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What is Journalism?

For several decades, journalism happened only in the three 'traditional' methods of communication: print, radio and television. The means of production of these is expensive, thus owned only by wealthy individuals or corporations, or heavily subsidized by such (through advertising and such). One unifying trait of the three technical modes of traditional media is that they are all broadcast media: one-to-many. As such a state of things persisted for several decades and journalism got professionalized during this period, a common cultural definition of journalism emerged: whatever is done by…

Energy Dissipation in a Physics Toy

A little while back, I used a photo of SteelyKid's toy Newton's cradle as the photo of the day, with a bonus video: I mentioned that I was going to do some analysis of this at some point, but didn't have time right then. I had a bit of time to poke at this yesterday, though, so here's some physics making use of the normal-speed part of that video (I have another purpose in mind for the high-speed stuff; you'll need to wait for that). The obvious thing to do with this is to plug it into Tracker and measure the position as a function of time. Here's a graph tracking the position of the two end…

The Role of Textbooks

Inside Higher Ed has an op-ed piece up urging faculty to abandon textbooks: Here's a statement with which everyone can agree: College instructors cannot assume that students come to their classes in possession of basic knowledge. Now here's one sure to generate some controversy: In many cases textbooks deter the pursuit of knowledge more than they help it. The sciences may be different, but at least in the case of the humanities, most of us would be better off not assigning a textbook. He goes on to make a strong case for abandoning history textbooks in favor of monographs, based on both the…

Open letters with signatories: Will they help counter the antivaccine movement?

As a "prominent" (as hard as I find it that anyone would apply the word to me) blogger about the anti-vaccine movement, somehow I ended up on the Every Child By Two mailing list. ECBT, as you may recall, is the organization founded by former First Lady Rosalyn Carter and former First Lady of Arkansas Betty Bumpers to promote vaccination against childhood diseases. It's a fine organization, and a much delayed counterweight to antivaccine propaganda mills like Age of Autism, Generation Rescue, the National Vaccine Information Center, and the up and coming antivaccine doctors' website Medical…

Oops, he did it again: Bill O'Reilly defames the victims of the Malmedy massacre

Back in October, Jamie McCarthy and I castigated Bill O'Reilly for implying that at Malmedy in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge U.S. Airborne troops had massacred Nazis soldiers who had surrendered when in fact the Malmedy massacre was perpetrated by SS troops to whom U.S. soldiers had surrendered. Naturally, after ragging on him a bit, we wrote it off as yet another example of Bill O'Reilly's self-confident ignorance. I figured O'Reilly had simply mixed up historical facts in his eagerness to defend the abuses at Abu Ghraib by pointing to supposed atrocities committed by U.S.…

Protecting Your Memory: A Full-time job?

A review of Carved in Sand, by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin I won't lie to you. The press release for Carved in Sand did not inspire confidence. "When journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin was in her early 40s, she began forgetting things and was having trouble concentrating," reads the description of the book: Embarrassed, but also concerned, she decided to get to the heart of the question so many people in midlife ask: Is this normal--or am I slowly losing my mind? A veteran reporter with two decades of investigative work under her belt, she decided to become a guinea pig . . . [embarking] on a…

Such blithe liars

I'm not getting a good opinion of people in New Jersey. They've got the awful George Berkin, a cretin who rants on NJ Online, and has a reputation as one of the dumbest jerks in the state. And he has commenters. I want to talk about one of them, Terry Hurlbut, who is a marvelous example of creationist pseudoscience and dishonesty. He's commenting on a Berkin article that is characteristically crazy (it's a defense of Christianity against atheism that cites CS Lewis's trilemma), but Hurlbut goes beyond mere inanity to lie about science. Take a look at this. Creationists only rarely get this…

What Should a 20-year-old Proto-Feminist Guy Be Reading?

