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The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor

Yesterday, at the American Public Health Association annual meeting, I picked up a copy of Les Leopoldâs new biography The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi. Tony is the towering figure in the US occupational safety and health movement. Until his death in 2002, Tony did more than anyone else in the country to shape the way unions and public health professionals work independently and together to prevent occupational injury and illness. The book is a great read. It kept me up late last night fascinated and exhilarated, inside the passage of the OSHAct,…

Summer reading

Who would have thought these words would ever be typed by me? I'm looking forward to Ann Coulter's new book. It's called Godless(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Apparently, Ann Coulter has written a book about me, although I suspect that she'll instead be pretending that people like me are representative of the Democratic Party as a whole. I wish. I'm sure it will be insightful, nuanced, and meticulously researched. Maybe Al Franken and I should get together in a summer book club to discuss it. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. Ann Coulter P.S.…

Poll time! Everyone take a poke at Florida

You've all seen the hideous Florida license plates, right? Well, the Orlando Sentinel has a poll to see whether people think it's reasonable for a secular state government to be punching out plates endorsing a weird sectarian faith. So far, the kind of people who read the Sentinel think it is. I wonder what the kind of people who read Pharyngula think… Should Florida lawmakers allow specialty state license plates with religious messages? Yes. Floridians who are religious should have the right to pay more to show it on their plates. (3592 responses) 58.3% Yes. Why is this any different than…

"And the sun came up this morning"

An ode to Princeton Professors: Don't try this at home... Rumour of War There are soldiers marching on the common today They were there again this evening They paced up and down like sea birds on the ground Before the storm clouds gathering I must buy whatever tinned food is left on the shelves They are testing the air raid sirens They've filled up the blood banks and emptied the beds At the hospital and the asylum I saw a man build a shelter in his garden today And we stood there idly chatting He said: "No, no I don't think war will come" Yet still he carried on digging Everything in my life…

Merry Christmas

tags: christmas tree, holidays, photography This is the Christmas tree located in my "watering hole", where I will be located this very evening, in fact, hanging out with friends. Unfortunately, I am not sure if I will have free wifi access on Christmas or New Year's days since the public libraries are closed on both holidays, but if I do find free wifi anywhere, it will be here! Image: GrrlScientist 2007 [really large view] I am having a great time, listening to christmas music in the pub and now, at this very moment, the bartender is playing some really fabulous music, Rumpelstiltskin,…

Looking for the Bacon Boson

I'm grading exam papers at the dining room table when Emmy trots in. "Hey, dude," she says. "Where do we keep the superconducting wire?" I'm not really paying attention, so I start to answer before I understand the question. "Hmm? Wire is in the basement, next to the--wait, what?" "The superconducting wire. Where do we keep it?" "We don't have any superconducting wire. And you're a dog. What do you need superconducting wire for, anyway?" "I'm building a particle collider! I need superconducting wire for the beam-steering magnets." How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog goes on sale next Tuesday…

links for 2007-11-15

Freshman's 3-Pointer Helps Lift Syracuse - New York Times A typical beginning of the season (tags: basketball) Relativity passes new test of time - physicsworld.com Precision spectroscopy of lithium ions in a storage ring confirm time dilation. That's a relief. (tags: physics science experiment news relativity) Donate to the Jhereg Foundation Steven Brust needs money to pay medical bills. Also, you should buy his books. (tags: books medicine) Negative refraction 'could trap rainbows' - physicsworld.com A proposal of a scheme for "stopping" light inside a negative-index metamaterial…

COTS software are not off the shelf or turn-key

There's a nice rebuttal of the Sirsi Dynix anti-open source white paper done by Mark Leggott that just came out (I found it via Jason Griffey). More thoughtful than some. There are so many misconceptions on both sides of this. First, open source is not free. You do need people to install and maintain it and maybe customize it. Some open source projects have less documentation than others. On the other hand, what's worse is when you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a large software product only to then have to pay more and more and more and more to buy additional modules,…

