Posts

April 09, 2013

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4:05 PM | Will “Pandora’s Promise” Start A New Environmental Movement FOR Nuclear Power?

The last line in Pandora’s Promise , Robert Stone’s new documentary about the environmental advantages of nuclear power, comes from Michael Shellenberger, co-head of the Breakthrough Institute. “I have a sense that this is a beautiful thing, the beginning of a movement,” he says. Provoking a new environmental movement in favor of nuclear power is [...]

March 01, 2013

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1:01 PM | The Messy (and Risky) Ways That Governments Try to Manage Risks

The very concept of risk is tricky. To you and me, it means pretty much what the dictionary says…the probability that something bad might happen. And to us, the part of that definition that most influences how worried a risk makes us feel is the subjective ‘bad’ part, more than the objectively quantifiable likelihood. We [...]

October 22, 2012

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11:01 PM | The l’Aquila Verdict: A Judgment Not Against Science, but Against A Failure of Science Communication

A court in Italy has convicted six scientists and one civil defense official of manslaughter in connection with their predictions about an earthquake in l’Aquila in 2009 that killed 309 people. But, contrary to the majority of the news coverage this decision is getting and the gnashing of teeth in the scientific community, the trial [...]

October 14, 2012

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7:55 PM | Could you look down from 24 miles up and jump? Felix Baumgartner just did.

DID YOU WATCH! Did your heart pound, your palms get sweaty, your muscles tense! Did you join the millions around the world gripped by fear and tension as Felix Baumgartner rose to more than 24 miles in a balloon-lifted capsule, opened the door (OH MY GOD!) stood out on the bar outside with a camera [...]

June 15, 2012

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11:54 AM | The Rise of Nuclear Fear – how we learned to fear the bomb

I remember going to bed one night when I was 11, seriously afraid I would not be alive in the morning. It was October, 1962, and the frightening cold war between the U.S. and Soviet Union, constantly in the news but mostly abstract to me as a kid, had becoming terrifyingly real. I had watched [...]

November 11, 2011

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11:18 AM | WARNING!!! Health Warnings May be Hazardous to Your Health!!!

For all the benefits modern society provides, not least of which are vast improvements in public health and longevity, our advanced post-industrial technological/information age also produces risks, far too many for you and me to keep track of. We depend in part on watchdogs and advocacy groups to uncover these dangers and sound the alarm. [...]

October 20, 2011

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11:59 AM | Italian seismologists on trial … for failing to communicate well?

The ground shook violently in L’Aquila, Italy, early in the morning of April 6, 2009, more violently than it had during the tremors the area had been experiencing for months. After the dust settled and the recovery effort was over, 308 people were dead. Now the local prosecutor is charging the scientific committee responsible for [...]

August 11, 2011

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10:27 AM | Food Fight: why are we so passionate about what enters our bodies

Why is that there can be such divergent views about basically the same body of evidence regarding organic and GM food? This debate/argument illustrates two things; the subjective and emotional nature of risk perception, and the fallacy of our faith in pure fact-based Cartesian reason as the be-all and end-all way of figuring out the [...]

July 18, 2011

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10:50 PM | The Lesson of the Fear of Vaccines.

Time for Society to Say Enough is Enough. The science community laments that people deny the evidence science produces. Usually this complaint is merely descriptive, intellectual frustration sometimes tinged with arrogance. Sometimes the criticism of denialism also offers solutions, which usually include education and communication to make the deniers stop denying, to make [...]