culture of science
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Ed Yong examines how a simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students.
The Questionable Authority considers The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath.
Jessica Palmer, in a healthy display of online media's corrective power, tries to make clear that For the last time: that "Twitter is Evil" paper is not about Twitter!.
Zimmer takes a tour of assisted migration.
Effect measure argues the lack of universal health care in the US is morally and fiscally bankrupt.
ddobbs | April 18, 2009Vaughn Bell, looking at the recent reports on torture, finds unsettling information about the participation of psychologists and physicians:
The Washington Post has an article exploring recently released 'war on terror' interrogation memos, showing that "psychologists, physicians and other health officials" played a key part in interrogations widely condemned as torture.
It's an interesting revelation because during the long debates, and some say heal-dragging, over whether the American Psychological Association should ban its members from participation, one of their main arguments was that…
ddobbs | April 15, 2009"You couldn't make this up: Cameras are being turned on the people paid to watch CCTV streams, to note which bits of surveillance footage they didn't see." via BoingBoing
The beauty of sand, close up -- a photo gallery at Discover.
Robots as recruitment to science. "If you stick a robot--I don't care if you're talking about grade school kids or high school students--if you put a robot in the middle of the room, there is something captivating about the technology." from Making Robots Personal - an interview with Tandy Trower of Microsoft Robotics. I find this particularly relevant as my 7-y.…
ddobbs | April 8, 2009When you propose that we are overdiagnosing PTSD in vets, you run into not only a lot of flak but many offerings of evidence suggesting that we're missing a lot of cases. Since publishing my article on PTSD, I've received those arguments directly in comments, and on Wednesday, April 8, Salon published an article, "I am under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD," by Michael de Yoanna and Mark Benjamin, that offers unsettling evidence that at least some doctors working for the VA are being pressed to not diagnose PTSD in combat vets.
So which is it? Are we under- or overdiagnosing PTSD in…
ddobbs | April 5, 2009Heads-up dept:
I'll be discussing I discussed "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," my Scientific American story on PTSD, at noon, Monday, April 6, on NHPR's "Word of Mouth." You can listen to the 7-minute segment here, following a very brief intro to the program. Link to the station's website here.
ddobbs | March 24, 2009Skip this post if you don't want to read a writer responding point by point to a self-indulgent, insubstantial attack by a major academic.
I should say right off that I've long admired the more measured critiques that J. Douglas Bremner, a PTSD researcher and professor of radiology and psychiatry at Emory University, has offered about the pharmaceutical industry's exploitation of the neurochemical model of depression. My regard for this work made his critique of attack on my article about PTSD, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome," all the more disappointing.
I'm not disappointed because…
ddobbs | March 23, 2009I've had mixed reactions to Gladwell's writing over the years: I always enjoy reading it, but in Blink, especially, when he was writing about an area I knew more about than in his other books, I was troubled not just by what seemed an avoidance of neuroscientific explanations of attention and decision-making, but by an argument that seemed to come down to "The best way to make decisions is the quick gut method, except when it's not." I was also troubled by ... well, I couldn't put my finger on it. But Joseph Epstein has:
Too frequently one reads Gladwell's anecdotes, case studies, potted…
ddobbs | March 22, 2009A few days ago I had a brief post on a team of Spanish kids who used a latex balloon and a $60 camera to take photographs of the earth from near the edge of space. My info was sketchy at the time, but an alert reader found and sent me a link to the group's website, which has a nice account, with many photos, of the operation. The page is in Catalan but has a pull-down Google translation option up near the top so you can quickly have it translated. It's a great look at the intense excitement of shoestring-budget science.
Here's the crew:
the trajectory of the balloon:
And along the way,…
ddobbs | March 20, 2009A few weeks ago, Matt Stevens, the National Guard captain and medic who served in Iraq and whom I mentioned in my Scientific American article, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap, wrote me an email about the social unease he often encountered when he showed any behavior that might remind people he had served in Iraq -- a greater seriousness, an impatience with petty concerns or inefficiency, or even just talking about the place.
I have begun to think of military PTSD as to some extent a civilian problem rather than a soldier problem. To expand slightly here; civilians/politicians send soldiers…
ddobbs | March 18, 2009It didn't take long for my Scientific American story on PTSD to draw the sort of fire I expected. A doctor blogging as "egalwan" at Follow Me Here writes
[Dobbs] is critical of a culture which "seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD." To critics like this, the overwhelming incidence of PTSD diagnoses in returning Iraqi veterans is not a reflection of the brutal meaningless horror to which many of the combatants were exposed but of a sissy culture that can no longer suck it up.
