Search Content

Displaying results 9701 - 9750 of 87947

McCain's Projector Comment and Scientific Earmarks

Many scientifically-inclined voters were a bit shocked by McCain's comment criticizing Obama for supporting a "3 million dollar earmark for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago." The "overhead projector" in question was actually a top of the line piece of equipment for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and many did not consider this an earmark. University of Chicago professor, Andrey Kravstov, responded in a comment on the NYTimes website (Hat-tip: Cosmic Variance): The way Sen. McCain has phrased it suggests that Sen. Obama approved spending $3 million on an old-fashioned…

Astroturfing To Protect Their Hidden Government Subsidies

It's always a good day when I can blog about profit hungry companies trying to protect their profit margins or about some group using sleazy tactics to try to get special interest legislation passed or blocked. Today is a very good day - I get to do both at the same time. That's right, folks, the Association of American Publishers is so worried about the damage that whole evil open access thing might cause to their profit the integrity of research that they've set up their very own astroturf -oops, I meant grassroots- group to protect us from this growing problem. Someone, somewhere is…

The Political Mind, Part I (Introduction)

Well, I've got Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, and I've read the first few chapters, so I figured I'd start sharing my thoughts about them. For now, I'll do it on a chapter by chapter basis, which makes sense, because the chapters are pretty disjointed and, at least after the first few, it's hard to really say anything general about the book. Really, the sections within the chapters are really disjointed as well, so even chapter-by-chapter reviewing is a little tenuous, but I imagine reviewing each little section would be tedious in the extreme. I guess after a couple posts, we'll see…

Beliefs, values and evidence

Last March, the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reported on research which showed that, in one interviewee's words, "We are really bad about putting ourselves in other people's places and looking at the world the way they look at it." We tend to quickly assign base motives to our opponents and lofty ones to ourselves and our allies. Vedantam concluded: It is important to note that the[se] experiment[s] do[] not establish which ... is true. It is possible ... that everything you believe about [your opponents'] motives is true and everything that your opponents believe is false. But a…

Fascinating Book About Right Wing Authoritarianism

And it's free! Bob Altemeyer, whose work on the authoritarian mind significantly influenced John Dean'sConservatives Without Conscience, has released a free online book, The Authoritarians, which is about, well, authoritarians. Here's an interesting bit from the book about evolution from Ch. 4: For the record, Darwin never said humans evolved from monkeys, even though many other people besides fundamentalists think he did. Even with the limited knowledge available to him 150 years ago, Darwin realized that humanity's ancestors had long separated from the evolutionary path that led to…

New tool anyone can use to track disease outbreaks

While CDC and FDA struggle to figure out where the Salmonella saintpaul in a large multistate outbreak is coming from they are not being forthcoming about where it has gone. We know the case total but not much about who is getting sick, where and when. There is no good scientific or privacy reason not to release more information. It's just the usual tendency to keep control. But some of the information is "out there" anyway, in news reports and other sources of information. People interested in disease outbreaks discovered years ago that this information could be harvested and disseminated to…

Books: 'On The Grid' by Scott Huler

About a month ago, I told you about the book-reading event where Scott Huler (blog, Twitter, SIT interview) read from his latest book On The Grid (amazon.com). I read the book immediately after, but never wrote a review of my own. My event review already contained some of my thoughts about the topic, but I feel I need to say more, if nothing else in order to use this blog to alert more people about it and to tell everyone "Read This Book". What I wrote last month, "I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but…

Darwin's Nemesis

Since I am busy, I thought I'd post this oldie from April of last year. The book in question, now titled "Darwin's Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement" will, according to Dembski, ship soon. I will offer a real review when I can. Over at his website, Bill Dembski had published the front matter [pdf] for A Man For This Season: The Phillip Johnson Celebration Volume to be published by InterVarsity Press in 2006, and edited by Dembski and Jed Macosko. The volume is a festscrift for PEJ that stems from the celebration that was held at the opening of the Intelligent…

Holocaust denial versus free speech

It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns one last time today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two on the same topic. As regular readers know, I've had a long history of combatting Holocaust denial online, but I also have a real problem when the price of combatting Holocaust…

The Medical Board of California initiates disciplinary action against antivaccine "hero" Dr. Bob Sears. It's about time.

