Search Content

Displaying results 78051 - 78100 of 87950

Is Modern Mathematics Reliable?

The new issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society turned up in my mailbox today. It features an interesting, if slightly disturbing, editorial (PDF format) by CUNY mathematician Melvyn Nathanson. He wonders about how confident we can really be regarding the proofs that appear in our research journals: But why the delay? Surely, any competent person can check a proof. It's either right or wrong. Why wait two years? The reason is that many great and important theorems don't actually have proofs. They have sketches of proofs, outlines of arguments, hints and intuitions…

Obligatory Cosmos Commentary

It says here in the fine print that my blogging license could be revoked if I fail to offer a public opinion on the Cosmos reboot, which premiered last night. I missed the first couple of minutes-- I had The Pip for bedtime, and he didn't start snoring until 8:58-- but saw most of it in real time. I posted a bit of commentary on Twitter, but will offer something marginally less ephemeral here. The show opened and closed with tributes to Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson standing on the same cliff where Sagan opened the original series back in 1980. That was good and fitting, and Tyson's…

Who Gets to Define Christianity?

The brou ha ha over original sin continues apace. Andres Sullivan has replied to Jerry Coyne. It's a very bad post, arrogant but contentless. Jerry has already delivered the well-deserved spanking. Sullivan uncorks nuggets like this: I would argue that original sin is a mystery that makes sense of our species' predicament - not a literal account of a temporal moment when we were all angels and a single act that made us all beasts. We are beasts with the moral imagination of angels. But if we are beasts, then where did that moral imagination come from? If it is coterminous with…

Monday Math: Proving Euler's Formula for Perfect Numbers

In last week's post we discussed perfect numbers. These were numbers, like 6, 28 and 496, that are equal to the sums of their proper divisors. We referred to Euler's formula, which claims that every even perfect number has the form \[ 2^{p-1} \left(2^p-1 \right), \] where the term in parentheses is prime. As we discussed last week, the term in parentheses is known as a Mersenne prime, which entails that the exponent p is prime as well. Our goal this week is to prove this formula. This is a very beautiful proof, in my view. It has tremendous flow, by which I mean that there is no one…

Should Professors Bring Religion Into the Classroom?

Elaine Howard Ecklund has a confusing post up at HuffPo. It is confusing because it is very unclear what exactly she wants. There is strong evidence that religion is resurging among students on America's top university campuses. Yet, a large number of academic scientists firmly feel that they should not discuss religion in their classrooms. I have spent the last five years surveying nearly 1,700 natural and social scientists working at elite U.S. universities -- talking with 275 of them in-depth -- in an effort to understand their religious beliefs and practices, or lack thereof. As I…

M and K in DC

The remainder of my review of Mooney and Kirshenbaum on paper will have to wait a bit longer. You see, I now have Mooney and Kirshenbaum in real life to discuss. Always happy to have an excuse to visit the big city, I stopped by the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC to see Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum speak about their book. I would estimate there were a little ove a hunred people there. Mooney and Kirshenbaum tag-teamed their prepared remarks. These remarks were brief and mostly focused on the reasons for writing the book, and a brief summary of what was in it. The…

Atheism Display in Washington State

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has won the right to post an anti-religion display next to a Christmas tree and a naticity scene in the Capitol rotunda in Washington State: An atheist group has unveiled an anti-religion placard in the state Capitol, joining a Christian Nativity scene and “holiday tree” on display during December. The atheists' sign was installed Monday by Washington members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national group based in Madison, Wis. With a nod to the winter solstice - the year's shortest day occurring in late December - the placard reads: “At this…

The Endnoting of Michael Pemulis

Via the Infinite summer roundup, Infinite Detox has a post about the novel's treatment of my favorite supporting character, whose title I have shamelessly stolen: The problem I have is that from a dramatic standpoint, the wave of Pemulis-bashing that gathers force on p. 774 and crests in endnote 332 isn't convincing to me. For the first 773 pages of the book Wallace presents Pemulis to us as a lovable rogue and prankster -- he has an acerbic wit, he's nobody's fool, he's the Jack Sparrow of differential calculus. He wears a yachting cap, for Christ's sake. What's not to like about this guy?…

Wake up, Arkansas!

