purepedantry | May 2, 2008There is a great blogginghead.tv conversation up between two of my favorite bloggers, Megan McArdle and Daniel Drezner.
They discuss whether academics are bitter. McArdle argues that the labor market makes their lives very unfortunate. Drezner argues that the issue is complicated by the fact that some academics how outside job choices such as industry. They are both probably right.
purepedantry | May 1, 2008After the whole Floyd Landis thing, I wrote a long post about the science of detecting steroid abuse. The primary test uses something called the T/E ratio to determine whether the athlete has injected steroids. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has a maximum T/E ratio of 4. If an athlete gets greater than four on any test, an investigation gets started.
However, researchers in Sweden have just published a paper suggesting that this test has a possibly fatal flaw.
Schulze et al. show that a gene variant present with alarming frequency in the population allows individuals to inject…
purepedantry | April 30, 2008(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 on Earth expensive, but I am getting a little annoyed by the Presidential candidates glib statements about how the intend to make it better.
Both Clinton and McCain have come out for a gas tax holiday over the summer. This is a horrible idea for at least two reasons. (1) It will just be a wind fall for oil producers. (2) We need to lower our oil consumption, and high prices are the…
purepedantry | April 29, 2008Paging 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 weight loss on the level of the firm. The quantity is less than where the marginal cost and the demand curves cross.
Here is my question:
Is there a dead weight loss on the level of the market? Does monopolistic competition result in a dead weight loss as compared to perfect competition? Is it sort of like a tax that way, or am I just…
purepedantry | April 29, 2008The 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 the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell "unbundled" versions of the books -- minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-…
purepedantry | April 28, 2008This 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 guess why we had to behave. In this case, the stories are about what traits our ancestors had to evolve 250,000 years ago to survive. At that time, Mother Nature or evolution was especially demanding, and selected those behavioral traits that permitted survival, much like a mom selects out table manners in her kids. Since all the…
purepedantry | April 24, 2008I 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 out at some place healthy a non-starter. Let's just say the easy fast food fix is very tempting.
NPR had a great story this morning about a Harvard medical student -- Michelle Hauser -- who is also a former chef. She has been teaching her classmates easy meals to cook that are also relatively healthy. This is important stuff for more than just…
purepedantry | April 23, 2008Boo 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.
Granted, Barack and Hillary did not say something as flagrantly wrong as when McCain cited "strong evidence" that thiomerosal causes autism. But it is still very disconcerting when politicians engage in this sort of flagrant pandering. Don't they have advisers? Don't they have a single person on their staff who can screen out this nonsense?
It just…
purepedantry | April 23, 2008(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 the brain. However, it turns out that different areas of the brain are affected depending on whether your language is alphabetic (like English) or symbolic (like Chinese).
Siok et al. present evidence in PNAS that English and Chinese languages utilize different brain systems and that as a consequence dyslexia presents differently in English and Chinese…
purepedantry | April 22, 2008The 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 can't tell which futures are better than others, it's hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as…
purepedantry | April 22, 2008The 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 P 11 -- see Fed R Civ P 45(a)(2)(B) which requires that a deposition subpoena be issued from the court in which the deposition is to occur and Fed R Civ P 45 (c)(1) commanding counsel to avoid burdensome subpoenas. A failure to appear will result in notification of Mr Shoemaker's conduct to the Presiding Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia."
So…
purepedantry | April 21, 2008A 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 their vaccines caused autism in children.
The subpeona filed by Mr. Shoemaker was particularly intrusive, and Seidel filed a motion to quash. The motion to quash has not been responded to yet. Also, Ms. Seidel is now receiving gracious and helpful legal council from the 1st Amendment team at Public Citizen.…
purepedantry | April 21, 2008This 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 nearly a year designing and constructing.
The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study's final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment. According to researchers administrating the…
purepedantry | April 21, 2008Eddie 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 is unlikely that aliens are listening. Short answer: the inverse square law causes the power of such transmission to decline below the microwave background radiation at about the edge of our solar system.
Dutch engineers are building floating cities in Dubai. Reminds me a little of Operation Atlantis. (A libertarian movement to…
kateseip | April 21, 2008As 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 Matt to speak at New York Academy of Sciences last year.
My colleagues and I believe that framing is one small component of the larger systemic problem of deteriorating science communication, and began organizing a series of lectures to delve deeply into other critical areas. We hope that this dialogue will flesh out the broader issues of…
purepedantry | April 20, 2008Everyone 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 and podcasts used to be offered for streaming at 128kbps; versions at 256kbps or even 320kbps are now common.
Video has an impact, too. Though online video-rental and distribution has only recently begun in earnest, all those HDTV sets sold over the past few years will shortly make high-definition downloads the norm. Meanwhile, waiting in…
kcontreary | April 19, 2008The 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 lived happily ever after", they mean a prince and a princess. The ideal of one man and one woman united in marital bliss is so pervasive in the developed world that sometimes it takes an egghead (or a pervert) to question why.
That is exactly what three researchers (so eggheads it is) at Hebrew University have done. In a paper in this month's AER, Eric…
purepedantry | April 19, 2008Tyler 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 incidence of the initial carbon tax, which of course falls on individuals one way or another. Second, does just sending people money, collectively, make the populace better off? Aggregate demand effects aside, will the fiscal stimulus make the citizenry as a whole better off? No. Will printing up more money and sending it to everyone, even if that is popular, make…
purepedantry | April 18, 2008Here 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 body parts controlled by thought, by placing electrode sheets directly on the surface of the brain. Led by Osaka University Medical School neurosurgery professor Toshiki Yoshimine, the research marks Japan's first foray into invasive (i.e. requiring open-skull surgery) brain-machine interface research on human test subjects. The aim of the research is to…
purepedantry | April 17, 2008This 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 Cindy McCain derives all of her recipes from First Principles.
I visualize a Cindy McCain in a lab coat furiously writing down the results of experiments and mixing bisque in a Ehrlenmeyer flask.
When it comes to recipes we are all hacks. Unless you have genetically engineered a new foodstuff, you are doing something that someone has done before.