Culture
cortex | October 11, 2006Jacob Hacker does a great job of making a rather radical health care reform seem like common sense. Speaker Pelosi (knock on wood), please read this article:
The biggest problem with American health financing is not that employers sponsor coverage. It's that employers decide whether workers get coverage at all. So, why not give employers the option of providing low-cost coverage to their workers through a new public program modeled after Medicare? If employers want to provide comparable private coverage, they can. But if they don't provide basic insurance, their workers should be…
razib | October 10, 2006Brown blogger Ruchira Paul offers her opinions about the veil. Fellow ScienceBlogger James responded with his own thoughts about indoctrinating children. ASSman has a long post about between cultural variation in personality.
cortex | October 10, 2006Here's an interesting, if slightly silly, study. Since I'm a male, and have absolutely no fashion sense, I'll resist making any editorial comments:
Women dress to impress when they are at their most fertile, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday in a study they say shows that signs of human ovulation may not be as mysterious as some scientists believe.
A study of young college women showed they frequently wore more fashionable or flashier clothing and jewelery when they were ovulating, as assessed by a panel of men and women looking at their photographs.
``They tend to put on skirts instead of…
cortex | October 10, 2006It is a truism of public health that America suffers from an abnormally high rate of infant mortality. Western Europe and Japan all have substantially lower rates of infant death, a fact which is normally attributed to our poor pre-natal care. But these comparisons, like so many international medical comparisons, are misleading:
It's shaky ground to compare U.S. infant mortality with reports from other countries. The United States counts all births as live if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size. This includes what many other countries report as stillbirths. In…
cortex | October 10, 2006Are there any? In my post last week on consciousness studies, I argued that neuroscience will never tell us anything interesting about how the water of the brain becomes the wine of conscious experience:
Even if neuroscience discovers the neuronal correlates of consciousness one day - assuming they can even be found - the answer still won't be very interesting. It still won't explain how we exceed our cells, or how 40 Hz oscillations in the pre-frontal cortex create this, here, now. It is ironic, but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.
Needless…
cortex | October 10, 2006If the election were held tomorrow, it would be a rout. What depresses me is that after all the genuine scandals of the last few years - Abramoff, Iraq, cooked intelligence, Plamegate, etc. - the Republicans will probably be toppled by a minor sex scandal. Americans are still annoying Puritans.
cortex | October 9, 2006This is a very depressing study. Harvard's Robert Putnam has found that increased societal diversity leads to diminished solidarity.
A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University's Robert Putnam, one of the world's most influential political scientists.
His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone - from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.
This is a contentious finding in the current climate of concern about the benefits of immigration. Professor Putnam told…
cortex | October 9, 2006If you enjoyed constructing urban utopias in SimCity, or elaborate familial soap operas with the Sims, then you'll love Spore, since it gives you creative control over the entire universe. Steven Johnson talks to Will Wright:
As you begin playing Spore, you take on the role of a single-celled organism, swimming in a sea of nutrients and tiny predators. This part of the game has a streamlined, 2-D look that harks back to classic games from the 80's like PacMan. Once you have accumulated enough "DNA points" or "evolutionary credits," you acquire the use of a feature called the "creature editor…
razib | October 8, 2006I have a post on my other blog about why Lakoff matters. Here is the conclusion:
In short, I think the problem with Lakoff's ideas are two fold: 1) the science is probably wrong, so it has little utilitarian value aside from enriching Lakoff 2) the false perception that the science is correct and can be used to persuade people basically leaves liberals totally vulnerable to being laughed at (a lot of the stuff that Lakoff acolytes say about the Right is giggle-inducing! Pinker is describing a real phenomenon, as I've chuckled myself). If I was a particularly partisan non-liberal I would…
cortex | October 6, 2006Here is Pelosi's plan for the first 100 hours as Speaker of the House. Much to my surprise, her agenda is coherent, well-packaged and urgently needed:
Day One: Put new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."
Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Time remaining until 100 hours: Raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step. Cut the interest rate on student loans in half. Allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices…
cortex | October 6, 2006Atul Gawande is a working surgeon, and yet he also finds time to write some of the best medical journalism around. His latest article on the "industrialization of childbirth" is a real gem.
