Nota Bene

You can't make this stuff up. Unfortunately, you don't have to: âAs hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves in which they are also at zero at the end of the year with credit cards and mortgage bills that are inescapable,â said Holly Peterson, the author of an Upper East Side novel of manners, âThe Manny,â and the daughter of Peter G. Peterson, a founder of the equity firm the Blackstone Group. âFive hundred thousand dollars means taking their kids out of private school and selling their home in a…
My brother, who started his medical career as a pulmonary tech at a naval hospital and is now the medical director for the National Disaster Medical System -- a system that draws heavily on medical personnel normally employed outside government -- sent me this account of his Inauguration Day, which he spent overseeing the NDMS care of the vast crowd on the Mall. Allen's job that day, for which he spent months preparing, was to be ready for anything from stubbed toes and headaches to widespread medical disasters of the sort best not pondered (except by disaster relief people). The day proved…
The blog post of that name (covering the Science article "Mispredicting Affective and Behavioral Responses" to Racism raises a good question. I always liked my sister's response when such sentiments were aired. "Excuse me," she would say, "but your cape is showing."
With this post, and with pleasure, I bring the blog formerly known as Smooth Pebbles -- now Neuron Culture (mark your RSS readers!) -- back to Scienceblogs. Seventeen months ago I said farewell to this Scienceblogs home, at least for a time, because I had not found blogging a comfortable fit. Since then, however, as I blogged off in the hinterland, I've come to better see how this slippery but flexible form can hold a valuable place in both my own writing and in the changing world of journalism. I've been particularly swayed by the work of bloggers innovatively exploiting the immediacy,…
One more reason to like Will Smith. Hat tip to kottke, who links to some other amazing Rubikiean feats.
Forgive if I'm obsessed with this death-of-journalism thing -- Andrew Sullivan has a nice piece in the Times of London about dying newspapers. Like Surowiecki, he fears the loss of the deep reporting that newspapers are already doing less of, and for which so far we have no real replacement venue. Stunning stat from the story: The Baltimore Sun, a pretty big and renowned paper (and the basis for The Wire) gets about 17.5 million page views a month. Sullivan's blog at Atlantic gets 23 million: The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the…
I won't replicate the Word-of-the-Day email every day, but this was too good not to pass on. "The Dingle duo are seriously concerned that Jasmine's about to go doolally." doolally PRONUNCIATION: (DU-lah-lee) MEANING: adjective: Irrational, deranged, or insane. ETYMOLOGY: After Deolali, a small town in western India. It's about 100 miles from Mumbai with an unusual claim to fame. It's where British soldiers who had completed their tour of duty were sent to await transportation home. It was a long wait -- often many months -- before they were to be picked up by ships to take them to England.…
How did I miss this for 24 hours? From the Times Magazine's 8th Annual Year in Ideas issue - Vending Machine for Crows: In June, Josh Klein revealed his master's-thesis project to a flock of crows at the Binghamton Zoo in south-central New York State. The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he'd created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish.…
From The Great Beyond Far East top in science subjects Researchers in the US have released the latest figures comparing the maths and science abilities of 4th- and 8th-grade students in countries across the globe. Far Eastern countries dominate the top tens, with Singapore top for science in both 4th and 8th grade. In maths, Hong Kong tops the 4th grade scores, with ‘Chinese Taipei’ leading the 8th. (Image right shows the percentage of fourth-grade students who reached the TIMSS advanced international benchmark in science in the top ten countries. See full graph.) As the New York Times points…
INTERVIEWER Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule? HEMINGWAY When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day…
There's been a lot of buzz on the Net* about the Nature commentary on cognitive enhancement I blogged about yesterday, in which I noted that you need only think about coffee to realize what a slippery slope the cog enhancement issue presents. If you want to experience first-hand just how slippery, take this survey, which reader Michael Lanthier kindly drew my attention to. It starts with a question about coffee and pulls you inexorably, um, downhill from there. It's hard to take that survey without concluding the issue of enhancement offers no bright lines. if someone knows of a rigorous…
Malcolm Gladwell on how to spot great teachers (and why we should want to): Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year%u2019s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half%u2019s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year%u2019s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a %u201Cbad%u201D school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad…
This time had to come: A group that includes some serious neuro-heavyweights, such as neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Ronald Kessler and the highly prominent and influential neuroethicists Hank Greely and Martha Farah, has published in Nature an essay "Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy." In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and…
A few that rolled away with the tide ... PsychCentral not impressed with Outliers Look Who's in the Operating Room From the Deutches Museum, tractors as core culture And from Boing Boing, a Studley tool chest. And I was all excited to get my little canvas toolbag yesterday. - Technorati Tags:Malcolm Gladwell, Medtronics, Deutsches Museum, Wildlife
Eva Sollberger of Seven Day has posted a charming video feature about the Christmas tree farm run by Jim and Steve Moffatt, of Craftsbury, Vermont -- a family that occupies a major part of my first book "The Northern Forest," which I wrote with my friend Richard Ober. I spent a lot of time with the Moffatts, some of the finest people I've ever known. This video captures their wonderful combination of humor, intelligence, and virtue. Short, sweet, and just the thing for the season. Technorati Tags:Jim Moffatt Technorati Tags:Steve Moffatt, Eva Sollberger, Christmas tree farms, Vermont,…
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 chagrin, but having met LeDoux -- who is highly enjoyable company and has done Nobel-Prize-level work defining fear's neuralogical pathways -- I know this will be a highly fascinating, fun, and funny evening. at the NY Academy of Sciences 7 World Trade Center (250 Greenwich St @ Barclay), 40th…
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 to the campaign with an ominous warning: "You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," an agent told Obama's team. "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system." The following day, Obama campaign chief David Plouffe heard from White House…
I'm brave, I'll call this one early: Go here for some wonderful photos of our next president. © Callie Shell/Aurora for Time
Music meets voice meets talking points. Via Alex Ross:
A couple months ago I became a subscriber to Very Short List, an email list that sends you just ONE web link a day, 5 days a week, as a way of clueing you in to something that is both good and overlooked: Might be a movie, a web site, a blog, a book. I've now become a (modestly) paid "advisor" to a new VSL email sub-offering, VSL Science, a science-only version of the same daily email. The Shirky talk on Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus in my previous post is today's VSL Science offering, and it was something I managed to stumble over and offer up in my advisor role. It's a fun list…