidential Debate. Then, the vaccine issue came up during that debate, and the mainstream media took notice—briefly.…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

As you may be aware, there was a non-review review of OpenLab 2008 in The New Scientist. I thought about fisking it line-by-line, but Passover interfered, and anyway, Brian, SciCurious, Ed and Blake already did it very, very well, so I can just move on...you can also see a discussion here. Any reputable media outlet out there that would be interested in doing a real review? Contact me. In the meantime, the reaction to the review brought in some new sales of the book (as well as sales of the previous two anthologies), so it worked out fine in the end. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008…

Framing the Economic Crisis: Bailout or Rescue Plan?

How critical is framing to effectively communicating about complex policy problems, especially under conditions of uncertainty? Just take a look at the debate over the economic crisis. As I noted last week, the term "bailout" has locked in a specific framing of the issue that inflames populist anger and caters to House Republicans' efforts to exploit the situation for political gain. The "bailout" triggers thoughts of saving irresponsible wealthy bankers who got greedy, whereas economists view the problem more along the lines of jump starting an economy that is collectively a stuttering…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 370 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 360 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You…

The monster sheep that wasn't, and other tales of African Bovini

If you're a regular reader you'll have seen the recent article on those African 'great bubalus' depictions and on how they might (or might not) be representations of the large, long-horned bovin bovid Syncerus antiquus. As discussed in that article, S. antiquus - long thought to be a species of Pelorovis - is now regarded as a very close relative of S. caffer, the living Cape buffalo. As usual though, there are quite a few additional things that I wanted to cover, so here's an attempt to tie up various loose ends [the illustrations above show radically different reconstructions of…

Facebook - Political Affiliation on Campus

About a year ago, on October 01, 2005, I did a little stats on the self-described political affiliation of NCSU students with Facebook profiles and posted it here. I reposted it here on January 16, 2006. I was thinking about doing the same thing exactly a year later, but the new Facebook News-Feed is making many students nervous, so they delete a lot of their information from their profiles. Political and religious affiliations are usually the first to go. I was interested if there would be any noticable change from one year to another, particularly in light of increased dissatisfaction…

Cyber Wars: liveblog

Ok, straight from cosmology to cybersecurity: the Aspen Institute is running an "Aspen Security Forum" with several days of events. Tonight General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA is doing a forum with NBC's Pete Williams. I got a ticket and got here early, as the heavens opened up and the lightning flashed. Despite the weather a lot of people are trickling in. The Homeland Security folks are discretely tucked away behind the pavilion under the trees - seem to be trying to stay out of the rain. Don't expect much news stuff, more here for curiousity and to hear the tone. Aspen Institute…

REPOST: OOPS! They did it again!

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science have a special online edition focused on the place of evilution in medicine. Shorter Michael Egnor: :-O Hat tip to Pharyngula. Oops. Dr. Egnor, Mr. Professor of Neurosurgery, doesnt seem to have learned a lesson from Mr. 99. And now hes going to get made fun of by a 23 year old girl, too. Someone get a Ziploc bag for his testicles. Really, it's a funny question. Think about it. Would anyone sponsor an essay contest on 'Why I would want my doctor to study anatomy' or 'Why I…

Reading Diary: Les Rêveurs lunaires: Quatre génies qui ont changé l'Histoire by Cédric Villani and Baudoin

A bit of a change of pace for me and my reviewing habits -- a book written in French! Of course, books about science or scientists are pretty typical review fodder for me. And even more typically, graphic novels about science or scientists are incredibly common for me to review. But books in French? This is a first. During my recent month-long stay in Paris (sabbatical life FTW!) one of the things I really enjoyed about the City of Light was the profusion of bookstores. Bookstores, record stores, bandes dessinées stores, every neighbourhood had a least a handful of good ones. Which is in…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 150 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work? A Blog Around The Clock:…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper:…

Study finds high support for public health interventions, few worries about encroaching 'nanny state'

by Kim Krisberg When it comes to public health law, it seems the least coercive path may also be the one of least resistance. In a new study published this month in Health Affairs, researchers found that the public does, indeed, support legal interventions aimed at curbing noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity. However, they're more likely to support interventions that create the conditions that help people make the healthy choice on their own. They're less likely to back laws and regulations perceived as infringing on individual liberties. It's a delicate…

Trump Won. What Next?

Remember those clowns a few weeks ago? The scary clowns? I think they were trying to tell us something. Did you know that 235,248,000 people are eligible to vote in the United States? Fewer than 120,000,000 of those people bothered to show up to vote this year, and turnout was considered high. Of those, about half, or one quarter of the voting population, elected a clown as our leader, because the clown promised to take steps to ensure a continued white majority in the United States. That’s what happened in my world last night. What happened in your world? Between the bouts of…

Who Really Needs Math?

The Washington Post recently published an op-ed by mathematician G. V. Ramanathan. The subject? Mathematics education. It is a mix of good points and bad points. Let's have a look. Twenty-seven years have passed since the publication of the report “A Nation at Risk,” which warned of dire consequences if we did not reform our educational system. This report, not unlike the Sputnik scare of the 1950s, offered tremendous opportunities to universities and colleges to create and sell mathematics education programs. Unfortunately, the marketing of math has become similar to the marketing of…