After all the bad news that I’ve been blogging about, it’s a pleasure for me to end the week with a bit of very good news, very good news indeed. That news came in the form of an article published in the Orange County Register with the glorious title Dr. Bob Sears faces medical board discipline in recommendation not to vaccinate. Behold: Dr. Bob Sears, the Capistrano Beach pediatrician who is an outspoken critic of mandatory vaccination laws, faces possible state Medical Board discipline after he recommended that a 2-year-old patient forgo immunizations, according to legal documents made…

Teaching Biology 101 (to adults)

I just got the teaching schedule for Spring, so I decided to follow up on last week's post by putting, under the fold, a series of short posts I wrote when I taught the last time, musing about teaching in general and teaching biology to adults in particular. These are really a running commentary on the course. The actual lecture notes are here: Biology and the Scientific Method Lab 1 Cell Structure Protein Synthesis: Transcription and Translation Cell-Cell Interactions Cell Division and DNA Replication Lab 2 From Two Cells To Many: Cell Differentiation and Embryonic Development From Genes…

The Friday Fermentable: A Romp Through Northern Italy's Lake Country

Another Wine Experience: A Romp thru Northern Italy's Lake Country By Erleichda (about the author) We touched down very early in Milan on what, for all eight of us, would mark the beginning of our hiking week in the Lake Country of northern Italy, a destination we had chosen after last year's successful Lot Valley (France) hiking experience. Sweetpea had to crash as she is circadian rhythm-challenged (easily jet lagged) while the rest of us got our leg muscles warmed up by walking to the Duomo and then climbing up to its roof for a great view of the city. By the time we walked to La Scala…

Action and Meaning

Throughout the brief history of cognitive science, debates over the nature of knowledge representation have raged. In the 1970s, the debate was between those who thought that knowledge was represented as images -- modal, or sensory representations -- and those who thought that knowledge was represented propositionally. That particular debate ended in a stalemate, upon the realization that you could account for pretty much any data set from either perspective. If you can't distinguish between perspectives, you can't really debate them. Despite the stalemate, most cognitive scientists who've…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Christie Wilcox

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Christie Wilcox, my newest SciBling here (three blogs to the left, then around the corner) at Observations of a Nerd to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?…

Torturing more mice in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience: PubPeer versus antivaxers

Last week, an antivaxer "challenged" me to look over a paper purporting to show that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause inflammation of the brain and therefore contribute to autism, a paper that she would be "citing frequently." Being someone who lives by the motto, "be careful what you wish for," I looked it over in detail. Not surprisingly, my conclusion was that the experiments were poorly done using obsolete and not very quantitative methodology and that the results do not support the conclusions made by the authors. I was not alone in this conclusion. Skeptical Raptor was, if anything…

"If You Love Evolution, Tweet About It!" COE # 36

Welcome to the Thirty Sixth Carnival of Evolution. The world of blog carnivals is in a state of flux and uncertainty these days, with the distinct possibility of a mass extinction just around the corner. One of the oldest, longest running, and most important carnivals, I and the Bird, issued its last issue only a few days ago, and the Keepers of the Carnival of Evolution themselves are said to be thinking about ways that this whole carnival thing can be made to work better. That could, I suppose, mean killing it and replacing it with something else. We are hopeful that this will not be…

CEO Pay and the Moral Decline of Economic Elites

Over the weekend, The Washington Post actually committed journalism with a report about the growing income and wealth gap in the U.S. To place it in historical context, they compared two CEOs, one from the 1970s and the current CEO. Here's the blast from the past (italics mine): It was the 1970s, and the chief executive of a leading U.S. dairy company, Kenneth J. Douglas, lived the good life. He earned the equivalent of about $1 million today. He and his family moved from a three-bedroom home to a four-bedroom home, about a half-mile away, in River Forest, Ill., an upscale Chicago suburb.…

The Normative Versus the Positive: Unemployment and Economics As a Social Science