The Arkansas Times has an excellent article on the difficulties of science teaching in that state (an article that was originally published in the Reports of the NCSE, too). It's darned depressing: the creationists don't need to get their laws passed in order to kneecap science teaching. Here's a geology teacher who has been muzzled by fear: Teachers at his facility are forbidden to use the “e-word” (evolution) with the kids. They are permitted to use the word “adaptation” but only to refer to a current characteristic of an organism, not as a product of evolutionary change via natural…

The Myth of the Abrasive Genius

Via Steve Hsu, a lengthy rant by Bruce Charlton about the dullness of modern scientists: Question: why are so many leading modern scientists so dull and lacking in scientific ambition? Answer: because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people. At each level in education, training and career progression there is a tendency to exclude smart and creative people by preferring Conscientious and Agreeable people. The progressive lengthening of scientific training and the reduced independence of career scientists have tended to deter vocational '…

There's No Escaping Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell has a number of public responses to the sort of thing I ranted about the other day-- not to me specifically, mind, but to the same general points-- on his own blog and on ESPN's Page 2. It's pretty much the same argument others made in the comments to my post. Taking a fairly representative bit from his blog post: The press is not for everyone. But then the piece never claimed that it was. I simply pointed out that insurgent strategies (substituting effort for ability and challenging conventions) represent one of David's only chances of competing successfully against Goliath…

Links for 2010-09-09

Swans on Tea » I'm Not Willing to Believe You "I'm perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one's thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that's not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation -- you can't just write off the experience leading up to it. To claim that you could just walk into the lab and take data means that you had the requisite knowledge and lab experience, which you must have acquired as an undergraduate. And I don't believe it." (tags: academia education science physics biology experiment blogs swans-on-tea) The…

Trapping Ions With Light

There was a flurry of stories last week about an arxiv preprint on optical trapping of an ion. Somewhat surprisingly for an arxiv-only paper, it got a write-up in Physics World. While I generally like Physics World, I have to take issue with their description of why this is interesting: In the past, the trapping of atomic particles has followed a basic rule: use radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields for ions, and optical lasers for neutral particles, such as atoms. This is because RF fields can only exert electric forces on charges; try to use them on neutral particles and there's…

Links for 2010-01-01

Giro.org » Grace, Internets. Internets, Grace. "Grace is snoozing away in Anne's arms while our lunch (rice and dumplings) and dinner (roast chicken with pesto) cook away. This will be the first non-hospital food we've had in two days, though I recall us sneaking in a patty melt and milkshake from Izzy's the night she was born. Really, this is all a blur of plastic bassinets, rotating nurses, and a tiny, tiny person with a mighty grip." (tags: kid-stuff blogs) Tell me what to agree with, and I'll agree § Unqualified Offerings "Indeed, even if we restrict ourselves to hypothesizing that…

Ben Domenech: creationist

Let us continue our Ben Domenech bashing. He's got this somewhat high profile gig at the Washington Post, and one has to wonder what his qualifications are. I think we can rule out "intelligence." GWW made an interesting discovery: he's a creationist. I don't understand why the Right is constantly elevating these ignoramuses; there must still be a few conservatives who read this site (I can't possibly have driven you all away)…aren't you embarrassed by this kind of thing? For instance, here's some dumb-as-a-post reasoning: I personally don't have a problem with evolution being taught in…

Relative Dog Motion

As I'm driving down the street, a squirrel darts out into the road a block or so ahead of me. From the back seat, the dog says "Gun it!!!! Hit the squirrel, hit the squirrel, hitthesquirrel!" "Will you sit down and be quiet?" We're having some work done on the house, and I'm taking her to work with me so she's not underfoot for the contractors. The squirrel makes it to the other side of the road, and up a tree to safety. "Awwww," says the dog. "Dude, you totally could've gotten that one. This car is way faster than a stupid squirrel." "That may be, but I have a class to teach today. I don't…

