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The illusion of time: Perceiving the effect before the cause

A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness. Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly…

Tracing memories

During the first half of the twentieth century, the American psychologist Karl Lashley conducted a series of experiments in an attempt to identify the part of the brain in which memories are stored. In his now famous investigations, Lashley trained rats to find their way through a maze, then tried to erase the memory trace - what he called the "engram" - by making lesions in different parts of the neocortex. Lashley failed to find the engram - no matter where he made a lesion, his experimental animals were still able to find their way through the maze. As a result, he concluded that memories…

The New Atheism and a Purpose Driven Life

The Barna Group maintains some of the best data tracking the consumer and opinion market for religious Americans, especially among Evangelicals. Though not an independent survey organization like Pew, over the years, I have found that their poll data is relatively consistent with poll findings from other organizations. In fact, often Barna has the most precise measures when it comes to segmenting the born-again Christian community across its diversity of doctrinal beliefs and group affiliations. So yesterday, when Barna released a survey on American views of poverty and their personal…

POLL REVIEW ON HURRICANE-GLOBAL WARMING LINK: Roughly 65% of Public Believes Global Warming is Either a Minor or Major Cause of Severe Hurricanes

Since last fall, poll questions across surveys have tapped public belief in the link between hurricanes and global warming. In this post, I provide a round up of poll findings in chronological order starting last year just after Katrina hit. The impacts of Katrina and Rita received saturation news coverage. The televised drama combined with the frame contest to connect the storm to global warming was very likely to move public opinion. According to Pew, more Americans reported paying "very close" attention to the Katrina story (73%) than any other event in recent American history, with…

Turtles all the way Down: Attractor Dynamics vs Backwards Inhibition in Lag-2 Repetition Cost

Say you are writing an email when the phone rings. After the phone call, you return to finish the email. Are you slower to continue writing this email than you would be if you'd been doing something else prior to the phone call? In general, yes - at least according to the finding known as lag-2 repetition cost. This idea has been tested in an experimental framework by having people perform three tasks (A, B and C) on the same set of stimuli. The critical question is whether you're slower to complete Task A if the previous trial order was A-B than if it was C-B. In general, you are slower…

Neural Substrates of Symbol Use

The capacity to use and manipulate symbols has been heralded as a uniquely human capacity (although we know at least a few cases where that seems untrue). The cognitive processes involved in symbol use have proven difficult to understand, perhaps because reductionist scientific methods seem to decompose this rich domain into a variety of smaller components, none of which seems to capture the most important or abstract characteristics of symbol use (as discussed previously). So, it's important to specify how the simpler and better-understood aspects of symbol processing may interact and give…

Body mass index (BMI) as a measure of obesity and health: a critical appraisal

If you go to your physician's office and inquire about your weight status, he or she will measure your height and weight to derive your BMI (weight in kg divided by height in m squared). Then they will compare your BMI to that of established criteria to decide whether you are underweight (<18.5 kg/m2), normal weight (18.5-24.9 kg/m2), overweight (25-29.9 kg/m2), or obese (>30 kg/m2) . Often times, this measure alone determines whether or not you receive lifestyle treatment. But how useful is this measure anyways? What does it tell you about your health? And finally, how helpful is it…

Are chemists really grinches?

With well known and respected open science projects coming out of chemistry as well as cool tools like pubchem and emolecules... it seems a bit unfair of me to ask if chemists are grinches. But there has been and there continues to be a lot of study of data/information/knowledge sharing in chemistry - or, really, the lack thereof.  In general, pre-prints are not passed around or self-archived, there is very little data sharing (there are counter examples in crystallography), and details are withheld from conference presentations or the conference slides are not made available (Milo used to…

The Shore of the Cosmic Ocean: A Confluence of Humanity and Science

Remembering Dr. Emma Bakes An exceptional person, Dr. Emma Bakes passed away on February 28, 2011. She accomplished a great deal and touched many people in an unfortunately short time. Her accomplishments span oceans and included the physical sciences, medicine, fashion, martial arts, and parenthood to name just a few. To honor and remember her, the SETI Institute and NASA's Kepler Mission Team invite you to read the following essay she wrote just a few months ago. It is an essay that reflects her life and her legacy... Donald Mendoza, NASA Ames, and the SETI Institute The Shore of the Cosmic…

Debate: Should We Continue to Eat Seafood?