In the midst of a vigorous discussion on my last post, reader Deatkin expressed his frustrations as to how he might engage in a positive manner in a discussion of feminist issues. In this case, it was not the hairy-legged man-hating feminazi Zuska who was intimidating; it was Comrade Physioprof. Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that the problem lies with me on this... In sum, I may simply be too immature (I'm 20 and a mere undergraduate) to think broadly and imaginatively enough on feminist issues in order for me to reach a conclusion that somebody such as [Comrade Physioprof] would find…

Male Barbary Macaques Like Their Lovers Loud

Barbary Macaques (an adult male and an infant). Via Wikipedia. Part of the experience of living in an apartment involves occasionally being subjected to the sounds of members of our own species mating. While the torrid love affairs of our neighbors might keep us up at night, though, there's a good reason why they do it (just as there's a good reason why there's a whole business based upon the proclivity of some men to drop loads of cash to listen to a woman pretend to have orgasms over the phone), at least if we're anything like Barbary Macaques (Macaca sylvanus). In a new study published…

CHOMP!

Tyrannosaurus rex is by far the most famous of dinosaurs, a creature that looms large in the field of paleontology as well as in the media. This amount of attention has caused plenty of controversy but it has also resulted in many studies of various aspects of one of the largest and most well-known extinct carnivores ever to have lived, and a new paper in the journal Paleobiology by Snively and Russell examines the prospect of "inertial feeding" in this titanic terror. Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives (i.e. Tarbosaurus, Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, etc.) were definitely…

Cooperation and multilevel selection

A few days ago I introduced how higher levels of selection could occur via a "toy" example. Obviously it wasn't realistic, and as RPM pointed out a real population is not open ended in its growth potential. I simply wanted to allude to the seeds of how Simpson's Paradox might occur, where population structure is needed to explain overall trends. Now I'm going to dive into a somewhat more complicated model, one which Martin Nowak published last year in PNAS, Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. The paper is free, so if this post piques your interest I recommend you dive straight…

American psychologists do the right thing

Hats off to fellow blogger Stephen Soldz and his colleagues, leaders of a coalition within the American Psychological Association that campaigned to put the APA on record declaring participation in torture interrogations at US prisons at Guantanamo Bay and similar prison camps an unethical breach of professional standards. The referendum victory (59%) comes after previous failures to ban professional complicity by APA members in interrogations where there is good reason to believe international law is being violated. The ban means those who are American Psychological Association members can't…

What do we do?

Not infrequently, I get asked what it is I do, anyway, as a scientisty sort of person. I blogged it, of course, but that was a "typical day" - during term time and filled with paperwork and class prep and general rushing about. This morning I woke up and found the Sb Overlords had frontpaged this quote: "I think I need to go back and think about adaptive load balancing block solving of sparse, nasty almost diagonal matrices; that and whether kinetic energy turbulence really affects sound wave propagation (duh, of course it does, but how much...)?" Huh? Ah, Particle Physics snark... So, how…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with GrrrlScientist

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked my SciBling GrrrlScientist of the Living the Scientific Life blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? I write the blog, Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted), under…

Ebola, for your kids! Interview with Tara Smith

Dr.Tara C. Smith is one of the original Gang Of Four(teen) here at Scienceblogs.com. She blogs on her Aetiology as well as contributes to Panda's Thumb and Correlations group blogs. At the 2nd Science Blogging Conference last month Tara moderated the session on Blogging public health and medicine. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job? Well, let's see. Working backwards, I'm an assistant professor; my field is infectious disease epidemiology.…

Why teach biology?

I've been tagged with a teaching meme: I'm supposed to answer the question, "Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?". We science types are late to the game; there are already several examples online, mostly from those humanities people. First, I'll be forthright in one thing: teaching was not my initial goal, nor was there anything in my training to encourage teaching. Especially if you get into a program with biomedical funding, there's active dissuasion from pursuing teaching: I was a TA for 3 quarters in my first year of graduate school, and then got put on…

Fair and Balanced

A couple weeks ago, I was chided by a couple of readers for only attacking rightwing lunacy and leaving leftwing lunacy alone. Let me rectify that for the moment with a look at this amusing bit of balderdash from Leonard Shlain, a professor of surgery from UCSF. It's an excerpt from his book The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. As a general rule, I think it's safe to say that if you come across a book title that invokes the Goddess, there's some major league flatulence on the way. This is no exception. His book begins: Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam…

