Search Content

Displaying results 7251 - 7300 of 87947

Al Gore's inconvenient crusade

I'm sure Robert Samuelson isn't the only pundit who doesn't buy Al Gore's argument that climate change is a moral issue. The Newsweek editor and Washington Post columnist weighs in on "An Inconvient Truth" today by rejecting Gore's characterization of the problem. The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless. Which got me to thinking: if climate change doesn't involve morality, then what does a public policy debate have to…

Sunday Function

Death and taxes. And dead is dead, but taxes come in a huge panoply of forms. There's property taxes, excise taxes, sin taxes and income taxes. There's gas taxes and sales taxes and VAT taxes (yeah, I know) and death taxes. With my politics I'm not a huge fan of any of them, but they are what they are. And every once in a while they produce some interesting math. One of the more interesting taxes, mathematically speaking, is the capital gains tax. It works like this: you invest your money in stocks or bonds or some other investment vehicle. In an ideal world your investment grows in value and…

A blast from the past and a personal update

I was digging through some of my old blog posts and had almost totally forgot about this artwork I commissioned for the blog when I first started back on blogger. Check it out and then I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and why I've been so sparse over the last many months. I stopped blogging consistently a while back, and it was for a great reason, I promise! About a year ago, after I passed my prelims, I went on the job market. I interviewed for a couple academic positions (mainly liberal arts) and a number of industry/government jobs. I finally decided to 'sell out' and take the…

Recursions

Janet asks what others have asked - what is science blogging all about, after a bully in the schoolyard taunted us Sciencebloggers. Her questions (and her answers) are very like mine, so I will steal them, below the fold. 1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog? Like Janet, I don't. I don't often blog about the science, for a very simple reason: I'm not a scientist, nor have I scientific credentials. I'm a philosopher of biology (check the Profile at the top left - it's there for all to see). So I blog about science itself, about scientists, ideas in science, and the ways we…

Science: It's a Girl Thing!

The European Commission is trying to get more women involved in science, which is good, except…look at their Science: It's a Girl Thing campaign. Jesus wept. Serious man sits at microscope. Fashionable, slender girls slink in on ridiculous high heels and vogue to shots of bubbling flasks, splashes of makeup, twirling skirts, and giggling hot chicks. Seriously, this is not how you get women excited about science, by masquerading it as an exercise shallow catwalking. This is a campaign that perpetuates myths about women's preferences. The lab is not a place where you strut in 3" heels. How…

Superclades of the Cambrian

Allow me to introduce you to a whole gigantic superclade with which many of you may not be familiar, and some other groups in the grand hierarchy of animal evolution that I've mentioned quite a few times before, but would like to clear the fog with some simple definitions. Consider this a brief primer in some major animal groupings. Here's a greatly simplified cladogram; I've left off quite a few groups to make the story simple. I have a frequently admitted bias: I'm most interested in the evolution and development of the Metazoa, or the multicellular animals. I don't follow the literature…

Lott finds more bias

Lott has teamed up with Kevin Hassett to study whether economic reporting is biased. The paper, Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased?, concludes, surprise, surprise that the newspapers are biased against Republicans. The trouble with their study is that the economy was stronger under Clinton than under either Bush, so of course the reporting of the economy under Clinton was more positive. Lott and Hassett claim to have controlled for this with a multivariate analysis but you should only find this persuasive if you have complete…

What happens when I don't rant about how crappy things are in academia?

Others write about it. So apparently some rant by a Physicist has been making the rounds (and it's not the first time). Lots of bloggers have commented on it. Should students be discouraged from going into science? Do we have to many PhDs? Should we help science undergrads organize their careers? And yes, poor physicists can't even jump ship and get a job in industry (unless they start designing semiconductors) ... But I refuse to participate! Enough whining! (Yes I know, by writing this entry I'm a hypocrite.) So what do I have to say? Well anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows…