One of the things that freaks out some people in the 'hard' sciences (and I use that term broadly) about the social sciences is that they, unlike the hard sciences, they don't restrict themselves to positive statements, but, instead, deal with normative statements. In other (less high-falutin') words, the social sciences don't only try to explain why things are, they often make statements about how things should be. This not only makes my colleagues in the physical sciences uncomfortable, but it's also viewed as lacking rigor which means your penis will fall off. This, to me, seems both…

This Is Not What I Want As a Defense of "The Humanities"

Yesterday was Founders Day at Union, celebrating the 220th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the college. The name of the event always carries a sort of British-boarding-school air for me, and never fails to earworm me with a very particular rugby song, but really it's just one of those formal-procession-and-big-speaker events that provide local color for academia. This year's event started, as always, with a classical music performance-- a song by Aaron Copeland, this time, so we've at least caught up to the 20th Century. (I'm not sure I want to live long enough to see a Bob Dylan…

Kent Hovind: Reliable Source?

Last night, Christopher L. Colegrove left a comment after a post I wrote last week about the Worldnutdaily pimping a book that claims that the pyramids around the world were built by the Nephilim, the demonic giants mentioned in Genesis. Here is his comment in full: I think the book gets at something I've been researching for a couple of years. As to the dimensions of these "giants". Try the Book of Enoch (non-biblical, but an interesting Hebrew read from antiquity), which--I believe--says they were "9 ells" in height. Bones have been unearthed of giants with human genetic makeup over 7 feet…

This food doesn't taste right ... or is it me?

As I was looking for a good sangria recipe some weeks ago, I came upon this article in Gourmet about how our understanding of the scientific basis for "flavor" as changed, not to mention what sorts of implications this might have for those who prepare -- and sell -- food. One of the interesting bits is how different the science on taste is from what you probably think it is: [N]early everything humans think they understand about taste is wrong. For generations, textbooks have trumpeted two universal truths about taste. Truth No. 1: There are four basic tastes--bitter, sweet, sour, and salty…

Ethics and the promotion of another anti-vaccine book

Here's a chance for some skeptical activism if you happen to live in New York and its environs. It's book promotion event for the most recent anti-vaccine propaganda piece, Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children by Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland. Naturally, the propaganda blog for all things anti-vaccine, Age of Autism, is furiously pimping away in a histrionic post entitled Is it Ethical to Kill Children to Save Children? Friday Night NYC Event Explains: Should the government promote a…

Penn & Teller deconstruct the anti-vaccine movement, not to mention an old friend of the blog, Dr. Jay Gordon

Thanks to Autism News Beat, I've found the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode Vaccination in a streaming form. I have two warnings. First, if you're not familiar with Penn & Teller, you should be prepared for lots of profanity, including liberal use of the F-word. There is also one scene with a topless woman near the end. If you're easily offended, then you probably shouldn't watch. You have been warned. Second, you have to hit the arrow directly in order not to go to the website hosting the streaming video: I have to say, I've rarely seen a more visually effective way of portraying…

Assisted Living Homes - A Cautionary Tale

Regular readers may know that my mother has been living in an assisted living home since January of 2008. Making the move to the AL home was agonizing for her and everyone in our family. Previously, my mother had been living still in the same house that she had been born and raised in, the house her husband, my father, moved in to when they were married, where all of us kids were born and raised. We had a difficult time finding a place for her - the choices are limited in southwestern Pennsylvania. And while my mother is fortunate to have enough money to afford some reasonable care, she…

The Great and Powerful Dr. Oz: Humbled by Senator Claire McCaskill

I almost feel sorry for "America's Quack," Dr. Mehmet Oz. Well, not really. Remember last week when I took note of an upcoming Senate hearing, specifically a hearing on weight loss scams in front of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance, which is chaired by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). At the time, I wasn't pleased, because I assumed that the reason Dr. Oz had been invited to testify was in order to bring some star power to the proceedings and get some television coverage, given that the rest of the witnesses consisted of representatives from government…

