February 3, 2010
I was thrilled this morning to learn that this humble, erratic blog was named one of Top 30 Science Blogs by Eureka, the new monthly science magazine recently launched by the Times of London. I find myself among some most admirable company, including giants, longtime favorites of my own, and a…
February 1, 2010
PTSD, pharma, adjuvants, bad movies -- these are a few of my favorite things, and readers' too.
What's Neil doing here? He wasn't on Neuron Culture; I posted his clip on my catch-all, David Dobbs's Somatic Marker, because I love him. So he comes first. From 1986. Looks as if he's having a…
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…
January 31, 2010
The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine
64 Comments
By Ed Silverman // January 28th, 2010 // 7:57 am
You've heard of evidence-based medicine. Well, a new paper summarizes a panoply of practices employed over the past two decades or so - ghostwriting, suppressing or spinning data, disease…
January 29, 2010
Hits of the week:
Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism?
Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss…
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…
January 26, 2010
We're not on health care now," Mr. Reid said. "We've talked a lot about it in the past.
via nytimes.com
With friends like this ...
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
January 26, 2010
Neuroskeptic ponders the growing evidence that antidepressants significantly best placebo only in the more (or most) depressed patients. His take is that:
antidepressants treat classical clinical depression, of the kind that psychiatrists in 1960 would have recognized. This is the kind of…
January 25, 2010
In my "Atlantic article on the genetic roots of stable-versus-reactive temperaments, I noted that the key gene variants linked to these traits appeared to have developed over only the last 50,000-100,000 years -- a short time in evolutionary time. That same idea is developed in Cochran and…
January 14, 2010
We don't have a government-run system. But our system is so expensive that our government's partial role is pricier than the whole of government-run systems.
via voices.washingtonpost.com
Absorb that: Our supposedly efficient supposedly free-market healthcare system costs us more in government…
January 14, 2010
This is a pretty big deal if it holds up in future trials. One caveat I've not had time to check out is whether the morphine was often applied as part of an more robust medical response in general, which itself might reduce later PTSD symptoms. I hope the DOD soon follows up with another, larger…
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…
January 8, 2010
The study made news--see, for example, this piece in the New York Times. But do the results really mean that antidepressants are ineffective? I don't think so. In order to understand the implications of the study, you have to understand how clinical trials are conducted, and how radically they…
January 5, 2010
'Twas the month of orchidness. I had a spotty month posting in December, as book bidness and then the holidays massacred blog production, but got some good traffic despite. The leaders:
1. Are "orchid kids" the same as "gifted children"? was my blog reaction to Lisa Belkin's' blog reaction at the…
January 5, 2010
I 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…
December 24, 2009
The last time a president won with 60 percent of the vote, for instance, was when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in 1964. Health-care reform passed the House with only 50.5 percent of the body voting for it. And the senators making up this morning's 60 votes actually represent closer to…
December 22, 2009
Amid the various recent whacks at considerations of Gladwell lately, I find this one, by Razib Khan, particularly helpful in defining what sometimes goes amiss with Gladwell â and the danger that waits every science writer:
[Gladwell's problem is that] out of the possible set of ideas and models,…
December 22, 2009
via Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
For a while now, the FDA and other regulators have been looking at safety risks associated with a few drugs patients sometimes take before getting MRI scans.
While it's common for new risks to crop up with established drugs, the Times of London this weekend…
December 22, 2009
My post of a few days ago on rebooting science journalism stirred more (and more interesting) discussion than I anticipated. After writing a very long response, I decided to just write a short response in the comments section. But once I'd done that, I thought, Well, maybe this should just be its…
December 21, 2009
Note: The version below is altered from the original, which was near-gibberish in a few spots. Why? Because I mistakenly posted a pre-edit version that contained the raw 'transcription' from voice-recognition software I've been trying out. (I suppose it could have been a lot worse.)
Here, more or…
December 21, 2009
Update: Show's done. You can listen to the 8-minute segment via Windows Media or MP3/iTunes.
I'll be on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word Of Mouth" noon-hour show tomorrow, Tuesday, Dec 22, talking with host Virginia Prescott about "Orchid Children," my recent Atlantic article about the genetic…
December 18, 2009
Like a compulsive crack user desperately sucking on a broken pipe, we can't get enough of addiction.
via slate.com
Great to see Bell in Slate, and as usual he brings some good hard facts -- along with finely wrought opinion and wit. â to an area that can get mushy quick.
Posted via web from…
December 18, 2009
Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn't scarce because people didn't create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That's no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody…
December 18, 2009
I wanted to rig up an electrified fence around the falsehood to keep the producers from sneaking back to it
via blogs.discovermagazine.com
Carl Zimmer on just how damned bad much science TV is. I've not advised programs, as Carl has, but the times I've seen subjects I'd written about covered on TV…
December 18, 2009
A nice short piece on "The Prehistory of Stress" by Matt Ford at Ars Technica (newly designed site worth checking out).
I have heard people say, on multiple occasions, that they think stress is a modern, Western phenomenon. While the psychological phenomenon known as stress has only had a formal…
December 18, 2009
If you need a neurohook, think language acquisition, attention, mirror neurons, make your pick. No need. This one wins on entertainment value alone. via the twitter feed of the fine writer P.D. Smith.
When you're done, tune into RadioLab's stunning piece on Hamlet's last utterings.
December 17, 2009
At the ScienceOnline 2010 conference next month, I'm going to be on a panel about "Rebooting Science Journaiism," in which I'll join Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, and John Timmer in pondering the future of science journalism. God knows what will come of it, as none of us have the sure answers. But that…
December 14, 2009
Last Friday I was on "To the Best of Our Knowledge," the excellent talk show put out by Wisconsin Public Radio, talking with Anne Strainchamps about my Atlantic article. Strainchamps is a good interviewer and we got some interesting calls. Those who missed it can listen to the hour-long segment…
December 14, 2009
Dear Readers, here's your chance to weigh in:
Over at the Atlantic, David Shenk, a sharp writer who keeps a blog there called "The Genius in Us All," has posted a gentlemanly smackdown ("Metaphor fight! Shenk and Dobbs square off") that he and I had via email last week regarding the "orchid-…
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…