The Aging Brain

I had an article this weekend in the Washington Post looking at the recent spate of "age defiance" - Dara Torres, Madonna, John McCain, etc. - and some recent neuroscience research: A s a 27-year old science writer who still gets carded at bars, I often find discussions of the aging process pleasantly abstract. I'm more likely to use Clearasil than anti-wrinkle cream. But the spectacle of Torres's competing and McCain's campaigning has rekindled an important scientific debate about the inevitability of the aging process and what even young and middle-aged people can do to blunt the adverse…

Buying the Wrong House

One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who bought subprime debt, the credit rating agencies who gave that debt high ratings, the mortgage brokers who gave out shady loans to people with bad credit, etc. But, in the end, the bubble really began when lots of people chose to buy the wrong home. They bought homes that were too big and too expensive, fueling an unsustainable boom in new home…

My terrible, awful, no-good brain

Here we go again, another creationist who doesn't understand the evolution side of the argument at all. He's criticizing the argument from bad design in a kind of backwards way. I've never heard a Darwinist complain that the mind they use is the result of lousy design, that their mind is the result of a mindless, purposeless process and thus fundamentally untrustworthy as a reality-processor. (Would you want to buy a "word-processor" made by a random, purposeless process? Would you trust it?) I've never heard a Darwinist complain they've been given a crappy brain never designed for…

Birds in the News 77 (v3n4)

A freshly-plumaged LeConte's Sparrow, Ammodramus leconteii, that Dave Rintoul banded in Kansas in the fall of 2005. (bigger version). Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU. Birds in Science In the past few years, China has become famous for the number and quality of bird fossils from the Early Cretaceous that have been discovered there. This week, another such discovery has been reported by an international team of Chinese, American and Japanese scientists. Their discovery of 120-million-year-old fossilized footprints made by a roadrunner-like bird in Shandong Province, China (see map), was published…

9 Ways to Debunk Coronavirus Myths Without it Backfiring

The spread of misinformation about the novel coronavirus, now known as COVID-19, seems greater than the spread of the infection itself. The World Health Organisation (WHO), government health departments and others are trying to alert people to these myths. But what’s the best way to tackle these if they come up in everyday conversation, whether that’s face-to-face or online? Is it best to ignore them, jump in to correct them, or are there other strategies we could all use? Public health officials expect misinformation about disease outbreaks where people are frightened. This is…

Birds in the News 163

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Wren (known as the "Winter Wren" in the United States), Troglodytes troglodytes, photographed near the Bridge of Orchy, Scotland. Image: Dave Rintoul, Summer 2008. [larger view]. Birds in Science and Technology What happens when the demand for suitable nesting sites exceeds the availability? The law of demand and supply also applies in nature, and the consequences of enhanced competition for limited nesting sites can have far-reaching effects. Which individuals will prevail? And what happens to the unsuccessful…

Median Housing Prices and Wages: The Underlying Fundamentals Suck

Update: Thanks to the readers who caught my error. I've updated the post here. A tale of two graphs. But before I get to them, I have to admit that this post by Amanda gave me the needed kick in the ass to write about the huge increase in housing prices relative to annual income. Amanda writes: ...above all, I'm concerned about this belief that housing prices must be maintained at the ridiculously high levels they reached during the bubble, no matter what... My feeling is that we're taking a hit on the economy any way you slice it, so why can't housing costs come down to a point where…

There Is a Difference Between a Sequencing Revolution and a Genomics Revolution

Last week, Forbes had an article about the advances in genomics, which focused on the Ion Torrent sequencing platform. It's a good overview of genomics and the Ion Torrent technology, albeit a bit much on the cheerleading side. For instance, this: Audaciously named the Personal Genome Machine (PGM), the silicon-based device is the smallest and cheapest DNA decoder ever to hit the market. It can read 10 million letters of genetic code, with a high degree of accuracy, in just two hours. Unlike existing DNA scanners the size of mainframes and servers, it fits on a tabletop and sells for only $…

Seeds for Change: The Need for Stress Tolerant Crops in Central America

A story by Guest Blogger Kay Watt Rice steamed in the husk and left to dry, then threshed is one of the subtle specialties of the region.     In Panama the rainy season lasts most of the year.  Rivers flood, runoff pours down hillsides, and the red clay roads become impassable. Horses strain forward against thick mud rising almost to their chests, soaked riders urging them on.  The village of Limón, 300 people and a two-room school house, both depend on and fight against the rain.  The small town grew up near a river that used to serve as transportation to the coast.  Although the area was…