Advice to my young self on my one-year-Con-niversary

"A lot of mothers will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves." -Banksy One of the great joys I got to experience came last year, when for the very first time, I was invited to be a guest of honor at a most fabulous convention: MidSouthCon 30! Image credit: MidSouthCon XXX, originally from http://www.midsouthcon.org/. I went into it not knowing what to expect, and I wound up having one of the best times I could have asked for. I met some of the kindest, most interesting people I've ever met in my life, and I felt like everyone there immediately accepted me into their…

Election Liveblogging

This election day post is going to be continuously updated until the winner becomes more-or-less official. Tomorrow we'll have one more politics post as something of a benediction, and then mercifully back to the physics. Updates will appear at the top of the post, so feel free to refresh throughout the night. I'm writing in the central time zone, so timestamps on this post will reflect such. 11:39 Well, the Minnesota mess is still a mess though Coleman has pulled ahead by a hair. Looks like the result will be Obama without a filibuster-proof majority. As such, I'm going to bed. Good…

Carrots trump sticks for fostering cooperation

When it comes to encouraging people to work together for the greater good, carrots work better than sticks. That's the message from a new study showing that rewarding people for good behaviour is better at promoting cooperation than punishing them for offences. David Rand from Harvard University asked teams of volunteers to play "public goods games", where they could cheat or cooperate with each other for real money. After many rounds of play, the players were more likely to work together if they could reward each other for good behaviour or punish each other for offences. But of these two…

"When Britney Spears Comes to My Lab"

Although I'm starting to suspect the Talk of the Town will not be noting our stunning performance, and Publisher's Weekly made not give us a starred review, I will still admit that Dave and I gave the best performance --the best performance? -- the best performance of our lives at the Cornelia St. Cafe a few weeks ago. Vince LiCata was the instigator of the whole to-do, in league with Roald Hoffmann. While Vince will no doubt soon be most known for the prize-winning choreography that has just netted him top honors by the AAAS for dancing his research, I'll also make him known here for one…

Causation in Brain Disease: A Lesson from Vietnam Veterans and PTSD

One of the practical issues in doing neuroscience in humans is that you have a problem determining causation. Say I do an imaging study with a neurological disease and find that the activity in a certain brain region is consistently lower. Do I know whether that reduced activity is causing the disease or whether it is just secondary? It is often really hard to tell in humans. If it were an animal study, we could just lesion the area in experimental animals and see if they were still capable of getting the disease. However, there are diseases where good animal models are lacking, and…

Comps readings this week

And now for something a little different. I'm continuing my preparations for comprehensive exams from my old blog.  There will be some test essays and also some continuing notes on readings.  Typically, I don't mark my notes on readings as "Research Blogging" because the articles are some what older, and some of my notes are very brief although they are on peer-reviewed research. I would be interested in feedback on that - if you think I should mark them research blogging, let me know! Quan-Haase, A., & Wellman, B. (2005). Local Virtuality in an Organization: Implications for Community…

Someone has taken the Coulter Challenge!

It only took five years. Remember, my Coulter Challenge was for someone to take any of Coulter's paragraphs about evolution from her book Godless, and cogently defend its accuracy. It's been surprising how few takers there have been: lots of wingnuts have praised the book and said it is wonderful, but no one has been willing to get specific and actually support any of its direct claims. Until now. It takes that special combination of arrogance and ignorance to think anything Coulter said is defensible, so I suppose it's not a huge surprise that our brave foolhardy contestant is Michael Egnor…

New Cognitive Science Books

Over the next few months, several cognitive science books will be coming out that look really interesting. I thought I'd list a few of them, in case you're interested in checking them out once they're published. The Prehistory of Cognitive Science - Andrew Brook, Editor Description Featuring contributions from leading figures such as Noam Chomsky, Don Ross, Andrew Brook and Patricia Kitcher, this book traces the philosophical roots behind contemporary understandings of cognition, forming both a convincing case for the centrality of philosophy to the history of neuroscience and cognitive…

A Necessary Twist (Values, part IV)

