I just received galleys of what looks like an interesting book: The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, by Matt Mason. I haven’t cracked it yet, but the Mason book reminded me of another recent book about piracy — the real, old-fashioned kind, with peglegs and pieces of eight — called Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for John Caplan, the president of Ford Models. Amidst all the Fashion Week furor, he took the time to answer. Q: Have models truly gotten smaller over the past, let’s say, 30 years? Is it a result of demands from designers, editors, and/or advertisers, or did it start with the kinds of models that . . .
Match the drug to the warning label. (Hat tip: BoingBoing) Does Consumer Reports need a lesson in data analysis? (Earlier) Meet Harvard macroeconomist Robert Barro. Hotels grapple with going green.
We hope to have something meaningful to say in our next book about the efficacy of advertising. This is a huge question that impacts everything from commerce to politics to journalism. But for now, let me give one example. My kids were recently watching a Yankees-Red Sox day game on TV, broadcast on the YES network. One of the commercials . . .
Levitt and Dubner have blogged quite a bit about the growing literature on happiness studies. Meanwhile, the media has been abuzz recently over the relationship (or possible lack thereof) between happiness and wealth. Enter Angus Deaton, a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton. Deaton has a published new paper, “Income, Aging, Health and Wellbeing Around the World: Evidence . . .
New book advocates following your gut. U.S. obesity rates keep on climbing. (Earlier) Ways to avoid hospital-transmitted infections. (Earlier) Red Lobster launches health-conscious Web site. (Earlier)
Is obesity really the Black Plague the media makes it out to be? Is the “overweight epidemic” real? We’ve assembled a team of prominent economists, doctors, authors and experts to offer inside views on health, nutrition, and whether America is eating itself to death.
Here’s even more reason to take a deep breath and let anger slide: The American Psychological Association Journal has published a study led by Smith College psychologist Benita Jackson testing whether a relationship exists between levels of hostility and lung function — the reduction of which can lead to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, one of the leading causes of death . . .
In testimony before the Senate health committee, James Holsinger, President Bush‘s nominee for Surgeon General, listed his three top priorities if approved. According to the New York Times, these priorities would be: “tackling childhood obesity, ‘making America a tobacco-free nation’ and improving the ability of the Public Health Service to respond to emergencies.” While these priorities are certainly in sync . . .
Mirroring Levitt’s thoughts on doctors plotting terrorist attacks, the Wall Street Journal takes an in-depth look at Alan Krueger‘s findings that terrorists tend to come from high-income, high-education families. David Pogue of the New York Times points out that, in the midst of last week’s iPhone mania, most of us missed T-Mobile’s announcement of a new plan under which all . . .
Via Wired: In addition to providing potential career-building skills, online gaming may be good for teens, according to a three-year study of adolescent gamers by researchers at Brunel University. The findings showed that teens who gamed could “establish their presence, identity and meaning in ways that might not be accessible or permissible in their everyday lives.” Though there’s also the . . .
Here’s a new way to improve the emergency room experience: Hospitals nationwide are starting to issue meal vouchers, movie passes and MLB tickets to emergency room patients who’ve been made to wait a long time for care. Other hospitals, meanwhile, are eliminating waits entirely by allowing patients to check in from their beds. (Hat tip David Brick.) Reader Fred Telegdy . . .
Anyone who cares about autism, and particularly the supposed spike in autism in recent years, would do well to read this very informative, cogent, and non-hysterical OpEd by Paul T. Shattuck and Maureen Durkin. It is written on the occasion of a case before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that’s investigating whether autism is linked to childhood vaccinations, as . . .
The introduction of new pay-by-weight trash charges in Ireland seems to have produced a strange and troubling effect: an increase in burn victims at St. James Hospital in Dublin. Huh? The theory is that people wanted to avoid having to pay for all their trash so instead they burned it in their backyards. Gary Finnegan, editor of Irish Medical News, . . .
There’s an incredibly interesting Q&A in today’s Wall Street Journal with Arthur D. Levinson, the CEO of biotech pioneer Genentech, mostly concerning the topic of the company’s cancer drugs. (There is a lot of interesting cancer news in the papers these days, mainly because of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.) Levinson regularly deals . . .