Bridges to Sustainability: People, Planet, Possibility

Climate change is the ultimate threat multiplier that will make other problems such as agricultural productivity worse. This is one of the conclusions at a panel called "Trusting Climate Science" here at the Aspen Environment Forum, sponsored by the National Geographic and the Aspen Institute. I am experimenting with liveblogging from the meeting. Lets see how it goes. The first panel I attended featured Andrew Revkin, Peter Huybers, Mohan Munasinghe, moderated by David Brancaccio. "The pace of sea level rise is uncertain" says Revkin. It is a distraction to argue about the pace when we…

Update on Life

Summer is officially over. Kids are back in school. I am pretty much a stay-at-home-Dad these days and this is even more obvious during breaks in the school calendar. And we certainly had a great summer, starting even before school ended, with our trip to New York City. We went to the pool a lot and generally had a nice laid-back family time together. Coturnietta spent a week in a science-technology summer camp, then ran off to the beach with her cousins and my mother-in-law for a week. She read a bunch of books (all with cats as main characters - she is a huge cat lover). She had such a…

Overheated and Undernourished

Major public health organizations are drawing attention to climate changeâs effects on health: the American Public Health Association has chosen âClimate Change: Our Health in the Balanceâ as the theme for National Public Health Week (April 7-13), and the World Health Organization used World Health Day (April 7th) to remind us that weâre already starting to see climate changeâs effects on health, and itâs not pretty. We can expect to see more deadly weather events, like Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 European heat wave, as well as more widespread and severe outbreaks of Rift Valley fever,…

Drum Misses the Point on Social Security

Kevin Drum (formerly CalPundit) of the Washington Monthly, is usually a pretty reliable source, but in this post I think he misses the point almost entirely. He is arguing that the "Social Security Trust Fund" is not an IOU even though Congress steals it to make the deficit appear smaller, and the premise of his argument is that it's no more an IOU than money itself is in our society: One of the most common conservative critiques of Social Security is that the Social Security trust fund is a myth. Since it consists solely of treasury bonds, it's nothing more than a promise from one branch of…

Social Construction of Race: The Dark Side of Social Status

Black is beautiful, without a doubt. We are all versions of Africans with varying degrees and patterns of non-adaptive and often unfortunate mutations owing to chance, inbreeding, or genetic isolation, and we are all subject to clinally manifest selective forces resulting in clinally distributed phenotypes. Here and there there may be a pocket of people who really stand out from the rest of the species, but that is rare and is presumably a short term phenomenon, and the level of difference if actually measured between such groups and their neighbors remains far less than typical levels of…

Testing the Multiverse

Here's an interesting article from Quanta. It's about efforts by physicists to test the idea of the multiverse: If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up…

Hugo Nominees: Longer Short Fiction

A little while ago, I griped about the Short Story nominees for this year's Hugo Awards. I've now finished the nominees in the Novella and Novelette categories, so I thought I'd comment on them as well. As a general matter, I'd just about be willing to contribute money toward a fund to buy supporting memberships for fans who can't generally afford Worldcon, in hopes of getting fewer nominees that suck. Seriously. It only takes 20-ish nominations to get a story on the ballot in one of the short fiction categories, and this would be a worthy project if it meant not having to read another…

Universal coverage, comparative effectiveness, and the muddying of the healthcare debate

A key component of health-care reform -- and saving our ass from going bankrupt and sick from spending too much on lousy treatments -- is establishing comparative effectiveness measures, otherwise known as "actually knowing WTF works and what doesn't." This idea terrifies companies who don't want such objective measures. It also generates a lot of fear, partly via confusing or intentionally frightening arguments. Yet making sure we don't pay for stuff that doesn't work is key to reform -- a point made in this Times op-ed from libertarian economist Tyler Cohen, keeper of the blog Marginal…

Should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?

