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.
April 30, 2008
Category: Energy Policy
(Keeping with our trend towards a week of economics -- see here and here -- I have another post where I attempt to talk above my pay grade.) I am as unhappy as anybody about high oil prices making everything...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:14 PM • 26 Comments •
April 29, 2008
Category: Economics
Paging Kara (or some other economist). I have an economics question. We were discussing monopolistic competition in micro today. So I get how because the quantity produced under monopolistic competition is less than the efficient scale there is some dead...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:49 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Textbooks
The NYTimes Editorial Board wrote at piece lamenting the high prices of college textbooks and praising Congressional action to limit them: College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:58 PM • 9 Comments •
April 28, 2008
Category: Haha, a funny
This is pretty funny. Check out Dr. Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology. Some of my favorites: Evolutionary Psychology: A branch of psychology, unwittingly inspired by Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling, that describes how we behave through made up stores that...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:53 PM • 2 Comments •
April 24, 2008
Category: Food
I can tell you from personal experience that being a med/grad student is not an environment that promotes healthy eating. Your schedule is all over bejesus and back, you're poor, and your often stressed. Rising food prices have made eating...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:02 PM • 34 Comments •
April 23, 2008
Category: Politics
Boo on you, Barack and Hillary. Others have this subject amply covered, but I wanted to note that Barack and Hillary have both jumped on the anti-vaccinationist bandwagon. The bandwagon is getting crowded what with McCain already being on it....
Posted by Jake Young at 3:59 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Language
(I have been meaning to post this for about two weeks, so if it is a bit dated forgive me.) Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by slower reading skills acquisition, and it is associated with certain structural abnormalities in...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:58 PM • 15 Comments •
April 22, 2008
Category: Psychology
The NYTimes has a great interview with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert: What we've been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy -- or unhappy. If you...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:36 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Autism
The subpeona against Kathleen Seidel has been quashed. ENDORSED ORDER granting MOTION to Quash Subpoena. Text of Order: "Granted. Attorney Clifford Shoemaker is ordered to show cause within 10 days why he should not be sanctioned under Fed R Civ...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:48 AM • 4 Comments •
April 21, 2008
Category: Autism
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Kathleen Seidel, a blogger at neurodiversity.com, who was being intimidated via subpeona by a lawyer for anti-vaccinationists. The lawyer, Clifford Shoemaker, represents plaintiffs in a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers alleging that mercury in...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:46 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Haha, a funny
This is from the Onion: University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:37 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Other People's Work
Eddie Izzard eyes entering European Union politics. Well that would at least make things more interesting. So much excellence on NPR lately. Robert Krulwich explains why -- though radio and television communications have long been projected into space -- it...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:37 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Media
As many of you may/may not know, my two wonderful colleagues and I organize an interdisciplinary lecture series on science communication, called the Science Communication Consortium. It followed on the heels of the framing debate, after I invited Chris and...
Posted by Kate at 10:46 AM • 0 Comments •
April 20, 2008
Category: Technology
Everyone seems to be worried about when the Internet will implode. From the Economist Tech.view: And not just because of the popularity of such file-sharing programs with music fans. The sizes of the files they handled increased dramatically. Music tracks...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:20 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Economics
The occasional 7-dwarf orgy notwithstanding (and you cannot convince me it never happened--I just know there was a night with a full moon and an opportunistic bottle of peach schnapps...), when most Western fairy tales end with "and they all...
Posted by Kara Contreary at 5:30 AM • 11 Comments •
April 19, 2008
Category: Economics
Tyler Cowen breaks down the thinking that a carbon cap with dividends is better than a carbon tax: A broader question is whether the carbon dividends in fact make the citizenry better off. First there is the question of the...