Physics to Finance

We had a talk yesterday at lunchtime from an alumnus who graduated with a physics degree, got a Ph.D. in Physics, did a couple of post-docs, and then decided to give academia a miss, and went to Wall Street where he's been a financial analyst for the last 12 years. He talked, mostly for the benefit of students, about his path to the world of finance, and what's involved in financial jobs. This was terrifically interesting, and really useful. Given the way academia works, people who manage to get tenure-track faculty positions almost never have any first-hand experience of the other career…

On Moderation

(Now that I look at the title, that sounds like an incredibly tepid harness-team command. "On, Moderation! Forward, with prudent speed!" I could clear that up by adding "Comment" in the middle, but I kind of like the image...) Over at Boing Boing, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a long explanation of the comment moderation policy in Q&A format. As you might expect, if you're a reader of Making Light, it's very well done, and as clear a statement of what good community moderation is about as you'll find anywhere. As you might expect, if you're a reader of the Internet generally, the…

Semi-Comfortable Question: Personal Particle Accelerator

Back in the comments of one of the "Uncomfortable Question" threads, Matthew Jarpe asked (as background research for a new novel): If someone were to hand you the keys to your own particle accelerator and you could do any experiment you wanted, what would it be? Well, if somebody just gave me the keys to CERN, and left for the weekend, I'd be sorely tempted to steal some vacuum pumps and digital electronics. Because, dude, they've got some awfully nice stuff, and they'd hardly miss it... I assume that the question is really intended to be what sort of particle physics experiment would I do…

Psychotherapy and Brain Chemistry

One of the articles that I read, early in my career, that influenced the way I think about neuroscience, was this one: href="http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/49/9/681">Caudate glucose metabolic rate changes with both drug and behavior therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder L. R. Baxter Jr, et. al., Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1992;49:681-689. We used positron emission tomography to investigate local cerebral metabolic rates for glucose (LCMRG1c) in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder before and after treatment with either fluoxetine hydrochloride or behavior…

Ant Course 2010: Borneo

ANT COURSE 2010 Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah Borneo, August 16 - 26 DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION: April 1, 2010 click here for application form COURSE OBJECTIVES. â ANT COURSE is designed for systematists, ecologists, behaviorists, conservation biologists, and other biologists whose research responsibilities require a greater understanding of ant taxonomy and field research techniques.  Emphasis is on the identification of the ant genera and species occurring in Southeast Asia.  Lectures will include background information on the ecology, life histories and evolution of ants.  Field trips…

ICE 2008

I've had a week to digest the International Congress of Entomology (ICE) meeting held earlier this month in Durban, South Africa. Thousands of diverse presentations happening in 15 parallel sessions cannot easily be summed up in a single blog post, so I'll stick to a few of my own impressions of the conference. First, the bad. Durban was a terrible location. Lovely beaches aside, the city was not safe. Several people were mugged outside their hotels, and there is nothing relaxing about having to watch your back when venturing off the conference grounds. The crime had a surpressive effect…

Giving you the business: learn how campus-based integrative medicine can work for you!

Dr Kimball Atwood IV at Science-Based Medicine and my long-time blogging colleague Orac have spilled oceans of e-ink on the institutionalization of alternative or integrative medicine in North America's top academic medical centers. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is now often called "integrative medicine" to intellectually justify the incorporation of evidence-free, anecdotal practices into the business of academic medicine. Of course, integrative medicine does co-opt a few areas of conventional medicine, like nutritional and psychological counseling, supported by an evidence…

Senator George A. Smathers, Stetson Kennedy, Woody Guthrie, and one's legacy

If I live to 93 and someone holds a mirror up to my life, I wonder how proud or embarrassed I would be. In my weekend reading, I realized that I never commented on the passing last month of former Florida Democratic Senator, George A. Smathers. He was 93 and left this world largely revered by today's Floridians. I bring up Smathers because of my educational links to the State of Florida, my previous writing on Florida civil rights leader Stetson Kennedy, and the melding of Smathers and Kennedy by Woody Guthrie in a song written to drum up votes during Kennedy's unsuccessful write-in campaign…