Repost: Suminia: Life in the Trees 260 Million Years Ago

Color-coded diagram of a small bone bed containing at least twelve individuals of the Permian synapsid Suminia. From Frobisch and Reisz (2009) When I hear the phrase "early human relative" I cannot help but think of an ape-like creature. Something like Sahelanthropus fits the bill nicely - it may not be a hominin but it is still a close relative from around the time that the first hominins evolved. That is why I was a bit puzzled to see MSNBC.com parroting a story written by the Discovery Channel which proclaimed "Early human relative predates even dinosaurs"! Was this another fossil that…

St. Vitus's Dance

After writing this recent post about Fyodor Dostoyevsky's epilepsy, I decided it was time I re-read one of the great author's novels, and chose The Idiot, because it contains Dostoyevsky's most vivid descriptions of the epileptic aura. (It is widely believed that Dostoyevsky based the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, on himself.) I'm reading a Penguin Classics edition of the book, which was translated by David McDuff, and was first published in 2004. In The Idiot, Myshkin's epilepsy is first mentioned in chapter one. In the online edition of the book, which I quoted in the post about…

Obama lifts stem cell restrictions

In what was widely seen as a needless politicization of science, President George W. Bush announced early in his presidency that he was forbidding federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells (with certain exceptions). This episode, and the way he sold his decision to the public, is the prime example in Chris Mooney's excellent The Republican War on Science. In particular, he oversold the exceptions, claiming that up to 60 lines of usable stem cells existed, when only 21 were viable, and when those were contaminated in various ways, and could not be used to research certain…

Birds in the News 174

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Common Kingfisher, Alcedo atthis. Image: Gisela Delpho [larger view]. Birds in Science Unpredictable weather seems to stimulate chatter among birds -- as well as humans -- according to researchers. A team of US scientists has found that Northern Mockingbirds living in variable climates sing more elaborate songs. Complex tunes, sung by males to impress females, are likely to signal the birds' intelligence. Carlos Botero, a researcher from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina, led the study. Dr…

Goodbye America: My List of What I Will (and Won't) Miss

By the time this publishes, I will be on the plane with my parrots somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean (hopefully not in it!), flying to Frankfurt! So while I am preoccupied with doing that, I thought I would write this list to amuse you (and to remind you that I am thinking about all of you, even while relocating); Why I WILL miss living in NYC: NYC's vibrant cash economy, which made it possible (barely) for me to pay my rent without having a "real job." As much as I love Seattle (my home), I am well aware that I could not have survived in Seattle if I had to rely on their cash economy.…

Gun control laws can impact death rates. But we need more research to find what works.

Guns are the third leading cause of injury-related death in the country. Every year, nearly 12,000 gun homicides happen in the U.S., and for every person killed, two more are injured. Whether Congress will do anything about this violence is a whole other (depressing) article. But there is evidence that change is possible. Last year, a study published in Epidemiologic Reviews “systematically” reviewed studies examining the links between gun laws and gun-related homicides, suicides and unintentional injuries and deaths. Researchers eventually gathered evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries,…

The microbiology of zombies, part V: beware the bite?

Now that seemingly the flu outbreak storyline has been wrapped up on The Walking Dead (unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, with their ineffective treatments proving to be miracle cures), there's still one more zombie microbiology topic I'd like to cover: what's up with the bite, and is it the cause of death? I said previously: "We know the pathogen can certainly be spread by bites and then cause zombification that way..." but one commenter disagreed, noting: "I don’t think we have evidence for that from the show. I think it clearer that zombie bites cause death, and there doesn’t seem to be…

Jesse Helms: In His Own Words and Deeds

tags: Jesse Helms, politics, rethuglicans Image: Orphaned (please contact me so I can properly attribute this image to its photographer). This morning, I learned that America is celebrating its independence from one of the politicians whose goal was to ensure that this country was a colder, meaner-spirited place for millions of its citizens to live; a former senator of North Carolina, Jesse Helms. A lot of people called him "Senator No", although I (and no doubt others) thought of him as "Senator Hate." How should we remember a right-wing religious control freak who has caused so much…

