Education & Health Articles
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types
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Kirk Citron: And now, the real news
How many of today's headlines will matter in 100 years? 1000? Kirk Citron's "Long News" project collects stories that not only matter today, but will resonate for decades -- even centuries -- to come.
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Florida students start the long road to their student green energy fund campaign
A simple idea of young people putting their money where their mouth is by creating small campus fees that cumulate to eventually set aside millions of dollars to be spent only on "green" projects. Green Fees are a great way to encourage campuses to go green quickly and consistently, most campuses and students groups are managing to set up green fees on their campus in one semester or less. Unfortunately for Florida students, setting up a green fee on campuses is an extremely difficult process. Unlike most states and universities any and all Florida student fees must first be passed through state legislation. So in order for Florida students to pass campus "green fees" legislation must be passed through the state legislator.
Luckily students in Florida have not been discouraged by this long tedious process. Florida students have made their campaign the Student Green Energy Fund a top priority; they have been working on the campaign since 2007. This year Florida students from eight campuses (FSU, FIU, FGCU,NCF,UF, FAMU,UCF, USF) have come together to work collectively around passing this legislation (Senate Bill 778 and House Bill 505).
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Divided Loyalties
One-fourth of private colleges do business with trustees' companies. Whose interests come first?
Trustees are a university's ultimate decision makers. Whether approving a building project or directing endowment money, they profoundly affect everyone on the campus. In making those choices, trustees are supposed to be concerned only with what is best for the institution.
But what happens when a trustee also has a business relationship with the university?
A Chronicle investigation of 618 private colleges found that one in four have financial ties with trustee-affiliated companies. These relationships are common at both small liberal-arts colleges and large research universities. The connections, ranging from a few thousand dollars' worth of business to multimillion-dollar contracts, involve banks, law firms, construction companies, and insurance conglomerates.
In Pennsylvania, for example, six universities have contracts with PNC Financial Services Group even though bank officials serve on their boards. At Bowdoin College, three trustees are partners at investment firms that manage portions of the college's endowment.
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Stanford Study Confirms That "Balanced" Media Stories Quoting Skeptics Mislead The Public
Providing climate skeptics a voice in "balanced" mainstream media coverage skews public perception of the scientific consensus regarding climate change, leaving viewers less likely to understand the threat of climate disruption and less likely to support government actions to address global warming, according to the results of a Stanford University research effort.
The Stanford researchers probed the impact on public understanding of climate change when media coverage features a climate skeptic alongside a climate scientist. Media stories featuring only a mainstream climate scientist "increased the number of people who believed that global warming has been happening and that humans have caused global warming."
However, when media stories also include a climate skeptic, ostensibly to add "balance" to the story, the result is a "significantly reduced" number of people who understand the issue and endorse government action to address the problem.
"Watching a skeptic decreased perceptions of consensus among scientific experts, and this decreased perception of consensus led respondents to be less supportive of government action in general and of cap and trade policy in particular," the researchers found.
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The Mythical Tuvalu Pineapple
First there were sunspots. Then cosmic rays. Now comes the latest "proof" being trotted out by the climate denial crowd… pineapples.
Swedish Scientist Nils-Axel Morner is claiming that sea levels in the island nation of Tuvalu are not rising there, or anywhere else. Why?
According to memo submitted by Morner to the Britsh House of Lords, "the truth seems to be that a Japanese pineapple industry had subtracted too much freshwater by that forcing saltwater to invade the subsurface."
To recap, sea is not rising- the land in Tuvalu is instead sinking due to inept irrigation by Japanese pineapple companies and local farmers who want to cover up their blunder. This is apparently proof that the largest peer-reviewed exercise in scientific history is in the measured words of Morner, the "greatest lie ever told".
There's one small problem with this line of thought. There have never been pineapple plantations on Tuvalu. This tasty tropical fruit cannot wipe away decades of peer-reviewed scientific research since it was never grown on the tiny South Pacific islands.
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John Mashey: Crescendo Climategate Cacophony
A new paper by the computer scientist and entrepreneur John Mashey, digs ever deeper (and in an increasingly well-organized way), into the morass of deception and disinformation that has characterized the recent climate conversation. Mashey never uses the word "lies," but somehow it seemed an appropriate illustration of what he finds underlying the recent campaign against climate science, scientists and anyone who respects their work.
This and Mashey's previous paper point an unflinching finger at corporate front groups and free market think tanks that have worked so hard in the last two decades to spread confusion about climate science and to block public policy that would regulate the use of fossil fuels. Mashey makes a compelling case that Congress has been misled in the process - which is an offense against the democracy that think tankers claim to love (in addition to being a felony).
