1. ddobbs
  2. More pebbles: items I (wanted to but) didn't get to

More pebbles: items I (wanted to but) didn't get to

By ddobbs on December 10, 2008.

EC2C82CA-A380-426E-8C7C-1D0599DEBFE0.jpg

Boing boing spots Virgin Mary in MRI

Bird flu round-up, from Great Beyond touches a few stories reporting some unsettling human deaths from bird flu. I think people are scared to cover bird flu these days: There was so much about it 2-3 years ago, then the epidemic didn't come (we're so impatient!), and now a lot of journalists feel they were out shouting wolf. Maybe wolf is still out there.

Jonah Lehrer on Governor "Show Me the Money" Blagojevich, greed, and a version of the ultimatum game called -- I love this -- the dictator game. "When the dictator cannot see the responder - they are isolated - the dictator begins acting with the kind of unfettered greed expected by economists." (Special bonus: Andrew Sullivan's Quote of the Day is also about Blagojevich.)

Daniel Carlat on "It's not about Goodwin. It's about disclosure."

The Extensible Obama: How the POTUS-elect will use web tools to power his next presidency. From MIT's Technology Review.

Tags
Brains and minds
culture of science
Pharma
Science Policy

More like this

Political Corruption
The pathetic behavior of the Illinois governor - his brazen attempt to sell a Senate seat - raises the larger question of power and corruption, and whether having a position of power reliably leads to unethical behavior. (My first thought, upon hearing that Blagojevich had been recorded by the Feds…
Power is Corrupting
Does power corrupt? And is absolute power absolutely corrupting? Here's some suggestive evidence: Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey.…
Power
The Economist reviews an interesting new study that investigates the immorality of power: In their first study, Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky asked 61 university students to write about a moment in their past when they were in a position of high or low power. Previous research has established that…
Why I've Gone Back to Seed - or 'Why I Blog More Happily Now'
With this post, and with pleasure, I bring the blog formerly known as Smooth Pebbles -- now Neuron Culture (mark your RSS readers!) -- back to Scienceblogs. Seventeen months ago I said farewell to this Scienceblogs home, at least for a time, because I had not found blogging a comfortable fit.…