Why can't we picture a fifth dimension? One, two, and three seem so easy to grasp. We can even see how one leads to the next: a line, composed of points, is a component of a shape on a plane, which in turn is a component of a spatial object. Consider that object with an additional aspect, enduring through time, and you can almost envision a fourth--a curving sense of endurance, relative to our space. So, why not imagine another dimension, not just curved, but twisted or spun, which consists of the aspects of time, present, future and past, relating to one another? Ok... don't picture it too…

Pharyngula on STRIKE

ON STRIKE! It's come to this. We've been facing a steady erosion of talent here at Scienceblogs, with the loss of good people like Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong a while back, and with the very abrupt departure of 15 bloggers after the recent PepsiCo debacle — an event that damaged the reputation of this place. And now just yesterday we lost PalMD and Bora. Something is going rotten here. What could it be? I don't think it's ultimately an ethical problem. I have every confidence that the management at Seed Media Group wants to do the right thing, and I think they have gotten many things exactly…

One More Reason Why Letting Iowa and New Hampshire Go First Is Stupid: Florida

I've described how the Iowa caucus voting procedure is a ridiculous way to decide how might be the next president, but Iowa's and New Hampshire's insistence on being the first states might have cost the Democrats Florida. Here's what the Democrats did: Fearing likely attempts by big states like Michigan and Florida to disrupt the parties' primary calendars with early dates in 2008, Republicans and Democrats ruled at their 2004 conventions that states trying to butt in before Iowa and New Hampshire would lose half their delegates. The Republicans left it there. The Democrats decided to try…

Open Science Digital Computation Research

Two recent announcements that are worth noting here. The first is for Digital Science, a Macmillan / Nature Publishing Group project involving some of the usual science online suspects like Timo Hannay and Kaitlin Thaney and some others in a really dynamic-looking multi-disciplinary team. The press release is here and the about page here. Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology. As well as developing our own solutions, we…

Surgical masks versus respirators for flu protection

We only just got to the surgical/N95 mask article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). We've been traveling and haven't been able to keep up with what others were saying, but we're sure it's been well covered by the usual suspects. So we'll just add our take here, for what it's worth. As most readers here know, what kind of mask (if any) will best protect a health care worker or anyone else at high risk of exposure to people infected with influenza virus is a difficult question. We still remain unsure whether flu is transmitted mainly by large or small droplets. If most…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: I treat myself for a condition for which The Literal Word of God can work

I recently had a medical condition that is the only one I know of where the Literal Word of God actually is effective treatment. However, as an atheist I didn't have access to the Literal Word of God (the online version isn't effective) so I asked one of my colleagues, a licensed physician, to treat me, using a modality in which I had faith: heavy science. Unfortunately my faith was misplaced. The treatment failed after three tries (he insisted on using Harrison's Textbook as his treatment source, when I would have used Cecil and Loeb). Desperate, I finally took matters into my own hands in a…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: What You See Is What You Get? Exclusion Performances in Ravens and Keas: Among birds, corvids and parrots are prime candidates for advanced cognitive abilities. Still, hardly anything is known about…

PNAS: Hamish Johnston, Physicsworld.com Editor

I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track. The tenth profile of this round features the editor of PhysicsWorld.com, which is probably the best physics magazine web site out there. 1) What is your non-academic job? I am editor of physicsworld.com, which is a website aimed at working physicists and people with a background in physics…

Blog Table Discussion with Puff the Mutant Dragon (part II)

In which we have the next round of the conversation with Puff the Mutant Dragon. Previous entries here and there. ------------ Amusingly, your post was singled out for high praise in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker review of the book. Probably because Deborah Blum, who wrote it, wrote a book about poisons, so the topic was close to her interests, but still, congrats. You're definitely right about blogging being a weird hobby. I think it's one of the more interesting but less examined aspects of the rise of social media that there's been this explosion of text writing by all sorts of…

Time is running out (Ain't it always?)

While the U.S. Senate's sense of urgency on the climate change front wanes, a new campaign originating on the other side of rapidly warming pond is urging us all to get with the program by cutting our emissions sooner rather than later. This is obviously a good idea from a scientific point of view, but what are its chances of success? The 10:10 campaign draws on the always-obvious-when-you-think-about-it, but until recently largely ignored, fact that it matters very much how quickly we reduce the carbon emissions that are trapping all the extra heat in the atmosphere and oceans. A pair of…

Things that are unlucky (or lucky?): Carbon tax game on when gas prices high.