This is from a letter to the editor that was published in The Tennessean about a month ago. In the "Issues" section on Sunday, they had a page devoted to this, and this time they actually published a long (more than 250 word) letter that I'd written. I had seen, a week previously, that they were going to do this, looking for opinions on the question, "should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?". I saw in the Issues section of the paper today that you will be doing an op-ed on the Creation Museum, and you are soliciting comments. Before I start, I want to make it clear that I comment…

2009 H1N1 Swine Flu: Is It Really Worth Making A Vaccine?

At least two medical doctors think that it isn't, and have said so publicly. They feel that the "research has shown" that the new flu isn't going to be very virulent, and question the wisdom of spending $1.5 billion developing a vaccine that "may never be used". I suspect that few of you will be surprised to learn that both these doctors are also Republican members of Congress. Representatives Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun (both of Georgia) made their views known during floor speeches in the House yesterday. I was not aware that any research had been published that demonstrates that we know…

Proposed Oil Legislation: Brilliant and Pointless

The House is considering legislation that would do two things: force oil companies to give up unused leases, and ban the export of oil from Alaska. It's brilliant because it highlights the absurd fallacy: that opening up more land for drilling would lower gas prices.  The fact is, oil companies already have leases that they are sitting on, not drilling on.   Opening up more land for oil leases will not cause them to drill more oil.  It'd be like putting more gas in the tank of a driverless car.  Putting more gas in the tank will not enable the car to go farther.  The car will go nowhere,…

Fine-tuning an analogy.

Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor's research group. I'm not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I'm hoping you can help. First, before critiquing the…

Friday Sprog Blogging: kitchen table conversations concerning water

The participants in the conversation recounted here were not under oath during the conversation, and there exists no official transcript of the conversation. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: When we were filling water bottles for soccer practice today, your child had an interesting theory about what was going on with the ice cubes. Dr. Free-Ride: You put ice cubes in the water bottles? Pretty fancy! So, what was the theory? Elder offspring: Well, the ice cubes floated to the top of the bottle, near where the drinking spout is. I think that's 'cause the ice cubes want to get warm and melt so…

And the jackals continue to turn on David Irving

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how Holocaust denier extraordinaire David Irving had gotten into some trouble with his former fellow travelers in the world of Holocaust denial. Apparently they didn't like the fact that he now concedes that the mass slaughter of Jews "may have" occurred. Of course he still denies that Auschwitz was a death camp (actually, it was both a work camp and a death camp) or that Hitler knew anything about the killings, but he's conceded more than his fellow Holocaust deniers would have liked him to concede, namely that as many as 2.4 million Jews may have been…

It's Time to Get Off the Bottle!

Via Deep Sea News, I came across a story from Tuesday's LA Times about recent corporate and fashion-industry efforts to ween Americans off of bottled water. With Americans currently throwing away 38 billion plastic water bottles each year (that's over 100 bottles per American!), it's a cause that can't be emphasized enough. Bottled water is wasteful. Period. Still, I find parts of the article somewhat tiresome, especially the title: "On the anti-bottled-water bandwagon: Filter and container makers are capitalizing on the latest green trend." Although this is mostly this is mostly just a…

Drug abuse on campus

No, not the hard stuff. Cassie Gentry uses the campus paper to get all worked up about abuse of Plan B. Plan B is basically a high dose of birth control pills. Taken shortly after intercourse, it prevents an egg from implanting in the uterine wall being released from the ovaries, preventing pregnancy. Gentry is worried about how easy it is to get it: A few days ago I heard of a friend who knowingly had unprotected sex. Afterward, she panicked about becoming pregnant and rushed out to get Plan B, or the morning-after pill. Thanks to a Federal Drug Administration decision made on August 24…

Nudges and Decision-Making

David Leonhardt has an interesting column on the importance of using subtle environmental cues - Leonhardt calls them "nudges" - to encourage good decision-making. He begins with a fascinating anecdote about patients in hospital beds: For more than a decade, it turns out, medical researchers have known that people on ventilators should generally have their heads elevated. When the patients are lying down, bacteria can easily travel from the stomach, up to the mouth and breathing tube, and ultimately into the lungs, causing pneumonia. When people are propped up, gravity becomes their ally.…