YES, SAYS RANDY OLSON: Until There Is Effective Leadership, There Is Little Point in Making Sacrifices I say we should not be expected to stop eating seafood until there is a clear strategy that will make use of individual efforts -- namely boycotts. Asking people to make sacrifices in the absence of organized efforts is asking them to make gestures that are more symbolic than real. That, in my opinion, is essentially religious behavior. Let me describe a similar situation. I support in general the idea of a reasonably high tax burden in our society with the intention of funding an…

A Great Letter About Acidification (and what you can do about it!)

Following on the heels of Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice and Sunsets and Southern Fried Science, I am posting this fantastic letter about ocean acidification by Randy Repass and Sally-Christine Rogers of West Marine (originally posted at The Intersection). Ocean acidification is, for me, the real crux of the issue when people talk about global warming or climate change. Acidification is a clear, very real chemical reaction between CO2 and seawater - there's no arguing its causes or consequences, which i suspect will be far more noticeable and painful in our lifetimes. Anyhow, read up! We are both…

What is the purpose of an anthology of science writing?

Sheril Kirshenbaum and DrHGG recently wrote posts expressing their disappointment at the selection of authors that Richard Dawkins included in the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. Neither of them was pleased that only three female authors were included in a book that featured 83 excerpts of writing by scientists. Dawkins explained, in a comment left on Sheril's post, why the numbers worked out the way they did: It is a collection of writing by good scientists, many of them dead and very distinguished. I am not one of those who thinks men are genetically better equipped than women…

Huns, Visigoths, and the Citadel of Science

In a post over at the Nature Network, Henry Gee notes that over the last twenty years, he's seen "an increase in ... a siege mentality among scientists". He's probably right. When there's a horde of angry, armed people outside your walls, and they start settling in and making themselves at home, you might start to wonder if you're looking at a siege. When the catapults come out and rocks, stones, jars of burning oil, and diseased animal carcasses start flying over the walls, the folks inside often feel besieged. By the time the attackers disappear in the middle of the night, leaving behind…

I get email

All it takes is a little prompting: I write a post titled "The Bible is not a medical text", and next thing you know, someone sends me an email titled "The Vedas are a medical text". It's enough to make a fellow weep. Dear Sir, I am PhD Scholar, enrolled with Utkal University of Culture, Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, India. The Topic I selected is "Vedas- A New Critical Analysis with Special reference to Human Body and Health" The Vedas quotes about NaNo technology, and I have analyzed the details in depth and is available in PDF form. I have proved that supportive therapy to cure cancer and…

Strong, Silent Men Wax Eloquent In Print To Refute Mehl Study

You can study it scientifically, gather the data, analyze it, publish it in Science, and have it discussed on NPR. But by golly, if you are asking us to give up cherished stereotypical beliefs about male and female nature, then you can just take your data and shove it, mister! You are wrong, wrong, wrong, because My Personal Feeling About How Things Are says otherwise. This, of course, would be the kind of reaction stirred up by Matthias Mehl et al.'s study Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?, published in the July 5, 2007 issue of Science. Let us consider the abstract from the…

Friday Bookshelf: The Canon

Mr. Zuska came home this evening, tired after a long week of work. We looked at each other and said "Pizza". Which turned out to be a good thing, because when the pizza delivery guy showed up and I went to pay him, I found a package on my front porch from the good folks at Seed (specifically, Jennifer - thanks, Jennifer!) A FREE BOOK! Yay! What's not to love about free books? And this one turned out to be written by Natalie Angier, whom I adore. Angier, you will recall, is the author of Woman: An Intimate Geography, which was the subject of my first Friday Bookshelf. The new book is…

What's Wrong With the Nobel?