Clayton Cramer...Again

Clayton Cramer is also discussing the Polk County "free speech zone" situation, partially in response to my post on the subject. Along the way he manages to give a perfect demonstration of the kind of nasty, simplistic and unjustified rhetoric that he is so infamous for. After falsely claiming that the ACLU "had to file suit to prevent free speech on public property", he quotes an Orlando Sentinel article about the Polk County Commission voting to do away with the "free speech zone". Then he lets loose with this little gem of attempted demonization against Volokh and everyone else who defends…

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (Review)

Somebody tipped over a bag full of a white powdery substance. Most of what fell out splayed across the dirty wooden table, but about a cup poured onto the dirt floor of the open-air Baraza at our research site in a remote part of the Congo’s Ituri Forest. Embarrassed about tipping onto the ground more of this valuable substance than most people living within 50 kilometers would ever see in one day, the tipper started to push loose dirt onto the powder to cover it up. But the spill had been noticed by two children lounging nearby; in what seemed like a fraction of a second, the boys were face…

More Dishonest Nonsense About the ACLU

The Worldnutdaily continues its campaign of outright dishonesty toward the ACLU with this ridiculous screed by William Simon. The lies begin in the very first sentence: Believe it or not, there was a time when the American Civil Liberties Union was a respected organization that fought to protect civil liberties for all Americans. But that time is long past. Nonsense, Mr. Simon. Your ideological predecessors were railing about the "godless and communist" ACLU at least as far back as the 1925 Scopes trial, and the ACLU was only formed in 1922. So please don't expect us to buy into this "I used…

Magical Night

As I mentioned yesterday, I got to see Vinx perform last night at an outdoor jazz festival. As always, it was a show that leaves you exhilirated. Vinx is one of those rarest of musicians whose work is completely unique. No one else sounds like him and his music is really impossible to describe or categorize. He usually performs with just percussion and voice, though last night he also had a guitarist with him on some of the songs. What makes it most incredible is that he has the ability to use percussion to create melody and harmony with his voice. I would never have thought that was possible…

“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” said Jonathan Wells

Correcting Jonathan Wells' misrepresentations is practically a full time job. He's been yammering away in the Yale Daily News lately, trying to defend his absurd disagreements with evolution, and he's just digging his hole deeper and deeper. In his latest, he's trying to argue for his abuse of the term "Darwinism", which has steadily become a term of art for the rantings of creationists in addition to its more specific meanings. Here's his most unpromising start to his letter: In a recent column ("Churches shouldn't buy into Darwinists' ploys," 1/29), I distinguished between "evolution" as…

AtC Reviewed in PSCF

I've recently had it called to my attention that Among the Creationists has been reviewed in Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith. That's the journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of Christian scientists. They are generally sympathetic to evolution and mostly have little patience for ID and creationism. On the other hand, they definitely like their evolution with a heavy theistic gloss. When I wrote the book, I was especially curious about how it would be received in quarters like this. So let's have a look. The reviewer is Robyn Pal Rylaarsdam of…

Meh. What's so special about HeLa cells?

On Friday, I wrote a post about the 20th anniversary of my PhD dissertation defense and my reverence for Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cervical cancer gave rise to the first immortalized human cell line and the primary system for my work. I also alluded to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the upcoming book by Rebecca Skloot that is already garnering extensive pre-release praise. I was, as readers have come to expect, quite a bit sentimental and reflective, with a call that we all do our part to somehow acknowledge those patients whose tissues make it possible for us scientists to do…

There's a (Shannon-entropy limited) map for that.

You probably haven't been able to avoid seeing the televised bombs AT&T and Verizon have been throwing at each other over the maps of their coverage. Both sets of commercials (to differing degrees) fail to make it especially clear just what their maps mean to the consumer. For instance: Verizon's commercial brags of overwhelming coverage while showing AT&T's comparatively sad little sparse map. AT&T fires back with a different map and a claim that they cover 97% of the US population. Both sets of claims are correct - if you pay close attention. Verizon's map indicates 3G…