I have a favorite thought exercise, especially when thinking about the sort of complex, dynamic systems that are interesting but difficult to write about: the health-care system, e.g., or education, politics, energy consumption, finance, cancer research, etc. One natural way to approach such systems is to take note of what inputs and outputs already exist and then, isolating them, try . . .
In the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Miriam Shuchman writes about the movement in Congress to allow the FDA to block direct-to-consumer ads for new drugs. “There is popular support for a ban: in a telephone survey conducted in March 2007 by Consumer Reports, 59% of respondents ‘strongly agreed’ that the FDA should ban advertisements for drugs that had . . .
Turns out the “CSI” effect on the criminal justice system may not be quite as severe as we thought. Michigan Circuit Judge and Eastern Michigan University criminology professor Donald E. Shelton has published a paper indicating that the TV show’s effects on jurors may be exaggerated. The data, consisting of a survey of 1,027 jurors called for duty in a . . .
Both of them would be better off if the default option were switched to opt-out as opposed to opt-in. This is hardly surprising but, sadly, it is still news. Let me explain. One of the reasons that some people don’t contribute to their 401(k) plans is because they usually have to “opt in” to the plan — i.e., actively choose . . .
More bad news on prostate health: The latest study by researchers at the National Cancer Institute found that lycopene, the antioxidant widely hailed as a prostate cancer inhibitor, may actually increase the cancer risk. In a study of more than 28,000 men, researchers found no significant correlation between incidents of prostate cancer and the concentration of lycopene in the subjects’ . . .
Not long ago, I wondered aloud on this blog why so many doctors write so well. The two doctors I mentioned in detail were Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, both of whom have new books out. For those of you interested in this subject, take note that Abigail Zuger, who is an M.D. herself, has written an article in the . . .
If a genie came out of a bottle and gave me the choice between magically doing away with global warming or getting rid of the threat of global pandemics, I think I would choose the latter. I am probably in the minority on this one, but I think a pandemic might be the graver threat. A few years ago I . . .
The British Psychological Society Research Digest addresses the question of how bilinguals switch between languages without mixing up words. It examines a report by the Rudolph Magnus Institute stating that, as an accidental result of brain surgery to cure epilepsy, two bilingual patients appear to have had their “language switches” accidentally flipped. The potential costs of HPV just got a . . .
Harold McGee, also known as the New York Times’ “Curious Cook,” has an article about a new paper from a Clemson University research group led by Paul Dawson on the validity of the “five-second rule” — the old adage that if you drop food on the floor but pick it up within five seconds, it’s okay to eat it. According . . .
The New York Times had an interesting article the other day, by Amy Harmon, on how more advanced and widespread testing for Down Syndrome is leading to a shrinking population of babies born with this condition. As evidence, the article cites research finding that 90% of parents choose to abort when they are given a diagnosis of Down Syndrome. I . . .
A reader named Andrew Gendreau recently wrote in on the topic of distributed computing, which refers to a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more computers while they communicate with each other over a network. According to Wikipedia (whose reliability is imperfect but often commendable), distributed computing differs from networking . . .
Do you regularly read the Marginal Revolution blog? If you care much about actual economics, and especially if you are a student of the same (either literally or figuratively), you would be wise to do so. This typically excellent post offers a brief review of a book called Money-Driven Medicine, by Maggie Mahar, whose argument Tyler Cowen summarizes thusly: I . . .
Remember this discussion about the likelihood of a three-way tie on Jeopardy? Everyone agreed that the estimate of 1-in-25 million was absurdly high. So too does Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal‘s “Numbers Guy.” Men outnumber women on the Internet, by a long shot … right? Wrong. Stockpickr.com takes a brief look at the stocks of companies working on treatment . . .
Mary Black, a public-health physician in Serbia, offers her ideas in the current issue of the British Medical Journal (abstract only). [Yes, I know: two posts in two days from BMJ — but hey, it’s interesting stuff.] Black’s criteria: “[T]hese are jobs that seriously compromise ethical and moral standards, are difficult to justify to your children, and are likely to . . .
An editorial in the current British Medical Journal makes a very sharp point that many of us have probably been thinking about in the last few weeks while reading the latest medical news in the papers: It’s easy to feel contempt for deluded practitioners of the past who advocated bloodletting and tonsillectomies for all. Easy, that is, until one considers . . .