Roomba x Alarm Clock = Clocky

Clocky sounds like R2D2 and looks kind of like an ATV's single-axled, pastel cub. In other words, it's really, really cute. Which is why when Clocky wakes you with its piercing warbles, crashes to your floor and rolls under your bed, you won't want to smash its little display with your fist. At least, we hope not! Click through for more details. Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day. Clocky began as a class project. After graduating, Gauri Nanda turned Clocky…

iScream

Seems like everything is being made so you can attach an iPod.   Shown below is the href="http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=204553512&adid=17070&dcaid=17070">George Foreman iPod Grill.  With 10-watt speaker. How patriotic is that? And what are we to make of one of the reviews posted at Buy.com? I love George Foreman's products! I own all of the grills, and I use them when I have small get togethers. They are great, indoors and out. I usually only use one at a time, since my friends don't really come to my parties. I don't know what that is about. I used the George…

Something every surgeon should have: LifeStat

Here's something I've been meaning to post for a while that somehow got buried in my list of cool, weird, or interesting links. One of the things they teach surgeons and emergency medicine doctors about is how to use common materials at hand to do, MacGyver-like, a cricothyroidotomy to save the life of someone who has an airway obstruction and is choking. But that's just so inelegant. Why use such crude methods (and take the chance that the necessary materials, like a straw or a Bic pen whose plastic body you can use as a tube, aren't readily available)? Get a hold of LifeStat, the…

Nobel laureate not buying that nobel prize winners live longer.

I posted this story a week or so ago about Nobel prize winners living longer. Some people didn't seem to believe the study and now it seems that even some Nobel Prize winners are questioning the results. Winning the Nobel Prize can add almost a year and a half to a laureate's life, two British economists say. But though he's 81, Harvard physicist Roy J. Glauber, a 2005 Nobelist, isn't buying it. So why doesn't Roy buy it? But Glauber said the study might have been biased by the fact that many laureates aren't selected until they're quite old. Glauber won his Nobel 40 years after publishing…

Let's not just pick on the Nigerians

The oppression begins at home, and we can't just blame the men. I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl then walked up and set down the newest volume of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. The mom says "You can't buy that." Girl: Why? Mom: Because it's too big. Girl: [Brother] is buying a book that big. It's not very expensive. Mom: [Brother] is a boy. You're a girl. And girls shouldn't read…

Collaborative domain-expertise development?

Libraries do collaborative collection development, through consortia and increasingly via direct institution-to-institution arrangements. Reference and instruction are collaborative endeavors—look at any social-networking service with lots of librarians and you'll see on-the-spot crowdsourced reference responses. Perhaps this collaboration instinct will help libraries respond to the challenge of domain expertise for data curation. Do I need to know cheminformatics, or do I just need to buy a cheminformaticist conference potations until I secure her business card? Formalizing expertise-sharing…

Colbert

That was fun! */ The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Jonah Lehrer Colbert Report Full EpisodesPaul McCartney Appearance Funny Political VideosMore Funny Videos A few random notes: 1) I can't bring myself to watch the clip. Which reminds me of my brilliant idea for an fMRI experiment: show people videos of themselves in a scanner and see what brain areas turn on. Presto: you've found the neural correlates of self-loathing. I'm betting on the insula. 2) It was totally surreal being on the set of a show you watch every night. Like walking into your television or…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How Fat or Fit Were Dinosaurs? Scientists Use Laser Imaging: Karl Bates and his colleagues in the palaeontology and biomechanics research group have reconstructed the bodies of five dinosaurs, two T. rex (Stan at the Manchester Museum and the Museum of the Rockies cast MOR555), an Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, a Strutiomimum sedens and an Edmontosaurus annectens. The team found that the smaller Museum of the Rockies T. rex could have weighed anywhere between 5.5 and 7 tonnes, while the larger specimen (Stan) might have weighed as much as 8 tonnes. Genes Important To Sleep Discovered: For many…

The 140conf

As you probably know, The Bride of Coturnix and I went to NYC last week to attend the 140conference organized by Jeff Pulver who I finally had a pleasure to meet in person. The speaker line-up and the program schedule had to be slightly modified as a few people got stuck in Europe under the volcanic ash and could not come in time. But there were plenty of smart people in attendance who could readily jump in and join the panels in their place. There were a total of about 1000 people the first day and only slightly fewer on the second day. There were only a handful people there who I've met…

Cyberspeech and cybersilence: thoughts on the Kathy Sierra matter.

