Setting annual meetings in massive convention centers, plus the cumulative effect of well-intentioned policies for promoting young academics, have effectively sabotaged the intergenerational culture essential for a rich sense of intellectual identity. Because of the physical restraints they impose, convention centers have conspired to stifle the informal gatherings that have always been one of the…
Across the world, many women drop out of — or never enter — work in the ‘knowledge society’, even after studying science and technology. Low enrollment rates for women in all but the life sciences, and high dropout rates after university (almost a third of women in science), result in not only the loss of…
Political leaders haven’t moved on global warming because they’re not feeling widespread public pressure to do so. And the public isn’t putting that pressure on their leaders in part because many people still don’t believe that climate change is a real, or all that dangerous. The vast, vast majority of climate scientists know that global…
Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our current course and fail to take more aggressive measures. A World Bank report imagines a world 4 degrees warmer, the temperature predicted by century’s end barring changes, and says it aims to shock people into action…
The persistent economic problems facing higher education these days make it evident that the financial models of most institutions are not sustainable. That challenge alone would be bad enough, but traditional educational models are also in trouble, as online learning upends the nature of higher education itself. But more serious than either the economic or…
For a second time in as many months, U.S. House Republicans will try to win approval of legislation to issue up to 55,000 so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) visas to students who earn advanced degrees at U.S. universities. A vote may come by the end of November. The STEM visa bill has a…
Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs. The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities…
If we hope to understand creationism, we need to abandon the trope that only the ignorant can oppose mainstream evolutionary science. It is a comfortable delusion, a head-in-the-sand approach to improving evolution education in the United States. In the end, it stems from a shocking ignorance among evolutionists about the nature of creationist beliefs.
From Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog at the New York Times: President Obama’s first long discussion of human-driven global warming in recent memory came near the end of a recent news conference. The president actually said quite a bit. Among other things, he offered a sobering reality check in the face of a big, and…
The UN Secretary-General’s high-level panel on life after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — the Post-2015 Development Agenda — held its second meeting in London at the beginning of November. It’s a reminder that the time has come for all of us to plan our futures in line with the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),…