Rule Number Two

I picked up my copy of this book when it came out last year. My wife read it - and loved it - immediately. It matched what she saw whenever she went to the CASH on her base in Afghanistan. I've picked up the book any number of times since then, but I could never quite bring myself to read it. I was absolutely positive that reading the book was going to hurt. I read the book today. It hurt as much as I thought it would. And now I feel forced to do something that's probably going to sound a little strange. I don't quite know how I'm going to do this, but I'm going to try to convince you to…

The Henry's - a 1st April Rant

This is one of the main works of art by a fellow known as Fred Dagg, whose oeuvre includes the discovery and commentating the sport of farnarkling, and who wrote the real New Zealand national anthem. In it, he explains the meaning of life, in 1977 to the presenter of the ABC's Science Show 100th episode, Robin Williams (no relation) who was choking in the background for most of it. I think that this is a particularly significant occasion for the program and it seems imminently suitable that we should ignore very briefly the peripheral areas however valuable, in the wonderful tapestry of…

The Political Mind, Part II (Chapter 1)

The first thing to say about Chapter 1 is that it's much better written than the Introduction. In fact, if you buy the book, I recommend skipping the introduction, and starting with Chapter 1. Chapter 1 is, in fact, the best chapter in the book. That's because it contains a pretty good discussion of scripts, schemas, frames, and the like, and how important they are in our thinking. The discussion is dotted with what I've taken to calling "gratuitous neuroscience" (I even mark "g.n." in the margins any time he uses it, and he uses it a lot throughout the book), but overall it's pretty good. If…

If you think it's just about mercury in vaccines, you're wrong

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on July 20, 2005. Today in Washington, there will be a march, called (with unintentional irony) the Power of Truth march. Its organizers claim that it will be to "…

Lott's fabrications about safe storage paper

In a paper claiming that safe-storage gun laws increase crime and do not decrease accidental deaths, Lott and Whitley: The Cummings et al., supra note 15, research provides evidence of a 23 percent drop in juvenile accidental gun deaths after the passage of safe-storage laws. Juvenile accidental gun deaths did decline after the passage of the law, but what Cummings et al. miss is that these accidental deaths declined even faster in the states without these laws. While the Cummings et al. piece examined national data, it did not use fixed year effects, which would have allowed them to test…

More trouble for Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski

It's a new year, but some topics remain the same. One of these is the case of the highly dubious cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have discovered anticancer compounds in the blood known as antineoplastons, conducts "clinical trials" for which he charges patients and whose results he are largely unpublished, and of late has started marketing a do-it-yourself "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy" that--surprise! surprise!--almost always involves antineoplastons. More importantly, contrary to Dr. Burzynski's claim that he doesn't use chemotherapy and that his therapy…

On the Positive Features of Drunken Idiots

I was invited to a dinner last night hosted by one of the umbrella organizations for fraternities on campus, with a stated goal of improving communication between faculty and frats. It ended up being kind of a weird crowd-- most of the non-students there were Deans of one sort or another; I think there was only one other regular faculty member there. I'm not sure quite how they drew up the invite list, but I suspect the two of us are probably among the most sympathetic faculty members-- I went to a school without frats, but the rugby club was functionally equivalent, and the other guy proudly…

"Invisible Cadaver Particles," behavior change, and the public health perspective

A recent Freakonomics podcast tells one of my favorite public health stories: how observant physician Ignaz Semmelweis figured out how to slash the incidence of childbed, or puerperal, fever, a disease that killed 10-15% of the women who gave birth in the doctor-staffed ward of the Vienna General Hospital in the mid-nineteenth century. (Death rates were similarly alarming elsewhere, since germ theory hadn't yet taken hold.) As the podcast explains, Semmelweis observed that the death rate from childbed fever was lower among women who delivered babies in the ward staffed by midwives compared to…

What I learned from ScienceOnline2010

Last weekend I attended the annual North Carolina sci-shindig (called ScienceOnline2010 this year), and it was the best iteration of the conference yet. I am still reeling from everything that happened during the three days I was there. Rather than post a session-by-session discussion of what happened there, though, I thought I would simply share a few of the main lessons I took away from the conference. Writers Help Other Writers Writing a book is no easy task. It involves much more than simply sitting down and hammering out an arbitrary number of words or chapters, and as someone who is…