So, there's been much argument lately in my neck of the woods, over the BC's new carbon tax. This is coming online in a few days (July 1st), and will be responsible (amongst many other things) for what has been figured to be a 2.4c/litre hike in gas prices. Anyway, folks are getting quite antsy here, with the opposition government saying all the usual things about getting rid of it, etc. In many ways, however, I think the timing couldn't be better. Mainly because this convergence of activity has just raised the "carbon tax" and "things concerning fossil fuels" to a whole new, almost…

Baby signing in the real world

Take a look at this video made by fellow ScienceBlogger Dr. Isis. She's talking with her son, a toddler who adorably mimics her as she says very complicated words such as "Adventures in Ethics and Science" and "Wackaloon" (but sadly, not "Cognitive Daily"): It's cute, but it's difficult to say whether Dr. Isis is really talking with her child. The difficulty babies have pronouncing words has led many parents to suspect they might be able to communicate better with their children using hand signs. Last week we talked about a study suggesting that teaching babies even a few signs like those…

iKnowwhatyoudidlastsummer

iPhones know where they are, so they probably know where you are, and these data have been captured and maintained by the Apple devices and have been used by police in geoForensic investigations. Crushing civil liberties? There's an app for that! Apple came to international attention in 1984 when the upstart computer company bought Superbowl Halftime ad space to show how they could destroy Big Brother. I'm not sure who Big Brother was at the time (it may have been a combination of IBM and Microsoft) but this was a direct reference to Orwell's book "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Ironically,…

Dr. Mehmet Oz: Gone completely over to the Dark Side

For some reason, I've tended to give Dr. Mehmet Oz a bit of a free pass when it comes to promoting woo. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I just haven't paid that much attention to him. Perhaps it's because, even when he was on Oprah's show, he didn't delve as deeply into the woo as her other frequent guests, such as Christiane Northrup, Suzanne Sommers, or Jenny McCarthy. The one or two times I saw him with Oprah, usually online because I'm never home to watch Oprah during the day and on those rare days when I am home on a weekeday, trust me, I don't watch Oprah. Then Dr. Oz got his own…

Academic samizdat

Since early days indeed, it's been possible to bypass journal publishers and libraries in a quest for a particular article by going directly to the author. Some publishers have even facilitated this limited variety of samizdat by offering authors a few ready-made offprints. I've even had publishers give me e-offprints (which to me, preprint disseminator that I am, just feels weird). The repository software ePrints can place an "ask the author" button on items that are withheld from public view for whatever reason. As best I can tell, just about everyone involved in scholarly communication…

Thurs. @ NYAS: Public Communication Re-Considered

The NY Academy of Sciences offers a stunning venue for public talks, forums, and receptions, with a view from the 40th floor of 7 World Trade Center. Thursday morning I will be heading up to New York to give a 7pm talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. A crowd of more than 100 is expected for what I am hoping to be an interesting discussion and entertaining reception to follow. (Register for free here.) Here's a brief preview of what I will be talking about followed by more specific details: Over the past few years there have been signs of a major shift in how the scientific community in…

Birds in the News 155

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Sun Conure chick, Aratinga solstitialis. Image: John Del Rio. [larger view]. Christmas Bird Count News The Annual Christmas Bird Counts are rapidly approaching, so I am publishing links to all of the counts here; who to contact, and where and when they are being held, so if you have a link to a Christmas Bird Count for your state, please let me know so I can include it in the list: Alabama (Thanks, Chazz Hesselein) Arizona (Thanks, Sheri Williamson) California (Thanks, Joseph Morlan) Idaho (Thanks, Denise Hughes)…

A horrendously bad "vaxed/unvaxed" study rises from the dead yet again

Some posts I really enjoy doing. I'm so fired up by the topic that the words flow, and I finish a post in record time. Other posts are more of a chore, written not so much because I'm excited by the topic, but because I feel duty bound to address it. I feel the need to write such posts when, for example, a bit of pseudoscience has gained traction in mainstream groups and readers keep writing me about it, to the point where I finally give in. This is one of the latter posts. None of this is to say that I don't still do my best with these posts to explain and argue my points. Fear not, I'll get…

Hire Google for your denialist campaign!