Chimpanzees take risks but bonobos play it safe

Would you gamble on a safe bet for the promise of something more? Would you risk losing everything for the possibility of greater rewards? In psychological experiments, humans tend to play it safe when we stand to gain something - we're more likely to choose a certain reward over a larger but riskier one. Now, we're starting to understand how our two closest relatives deal with risk - bonobos, like us, tend to be risk-averse while chimpanzees usually play the odds. Sarah Heilbronner from Harvard University studied the attitudes of five chimps and five bonobos to risky decisions. All the…

I HATE Fahrenheit ... and its link to presidential elections

The past few days have seen wild thermometer swings in my neck of the Blue Ridge woods. Overnight lows are hitting a few degrees below freezing and by the mid afternoon it's almost room temperature. Measuring all that in Fahrenheit only makes more confusing. What this country really needs, says this Canadian ex-pat, is a presidential candidate who thinks in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.... OK. Not really. I'm talking metaphorically. But for me there really is a connection between American resistance to the metric system and the absence of anything more than lip service paid during this…

Rwanda understands the irrationality of the death penalty: The U.S. not so much

As Tara writes at Aetiology, it's interesting that the Rwandan government, which might be excused for letting for a little blood lust taint its criminal justice system, what with the slaughter of 800,000 people on their minds, has voted instead to abolish the death penalty. Yet here in America, capital punishment remains on the books in 38 states. I have little new to add, offer these thoughts, which I wrote more than a year ago in an attempt to give the subject a local take, back in pre-ScienceBlog days. My thesis was an is that a scientific approach to justice is incompatible with state-…

Hansen, melting ice and linear thinking

OK. I've read Hansen's new paper, which has been submitted to Environmental Research Letters, but not published. It's basically a review of existing, well-established science followed some personal opinion on the responsibility of scientists to express themselves, so I doubt it will be edited much before publication. And published it should be. The basic thrust is Reticence is fine for [the] IPCC. And individual scientists can choose to stay within a comfort zone, not needing to worry that they say something that proves to be slightly wrong. But perhaps we should also consider our legacy from…

British flakes

Today's time-waster while I wait for the first coat of sky blue to dry in what used to be the study is reader-baiting. The targets are citizens of the U.K. The subject is the paranormal. I ask you, what's with the enduring popularity of belief in ghosts, telepathy, and other such flaky beyond-belief stuff in Great Britain? To be fair, it's not as bad as creationism in America, not by a long shot. The British Isles are the birthplace of John Locke, David Hume and Bertrand Russell, after all, and the legacy of the Enlightenment continues to burn brightly in England, for most part. But still,…

Htargcm Retsila

I am astounded. Alister McGrath wrote something that was correct! Reason needs to be calibrated by something external. That's one of the reasons why science is so important in the critique of pure reason — a point that we shall return to in the next article. Of course, it's only two sentences embedded in a great gross tangle of wrong, and he does accompany it with a threat to screw it all up in his next essay, but let's give him credit for finally, after years of pretentious mumbling, managing to say one thing I can agree with. It is exactly right. I've had the experience of putting…

Not-so-supreme Science

Yesterday's non-decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on just how far the Army Corps of Engineers can go in telling developers what they can and cannot build produced no identifiable winners or losers. But a close look at the rulings hints at how the court will treat science in future cases. In the end, the court couldn't agree on what the Clean Water Act was meant to do, so it sent Rapanos et ux., et al, v. United States back to the lower courts to sort out just what constitutes a wetland deserving of protection. One of properties in contention is depicted at right. You can see why there's no…

Why are clouds white?

Why is the sky blue? It's a classic question - probably the classic question of the genre of explanatory popular physics. The famous short version of the answer is that Rayleigh scattering by air molecules affects short-waveength light more than long-wavelength light, and so blue light tends to get scattered in random directions to create the diffuse blue we know and love. But like almost every answer physics can give, the answer leads to more questions. Why does Rayleigh scattering scatter short-wavelength light more strongly? This is a fairly involved question to answer from first…

Sunday Function

In my free time during data acquisition runs and the like, I've been paging through Hardy and Wright's famous textbook An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers. It has something of a legendary reputation among pure math textbooks, and so far as I can tell it is entirely deserved. One of the topics treated in the book is the representation of numbers in the decimal system. In some ways it's an elementary topic, but it also serves as a starting point for some genuinely deep mathematics. Today I'd like to noodle around with the connection between fractions and decimals. It's a bit of a stretch…

Amateur Lunar Ranging? Hmm.