Shane asked the following: So Zuska, just to be clear, did your post mean to suggest: 1. The structure of science is hostile to or biased against women, leading to an under-representation of women at its highest level. Eliminate this bias and more women would be awarded the Nobel Prize *in the future*. OR 2. Women currently at science's highest level are being discriminated against. Were it not for this bias, more women would have won Nobel Prizes *this year*. OR other? Shane, I like the way you phrased 1 and 2, with the exception that in #2, "more" should be "some". Why limit…

Not Just a Headache

Hi folks. Last Friday I had a botox treatment for my migraines and it does seem to be having some good effects already. I'm going to give myself another day or so off from blogging since the computer can be one of my migraine triggers. Please let me stop you before you get a chance to write that clever comment about how at least I'll always have a youthful appearance because of the botox treatments, or some such other clever riposte. I have heard them all. FYI, botox treatments for migraine have nothing in common with beauty treatments, and I had to fight tooth and nail with my…

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

It's the start of the fall semester. New committees are being formed, old committees are having new members appointed and all of them are convening for their first meetings of the year. I happened to get hold of the minutes of the first meeting of the Committee on the Status of Women in Science and Engineering (CSWSE) at IncrediblyLowPercentageOfWomenInEngineering Polytechnic University (ILPOWIE Tech). The committee members were appointed by the provost, and they included the Engineering Dean, the Women in Engineering (WIE) Program Director, and a Women's Studies (WMST) Professor. Read…

Is religious cognition adaptive?

There was a paper recently in PNAS on "The cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief". A couple of bloggers, Epiphenom and I Am David, come to opposite conclusions. Epiphenom says that the study shows that religion is not a side-effect of the evolution of cognitive processes, while IAD says that is exactly what it shows. The paper purports to show that when thinking about God or beliefs about God, the very same areas of the brain are used that are used in ordinary social interactions and so on: The MDS results confirmed the validity of the proposed psychological structure of…

Cause, Effect, and Crying "Poor Me": Day 3 of the Luskin Thing.

We're now into the third day of the brouhaha that was sparked by Casey Luskin's misuse of the "Blogging About Peer-Reviewed Research" icon. Casey posted a few responses to criticisms in the discussion thread over at the BPR3 blog, then packed his bags and went home because Dave Munger didn't delete all of the comments that had said bad things about Casey. It's pretty clear that Casey got what he was fishing for before he left, though: more stories about how poor Intelligent Design proponents are picked on by mean scientists. They've been playing up that sort of story for a while now, and…

Species and The Economist

The Economist is normally my favorite weekly news magazine. It has a much broader focus than any of the major American publications, covers topics in more depth, and uses a vocabulary that goes beyond the 6th grade level. Every now and then, though, they come out with something that makes you wonder what the hell they were thinking - and this week is one of those times. Their recent opinion piece on species and conservation (which was also picked up by the Wall Street Journal) was written by someone whose head was so far up - well, let's just say that their scalp's not getting a lot of…

Why are creationists creationist? 4: How to oppose anti-science

Previous posts in this thread: 1, 2, and 3 With this model of the bounded rationality of anti-science in mind, what lessons can we draw from it for public policy and education? Assuming that the model is a good first approximation of why people choose to believe creationist and other anti-science belief sets, several implications might affect our mode of public education and discourse. The first is that it is highly unlikely that we can argue creationists et al. out of their belief sets by merely presenting better information about science. Since they lack the epistemic values that…

What is "life", at last

Recently, that is since 1975 or so, the view has arisen that a living thing is something that satisfies several conditions. In 1966 George C. Williams introduced the notion of an "evolutionary gene" in his Adaptation and Natural Selection, which was, he said, a "cybernetic abstraction". This idea was taken up by Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene. Dawkins posited that evolution had some necessary and sufficient criteria: There had to be replicators with the following properties: Longevity (over evolutionary time) Fecundity (more made than can survive) Fidelity (nearly perfect…

You're More Hardwired than you Think: A List of Traits Affected by your Genetics - Part I

In one of my talks, I sometimes put up an ad which suggests that one day, there will be the astrological-type divination of fate via genetics - instead of a horoscope, a geneticscope if you will. The ad reads: But the truth is, is that in some respects, we're really not that far off. So for fun, discussion and debate, I'd like to present a series of posts culminating in a less than extensive list of traits - some unlikely, some intimidating, some just sort of bizarro - where it's clear that genetics is playing some type of role (NOTE: that links below lead to a pdf of the first page of the…

