purepedantry
Posts by this author
May 12, 2008
Recently, there were a set of posts arguing for different models of the effects of the minimum wage on employment. Megan McArdle argues that perfect competition models of the effects of minimum wage on the labor market implies that increases in the minimum wage will raise unemployment. Kathy G at…
May 9, 2008
This is funny. Daniel Drezner, having received the full professor status, lists the benefits:
6) Something better than that stupid f@#%ing pen ceremony. As this site observes, "The scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind in which mathematics professors ritualistically present pens to Nash was…
May 9, 2008
Language Log has a fascinating article about creole languages and birdsongs:
Zebra finches are among the songbirds who learn their songs by imitating adults, just as human children learn their language by interaction with those who already know it. Male songbirds raised in isolation, without any…
May 9, 2008
We have known for some time that there is a double dissociation (I will define that term in a minute) between location and identification in the visual system. Neuroscientists speak of a "where" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe up into the parietal lobe.…
May 8, 2008
Stephen Colbert skewers as per usual...
"If we go to smaller cars, soon we'll be just like Europe."
Hat-tip: Greg Mankiw and Tyler Cowen
May 8, 2008
Thank you, NYTimes, for clarifying something I have always wondered about: how does running outside compare to running on a treadmill?
A number of studies have shown that in general, outdoor running burns about 5 percent more calories than treadmills do, in part because there is greater wind…
May 8, 2008
In honor of Mother's Day, NPR has a great piece on the difficulties of being a modern Mom and delaying having children:
Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually…
May 8, 2008
Bryan Caplan writing in the NYTimes suggests that in spite of making no economic sense whatsoever the gas tax holiday might be a good idea as a symbolic gesture:
The first is that the tax holiday is a relatively cheap symbolic gesture that makes truly bad policies less likely. The main causes of…
May 7, 2008
There is an interesting article by Brandon Busteed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about college drinking. Busteed argues that the problem is not the population that addiction specialists tend to focus on: the really heavy drinkers. Rather the problem is in the much more numerous group of moderate…
May 5, 2008
Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Down with that imperialist aggressor Napoleon III! (The painting to the right is Manet's Execution of Maximillian. Supposedly, the chap on the right looks like Napoleon III, in a zinger to his administration which Manet viewed as responsible for Maximillian's death…
May 5, 2008
A post over at the Scientist blog laments the difficulty in getting people to acknowledge the English-language bias in science:
Many, perhaps most, scientists are grateful that English has become the international language, but an informative protest comes from Prof. Tsuda Yukio of Japan, who has…
May 2, 2008
There is a great blogginghead.tv conversation up between two of my favorite bloggers, Megan McArdle and Daniel Drezner.
They discuss whether academics are bitter. McArdle argues that the labor market makes their lives very unfortunate. Drezner argues that the issue is complicated by the fact…
May 1, 2008
After the whole Floyd Landis thing, I wrote a long post about the science of detecting steroid abuse. The primary test uses something called the T/E ratio to determine whether the athlete has injected steroids. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has a maximum T/E ratio of 4. If an athlete gets…
April 30, 2008
(Keeping with our trend towards a week of economics -- see here and here -- I have another post where I attempt to talk above my pay grade.)
I am as unhappy as anybody about high oil prices making everything on Earth expensive, but I am getting a little annoyed by the Presidential candidates glib…
April 29, 2008
Paging Kara (or some other economist).
I have an economics question. We were discussing monopolistic competition in micro today. So I get how because the quantity produced under monopolistic competition is less than the efficient scale there is some dead weight loss on the level of the firm. The…
April 29, 2008
The NYTimes Editorial Board wrote at piece lamenting the high prices of college textbooks and praising Congressional action to limit them:
College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of…
April 28, 2008
This is pretty funny. Check out Dr. Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology.
Some of my favorites:
Evolutionary Psychology: A branch of psychology, unwittingly inspired by Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling, that describes how we behave through made up stores that guess why we had to behave. In this…
April 24, 2008
I can tell you from personal experience that being a med/grad student is not an environment that promotes healthy eating. Your schedule is all over bejesus and back, you're poor, and your often stressed. Rising food prices have made eating out at some place healthy a non-starter. Let's just say…
April 23, 2008
Boo on you, Barack and Hillary.
Others have this subject amply covered, but I wanted to note that Barack and Hillary have both jumped on the anti-vaccinationist bandwagon. The bandwagon is getting crowded what with McCain already being on it.
Granted, Barack and Hillary did not say something as…
April 23, 2008
(I have been meaning to post this for about two weeks, so if it is a bit dated forgive me.)
Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by slower reading skills acquisition, and it is associated with certain structural abnormalities in the brain. However, it turns out that different areas of…
April 22, 2008
The NYTimes has a great interview with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert:
What we've been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy -- or unhappy. If you can't tell which futures are better than others, it's hard to find happiness.…
April 22, 2008
The subpeona against Kathleen Seidel has been quashed.
ENDORSED ORDER granting MOTION to Quash Subpoena.
Text of Order: "Granted. Attorney Clifford Shoemaker is ordered to show cause within 10 days why he should not be sanctioned under Fed R Civ P 11 -- see Fed R Civ P 45(a)(2)(B) which requires…
April 21, 2008
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Kathleen Seidel, a blogger at neurodiversity.com, who was being intimidated via subpeona by a lawyer for anti-vaccinationists. The lawyer, Clifford Shoemaker, represents plaintiffs in a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers alleging that mercury in their vaccines…
April 21, 2008
This is from the Onion:
University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year…
April 21, 2008
Eddie Izzard eyes entering European Union politics. Well that would at least make things more interesting.
So much excellence on NPR lately.
Robert Krulwich explains why -- though radio and television communications have long been projected into space -- it is unlikely that aliens are listening…
April 20, 2008
Everyone seems to be worried about when the Internet will implode.
From the Economist Tech.view:
And not just because of the popularity of such file-sharing programs with music fans. The sizes of the files they handled increased dramatically. Music tracks and podcasts used to be offered for…
April 19, 2008
Tyler Cowen breaks down the thinking that a carbon cap with dividends is better than a carbon tax:
A broader question is whether the carbon dividends in fact make the citizenry better off. First there is the question of the incidence of the initial carbon tax, which of course falls on individuals…
April 18, 2008
Here is a different approach to measuring brain activity in humans. Researchers in Japan are placing a sheet of electrodes inside the skull but on top of the cortex.
Researchers at Osaka University are stepping up efforts to develop robotic body parts controlled by thought, by placing electrode…