All right, I'm gonna delay the next installment of the quantum bouncing ball for a brief diversion. I have a friend who's also a physics grad student, and he suggested that we along with a few other fellow students form a yet-to-be-named unofficial club whose raison d'etre is to get together every few weeks and do interesting Mythbusters-style science for no good scientific reason. After all, we are fortunate enough to be surrounded by expensive cutting edge equipment and brilliant people, and we should have some scientifically interesting fun. One suggestion for something we might try was…

How light or dark is Barack Obama's skin? Depends on your political stance...

In the early days of the last US elections, Hillary Clinton's campaign was accused of deliberately darkening Barack Obama's skin in a TV ad. The implication was that by highlighting Obama's "blackness", Clinton's camp was trying to exploit negative associations that voters might have with darker skin. But you don't need editing software to do that - a fascinating new study suggest that people literally change the way they see a mixed-race politician, depending on whether the candidate represents their own political views. Liberal American students tend to think that lighter photos of Barack…

Feminist hypersensitivity or masculine obtuseness?

The latest furious argument going on in the atheist community is over this panel at an American Atheists meeting in Huntsville, Alabama. The subject was what atheist groups can do to attract more women, which is a good and important question. Kudos for asking it. Here, go watch the video before you read further. Try to see the problem that got some people rather irate. Done? OK. Now go read what Sharon Moss and Lyz Liddell had to say about it, their subsequent clarification, and Ophelia Benson's comments. Listen. To. The. Women. I've got a simple suggestion for my fellow men. Learn to shut up…

Barry Commoner, Science, and Action: Part II

Part II of our Science and Society discussion with Michael Egan, author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival. Part I is here. Want a blurb? How's this: For over half a century, the biologist Barry Commoner has been one of the most prominent and charismatic defenders of the American environment, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1970 as the standard-bearer of "the emerging science of survival." [In this book,] Michael Egan examines Commoner's social and scientific activism and charts an important shift in American environmental values since World War II. Continuing now…

Voters use child-like judgments when judging political candidates

During elections, what affects our decision to vote for one politician over another? We'd like to think that it's an objective assessment of many different factors including their various policies, their values, their record and so on. But in reality, voters are just not that rational. In the past, studies have shown that people can predict which of two politicians will win an election with reasonable accuracy based on a second-long looks at their faces. With a fleeting glance and little purposeful consideration, people make strong judgments about a candidate's competence, that can sway…

Dogs frown on unfair rewards

If a colleague of yours was rewarded for their work while you received nothing for your (similarly sized) efforts, you would probably be quite peeved. Now it seems that man's best friend also shares our disdain for unfairness. Humans are notorious for our dislike of injustice. It rankles us to see others being rewarded or penalised unfairly. We not only have the capacity to recognise when someone else is being rewarded beyond their efforts, but the inclination to punish them for it, often at personal expense. But other species behave in the same way - recent studies have found that capuchin…

Cutting through the haze: Nailing down the role of aerosols in climate change

Climatologists have long known that aerosol "haze" plays an important role in determining just hot things get on Earth. But figuring out just what the role is has proven frustrating. The tiny, airborne particles that fly out of smokestacks, tailpipes and ordinary biomass fires can either help cool the earth by reflecting sunlight, for example. But they can also settle on snow in the form of soot and absorb heat. Now comes a paper that claims to have calculated the net effect. If the researchers are right, they've identified an important piece of the climate change puzzle. Just as important,…

Humor as a Guide to Research

Over at the optimizer's blog, quantum computing's younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I'd only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave…

Effect of Modafinil on Dopamine

Today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association contains a study that employed PET scans to determine the effect of modafinil upon dopamine concentration and reuptake in the human central nervous system.  They conclude with a caution that clinicians should be mindful of the potential for abuse and dependence in persons taking modafinil. The problem with the study is that it adds very little, if anything, to clinical practice. href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/301/11/1148">Effects of Modafinil on Dopamine and Dopamine Transporters in the Male Human…

