November 28, 2008
Jerome Kagan, a highly prominent developmental psychologist, weighs in the Dana Foundation's Cerebrum on the roots of the skyrocketing rates of diagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder, autism, and ADHD. "[it] is important ... to ask," he writes
whether this troubling [increase] reflects a true…
November 26, 2008
Lisa Bero
Critics of the FDA drug-trial process have often complained that the drug companies are free to publish only the trials that are flattering to their cause (that is, only those that show effects above placebo and relatively low side-effects). As explained in Wired Science, UC San…
November 26, 2008
If you liked the Grifters, you'll love this: Watch Skeptic editor Michael Shermer participate in a classic con called the pigeon drop. Beautiful stuff.
November 25, 2008
More wheels coming off the bus.
Research Center Tied to Drug Company - NYTimes.com:
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: November 24, 2008
When a Congressional investigation revealed in June that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a world-renowned child psychiatrist, had earned far more money from drug makers than he…
November 25, 2008
Vintage Trillin:By Meat Alone: The Best Texas BBQ in the WorldThe first time Burka went to Lexington to check out Snow's, he arrived
just before noon. "It looked like it had never been open," he said. "It
was deserted." When he finally got there at a time when meat was still
available, he was…
November 24, 2008
Some musico-video relief from darker matters.
First, from On an Overgrown Path:
Here is the Zurich Chamber Orchestra putting the usual YouTube offerings to shame. The full screen version is even better.
Zurich Chamber Orchestra : Roller Coasterby mikropikol
Path also led me to nice piece on the…
November 24, 2008
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa
As the Times reported Friday, Senator Charles Grassley's pharma-money sweep has taken down another huge player in psychiatry: Grassley revealed that Fred Goodwin, a former NIH director who has long hosted the award-winning NPR radio show "The Infinite Mind," which…
November 24, 2008
Computerized reconstruction, via BBC
from Nature's The Great Beyond:
Copernicus corpse confirmed - November 21, 2008
A skull from Frombork cathedral in Poland has been identified as that of revolutionary astronomer Copernicus.
Marie Allen, of Uppsala University, says DNA from the skull is a…
November 21, 2008
This one hits close to home, as I live in Vermont. As Daniel Carlat notes, Vermont is one of the few states to actually require drug companies to disclose drug-company payments to MDs, but the state allowed exception for payments related to 'trade secrets.' The companies apparently made the most…
November 10, 2008
The wonders of YouTube. Couple of highly distinctive voices here. Wonderful stuff.
Hat tip: kottke
November 7, 2008
For those in or near NYC, a notable event: Fear researcher Joseph LeDoux, whom I profiled a while back in Scientific American Mind, will lecture about fear -- and then, fearlessly, play with his R&R band, 'The Amygdaloids.' (The amygdala is the brain's fear center.)
I can't make it, much to my…
November 6, 2008
Wow. From Newsweek:
At the Obama headquarters in midsummer, technology experts detected what they initially thought was a computer virus—a case of "phishing," a form of hacking often employed to steal passwords or credit-card numbers. But by the next day, both the FBI and the Secret Service came…
November 6, 2008
photo: E. Leslie, via New Scientist
As Science News reports, drawing on a paper in the Nov 6 Nature (paid subscription required), climate change -- in particular a lack of the fluffy snowpack that lemmings depend on as cover for ground-level foraging -- appears to be putting the hurt on lemming…
November 4, 2008
From "Bye-bye blackboard ... from Einstein and others," an exhibit at the Museum of the HIstory of Science in Oxford.
‘I wrote the music on this blackboard while I was giving a lecture about Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Holywell Music Room on 22nd March this year, before performing them. I…
November 4, 2008
As an avid tennis player (though it's been a while), I had to love this and do: The busy bloggers at Neurophilosophy bring their usual lucidity to a paper by David Whitney, of the University of California, Davis, on how inherent dynamics of visual perception make line-call errors by tennis…
November 4, 2008
Earlier today I posted about Paul Tough's Clay Risen's* Atlantic profile of Michelle Rhee, the controversial Washington DC school chancellor. I forgot to mention that there is also an interview of Rhee on the Atlantic website.
*correcttion made 11/09/08
November 4, 2008
Michelle Rheephoto by David Deal, from Atlantic Monthly
To my surprise, one of the most-read posts on this mostly-science blog is "Are Teachers Profesionals of Public-Service Workers?", which looked at a NY Times Magazine piece on school reforms by Paul Tough. Tough now has Now there is a piece…
November 4, 2008
I'm brave, I'll call this one early: Go here for some wonderful photos of our next president.
© Callie Shell/Aurora for Time
November 3, 2008
I like several of Ian McEwan's novels and especially admired his novel Saturday, which, being among other things a riff on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," updated that novel's m.o. by giving the stream of its narrator's narrative a decidely neuroscientific tint.
In another novel, Amsterdam,…
November 3, 2008
Music meets voice meets talking points.
Via Alex Ross:
October 18, 2008
The good folks at Neuroanthropology drew my attention to a pair of videos showing how chimpanzees work together to corral, kill, and then eat colubus monkeys. Amazing stuff.
The embedded video below shows a hunt from the rather chaotic point of view of cameramen chasing the chase at jungle-floor…
October 17, 2008
Somebody bought Einstein's watch. Does this thing run fast, or slow?
You have to love a guy who plays violin and sails.
photo courtesy Antiquorum
October 17, 2008
In "The Gregarious Brain," my NY Times Magazine story last year about Williams syndrome -- in which a genetic accident causes an intriguing combination of cognitive deficits and hypersociability colored by a lack of social fear and (to some extent) savvy -- I devoted some space to the "social…
September 26, 2008
This week's Science is particularly rich in stories, it seems. These stories require a paid subscription, alas -- but the write-ups here, in Science's weekly mailing, make pretty good reading on their own for those without a subscription. My favorites:
From the Minds of Babes
I became fascinated…
September 19, 2008
Direct from Mind Hacks: Loud Music Makes You Drink More:
PsyBlog has a delightful article discussing whether louder music increases alcohol consumption. It turns out it does, and surprisingly, there seems to have been quite a few studies done to examine the effect.
One research group even did a…
September 16, 2008
Here's one completely new to me:
Today's VSL:Science link calls attention to tardigrades (aka "water bears," for reasons apparent in the YouTube video above), which are barely visible invertebrates that live on mosses and lichens -- and through virtually anything.
They are virtually…
September 15, 2008
Quite bizarre. No evidence one way or another whether (or how) this might actually affect us. But it's an odd thing to ponder.
Via Furious Seasons, I'll just let him deliver it:
September 12, 2008
The AP Finds Even More Pharma Products In America's Water Supply
Back in March, the AP's investigative…
September 11, 2008
A friend asked me the other day why he hadn't heard more this year about the question of whether global warming was driving more and bigger hurricanes. The Knight Science Journalism Tracker suggests he's just not reading the right papers. It brings a good round-up of how coverage on that question…
September 11, 2008
Gotta love this. The geeky (but attractive) blog Radio Bantik: Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek, runs a comparative politico-coding analysis of the website engineering behind the McCain and Obama websites. Great stuff, brought to my attention by the Columbia Journalism review.
I spent some time…
September 11, 2008
An amusing (and revealing, when Carrell asks McCain about pork) look at Steve Carrell's on-the-job training as a political journalist on the Daily Show.
Hat tip to:mediabistro.com: FishbowlNY .
Tags: JohnMcCain, journalism, Steve Carrell, Daily Show, Straight Talk Express