Posted by Jake Young at 3:33 PM • 1 Comments •
April 18, 2008
Category: Neural interfaces
Here is a different approach to measuring brain activity in humans. Researchers in Japan are placing a sheet of electrodes inside the skull but on top of the cortex. Researchers at Osaka University are stepping up efforts to develop robotic...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:55 PM • 0 Comments •
April 17, 2008
Category: Politics
This is Megan McArdle on Cindy McCain's gaffe. She passed recipes from the Food Network off as her own: The honorable thing to do is attribute, of course, but the McCain team still seems to be intent on pretending that...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:12 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Academia
Yesterday I took a day off (first in a while for me), and I had a chance to see the movie Smart People starring Randy Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Ellen Page. The movie is about a rather odd...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:37 PM • 4 Comments •
April 16, 2008
Category: Evolution
Wow. I just saw the Expelled TV ads start on CNN of all places....
Posted by Jake Young at 11:16 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Carnivals
Encephalon 43 is up at GNIF Brain Blogger....
Posted by Jake Young at 11:08 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Neuroeconomics
Nature News is reporting on a paper that just came out in PNAS. The paper, Coates and Herbert, correlates the daily profits and trading volatility of traders in London. They argue that changes in these hormone may be responsible for...
Posted by Jake Young at 10:53 AM • 1 Comments •
April 15, 2008
Category: Neuroeconomics
Greg Mankiw linked to this article in the Washington Post by experimental philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah points out that whether you think a tax system is equitable is determined partly by whether it is framed as a loss or...
Posted by Jake Young at 9:07 AM • 0 Comments •
April 10, 2008
Category: Other People's Work
On my books to read list, Bonk by Mary Roach explores the cross-overs between science and sex. She is interviewed by NPR here. (Hat-tip: Daily Zeitgeist) Also on NPR, does teeth whitening using light actually work? Not better than at-home...
Posted by Jake Young at 12:14 PM • 0 Comments •
April 9, 2008
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
I saw this news story in Nature a couple days ago about finding a gene for "ruthlessness." I realized that I always say the same thing about these behavioral genetics stories -- stories where they claim to find a gene...
Posted by Jake Young at 5:36 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Evolution
As a research studying maternal behavior, I come across a lot of sex & reproduction research. As a (very) general rule of thumb, most small mammals are either sexually receptive or parentally responsive - your sex circuits remain on until...
Posted by Kate at 11:10 AM • 2 Comments •
April 8, 2008
Category: Haha, a funny
Despite the stacks of research that I've had wonderful intentions of blogging on for a while now (one dealing with the origins of elephant testes, to Jake's delight), a brief post today will have to suffice. You see things like...
Posted by Kate at 12:09 PM • 1 Comments •
April 7, 2008
Category: Blogging
Methinks this article from the NYTimes is a tad hysterical: They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece -- not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a...
Posted by Jake Young at 11:23 AM • 5 Comments •
April 4, 2008
Category: Teaching
I didn't have much to do this afternoon, so I played hookie and went down to the FIRST Robotics Competition. The competition pits bands of high school students (and their engineer/mentors) in a contest to see who can build the...
Posted by Jake Young at 4:56 PM • 1 Comments •
April 3, 2008
Category: Law
You have got to be friggin' kidding me!? Kathleen Seidel, blogger at neurodiversity.com, has been subpoenaed by Rev. Lisa Sykes and Seth Sykes to appear in their case against the Bayer company. Their case alleges that mercury additives to vaccines...
Posted by Jake Young at 7:51 PM • 16 Comments •
April 2, 2008
Category: Gender
What an astonishingly useful graphic (click to enlarge, source):...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:17 PM • 10 Comments •
Category: Neuroscience
How do neurons in your brain encode the diversity of stimuli present in the world? This is one of the questions that neuroscientists have to answers about how the brain works. The world holds an infinite array of things to...
Posted by Jake Young at 2:00 PM • 6 Comments •
April 1, 2008
Category: Other People's Work
Encephalon is up at Of Two Minds, Paris Hilton-style. Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) do not improve mortality at home. This contrasts AEDs in public places. The authors of the paper, in NEJM, attribute the difference to a much larger population...
Posted by Jake Young at 1:24 PM • 1 Comments •