Reading the Body

Darwin's spirit lives on in everything from the Human Genome Project to medicine to conservation biology--the three topics I covered in my post on Friday. It also lives on in brain scans. While Darwin is best known for The Origin of Species, he also wrote a lot of books in later years, most of which explored some aspect of nature that he showed revealed the workings of evolution. His examples ranged from orchids to peacock tails. In his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he proposed that the expressions we humans use--our smiles, our frowns, and so on--are part of a…

The House Debate: Can a Jerk Doctor Teach Ethics? And What about the "Gattaca" Effect on Perceptions of Medical Cloning?

The latest issue of the American Journal of Bioethics features an important study on the effects of viewing medical dramas on the ethical reasoning of medical and nursing students. From the abstract for the study by researchers at Johns Hopkins: Television medical dramas frequently depict the practice of medicine and bioethical issues in a strikingly realistic but sometimes inaccurate fashion. Because these shows depict medicine so vividly and are so relevant to the career interests of medical and nursing students, they may affect these students' beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions…

Let's Hope There's a Place for Cizik in the Obama Administration or Progressive Movement

Many readers were shocked and disappointed last week with the forced resignation of Rev. Richard Cizik from his position heading up the Washington office of the National Association of Evangelicals. As I wrote just a day before his resignation, Cizik's work on climate change and his unique standing among Evangelicals may make him America's most important climate communicator. With news of his resignation, the NY Times Nicholas Kristof lamented the loss of a major political "bridge maker" and noted Cizik's instrumental role in raising public concern over AIDS, Darfur, poverty and religious…

Is Richard Cizik America's Top Climate Communicator?

Over at George Mason's Center for Climate Change Communication, they are hosting a poll asking readers to vote for the 2008 Climate Change Communicator of the Year. Among the choices are such notables as Thomas Friedman, Bill McKibbon, John Warner, and Chevron's "Will You Join Us" Campaign. But my vote would be for a name not on that list: the Reverend Richard Cizik, VP for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals. Cizik is a perfect spokesperson for a hard to mobilize segment of Republican-leaning America. Not only does he have credibility among Evangelicals, but…

Sick Building Syndrome as a Problem of Design and Expertise: Part II with author Michelle Murphy

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 - - - Part 2 with Jody Roberts and Michelle Murphy--discussing her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty--follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. - - - WF: So we've got the women on the inside organizing and collecting their own data. But how did this fit within the language and practices of the outside "experts" dealing with these cases? MM: I also wanted to insist that what the "experts" were doing around SBS (and the politics of low-level chemical exposures more generally) was also crafted out of gendered…

Bacon, Fish, Arts vs Science, and Dawkins.

I wrote about this over at Terry, but will reprint here as well This is interesting, if not a bit alarming. Essentially, this story follows a trail of individuals that even Kevin Bacon would be proud of. The cast includes: a UBC student, her sister (also a UBC student), a senior level biology course, the course's teacher and the course's teaching assistant. As well, there is another teaching assistant - this one from the History Department (not Biology), and for the rest of us here, this TA is sort of the antagonist. Oh, and the aforementioned biology course focuses on the theory of…

The Undesirability of Utilitarian Judgements

The SciAm blog has a great discussion on current research into the neuroscience of morals. Two cool observations. First, while people tend to agree with the calculus of utilitarian moral judgments, they tend to reject them. Would you kill one person to save twenty? Even if you can morally justify that exchange, you are decidedly reluctant to do it. Second, this reluctance to make utilitarian moral judgments is neurologically based in the sense that if you lose a certain part of your brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) you are more likely to accept this calculus. Go check it out. I…

Resident Work Hour Restrictions Improve Patient Care

The holographic doctor from Star Trek. He never got tired. He never made mistakes. All he would do is get saucy when too many people were bothering him. If only all of us could be like that...(tear) Anyway, unfortunately we aren't all like him, and to address the issue the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education -- the body responsible for certifying medical residencies in the US -- implemented in 2003 work rules to limit the number of hours residents can work. (The details of the rules can be found here.) Among other things, the rules limit the number of hours that a…