The degree to which birth has been transformed by medicine is astounding and, for some, alarming. Today, electronic fetal-heart-rate monitoring is used in more than ninety per cent of deliveries; intravenous fluids in more than eighty per cent; epidural or spinal anesthesia in three-quarters; medicines to speed up labor (the drug of choice is no longer ergot but Pitocin, a synthetic form of the natural…
cortex | October 6, 2006From the WSJ's always thought-provoking Sharon Begley. This column is so interesting I'm going to post a big chunk of it:
You have 100 doses of a vaccine against a deadly strain of influenza that is sweeping the country, with no prospect of obtaining more. Standing in line are 100 schoolchildren and 100 elderly people.
The elderly are more likely to die if they catch the flu. But they also have fewer years left to live and don't get out enough to easily spread or catch the disease. The kids are more likely to act like little Typhoid Marys, sneezing virus over anyone they encounter, and have…
cortex | October 5, 2006A final list, by the man in full, the Falstaff of our time.
Update: There is a nice e-shrine to R.W. Apple over at New York Magazine, which features links to a few of his more sublime food articles.
cortex | October 5, 2006The much awaited Harvard University proposal to revise its aged core curriculum has been released. So far, two details have gotten most of the attention:
1) The committee did not follow Larry Summer's suggestion to increase core requirements for science. Students would still have to take one course each in life science and physical science.
2) The committee has added a mandatory course on religion, dubbed "Reason and Faith". From the WSJ:
The proposed religion course would address topics from personal beliefs to foreign policy to the interplay between science and religion. The report, which…
cortex | October 4, 2006Well, that didn't take long: thanks to falling gas prices, sales of light trucks and SUV's rose 1.2 percent last month. The good news, though, is that policy makers now know how much gas needs to cost before consumers start buying subcompacts. If I were a politician who didn't want to get re-elected, here's what I'd call for: a floating gas tax designed to maintain a steady price of $3 a gallon. If the price of crude falls, then the tax increases. Only by keeping the price of gas consistently elevated will we create a marketplace in which companies and consumers are willing to invest in fuel-…
cortex | October 3, 2006From the latest edition of Science. It's worth noting in advance that, if one were to design an educational system that were the exact opposite of No Child Left Behind, it would look a lot like Montessori's approach:
Montessori education is a 100-year-old method of schooling that was first used with impoverished preschool children in Rome. The program continues to grow in popularity. Estimates indicate that more than 5000 schools in the United States--including 300 public schools and some high schools--use the Montessori program. Montessori education is characterized by multi-age classrooms,…
cortex | October 3, 2006At last, someone demolishes the bad cognitive science and even worse political science being peddled by George Lakoff. If the Democrats really think that calling income taxes "community dues" or "membership fees" will help them retake the White House, then God help us all, because Rove is going to be pulling the strings for many elections to come. In the new TNR (subscription only), Pinker takes his intellectual axe to Lakoff's theory of "conceptual metaphor," which advises Democrats to package their policies into Orwellian sounding soundbites, so that stupid voters might be tricked into…
cortex | October 3, 2006Neuroscience now knows that chronic stress and impoverished environments - the two hallmarks of human poverty - are debilitating to the primate brain. Stress releases glucocorticoids which, if they hang around long enough, turn into poison, while impoverished environments diminish the growth and density of our dendrites. As I wrote in my profile of Elizabeth Gould:
The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate's particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain--and Gould's team has shown…
cortex | October 2, 2006Bob Lutz, the vice-chairman for development at GM, is best known for creating gas-guzzling and eye-catching icons, like the Dodge Viper, Camaro concept and latest generation Corvette. He loves V-12's and ridiculous amounts of horsepower. So I was shocked to read this quote in today's WSJ:
"I'd say the best thing the (U.S.) government can do is to raise the gas tax by 10 or 15 cents a year until it reaches European levels," Mr. Lutz said, during an impromptu interview just before GM Europe's media event last Thursday.
That way, he says, car makers could concentrate on designing for the U.S.…
cortex | October 2, 2006Just when you thought GM might be learning from its past mistakes, they go and do something really stupid like this...