Doctor or not, he's seeing politics where my…
ddobbs | March 16, 2009Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn't fit in the main piece -- though those may end up at the main blog, so you may want to keep an eye there or subscribe via RSS or Atom.
Main sources and documents in "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap."
These are organized by story section, roughly in the order the relevant material appears.…
ddobbs | March 14, 2009
My story in the April 2009 Scientific American story, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap", just went online. Here's the opening:
In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest
period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended.
[snip]
"Clinicians aren't separating the…
ddobbs | March 10, 2009"How We Decide" author Jonah Lehrer, fresh from a book tour of the UK, offers what he calls a "spluttering answer" (it's really quite lucid) to a question he says he's getting a lot these days: What decision-making errors were involved in our current financial meltdown??
The short version of his answer -- well worth reading in its entirety -- is that we (and big investment outfits particularlyl) succumbed to an abhorrence of uncertainty.
We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions. I think some of the…
ddobbs | March 5, 2009Notables from my morning feedscan:
The vision folks at Barrow study "Where's Waldo?" to figure out search strategies.
A virtual-reality helmet claims to to feed all five senses. Interesting if true.
Winner best-and-worsrt headline writing in a press release: Prawnography shows captive bred prawns lack lust And in second place, running, um, close behind: Scatological clues lead to an intimate view, which actually looks at some pretty interesting group dynamics in lemurs during their annual birthing time, when babies are at risk of being murdered.
Neurotopia continues a good series on the…
ddobbs | March 2, 2009Below, the "jugum penis," designed to prevent "nocturnal lincontinence" (aka masturbation). One of many wonders in a new London Science Museum online exhibit of historical medical objects called "Brought to Life," as featured in this New Scientist photo essay.
Don't try these at home.
ddobbs | March 1, 2009Matthew Nisbet says maybe, but not by much.
In the U.S., there is often the false assumption that Europeans are somehow more engaged and supportive of science than Americans. Yet, as I discuss in several studies and as I have written about in articles, instead of science literacy, the same generalizable interaction between values, social identity, and media portrayals drive European perceptions of science debates. Indeed, cross-national survey studies show that while science remains the most widely admired and respected institution in American society, Europeans are far more ambivalent about…
ddobbs | February 27, 2009I drove up to Montreal yesterday, and amid visits with anthropologist and Somatosphere founder Eugene Raikhel, anthropologist Allan Young, and Suparna Choudhury, talked about (among other things) the emerging new area of study they're calling "critical neuroscience."
What the heck is critical neuroscience? Well, one definition calls it
the attempt to assess and inform neuroscientific practice from a rich interdisciplinary perspective, and to categorize, evaluate and (begin to) manage the various risks resulting from neuroscience and its results and applications
.
Daniel Lende, one of the…
ddobbs | February 19, 2009
The Amygdaloids at the 92d Y, 4/3/08. Music starts at about 3m. LeDoux's the guitarist who is NOT singing. (Maybe it scares him?)
A few months back I gave a heads-up that NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux and his band, t the Amygdaloids, were playing in NYC. Well, the virus has spread! At Rock-It Science, March 3 in NYC, LeDoux and his band, the Amygdaloids (LeDoux pretty much owns the amygdala via his work on fear mechanisms) are to be joined on March 3 in NYC by other musical scientists-would-be-rock-stars, science bands, and science writers such as Pardis Sabetti (Harvard), David Soldier (…
ddobbs | February 13, 2009Dangerous concept; successful execution: From the mediea team at Small Mammal, a cute video story that deconstructs a cute YouTube video to look at the science of cuteness.
Somebody run tell Liz Spikol!
ddobbs | February 12, 2009Despite the rain on my window, it's a fine day indeed, with many wonderful celebrations of Darwin's 200th ringing throughout the blogoshere.
Most of these, naturally, focus on Darwin's theory of evolution and its many implications and reverberations. I much admire that theory. But what I find most fascinating about Darwin is not his theory of evolution but his method of empiricism. For as vital as was Darwin's theory of evolution was, his impact on how we view ourselves is rivaled by his impact on how we view and do science.
This and many other perverse oddities struck me when I was…