Rick Perry defends his climate change denial

In his book Fed Up, Rick Perry came out solidly in the climate denial camp, repeating long-discredited claims of that the underlying science is fraudulent. ThinkProgress quotes him writing: For example, they have seen the headlines in the past year about doctored data related to global warming. They know we have been experiencing a cooling trend, that the complexities of the global atmosphere have often eluded the most sophisticated scientists, and that draconian policies with dire economic effects based on so-called science may not stand the test of time. Quite frankly, when science gets…

Celebrating African American History Month with Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Barrington Irving

USA Science & Engineering Festival X-STEM Speaker renowned aviator Barrington Irving sums up his current mission as a role model this way: "Kids want to be challenged, but today too many are bored and uninspired. I want to use aviation to excite and empower a new generation to become scientists, engineers, and explorers." He has a lot to inspire kids about. Born in Jamaica and raised in Miami Florida's inner city, surrounded by crime, poverty, and failing schools, he beat the odds in 2007 when, at the age of 23, he became the youngest person ever (and only African American) to pilot a…

This is My Farm: From the City to the Country and Back Again

What I stand for is what I stand on. - Wendell Berry Note: You've got to give the Dervaes' some credit - their asshattery has inspired a wholel lot of focus on urban sustainable agriculture, homesteading and making a good life in the city! Today is "Urban Homesteading Day" and in its honor, here are some meditations on the relationships we need between city homesteaders and farmers, country homesteaders and farmers and everyone in between. Urbanization is the biggest trend in history. For the first time, more human beings live in cities than in the country. More than 50,000 farmers worldwide…

Is Google's Supposed Weakness an Engineering Mindset? Or Just Bad Luck?

When I read about Google, I often encounter a claim that Google's emphasis on engineering and mathy stuff has hobbled its ability to keep up in the social media world, and is in danger from Twitter and Facebook--although maybe Google+ will change that. It's usually something like this from the NY Times (italics mine): But Google has been criticized for failing to understand the importance of social information on the Web until competitors like Facebook and Twitter had already leapt ahead. Larry Page, Google's co-founder, regrets Google's failure to lead in this market and has spent time…

Chinese checkers

The irony is too delicious. Boingboing reports that Yahoo China will be sued by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries for enabling the pirating of music by disclosing to its users where to get it on the internet. In effect they are being held responsible for the copyright status of everything they point to: "Yahoo China has been blatantly infringing our members' rights. We have started the process and as far as we're concerned we're on the track to litigation," said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the music industry trade group the International Federation…

ACM responds to the blogosphere

Scott Delman, Group Publisher of the ACM, has responded to my post earlier this month on society publishers and open access. That post generated some very good discussion in the post comments that are well worth checking out. Delman's article is in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i8): Responding to the Blogosphere. Here are some excerpts, although Delman's article is so interesting that I wish I could quote the whole thing. The fact that ACM charges both for access to the published information in its Digital Library and also extends the courtesy of "Green OA" to its authors is…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Duetting Birds With Rhythm Present A Greater Threat: Birds that sing duets with incredible rhythmic precision present a greater threat to other members of their species than those that whistle a sloppier tune, according to a study of Australian magpie-larks reported in the June 5th issue of Current Biology, published by Cell Press. Going Fishing? Only Some Catch And Release Methods Let The Fish Live: NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI) fisheries scientists are investigating ways to boost the survival rates of several more species of fish caught and then released by anglers. Some…

Snowden

Yeah yeah, yet more opinion. So, Snowden has asylum in Russia. Naturally, he's delighted to be out of his tedious airport, saying in the end the law is winning. But is it? Because the interesting thing is who is making the decisions: Putin. As the Graun says the decision was "almost certainly taken personally by President Vladimir Putin". In Russia, that would be entirely natural: Russia is his persona fiefdom, and there is no rule of law - the law is whatever Putin happens to want it to be that day (Snowden also said I thank the Russian Federation for granting me asylum in accordance with…