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The 5 characteristics of scientific denialism
One of the best climate websites is SkepticalScience.com run by physicist John Cook.
The goal of SkepticalScience is to "explain what peer reviewed science has to say about global warming" and answer the most common questions and objections raised both by the well-meaning doubters and the not-well-meaning disinformers.
Fortunately for us, Cook is blogging more now, which means I'll be quoting him more (see "How we know global warming is happening — Skeptical Science explains: It's the oceans!"). Cook has a good discussion of a recent paper, "Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?" that I excerpt below:
While the [paper's] focus is on public health issues, it nevertheless establishes some useful general principles on the phenomenon of scientific denialism. A vivid example is the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, who argued against the scientific consensus that HIV caused AIDS. This led to policies preventing thousands of HIV positive mothers in South Africa from receiving anti-retrovirals. It's estimated these policies led to the loss of more than 330,000 lives (Chigwedere 2008). Clearly the consequences of denying science can be dire, even fatal.
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12 Most Pesticide-Laden Fruits and Veggies
Some fruits' and vegetables' thick skins do protect the edible part from chemicals. But not all. The Environmental Working Group recently analyzed samples of 47 common produce items in the state that they're usually eaten (i.e., avocados were peeled, apples washed with water, etc.) then ranked them according to the amount and variety of pesticides the researchers found. Good news for my guac addiction: As I suspected, peeled avocadoes contain a small amount of pesticides, ranking 46th on the list. But bananas come in at a surprisingly high 27, and cucumbers at 19. "It's really hard to use your intuition to figure out what's going to have high pesticide loads," says EWG spokesperson Amy Rosenthal. "Skin is something to take into account, but it doesn't always make a huge difference."
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Climate scientists face political barbs
When Pennsylvanians heard the so-called climategate scandal involved a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, the orderly world of the ivory tower was suddenly invaded by a shouting match worthy of talk radio.
Confronted by a torrent of complaints and concerns from the public and from state officials, the university started a familiar procedure - a misconduct inquiry, which escalated into an investigation last month, focused on the activities of climatologist Michael Mann.
It's an inquiry that's normally prompted by a specific complaint launched by a fellow researcher who suspects that data in a piece of published work were made up, manipulated, or copied.
This case is different.
There are no scientists pointing out instances of cheating on the part of Mann, who is director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center. Instead, the complaints are coming from people angry over statements about Mann's work made in a series of e-mails stolen from a server in England in November. Critics interpreted those e-mails as admissions by scientists that important data fundamental to the climate-change debate were falsified.
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Prime Example of Disinformation, who should call them out?
Joe Bastardi can't read a temperature anomaly map and so spins another conspiracy theory - Says pre-1978 temperatures use "magic readjustment"
Accuweather's "expert long-range forecaster" Joe Bastardi has now firmly established himself as the least informed, most anti-scientific meteorologist in the world (see here).
In this impossible-to-believe video more suitable for April 1 or The Onion, he demonstrates he doesn't even know the difference between temperature and temperature anomaly or what the Arctic Oscillation does! And while he himself is constantly citing temperature data from before the satellite era, he labels all such temperature records as based on "magic."
Please put your head in a vise before viewing this:
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It's Official: High Fructose Corn Syrup Makes You Fat
The high fructose corn syrup industry has been arguing for years that their product is no worse than sugar when it comes to weight gain and obesity. According to a new study by Princeton University, that's simply not true.
When researchers fed HFCS to rats, the rodents gained significantly more weight than those fed regular sugar. Further, the HFCS-fed rats exhibited more specific characteristics of obesity, including increased abdominal fat and trigylcerides.
The study illuminates the underlying problem with the obesity epidemic, which hits low-income areas the hardest. Agricultural corn subsidies make HFCS a remarkably cheap sweetener to produce, so it's commonly used in low-cost products. Not surprisingly, last year the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found higher intakes of HFCS in groups with low income levels.
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Human Achievement Hour: Sticking it to Environmentalists
A certain brand of libertarian ideology is about a principled dislike of government intervention into personal and economic affairs. Another brand, subscribed to by the Cato Institute's David Boaz, is about sticking it to hippies. This in response to environmentalist suggests that people observe an "earth hour" and—voluntarily, I note—conserve energy by turning out the lights, he suggests that we deliberately waste energy in order to stick it to the hippies:
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Improving Global Food Security with Focus on Agriculture
Check out this article outlining the Obama Administration's focus on agriculture to reduce hunger and malnutrition in Africa. Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the following remarks at the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, further emphasizing the administration's focus on agriculture as a means to alleviating global hunger and poverty, as well as improving livelihoods and whole economies (via The Chicago Council on Global Affairs):
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