A Different Kind of Al Gore Movie

Hello, those of you from boingboing.net. Please take a moment to peruse the site. In a nutshell, this is a site that is all about looking at things from both the humanist and scientific perspectives. The World's Fair is run by two science academics, who write things for McSweeney's and the like. We even have a puzzle if you think yourself the clever type (hey, that rhymes!) - - - Since I brought up Al Gore a few days back, I thought I may as well let you in on a cool little film that is available in Issue #1 of McSweeney's Wholphin DVD. Essentially, it's a short 15 minute movie filmed by…

Free Gregory Koger

Gregory Koger is an ex-con and a revolutionary communist…and none of that should matter in the slightest. He's also a person who was beat up, handcuffed, maced, arrested, and now faces the prospect of a three year jail sentence for the crime of holding up his iPhone to take pictures of police harrassment. Koger is the young man who was documenting Sunsara Taylor's protest of the behavior of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (which, by the way, ought to change their name to drop the first word), and who, oddly, was manhandled and arrested for taking videos of the event, while Taylor…

The majestic Megatherium

A restoration of Megatherium from H.N. Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters. For over a century and a half dinosaurs have been the unofficial symbols and ambassadors of paleontology, but this was not always so. It was fossil mammals, not dinosaurs, which enthralled the public during the turn of the 19th century, and arguably the most famous was the enormous ground sloth Megatherium. It was more than just a natural curiosity. The bones of the "great beast" represented a world which flourished and disappeared in the not-so-distant past, but, as illustrated by Christine Argot in a review of its…

Book Review: For the Rock Record

At this moment there are more anti-creationism books available than I care to count. While they can be exciting for neophytes to dig into many repackage the same information and arguments over and over again, and they can quickly grow boring for those who have been following the creationism controversy closely. That is why I was excited to see that the new book For the Rock Record: Geologists on Intelligent Design was going to allow geologists and paleontologists to respond to creationist claims. The primary difficulty with the volume, however, is that intelligent design does not have much…

The curious tale of the Dimetrodon sail

A mount of Dimetrodon at the AMNH. From the Bulletin of the AMNH. The predatory pelycosaur Dimetrodon has always been a favorite of mine. Though not a dinosaur it has an appearance as bizarre as any dinosaur you care to name, and the function of the huge sail on its back is remains an enigma. What could such an impressive structure be used for? Slight differences in the bony back struts of a similar animal that inhabited the same habitat as Dimetrodon provided paleontologist E.D. Cope with a clue. Where Dimetrodon was a large apex predator "Naosaurus" appeared to be a more peaceful…

Okay. I need a plan.

I got back into town at about 1:00 pm on Monday from a weekend at my other house. I ate lunch from leftovers in the fridge from at least 1.5 weeks ago (ack), and proceeded to waste much of the rest of the afternoon. While I did call some landscapers for help with our blank-slate back yard, and go to the grocery store, and make risotto and sauteed cauliflower for dinner (with leftovers!) and eat it outside, I did no *real* work - ie, work for which I am being paid. And while I should indeed have time without work in order to recharge for the next day, I don't yet feel enough on top of work…

Silence is the Enemy

A sexual violence victim recovers in Goma, Congo photo by Endre Vestvik A few weeks ago, the NYT published a horrifying account by Nicholas Kristof of the pervasive sexual violence left over from Liberia's civil war. A major survey in Liberia found that 75% of Liberian women had been raped - most gang-raped. And many of the victims are children: Of course, children are raped everywhere, but what is happening in Liberia is different. The war seems to have shattered norms and trained some men to think that when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl. Or at school, girls sometimes…

Anamorphosis: skulls, songbirds, and invisible portraits

The Ambassadors, 1533 Hans Holbein the Younger In the artistic technique called anamorphosis, an object is depicted in distorted perspective, so that the viewer has to take special action, like looking from a specific angle, to see the "correct" image. The most famous example of anamorphic painting is Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533), a double portrait in which the illusion of highly detailed reality is fractured by a blurred grey streak superimposed across the painting's bottom third. If one stands at an acute angle, close to the painting, the blurred streak resolves itself into a…

Weekend Essay Links: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. . . Or is it?