In case you somehow missed it: tech writer and blogger Kathy Sierra canceled public appearances after receiving death threats. In addition to the death threats, she called attention to some posts about her that were threatening in tone (though probably falling short of actual threats) and definitely mean on now-defunct sites set up by other A-list tech bloggers. Since blogging about this, SIerra has received more threats. A number of bloggers think Sierra has smeared the people who ran the now-defunct websites by not drawing a clear enough distinction between the death threats (which they…

What Am I Up To?

Re: Video programs Inbox UNARIUS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE to me Dear Claire: We would be most happy to meet with you at the Unarius Center when you have the opportunity to make the trip from Los Angeles. We are open from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Saturday. As you may have discovered on our web site http://www.unarius.org/, we have classes on Wednesday and Sunday evenings from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM May we suggest that you participate with us online for Sunday evenings past-life therapy classes that are being audio-streamed live from about 7 to 9 PM PDT. To listen, go to the Unarius Web…

Mighty Mite Sex Returns!

If it's about spiders and sex, it's gotta be Live Science! Well, to be accurate, the critters are not spiders, but mites from the family Crotoniidae. These mites reproduce sexually, which is not much of an eyebrow raiser until one considers that their close relatives, the Camisiidae, reproduce by parthenogenesis. From Tiny Creatures Rediscover the Joy of Sex Evolutionary biologist Katja Domes at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and her colleagues examined genetic sequences in two Crotoniidae species and a diverse range of 13 other mite species. Their calculations show the…

The World Science podcast/forum: May Berenbaum - DDT vs. Malaria: The Lesser of Two Evils?

The World is a radio show co-produced by WGBH Boston, Public Radio International and BBC. You can probably hear it on your local NPR station - if not, you can find all the shows recorded on the website. You may remember that I went to Boston a few months ago, as a part of a team of people helping the show do something special: use the NSF grant they recently received to expand their science coverage and, in collaboration with Sigma Xi and NOVA, tie their radio science coverage to their online offerings. The result is The World: Science website, a series of weekly science podcasts with Elsa…

Song of the Science Policy Successes

ScienceBlogger asks: "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?" Um, errr... Ok, since the place is full of bio/med/geo types, lets narrow the field to astro and space. Astronomers have been extremely successful in guiding space science policy, at least through to 2005, through the little know advisory committees and various NRC, AAS and APS small, high prestige, ad hoc committees that make recommendations like "the decadal survey" and how astro and physics should interplay their priorities, like Quarks to Cosmos. These are major…

Evolution: Education and Outreach dedicates issue to Genie Scott

The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach (volume 3, number 2) is in honor of -- if a few months in advance of -- the sixty-fifth birthday of NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott. Edited by NCSE's deputy director Glenn Branch (who contributed "Three wishes for Genie" by way of introduction), it contains essays by Nicholas J. Matzke, Robert T. Pennock, Barbara Forrest, Raymond Arthur Eve with Susan Carol Losh and Brandon Nzekwe, Lawrence M. Krauss, Robert M. Hazen, Kevin Padian, Jay D. Wexler, Kenneth R. Miller, Brian Alters, and Carl Zimmer. Plus there's a biographical…

That Nightline Debate About God

If you have any interest, clips from the big Nightline God debate are now online at the ABC News website. Mostly what you'd expect, though I think things went a bit better for the atheists than I had anticipated. Representing the forces of darkness and ignorance were Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. Having seen their staggeringly dopey infomercials on television, I was not optimistic that they would have anything intelligent to say here. They are, however, very polished in their presentation, which made me worry they might come off as persuasive. As it happens I needn't have worried. The…

"What makes you so special, Genome Boy?"

