Nota Bene
ddobbs | February 2, 2007Now we know what Harvard's doing with all that money.
Here's an amazing look at the state of the art in biological illustration and animation: a sort of cell's inner life, with extremely high production values. Takes a few seconds to load on broadband; don't think I'd try it with dial-up.
But this is some serious eye candy. Wish I knew what half the stuff was.
ddobbs | January 18, 2007Now comes more news -- unflattering to the company -- about Eli Lilly's, um, selective release of data about its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. Lilly is trying to squash the full release (aka "leak" or "unauthorized publication") of internal company documents that allegedly reveal its attempt to cover up Zyprexa's dangerous side effects. But as Jake at Pure Pedantry outlines and the New York Times details, the attempt -- which itself hardly looks good -- will likely fail, partly because many of of the documents have already been posted on web servers outside the U.S. ,and thus out of reach of U…
ddobbs | January 10, 2007
Capt. Andy MacLean, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, after his unit's first night of serious combat in the Iraq War, Apr 1-2, 2003. Image by David Leeson/Dallas Morning News/CORBIS SYGMA
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The floor of the National Museum of Iraq after it sacking during the second week of April, 2003.
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Among the responses to my previous post, "Why we're suckers for war talk", was a comment accusing me of "the error of assuming…
ddobbs | January 8, 2007
I'm not a reagular reader of Foreign Policy magazine, but thank goodness I check in regularly at The Thinking Meat Project, which draws attention to a fascinating piece by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemnn on on how common "error biases" in our thinking make us vulnerable to the strident certainty of hawkish arguments. The article explains why leaders (and the rest of us presumably) often fall for arguments that advocate "forceful action" when something more thoughtful is called for.
This is not a cutesy essay by some trendy thinker; it's is a careful piece of work by Princeton economist…
ddobbs | December 22, 2006Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, recently raised some juicy issues about bringing a Media 2.0 sort of transparency to a Media 1.0 (okay, Media 1.4) "traditional" magazine like Wired. His proposals address questions that I, as a writer mainly in 1.0 venues like print magazines and books, have been mulling over in a back-of-the-head sort of way.
(My long recent silence on this blog, for instance, while due mainly to being far too busy, rose also from my ambivalence about what makes a worthwhile blog post (more on that some other time) and a slight unease with…
ddobbs | December 20, 2006
I try to keep on top of controversies about drug companies, but lately it's hard to keep up with all the latest revelations and laundry spills -- and to wrap your head around the variations. Today the New York Times reports that Eli Lilly mounted an organized effort to convince doctors to prescribe its powerful schizophrenia and bipolar-disorder drug Zyprexa for elderly patients with symptoms of dementia -- despite that dementia in the elderly rises from causes quite different than those of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, is far less serious problem than schizophrenia, and that Zyprexa…
ddobbs | October 25, 2006
I'm not speaking of political terrorists but of the terror that spreading "ordinary" violence brings to communities. Amid the rash of school violence over the last few weeks, the town just next to my own placid, lovely Vermont town, Barre, was recently shaken when three teenagers got involved in a grisly murder of a down-and-out drifter and drug dealer. A friend of mine teaches at the Barre High School, and he said the entire student body is shaken up. Kids are edgy; fights are breaking out for no reason; the school teams are getting into scraps on the field.
So it was depressing and…
ddobbs | October 23, 2006Amid my guilt at not writing more on avian flu myself, I note well this typically excellent post from Effect Measure, pondering: Why so little word lately of bird flu? Its issues intersect, in a very rough way, with those raised about science journalism by Janet Stemwedel, James Hrynyshyn and Jonah Lehrer.
I won't go here into why lousy science journalism happens. But the bird flu issue illustrates another problem in science (and other) journalism, which is the lack of coverage sometimes given to important stories. The publishing industry, particularly the newsier part, generally values…