Digital culture
ddobbs | July 1, 2010Â
You just never know what'll catch fire. Then again, maybe I should have figured "Ozzy Osbourne" and "genome" would have. In any case, Ozzy simply buried every other contender this past month, racking up 7 times as many hits as any other entry ever did in one month -- and accounting for two-thirds of June's unique pageviews altogether. The power of Stumbleupon. A fifth of those readers went on to other pages. So maybe something good came of it.
Without further ado, here are Neuron Culture's Top 5 from June.
Ozzy Osbourne. Now genomics is getting somewhere. Geneticists hope to figure out how…
ddobbs | June 29, 2010Reading isn't just a monkish pursuit: Matthew Battles on "The Shallows" » Nieman Journalism Lab More on Carr's ideas from "The Shallows"
BoraZ interviews Eric Roston and gets some good ideas about journalism and reporting, past, present and future.
The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk. Or why my move to London is a good work idea.
Razib says what can't be said too often:Â Your genes are just the odds
Also worth many reminders:Â Healthcare: U.S. spends more, but gets less, from the Well
Not again with the sekrit Renaissance brain anatomy! But yes: again. 
I want to see this…
ddobbs | June 22, 2010Research Digest blog, the highly useful and content-rich site that tracks all things psych, just opened its "The Bloggers Behind the Blogs," series, which will run ten interviews with bloggers of mind and brain. It's with a nice interview of Jesse Bering, of Bering in Mind.
It's a dandy line-up (of which I'm happy to be part), and I look forward to reading them as they come out, about one a day, over the next couple weeks. Here's who's coming, in alphabetical order.
Jesse Bering of Bering in Mind -- already posted Anthony Risser of Brain blog. (coming soon) David DiSalvo of Brain spin and…
ddobbs | June 19, 2010Â
Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky's central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been wasting watching TV. Yet Lehrer â who, unlike me, has read Shirky's book â finds that Shirky overplays his case, and that in his enthusiasm for networked contributions and collaborations he discounts both consumption and many offline interactions.
He Lehrer mounts a convincing argument, and you really…
ddobbs | June 17, 2010
Last week's spat between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker generated a lot of attention â and, happily, delivered a couple of the more lucid framings yet of the debate over whether digital culture makes us shallow, as Carr argues in his new book, or simply represents yet another sometimes-distracting element that we can learn to deal with, as Pinker countered in a Times Op-Ed last Thursday.
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I sympathize with both arguments; I see Carr's point but feel he overplays it. I find digital culture immensely distracting. I regularly dive down rabbit holes in my computer, iPhone, and iPad,…
ddobbs | June 14, 2010
A still from Visconti's The Leopard, via NYRB
This is not new, but seems to me overlooked (and underlinked) in the blogosphere: The New York Review of Books â a long, longtime favorite of mine â has a blog stable that offers a nice variety of goodies. The current line-up gives a sense of the range: a piece on Mexican art by Alma Guillermoprieto; Sue Halpern's beef about the iPad, which I elaborated on earlier; pieces on the Vatican, Iraq, and Pakistan; and a leisurely travel post on Palermo that begins, "Everything in Palerno is slow except the traffic, which is as confusing as a…
ddobbs | June 10, 2010Â
Don DeLillo's Players, as marked up by David Foster Wallace.Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
I just sat down to air a complaint about reading on the iPad when I discovered that Sue Halpern had done much of my work for me:
For all its supposed interactivity, the iPad is a surprisingly static machine, especially for reading. ... One of the guilty pleasures of an actual, ink-on-paper book is the possibility of marking it upâunderlining salient passages, making notes in the margins, dog-earing a page. While itâs true that some electronic book platforms for…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010
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When Jessica Palmer gave a talk at the "Unruly Democracy" conference last month, she gave what appears, from her after-the-fact blog post excerpted here, to have been a semi-contrarian take on blogospheric civiility:
What I did endeavor to convey in my brief talk was the difficulty of blogging on interdisciplinary borders, where science meets art and the humanities. My big concern? While individual blogs often have communities who are internally civil and share norms and history, when you move from blog to blog, those norms and history break down. There are no universal norms in the…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010Here's what I distracted myself with this morning. Don't mix these at home.
Wired Sci examines how Testosterone Makes People Suspicious of One Another. And that's a hell of a photo.
New Flu Vaccines Could Protect Against All Strains If all goes well, of course. Not to count on at this point, but an interesting look at one direction in vaccine development. I covered another approach in an Technology Review article last year, when I also looked at the weird history of adjuvants. (If you want, check out my complete vaccine coverage. You can find also some other good ones at the Technology…
ddobbs | May 11, 2010
I've been deemed a pusher, and that's a good thing.
