purepedantry | January 16, 2009People expressed a healthy skepticism to my assertion that money for science in the economic stimulus package is not the best way to fund science and may do more harm than good. One of my assumptions in that argument was that this funding would be short-term and not followed through with further increases.
Nature has more on the stimulus package suggesting that it may be more long-term:
Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities (AAU) in Washington DC, said the bill represents a solid endorsement of the scientific community's argument that investing in research and…
purepedantry | January 16, 2009Orac and PZ are popularizing a post at Change.gov to defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM):
Biomedical research funding is falling because of the nation's budget problems, but biomedical research itself has never been more promising, with rapid progress being made on a host of diseases. Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by…
purepedantry | January 15, 2009So I have been reading over the details of the stimulus bill that is working its way through Congress. Now I grant that this is a rough draft and may be substantially modified in the process of passage, but one particular sentence got me thinking:
Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: We need to put scientists to work looking for the next great discovery, creating jobs in cutting-edge-technologies, and making smart investments that will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy. For every dollar invested in broadband the economy sees a ten-fold return on…
purepedantry | January 14, 2009I caught this article in O magazine by fellow ScienceBlogger, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish. The article isn't bad. It is about why people have trouble overcoming unproductive habits like trouble exercising. But I want to correct something she says that is inaccurate.
Dopamine has a primary role in the signaling reward, and this is a point made in her article. But she also says:
Dopamine teaches your brain what you want, then drives you to get it, regardless of what's good for you. It does this in two steps. First you experience something that gives you pleasure (say, McDonald's french…
purepedantry | January 14, 2009The NYTimes profiles Paul Offit, author of Autism's False Prophets. Offit has been taking the anti-vaccine lobby to task over pseudoscience, and he hasn't been winning many friends in the process:
Those backing Dr. Offit say he was forced into the role. Opponents of vaccines have held rallies, appeared on talk shows like "Oprah" and "Imus in the Morning," been the heroes of made-for-TV movies and found a celebrity spokeswoman in Jenny McCarthy, the actress and former Playboy model who has an autistic son. Meanwhile, the response from public health officials has been muted and couched in dull…
purepedantry | January 12, 2009There is a very good article in the NYTimes about whether doctors should inform patients about disparities in care between hospitals:
An article published online in October
in the journal PLoS Medicine really hit home with me. Noting that the
quality of cancer care is uneven, its authors argued that as part of
the informed-consent process, doctors have an ethical obligation to
tell patients if they are more likely to survive, be cured, live longer
or avoid complications by going to Hospital A instead of Hospital B.
And that obligation holds even if the doctor happens to work at
Hospital B,…
purepedantry | January 9, 2009I caught this neuroscience question over at a new blog I like, Think Markets. Sandy Ikeda comments on a section of Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness:
I've been thinking about the following from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness:
Experiments have demonstrated that the moment we encounter an object, our brains instantly analyze just a few of its key features and then use the presence or absence of these features to make one very fast and very simple decision: "Is this object an important thing to which I ought to respond right now? [...] As such, our brains are designed to…
purepedantry | January 6, 2009Obama's transition team has approached CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta for the position of Surgeon General:
The Obama transition team approached Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, about becoming U.S. surgeon general, according to sources inside the transition and at CNN.
Gupta was in Chicago, Illinois, in November to meet with President-elect Barack Obama on the matter, sources said.
Gupta has declined comment.
The transition team is impressed with the combination of Gupta's past government experience, as a White House fellow in 1997 and a special adviser to then-first lady Hillary…
purepedantry | January 5, 2009Seriously, when I read the headlines to this article, I wanted to wretch retch. (Ed. I need to learn how to spell.)
Scientists discover true love
Scientists: True love can last a lifetime
I can feel it welling up now...eh...OK, I feel better.
Just to be clear, I didn't want to wretch retch because I am a deeply cynical person who scoffs at the notion of true love. (That is true, but not why I wanted to wretch retch.) I wanted to wretch retch because scientific research like this inevitably results in the worst kind of popular tripe when communicated in journalism. We are talking the most…
purepedantry | January 2, 2009In an article reviewing the success of the Euro, the WSJ attributes at least some of the finiancial instability of recent months to currency volatility between the US and Europe.
