News Updates

Gwyneth Paltrow, the actor turned head of a vast lifestyle-and-wellness enterprise called Goop, personifies the power of celebrities to influence everyday people’s health, often in ways that turn science on its head, says a long-form read in the New York Times Magazine. But rather than ignore potentially harmful pseudoscientific claims, two scientists who study such matters recently noted in Issues that “the rise in celebrity culture will doubtless create multiple and regular opportunities for scientists and clinicians to spread evidence-based and credible scientific ideas as part of an ongoing public discussion of science—if the scientific community is prepared and willing to engage.”

The legal system increasingly uses “risk assessment” algorithms in making decisions about bail, sentencing, and parole, but an official at a nonprofit legal association says these tools “are too rapidly acquiring an exalted place in human decision-making.” An independent research consultant earlier argued this case in Issues, and she proposed ways to improve their use, including making the nuts and bolts of the algorithms more transparent, subjecting them to independent audit, and using them only if they demonstrably serve to reduce pretrial incarcerations.

Waymo, a company fast-forwarding the development of self-driving vehicles, just launched a trial program in the Phoenix area to team up with Walmart and four other firms to transport people between their homes and nearby stores, restaurants, and other retail destinations. As autonomous vehicles move into everyday life, some observers are calling for tighter government regulations. But a technology analyst recently said in Issues that any new rules should be flexible enough to encourage innovation while ensuring that the vehicles are safe and broadly accessible across society.

Ever since the water in Flint, Michigan, was found in 2014 to be contaminated with lead, a range of people have cited various statistics to show that children’s health might have been harmed. But two scientists now say that a comprehensive review of the data has “raised questions about how risks and statistics have been communicated,” adding that “the furor over this issue seems way out of proportion to the actual dangers.” From a broader perspective, a book titled Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks, reviewed in Issues, explores the challenges of understanding and prioritizing risk and examines how the tools of risk assessment can help to protect public health without raising undue worries.

At an international conference on artificial intelligence (AI), numerous researchers signed a pledge to “neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.” This accords with a recent examination in Issues of when and how AI writ large should be regulated, which found reason for limiting “the development of autonomous weapons that employ AI to decide when to fire, with how much force to apply, and on what targets,” but added that this would best be done as part of a broader public discussion of “the policy measures and cultural changes that will be needed to negotiate the coming transformation into an AI-rich world.”

A leading bioethics advisory group in the United Kingdom says in a new report described here that genetically modifying human embryos, sperm, or eggs to influence the characteristics of a future person—a process known as heritable genome editing—could be morally permissible if it would provide meaningful benefit to the individual and would not be expected to increase discrimination or division in society. On a larger stage, an international summit recently examined the potential and challenges of human gene modification, and Issues summarized some of the presentations exploring the social, legal, ethical, and policy questions that are essential to understanding how to use or limit this new technology.

With the National Flood Insurance Program set to expire on July 31, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) is fighting hard to prevent any reforms. Meanwhile, a group of state insurance commissioners has provided an update on what other members of Congress are doing. For help in deciding what to do, legislators might look to Issues, where a decision-sciences expert proposed that the program should base premiums on up-to-date assessments of the degree of flood hazard that homeowners face, and that it should incorporate incentives such as means-tested vouchers or low-interest loans to encourage homeowners of all income levels to undertake cost-effective protective measures.

7/15/18 – China joined the world’s top 20 most innovative economies and is aiming to move higher, while the United States fell out of the top 5, according to the recently released Global Innovation Index 2018, cosponsored by the United Nations. Although measuring an economy’s innovativeness is inherently difficult, and many experts would challenge the rankings in this study, no one doubts that China’s innovative capacity is on the rise. The United States should not take its strength relative to China for granted, a leading scholar and former government adviser says in Issues, and he proposed actions to both boost US innovation capability and respond to China’s technological ambitions.

7/14/18 – California has become something of a test case for mandatory vaccination laws, as many parents in some communities are obtaining medical exemptions for their children. Convincing such parents to have their kids vaccinated will require more than pointing to scientific evidence that vaccines are safe and effective, a philosopher and data analyst said recently said in Issues, because vaccines have become a proxy for a much deeper controversy about the nature of risk and the role of experts, and more work is needed to learn how to address the concerns of both medical experts and vaccine-hesitant parents.

7/11/18 – A nonprofit group in Israel is leading a mission to softly land a spacecraft on the moon early next year, thereby becoming the first nongovernmental enterprise to do so. The group proposes to do this using an innovative two-months-long launch process that will be far cheaper than conventional methods. The effort illustrates in spades how space activities are becoming increasingly diverse, as an analyst recently explained in Issues, adding that the shift is requiring the United States to adjust its space programs and policies accordingly.

7/9/18 – A new US jobs report declared that companies are finding it difficult to find qualified workers to fill open positions. But in Issues, a longtime workforce analyst recently looked behind the curtain, arguing that employers’ complaints about skill shortages mask a deeper struggle to extend their leverage in the labor market, and that “What everyone needs are opportunities to learn and to advance in accord with their wishes and motivations without sacrificing already meager paychecks.”

7/9/18 – Seven states recently increased their fuel tax that funds highway construction and maintenance projects, while some California politicians are pushing to repeal a recent hike in the tax. But in Issues, an energy analyst has proposed a totally different route, charging motorists by the miles they travel, arguing that the new system would be better suited to the changing nature of automobiles and driving habits.