A very nice surprise greeted me this morning on the local page of my AP News iPhone app: an interview in the News & Observer with Dr. Misha Angrist of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy by freelance journalist, T. DeLene Beeland (also on Twitter @tdelene). Angrist is perhaps best-known as the fourth of the first 10 people whose genome was sequenced for George Church's Personal Genome Project. Not surprisingly, his work focuses on the societal implications of the personal genomics movement and what knowing one's DNA sequence means today and will mean in the future. We last…

My Day

Wake up, make breakfast. Espresso, two slices of bread from a French batard from Clear Flour Bread with some mouhamara spread from Arax. In the newspaper I read about the primaries, the financial crisis and nothing too important. I waste an hour with email, signing up to some HHMI online system, reading teh intertubes and blogging. Time to work on the grant. I read the background and significance section ... did I compose that crap? After rewriting a bit I move down to preliminary data. Not so bad. I add some clarifications here and there ... man I have to finish the methods section and it's…

Around the Web: On Naming Names and Calling Out Trolls, Not so tech-savvy millennials and more

On Naming Names and Calling Out Trolls Gawker, Reddit, Free Speech and Such Millennials: They Aren’t So Tech Savvy After All Project Information Literacy: Inventing the Workplace and How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace The Philosophy of Open Access Impostors, Performers, Professionals - I and II (feeling like an academic imposter, pt II on the job hunt) The Teaching Track? Really? Teaching them to fish… (on higher ed "disruption") Zeitgeist: On Ditching the Monograph and Digital Print Culture The B-School Twitter-Free Zone The future of higher…

Around the Apocalyptic Web: The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats Facebook's massive psychology experiment likely illegal Facebook and Engineering the Public College graduates earn more, but that doesn't prove college is worth it Mirrortocracy: The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture Google’s latest empire-building tactic: cheap phones How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media Education’s war on millennials: Why everyone is failing the “digital…

Pixel-Stained Technopeasants Unite!

SFWA, your source for train-wrecky goodness on the Internet has indirectly caused International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day: On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn't matter if it's a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn't matter if it's already been published or if it hasn't, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood. Here's the central index of free stuff, which doesn't include everything-- for example, Kate has posted her law review article-- but does include more than enough free professional-…

Linkfest: Earth Science Week, AWG's new website, and annual meetings galore

Earth Science Week 2009 will be October 11-17 (ending on the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake!). This year's theme is "Understanding Climate." There are photo, visual arts, and essay contests, and Thursday is going to be the first "Women in Geosciences" day. (And then Friday will be "frantically put posters together for GSA" day. Maybe the people who prefer AGU can make this year's Earth Science Week happen...) The Association for Women Geoscientists has a new website (at the old address). They're now collecting dues online, but the transition to a paperless world has been…

A Moving Box for My Face?

My mother uses Lancome for skin and make-up. I use Lancome. I sense Lancome knows that brand inheritance helps build brand loyalty. They also make very nice products, which helps. But Lancome is about to lose me as a customer. I decided to order a few things online last week and they arrived yesterday. Products that weigh less than a pound packaged in glass, packaged in plastic, packaged in a fancy box, in a plastic bag, in another box, wrapped in paper and sent in a moving box. I actually blushed when I picked it up at the post office. This mountain of packaging in an era of over-…

"Gen Ed" Relativity: Pondering Books

This coming fall term, I'll be teaching Astronomy 052, "Relativity, Black Holes, and Quasars," because the guy who has traditionally taught it (a radio astronomer who studies active galactic nuclei) has to do other courses instead. But I said "Well, hell, I've written a popular audience book explaining relativity. I can teach that." And since I get to make teaching assignments (the one and only positive feature of being department chair), well, I put myself down to teach it. Now, of course, I find myself thinking about ideas for that class, months in advance, when I ought to be working on…

ScienceOnline2010 - what to do while there, what to do if you are not there but are interested?