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' -John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" On rereading the whole "Ode," this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be that either I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary…

Coolest... Experiment... Ever

Yesterday, Steve of OmniBrain asked, "What is the coolest psychology experiment ever?" Feel free to provide your own answer in comments there and/or here. As for me, there are some that I think are really cool for theoretical reasons, but the coolest ever just for the sheer implausibility of the results has to be Daniel Simons and Daniel Levins' "real-world interaction" change blindness experiment. It simply boggles the mind. First, a little bit about change blindness. Check out this scene, and see how long it takes you to figure out what changes when the scene flashes. I'll give you a moment…

Implicit Agency in Time-Space Metaphors

As I've said before, the primary (if not the only) real experimental evidence for conceptual metaphor theory -- the theory that abstract concepts are structured by more concrete (i.e., closer to sensory/perceptual) concepts -- comes from one domain: time. Time, according to conceptual metaphor theory, is structured primarily through spatial metaphors. In English, there are two dominant spatial metaphors: the ego-moving metaphor, in which we are moving toward the future (e.g., "I'm coming up on my 30th birthday"), and the time-moving metaphor, in which we are stationary while time moves…

BGC20-0166

Sleepdoctor (Michael Rack) alerts us to a new pharmaceutical product in development: BGC20-0166.  He doesn't say a lot, except to dismiss it out of hand.  That is appropriate, but I thought I'd add a bit of explanation.   His post: Saturday, May 03, 2008 href="http://sleepdoctor.blogspot.com/2008/05/pills-dont-cure-obstructive-sleep-apnea.html">Pills don't cure Obstructive Sleep Apnea The life sciences company BTG is developing a pill that will supposedly treat obstuctive sleep apnea: BGC20-0166 is a novel combination of two marketed serotonin modulating drugs being developed…

The Mind and Evolution

There is a whole field of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology">evolutionary psychology.  Let me get this out of the way: I remain skeptical of the entire endeavor, even though there is now a href="http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/">Center for Evolutionary Psychology. But when it makes it into the mass media, it deserves some comment.  The LA Times reported a few days ago on how the formulation of psychiatric disorders is changing, in part because of evolutionary theory.  href="http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-evpsych12feb12,0,3649492.…

100 years of genetic research and science journalists are still confused

If you missed it, today's NY Times Science section has been dedicated to "The Gene" a concept invented 99 years ago by Wilhelm Johanssen. Overall, the articles were very good, however as a scientist who wants to explain basic concepts of molecular biology to the masses, I have a few problems. First, there is a misplacement of emphasis on how information flows from DNA to phenotype. The idea that the articles try to convey is that in the old model went along theses lines: DNA contains genes, each is copied into RNAs that are then translated into a certain type of protein ... and then presto…

Satoshi Kanazawa is back

Now he's got a gig at Big Think. Kanazawa, you may recall, is the evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics who loves to make racist arguments and then go racing to the data to find selective support for them; he's a terrible scientist. I'm no big fan of evolutionary psychology, not because I think its premises are wrong (evolution did shape how our brains work), but because it is trivially easy to find lazy, bad scientists who have hopped on the bandwagon because it is an easy path to media sensationalism — and Kanazawa is the kibitzer dancing in the locomotive cabin,…

Friday Sprog Blogging: circuitry.

Have you ever bought a present for a loved one where you weren't totally sure that he or she would be enthusiastic about the present, but you figured that you could always keep it if it was a dud? I have this hunch that a good number of "educational" gifts that parents get for kids fit in this category. I have a further hypothesis that the gifts that the parents are really secretly hoping that they will get to keep for their very own are the gifts their kids end up liking the most. A recent data point in support of that hypothesis: The Snap Circuits set we got for the elder Free-Ride…

Friday Sprog Blogging: placebo effect.