October Pieces Of My Mind #1

Satanic Men At Work in Umeå. (Actually, there's condensation on the other side of the sign, and the sun is boiling it off.) Me: "subject". Autocorrect: "Sibbertoft". Hey everyone who names your daughters "Chatarina"! I just want you to know that you're stamping your kid with this big label that says "From A Home With No Language Skills". It's like naming her brother "Piliph". Huh? There's an online service named Plurk. I have no idea what it does but it sounds extremely funny in Swedish. Plurk plurk! Whenever I see a schnauzer dog I wish I could give its face a buzz cut. Android. The…

Links for 2010-11-09

Moving Toward Quantum Computing - Science in 2011 - NYTimes.com "In 1981 the physicist Richard Feynman speculated about the possibility of "tiny computers obeying quantum mechanical laws." He suggested that such a quantum computer might be the best way to simulate real-world quantum systems, a challenge that today is largely beyond the calculating power of even the fastest supercomputers. Since then there has been sporadic progress in building this kind of computer. The experiments to date, however, have largely yielded only systems that seek to demonstrate that the principle is sound. They…

Manual Links Dump

You may or may not have noticed the absence of the "Links for [Date]" posts the last couple of days. There's been some sort of glitch at del.icio.us, and they didn't auto-post the way they usually do. You may or may not have missed them, but I do, so below the fold you'll find the big long list of stuff that would've posted, had things worked as usual (many thanks to Kate for cleaning up the HTML from the del.icio.us source)): Physics and Physicists: Accelerator in a Bowl A nifty tabletop demonstration of a particle accelerator, using a ping-pong ball and a salad bowl. (tags: href="http://…

Fire ants move brood using temperature cues

  Does ant activity cycle by an internal clock, or is their activity cycle a response to changing environmental cues? A study in Insectes Sociaux weighs in on the side of environment. Penick & Tschinkel experimented with applying light and heat from different directions and at different times of day to fire ant mounds.  It turns out that the ants' daily rhythm of moving their brood around the nest is a result of temperature tracking.  I've pasted a link to the article and the abstract below. Penick & Tschinkel. 2008. Thermoregulatory brood transport in the fire ant, Solenopsis…

The Ultimate Charles Darwin Coffee-Table Book

The Darwin Experience: The Story of the Man and his Theory of Evolution by John van Wyhe National Geographic Books It almost seems like a throwback to another age, a time when people actually read books and stuff. And National Geographic Books' The Darwin Experience: The Story of the Man and his Theory of Evolution may be one of the last such volumes ever produced, given the rate at which e-books are gobbling up market share. After all, if you want to browse through Darwin's life or read On the Origin of Species, you can do that online. But for those of us born before the advent of the…

McCain's nuclear fetish

Two things stand out in my mind about Wednesday's presidential debate, both of them the product of John McCain's imagination. First is his insult to every science educator in the country. Once again, he deliberately mischaracterized a grant request to update an aging projector for Chicago's Adler Planetarium as an earmark for an "overhead projector." Second, he insisted America "can eliminate our dependence on foreign oil by building 45 new nuclear plants, power plants, right away." How many times do we have to point out the flaws in his logic before it sinks in? I have nothing new to say…

Neurologists Say Enhancement Is Ethically Proper

The topic of neural enhancement has created controversy.  This came to wide attention in late 2007, upon the publication of various articles in Nature, as noted by  href="http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/12/cognitive_enhancers_in_academi.php">Shelley Batts, href="http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2007/12/the_ethics_of_performance_enha.php">Janet Stemwedel, href="http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/04/steroids_for_the_brain_nature.php">David href="http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/12/survey_the_slippery_slope_of_c.php">Dobbs, href="http://…

Telling the Patient When You are Not the Best Doctor for the Job

There is a very good article in the NYTimes about whether doctors should inform patients about disparities in care between hospitals: An article published online in October in the journal PLoS Medicine really hit home with me. Noting that the quality of cancer care is uneven, its authors argued that as part of the informed-consent process, doctors have an ethical obligation to tell patients if they are more likely to survive, be cured, live longer or avoid complications by going to Hospital A instead of Hospital B. And that obligation holds even if the doctor happens to work at Hospital B,…