ScienceOnline2010 is starting in three days! If you are not excited yet....well, I think you should be! And perhaps I can help you....with this post. First, see the complete list of attendees, or, if you want more details about everyone, browse through these introductory posts. It is always good to know more about people you are about to spend two or three days with.... Then, check out the Program to see which session in each time-slot you want to participate in. Go to individual session pages right now and join in the discussions, or ask questions. Start shaping the discussion online before…

Joint Sponsors Return: C&EN and the American Chemical Society

Two well-respected members of the science community-C&EN and the American Chemical Society (ACS) -have made commitments once again to participate as media partner and exhibitor/sponsor, respectively, in the USA Science & Engineering Festival. The Festival will be held for the second time on April 27-29 in Washington, D.C. C&EN, the flagship weekly newsmagazine published by ACS, will help convey information about the festival nationally and internationally through both its print and online editions. With 163,000 primary member subscribers worldwide together with pass-along and…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Antisocial Behavior May Be Caused By Low Stress Hormone Levels: A link between reduced levels of the 'stress hormone' cortisol and antisocial behaviour in male adolescents has been discovered by a research team at the University of Cambridge. Gas From The Past Gives Scientists New Insights Into Climate And The Oceans: In recent years, public discussion of climate change has included concerns that increased levels of carbon dioxide will contribute to global warming, which in turn may change the circulation in the earth's oceans, with potentially disastrous consequences. Adolescent Insomnia…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Tuesday - let's take a look at 4 out of 7 PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Disrupting Circadian Homeostasis of Sympathetic Signaling Promotes Tumor Development in Mice: Cell proliferation in all rapidly renewing mammalian tissues follows a circadian rhythm that is…

RIN’s Use and relevance of web 2.0 for researchers

The announcement is dated January 6, 2010, but the report itself is dated July 2010. In any case it's new to me, so I thought I would run through some interesting points. Here's the citation (as much as I can tell): Proctor,R., Williams,R. & Stewart, J. (2010). If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0. London: Research Information Network. Retrieved July 6, 2010 from http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/web_2.0_screen.pdf It often seems like people are very negative about the adoption of web 2.0 stuff in science; that is, when they're not hyping…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Why do I blog?

I've been giving some thought about the value I as an assistant professor find in blogging in part because it's the current Ask a Blogger question, in part because I just gave this presentation on blogging at the Inclusive Science conference, and in part because I have some blogger meetups scheduled and chatting about why we blog is always part of those conversations. So why do I blog? I've blogged pseudonymously as well as as me, and each kind of blogging has served a different purpose. When I was blogging pseudonymously, I used my blog to find community, to keep track of my progress on…

Citizen Science projects on-line

On Saturday afternoon, at ScienceOnline2010, the science goddess, the chemspider, and I (Sandra Porter) will be presenting a workshop on getting students involved in citizen science. In preparation, I'm compiling a set of links to projects that involve students in citizen science. If you know of any good citizen science efforts, please share them here in the comments. And, you want to see a really interesting set of projects, be sure to check out the comment section on the original post. Here we go! Before I start listing links, I am limiting my list to projects that allow both students and…

Friday Recipe: Chicken and Bean Sprouts

This is a very simple, authentic chinese dish. It's a great example of what real chinese food is like - it's a lot lighter and more delicate than what's typically passed off as Chinese food in the US. You should really go to a chinese grocery store for the bean sprouts: you'll get them fresher, and a hell of a lot cheaper. (My local chinese grocery sells bean sprouts for under $1/lb; at the local grocery store, I can buy one-half a pound of sprouts for $4.) Like most real chinese food, a this isn't a full meal by itself - a real chinese meal has several contrasting dishes served together.…

The Ghouls of Wall Street

Just when I thought that after six years of Little Lord Pontchartrain, I just couldn't be shocked anymore, I find a heart warming story of profiting from the Sept. 11 Massacres. By way of The Big Picture comes this Wall Street Journal report (italics mine): On Sept. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Across town, families buried two firefighters found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York's Adirondacks, soldiers readied for deployment halfway across the world. Boards of directors of scores of American companies were also busy that…

The anthrax drug boondoggle

And I thought my prescription drugs were expensive. The US government has just announced it was exercising its option to buy 20,000 treatment courses of ABthrax (raxibacumab) from Human Genome Sciences. That's $8250 a pop. It will go into the Strategic National Stockpile. This drug is for inhalational anthrax, a disease practically no one in the world ever gets. Its only use would be the consequence of a massive bioterrorism attack. It is a monoclonal antibody directed against the anthrax organism's protective antigen, the protein that grabs onto the cell and forms a channel allowing another…

