• The Republican Party Isn’t Really the Anti-Science Party » Megalextoria: News and Politics

    Republicans, and members of the traditionally Republican coalition like conservatives and the religious, are criticized for rejecting two main areas of science: evolution and global warming. But even those critiques are overblown. Believing in God is not the same as rejecting science, contrary to an all-too-frequent caricature propagated by the secular community. Members of all faiths have contributed to our collective scientific understanding, and Christians from Gregor Mendel to Francis Collins have been intellectual leaders in their fields. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, wrote a New York Times bestseller reconciling his faith with his understanding of evolution and genetics.

    Numerically speaking, according to Gallup, only a marginally higher percentage of Republicans reject evolution completely than do Democrats. Yes, an embarrassing half of Republicans believe the earth is only 10,000 years old—but so do more than a third of Democrats. And a slightly higher percentage of Democrats believe God was the guiding factor in evolution than Republicans.

    via The Republican Party Isn’t Really the Anti-Science Party


  • Trio of young coders build health-care website in days

    How hard is it to create a website to help people get health insurance under the Affordable Care Act?

    For three 20-year-old programmers in San Francisco, it took about three days’ worth of work.

    Spurred by the problems that have surrounded the rollout of the official HeathCare.gov site, the trio created an alternative, Health Sherpa, quickly and cheaply. At first glance, it looks like a triumph of tech-startup nimbleness over government inefficiency.

    George Kalogeropoulos, who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser, said all three of them had tried using the government website to get insurance.

    “We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options,” he told CNN. “Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans.”

    The result is a bare-bones site that lets users enter their zip code, plus details about their family and income, to find suggested plans in their area.

    “The Health Sherpa is a free guide that makes it easier to find and sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. We only use carefully vetted, publicly available data,” the site reads. “The Health Sherpa is not affiliated with any lobby, trade group or government agency and has no political agenda.”

    Full article: http://www.cnn.com/2 … ate-healthcare-site/