An alert reader noticed that when he performed a Google search on 'Sicko', guess who pops up in the sponsored links? Why, our good friends at AEI, a denialist organization second only to CEI, but since they have a lot of the same people working for both it's really just academic which one you're arguing with. When you need your crappy industry defended from public criticism, you can always rely on AEI or CEI to chomp at the bit and pretend there is "no problem". What's even more interesting is that Google actually solicited ads (fixed link) to combat Sicko's bad PR for the insurance…

Hayek vs Hobbes and the theory of law

There is, of course, a theory of law. As soon as you ponder the question, you realise there must be. But it had never occurred to me (in my faint defence I find, now I look, that whilst wiki has a category for theories of law, it doesn't seem to have an overall article on the concept of theory of law). Nor, when I mention it to various friends, did the question strike any kind of "oh yeah, I know that stuff" answer. My children, who have done some "philosophy" in school, hadn't heard of the idea either. So this post is likely to be naive. But my dumb opinions are just as good as anyone else…

Interference with 10,000-Particle "Particles": "Matter-wave interference with particles selected from a molecular library with masses exceeding 10000 amu"

I'm teaching Quantum Optics this term, and one of my students picked "Atom Optics" off the list of suggested paper topics. When he asked for pointers, I said "You should check out the diffraction stuff Markus Arndt's group does." And just like that, a paper from the Arndt group turns up from the Arxiv Blog... This is apparently only recently posted to the arxiv, though the article in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics claims to have been online since July. Since I never get tired of talking about this, let's talk about this one, too. So, what's this one about, then? In a lot of ways, it's…

Gene Genie #24

Welcome to Gene Genie #24: with a heavy emphasis on Personal Genetics The previous Gene Genie was hosted at DNAdirect Talk and it is still fresh, so go have a look if you have not already. The next Gene Genie will be hosted at My Biotech Life. By the way, the Gene Genie logo was created by Ricardo at My Biotech Life -- see the other award winning artwork here. If you wish to submit a post for the next Gene Genie, you may use the handy-dandy submission form. And, now, on with the show: Did you ever wonder How many knocked out genes in Knock Out mice? at molecular B(io)LOG(y) One would…

Weekend Diversion: My Love Letter to Winnie Cooper

"When you're a little kid you're a bit of everything; scientist, philosopher, artist. Sometimes it seems like growing up is giving these things up one at a time." -Kevin Arnold, The Wonder Years Like many who grew up around the same time I did, The Wonder Years was one of my favorite shows, putting on display much of the awkwardness, anxiety, hope and powerlessness that comes along with being a pre-teen/teenager in this world. And like many, I had a secret crush on Winnie Cooper, played by Danica McKellar. To accompany this post, with a modern twist, here's the Easy Star All-Stars singing…

Public health takes on the opioid abuse and overdose problem, building on strengths as conveners, educators

This is the last in a series exploring the intersections between effectively caring for people living with chronic pain and the rise in unintentional poisoning deaths due to prescription painkillers. This week's story looks at the role of public health in curbing the opioid abuse and overdose problem. Read the previous stories in the series here and here. (We'll be publishing a bonus addition to the series next week — a discussion with Dr. Daniel Carr, director of the Pain Research, Education and Policy Program at Tufts University.) by Kim Krisberg A decade ago, only about 10 percent of the…

Boston Marathon

The rowing one, that is. It was just like last year except wetter, and we were better, but our cox was less lovely. Oh, and as promised, this is the last of the random rowing-n-running types posts here. You need to go to the other blog for that from now on, except for important stuff like the bumps, of course. Pic: all of us: L to R: Jo (3), Mel (7), Anne (6), William (4), Joss (4), Freya (Stroke), Amy (Bow), Me (5), James (Cox). Spot the survivors from last year. You can also read Amy's take on it all. The results are now up: 4:43:04 for us (I made it 4:42, but I started my watch a fraction…