The Euro has had numerous benefits:
Travel was made easier, as was trade and investment. Interest rates fell. Prices for labor and goods were suddenly transparent across the bloc, increasing competition. As important, the creation of a single European Central Bank (ECB) has better insulated monetary policy from political manipulation. Politicians could no longer attempt to inflate their way out of their employment…
purepedantry | January 1, 2009Nobel laureates on the board bring in the bacon when it is time to capitalize a firm:
WHAT is a Nobel prize really worth? The market values it at $34m, according to a new NBER paper by Matthew Higgins, Paula Stephan and Jerry Thursby. They studied the biotech industry during the 1990s. The industry, in the early part of the decade, was relatively new. The lack of market experience meant there existed few ways to determine the value of fledgling start-ups. Firms had to signal their value and some did so by affiliating with Nobel laureates. The firms advertised the affiliation heavily in their…
purepedantry | December 31, 2008PhRMA -- the association of pharmaceutical companies -- has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on drug paraphernalia given to doctors:
Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies -- Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs -- that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.
No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned…
purepedantry | December 29, 2008My suspicion is that many of you went home for the holidays, and my suspicion is that many of you were not entirely honest with your relatives while you were there. While it is not my intention to encourage this behavior -- I, of course, am totally honest all of the time ;) -- you are not alone. Here is a great article from the NYTimes about the prevalence of lying:
Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called "lying in day-to-day life," Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of…
purepedantry | December 29, 2008Ha! I knew it. The quiet animals get more play than the loud obnoxious ones:
During bison mating season, the quietest bulls score the most mates and sire the most offspring while studs with the loudest bellows see the least action, according to a surprising new study by researchers at University of California, Davis, and Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. The researchers also found that the volume of a bull's bellow was not related to its weight or age.
"We were expecting to find that the bigger, stronger guys -- the high-quality males -- would have the loudest bellows, because…
purepedantry | December 29, 2008People are doing biology in their kitchen now, or in rented labs with cheaper equipment:
In Cambridge, Mass., a group called DIYbio is setting up a community lab where the public could use chemicals and lab equipment, including a used freezer, scored for free off Craigslist, that drops to 80 degrees below zero, the temperature needed to keep many kinds of bacteria alive.
Co-founder Mackenzie Cowell, a 24-year-old who majored in biology in college, said amateurs will probably pursue serious work such as new vaccines and super-efficient biofuels, but they might also try, for example, to use…
purepedantry | December 26, 2008Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science has an excellent piece on using chess to explain the differences between men and women in the hard sciences. Turns out, participation not biology is key:
Every serious player has an objective rating - the Elo rating - that measures their skill based on their results against other players. Bilalic looked at a set of data encompassing all known German players - over 120,000 individuals, of whom 113,000 are men. He directly compared the top 100 players of either gender and used a mathematical model to work out the expected difference in their Elo ratings,…
purepedantry | December 26, 2008A economist at Yale, Robert Shiller, compiled an index of housing prices since 1890 in an attempt to determine what caused the housing bubble (click to enlarge):
The figure is from here. (Hat-tip: Cafe Hayek)
I post this figure because I think it dispels a couple of delusions I hear people quoting about the housing bubble.
1) There have been several housing bubbles in the past followed by corrections. They were just not as big as this one.
2) Look at the year for the beginning of the meteoric rise in housing prices. 1997. Bush didn't create this alone. He likely participated in it and…
purepedantry | December 26, 2008Barry Gewen from the NYTimes Paper Cuts blog on the reimergence of John Kenneth Galbraith:
Friedman has no good explanation for "too big to fail," but it's at the heart of Galbraith's 1967 best seller, "The New Industrial State." Galbraith's basic argument is that there is an inevitability to economic development, that capital and technological requirements lead inescapably to the emergence of large, bureaucratic, oligopolistic firms. These firms have a high degree of control over prices and markets, and they don't seek the profit maximization the orthodox economists talk about, but stability…
purepedantry | December 18, 2008I doubt it...but more on that in a second.
There is a fascinating argument going over at Edge.org about whether science can save the economy. The authors suggest that the scientific techniques being applied to the natural sciences should be applied to establish a new consensus about how the economy works:
In the near-term, Eric Weinstein has spoken about an "economic Manhattan project". This means getting a group of good scientists together, some who know a lot about economics and finance, and others, who have proved themselves in other areas of science but bring fresh minds and perspectives…