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you know what a placebo is? Elder offspring: A placebo is something that you think works but doesn't really work. Dr. Free-Ride: Sometimes when people are not feeling well, like, if you're sick and bed and want some medicine -- you've asked me for medicine before when you were sick. Why do you ask for medicine? Younger offspring: Because I think it will make me better. Dr. Free-Ride: You think it will make you not sick anymore. Younger offspring: Mmm-hmm. Dr. Free-Ride: And sometimes you get the medicine and almost immediately you think maybe you feel better. Although I…

Antivaccine activists try to flog Rep. Dan Burton's fear mongering about an "autism epidemic"

Oh, goody. Remember last week, when I took note of how organized quackery's best friend in Congress, not to mention a shining example of crank magnetism, Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, was taking the opportunity of his having announced that he would not be running for reelection this year to write a typically brain dead post on his Congressional blog about the "autism epidemic"? In that post, Burton bought into the mythology of the "autism epidemic" and defended his previous efforts to root out that dreaded mercury in vaccines (and, of course, vaccines themselves) as the cause of this…

X Minus One for vaccination

Yesterday was a bit of a rough patch; so today there won't be the usual Orac magnum opus to which you've all become accustomed. Instead, maybe I'll do a briefer post with semi-random thoughts. Of course, even Orac's shorter posts are longer than the average blog post; so you're still getting your money's worth. Oh, wait. The blog is free. Never mind. First up, as I've mentioned before, over the last couple of years, I've gotten into old time radio through Radio Classics. The other day, I happened to be listening to an episode of the 1950s science fiction radio show X Minus One. The specific…

The Tripoli Six revisited

Last fall, I and quite a few other bloggers wrote about the Tripoli Six. These are six foreign medical workers arrested for allegedly intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital and, thanks to the ignorant hysteria whipped up against them and the need of the Libyan government to find scapegoats for unhygienic conditions in the hospital, sentenced to death by firing squad, despite allegations that they were tortured while in a Libyan prison to extract "confessions." Now, five months after their being sentenced to death, the international dance by which Bulgaria and…

Bell Museum Happenings - June 2008

Special Events; Summer Camps; Exhibits' Field Trips; Nature Play; Nature Tots Read all about it: BioBlitz Friday, June 13, 5 p.m. through Saturday, June 14, 5 p.m. BioBlitz is part scientific survey, part community event, and part festival. This year, BioBlitz participants will help survey part of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Newly acquired by the refuge, this beautiful land is a scientifically interesting site that is surrounded by the rapidly developing Carver County. The data collected will be used to help manage the site. Activities will take place all day. For…

The earliest well dated human fossil in Europe

Let us begin by noting that "Europe" is an arbitrarily defined geographical unit occupied for the last few hundred years or so by people who believe that "Europe" is the Center of the Universe. Therefore, this statement: "The earliest hominin occupation of Europe is one of the most debated topics in palaeoanthropology" is more about European Ego than it is about human prehistory. Nonetheless, there is an interesting find ... of a hominid mandible ... reported in the current issue of Nature that relates to human prehistory in the region of Western Eurasia. The mandible is associated with a…

Bad, bad, bad autism advice in the Washington Post

I must admit that I've never heard of Margerite Kelly. Apparently she's some sort of advice columnist for the Washington Post. Apparently she's also fairly clueless, if her column from last Friday is any indication. At least, she's clueless about autism. In her column Diagnosing Autism Is Never an Easy Process, she betrays a whole lot of ignorance about autism, autism treatments, and the quackery that is being sold to parents as a "cure" for autism. A parent writes to Ms. Kelly about her two-year-old nephew, who is throwing tantrums and showing signs that concern her that he may be autistic.…

IBC takes on the Lancet study

Iraq Body Count has published a defence against some of the criticism they have been receiving. The Lancet study implies that there are about five times as many Iraqi deaths as the IBC number. They do not accept this and so are arguing that Lancet estimate is to high and is not corroborated by the ILCS: Comparisons between the Lancet study and ILCS have been attempted in the past, one of the best-known being by British activist Milan Rai. His analysis concludes: "If we crudely scale up the UNDP [IMIRA] figure to take account of the longer Lancet time period, we reach a figure (33,000) which…

Taking pay for performance to a ridiculous extreme

This story's been floating around the blogosphere for a few days now, and I've been wanting to weigh in. Basically, Medicare is saying that it will no longer pay for conditions and treatments that result from hospital errors. Sounds reasonable on the surface, right? After all, if a surgeon leaves a sponge in a patient, why should the patient or the patient's insurance company have to pay for the extra operation that it takes to remove the object and the additional hospital time? Most surgeons, at least, don't charge a fee for the reoperation to remove a retained surgical instrument or object…