Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine focusing in Neuroscience. He is due to graduate in 2032. He received a BS and a MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University -- where he spent most of his time drinking heavily and building vegetable catapults instead of learning information that would now be eminently useful. When he is not failing terrifically to perform his sworn duties, he enjoys watching bad movies, ethnic food, and running.
Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.
Jake is joined periodically by two wonderful guest bloggers: Kara Contreary and Kate Seip. See the About Page.
DISCLAIMERS: 1) Jake Young is not a licensed physician (yet). He is merely a medical student. The information published on this site is not intended for use in medical decision making. Please seek advice from a licensed, medical professional before making any health decisions. 2) The opinions expressed are my own or those of my co-bloggers. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments we currently attend.
October 31, 2007
Category: Blogging
I don't know if you caught it on these two posts, but I have started to add the Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research Icon whenever I am analyzing a peer-reviewed paper specifically....
Posted by Jake Young at 2:06 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Evolution
There is a really cool paper in Current Biology about the how even an animal's sensory apparatus adapt to their particular evolutionary niche. Greiner et al. looked at four closely-related species of ants from the genus Myrmecia. (As you can...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:55 PM • 0 Comments •
October 29, 2007
Category: Atheism
Writing in the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple criticizes the equivalence of religion with the immoral and atheism with the moral: Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:45 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Synapses
Researchers at UCSF show a way to watch AMPA receptor insertion.
Posted by Jake Young at 11:29 AM • 1 Comments •
October 24, 2007
Category: Disasters
California wildfires continue to blaze, but this caught my eye: Almost 200 square miles of California, including nearly 700 homes burned since the last official measure. But far fewer homes are threatened and more emergency personnel have arrived. Here are...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:32 PM • 0 Comments •
October 22, 2007
Category: History
People do remember what they use to do at CSHL, right?
Posted by Jake Young at 9:50 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Economics
Improving the general caliber of economics understanding is a critical goal.
Posted by Jake Young at 9:44 AM • 3 Comments •
October 19, 2007
Category: Intelligence
Here is a must-read post on g-factor by Three Toed Sloth: Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:22 PM • 1 Comments •
October 18, 2007
Category: Math
Bettencourt et al. in PNAS looked a variety of cities of various sizes. They wanted to determine what the effect of population size of the city has on their properties including physical properties like roads, but also economic properties like...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:24 PM • 1 Comments •
October 17, 2007
Category: Healthcare
From the Economist, medicine is not going well in rural China: Since 2004 the government, for the first time, has been giving direct subsidies to grain farmers in an effort to keep them growing grain and to curb grain-price rises....
Posted by Jake Young at 3:24 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Haha, a funny
This is just priceless. Stephen Colbert talks about the vanishing awards that he can win now that Gore has the Nobel. (Sorry about the ads.)...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:22 PM • 1 Comments •
October 15, 2007
Category: Economics
Sigh, the weak dollar is killing me over here in London. But if Marty Feldstein says it's a good thing, I guess I'm in no position to contradict him....
Posted by Kara Contreary at 5:35 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Economics
I am not smart or qualified enough to explain the work of the winners of the Nobel in economics, but they have a great explanation at Marginal Revolution....
Posted by Jake Young at 12:35 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Terrorism
I was struck by an NPR story this morning where they talked to a pathologist in Afghanistan. He conducts the autopsies on the remains of suicide bombers there. The doctor argues that a great many of them had mental or...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:25 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Free speech
Kurt Anderson writes a great piece in New York on the recent tendency to blow things wildly out of proportion: Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:52 AM • 2 Comments •
October 14, 2007
Category: Consumer Theory
Ask anyone who's spent any time in a strip club, and one of the things he will almost certainly not mention is the ovulatory state of his favorite gal. But, according to a recent paper by Geoffrey Miller et. al.,...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 12:33 PM • 15 Comments •
October 11, 2007
Category: Evolution
Erez Lieberman et al. at Harvard are looking at the rate of change in words to see if words evolve: Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do,...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:29 PM • 1 Comments •
October 10, 2007
Category: Haha, a funny
I don't remember the last time I found two Onion articles funny in the same calendar year. Here is another one: "If you're looking for some button-down traditionalist who relies on so-called induction, conventional logic, and verification to arrive at...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:12 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Technology
University of Washington researchers have developed a vocal mouse that moves the cursor around the screen with clicks and phonemes: The Internet offers wide appeal to people with disabilities. But many of those same people find it frustrating or impossible...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:31 AM • 0 Comments •
October 9, 2007
Category: Blogging
The illustrious Shelley Batts, fellow ScienceBlogger and author of Retrospectacle, has been nominated for a blogging scholarship for yet another year -- she won some money last year as a runner -up. Shelley is an excellent blogger and a truly...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:57 PM • 1 Comments •
October 8, 2007
Category: Sex
Ouch: A Chicago woman who became enraged after discovering her longtime boyfriend's stash of pornography shot and killed him in their South Side home over the weekend, prosecutors said. Jeanette Strowder, 58, is facing a first-degree murder charge in the...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:13 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Perception
Functional MRI (fMRI) is a very useful technique, but it lacks in resolution making some systems difficult to study. Adams et al. show in a study of ocular dominance columns in humans why good old staining is still useful when...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:04 AM • 1 Comments •
October 3, 2007
Category: Other People's Work
Check out this must-read long post on heritability and IQ: One of the sound tenets of a lot of conservative social and political thought is an insistence on the importance of tradition and tacit knowledge, its transmission through families and...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:23 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Publishing and Journals
Check out this useful piece of freeware -- Publish or Perish -- that calculates the impact factors of particular individuals, journals, or articles based on info from Google Scholar. Since it is Google Scholar rather than PubMed it should work...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:10 PM • 0 Comments •
October 2, 2007
Category: Physics
I had not thought that water was a poorly understood substance. Here are two interesting water articles that show that there is still more to learn. Who knew. First, if you put water in a high DC current it can...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:33 AM • 2 Comments •
October 1, 2007
Category: International Politics
Possibly in response to Kara's earlier post, sales of Belgian flags have skyrocketed. They are selling like they are going out of style...and they may well do so: A growing debate about the potential division of Belgium has led to...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:16 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Blogging
An anonymous medical blogger in Texas is being sued by a hospital for defamation and for releasing patient information: An unlikely Internet frontier is Paris, Texas, population 26,490, where a defamation lawsuit filed by the local hospital against a critical...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:42 PM • 1 Comments •