Murray cares about the chickens, the workers? Not so much

Earlier this month a federal judge upheld citations issued by OSHA to Murray’s Chicken. The company, located 100 miles north of New York City, was cited by OSHA in June 2012 for repeat and serious violations of worker safety regulations. Among others, Murray’s Chicken failed to provide information and train its workers on the hazardous chemicals used in the plant to disinfect the chicken carcasses. OSHA inspectors found that workers in the “kill, evisceration and other poultry processing areas” were routinely exposed to bleach and Perasafe, an antimicrobial agent containing peracetic acid,…

What Is In Your Seed Order?

Buying seeds here is not a quick process. First there's the perusal of all the seed catalogs, the dreaming and fantasizing with my garden porn. Then there's the marking of all the things I'd like to try this year, which would get me a seed order about 4 times bigger than I could possibly plant, even on my farm. Then there is the actual ordering, and the occasional banging against reality, like the fact that I waited too long to get that variety or this one. I'm winding up the process now, and starting to get to open the boxes of seeds. For those of you who have ordered or at least…

The Changing Fortunes of a Labour Monument

Vår Gård in Saltsjöbaden is a conference venue and training centre whose history illustrates political trends in Sweden over the past century and more. 1892. The Thiel brothers, two of Sweden's wealthiest art patrons, buy a property by the sea in the new fashionable resort of Saltsjöbaden and build two luxurious summer mansions. They name the place Vår Gård, “Our Farmstead”. 1899. The Swedish Cooperative Union is founded. 1924. The Cooperative Union buys Vår Gård and adds a number of buildings to the property to house its new training centre and its art collection. 1932. Sweden's first Labour…

The aggravation of Trek

Ars Technica has an article on bad science in entertainment, with a list of items that were particularly annoying: Any time Star Trek tried to do biology. They may have been awful with all the other areas of science, but I'm a biologist, and I know they were awful with this. Note to film and TV producers: science grad students work for peanuts. Buy one. Quixote follows through with a specific example: Take an example from an episode of Star Trek- The Next Generation. There's a big disaster as everyone evolves backward into insects (small problem right there…) and Beverly Crusher is saying…

Gun Ownership is Way Down in the US

Gun ownership rates in the US have been declining in recent decades. The National Rifle Association has started to produce denialist rhetoric to obscure this well documented fact. One of the reasons there is less gun ownership is because of changes in the demography of the US population; Angry white men whose recent ancestors were angry white men are declining in numbers and less paranoid and less violent browninsh people often with recent ancestors from other, non gun-happy countries are becoming more common. You've heard about the rush to buy guns that happens every time Obama mentions…

New Teaching Evaluation Study

Inside Higher Ed, in their "Quick Takes" points to a new study of teaching evaluations that they summarize thusly: Students care more about teaching quality than professorial rank when evaluating professors, and professors who receive good evaluations from one group of students typically continue to do so in the future, and to have students who earn better grades than those in other courses, according to new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research. None of that sounds all that shocking, and the abstract of the paper itself doesn't add much more detail. The key sentences would…

At least it's not more lead...

My wife just reminded me that PharmKid wanted us to buy her Aqua Dots a week or two ago. The WSJ Health Blog nicely summarizes a New York Times article on the recall of the toy beads because their ingestion releases the CNS suppressant, GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), from a precursor present in the bead adhesive. Yes, the product was manufactured in China, but it was distributed by a company in Toronto. A recall has been ordered by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. The NYT article by Keith Bradsher has a great angle on how a scientist identified the GHB and GHB precursor after a case…

Why does it cost so F'ing much to live in NY?

I live in Manhattan, and it has always been a source of fascination how prices got so exorbidant. While I am somewhat protected from market forces -- I live in school-subsidized housing -- even with the help I have a room only slightly wider than my mattress and a shower just about big enough to stand sideways in. Anyway, Free Exchange had this great post on why is so ridiculous here in Manhattan: The problem, after all, is just as pronounced in New York's the rental market. The current vacancy rate for apartments in Manhattan is less than 1%. Rents of several thousand dollars a month for…