The accuser is Colin Schultz, a busy, curious, and inquisitive young journalist who awarded a story of mine his first annual prize for "push" science journalism. First of all let me say I'm pleased, mainly because the story, " A Depression Switch?", about neurologist Helen Mayberg's experiment using deep brain stimulation to treat depression, is one of the most fascinating, enthralling, and rewarding I've ever worked on.
But what is this push journalism business? Push science journalism, says Colin, is science writing that…
ddobbs | May 5, 2010
Would you believe this brain?
Every few months, sometimes more often, someone tries to ramrod fMRI lie detection into the courtrooms. Each time, it gets a little closer. Wired Science carries the latest alarming story:
A Brooklyn attorney hopes to break new ground this week when he offers a brain scan as evidence that a key witness in a civil trial is telling the truth, Wired.com has learned.
If the fMRI scan is admitted, it would be a legal first in the United States and could have major consequences for the future of neuroscience in court.
The lawyer, David Levin, wants to use that…
ddobbs | March 19, 2010
Cordyceps in glass, by glass artist Wesley Fleming -- a strange depiction of a rather horrid business. For more, do go to the source, the lovely Myrmecos Blog, which is all about bugs.
Now, the best of the week's gleanings. I'm going to categorize them from here out, and at least try to keep them from being from completely all over everywhere about everything.
Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things)
While reading Wolpert's review of Greenberg's book about depression (he didn't much like it), I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development.
Slate's Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried women.
The Bay State's AG finds that Massachusetts Hospital Costs Not Connected To Quality Of Care
Ezra Klein asks a good question: Was Medicare popular when it passed? Apparently not.
Jeff Jarvis…
ddobbs | January 31, 2010
Me (right) hypnotizing Carl Zimmer just before the Rebooting Science Journalism session at ScienceOnline 2010. It worked. Carl had planned to use his 5 minutes to just say, "We are DOOOMED." Instead he talked about duck sex.
I've been meaning for two weeks now to post on ScienceOnline 2010 and the Rebooting Science Journalism session, in which I joined Ed Yong, John Timmer, and Carl Zimmer as "unpanelists." Lest another frenzied week delay me further, here's my addition to the #scio10 #reboot corpus.
Journalists-v-bloggers is (almost) dead
Many at the conference, and pretty much everyone…
ddobbs | January 26, 2010
Above: Kasparov after his first meeting with Deep Blue, in 1997, when he crushed DP. Later it wouldn't go so well.
In a splendid article in the NY Review of books, former world chess champion Gary Kasparov ponders the limitations of technology as a means of playing chess truly well. When I hit this paragraph late in the article, it struck me that you could write much the same thing about pharma. From The Chess Master and the Computer - The New York Review of Books:
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism…
ddobbs | January 13, 2010
Tomorrow I fly to North Carolina for the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, or unconference, where on Saturday I will sit down with Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and anyone else who squeezes into the room, to talk about rebooting science journalism. The obvious assumption behind the topic (if I can return to the titular metaphor) is that science journalism is such a mess that it needs not just cleaning up, but a wholesale restart. But "rebooting" is probably too mild a term for what most people think is needed; if we're to stick with digital metaphors, I'd to say the assumption is more that…
ddobbs | January 5, 2010I rarely take direct exception to anything my friend Jonah Lehrer writes, and I fully recognize he's just quick-riffing on a Hollywood movie. But if I understand his Avatar post correctly, my good man Jonah is arguing, at least in a minddump-at-the-bar sort of way, that James Cameron's latest movie is a pretty full neuro-aesthetico-art-critico realization of film's medium. His is a fun post, and worthwhile just to see Cameron crammed onto the same page, with appropriate apologies, with Clement Greenburg, Clint Eastwood, and Jorge Luis Borges. But I must differ. In Avatar, which I saw last…
ddobbs | December 9, 2009
Facebook profiles capture true personality, according to new psychology research
Online social networks such as Facebook are being used to express and communicate real personality, instead of an idealized virtual identity, according to new research from psychologist Sam Gosling at The University of Texas at Austin.
"I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves," says Gosling of the more than 700 million people worldwide who have online profiles. "In fact, our findings suggest…
ddobbs | November 5, 2009
By way of demonstration, the group plugged in stats from the Oct. 11 playoff game between the Angels and the Red Sox:
BOSTON -- Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.
Guerrero drove in two Angels runners. He went 2-4 at the plate.
via mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
ddobbs | October 21, 2009"Book Launch 2.0" This kills me -- but maybe just because I've written books. (Oh yeah -- the links to the books. First two here. Reef Madness here. Buy 'em. Read 'em. They're better than the stuff you're reading now.)
This video should follow or be followed by Ellis Weiner's "Our Marketing Plan" from the New Yorker:
Once we get back from Frankfurt, weâd like to see you on morning talk shows like the âTodayâ show and âThe View,â so please get yourself booked on them and keep us âin the loop.â If Iâm not hereâwhich I wonât be, since after the book fair I go on vacation for two weeksâjust…