One salient feature of the United States in the 21st century is a belief that our school system – from pre-kindergarten to higher education – is failing us. There are […]
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Long before Allen Ginsberg used the phrase ‘first thought, best thought’ to describe spontaneous, intuitive writing that seemed to spring unaware from ‘somewhere else,’ Buddhists had developed this maxim as […]
In a new study at the journal BMC Medical Ethics, my colleague Declan Fahy and I analyze the journalistic and critical reception of Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 best-selling book The Immortal Life of […]
Consider one last autobiographical note before I answer the question: “How do we avoid the Sartre Fallacy?” I conducted an independent study my senior year that focused on biases and […]
No doubt everyone has seen the two-part Piers Morgan interview of conspiracy-weaver, gun “enthusiast” and upcoming thespian, Alex Jones. The interview is truly bizarre: firstly, for making so many people […]
How much would you pay to prevent the death of a child, or anyone else, from gun violence?
When composer Van Stiefel realized that he wanted to somehow set the paintings of Andrew Wyeth to music, he searched for the words to marry to his expressions in sound. […]
Our leaders in Washington are playing an irresponsible game of chicken with the American economy.
When true paradigm shifts occur, as with Cloud Computing and NewSpace, there is no buzz phrase that is more appropriate, stigmatized as it may be. When examining existing and emerging […]
Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions.
Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As one writer put it recently, “researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.”
Sure, the Allies are advancing… but a snail could do it quicker!
In 1951, musical composer and overall art theorist John Cage (shown above) stepped into an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Touted as the quietest place on Earth, the anechoic chamber […]
Ever since our first digital search we’ve all spent increasing amounts of time on the web looking for the information we need. Since most of us are in a hurry, […]
Why can we face up to our inconsistencies in the past but not expect more in the future?
It’s that time of the year again when techno pundits are once again breathlessly telling us all about the technology and innovation trends that will be big in 2013. That’s […]
RIP Aaron Swartz, you will not be forgotten.
You may have missed it, but on the Friday heading into the Christmas holiday, the FDA announced its decision about the safety of salmon genetically engineered to grow faster. After […]
Down in the dumps? You’d better watch your wallet, among other things.
Humans experience joy in a multitude of ways, yet the varied forms of suffering—death, divorce, separation—return to one root principle: loss. What drives the fear of loss is something far […]
The gap between invention and implementation is beset by a bias: when in doubt we prefer the status quo, even when solutions to deficiencies are apparent. Is it any wonder […]
Almost a year ago I posted a blog post titled ‘A Yale Professor’s One Man Rampage Against PloS, the Internet and a Belgian Research Group‘, covering the case of a […]
How long does it take to know that you’ve found The One—or someone who you might want to see for a second date? I found the answer to this and […]
If phantom islands can be discovered as recently as 2012, maybe there are still more of them out there.
As lawyers say, exceptional cases make bad law. The director of the CIA having an affair in which, at best, he lacked the wherewithal to keep the secret secret (isn’t […]
For the third year running, here’s a very personal, very subjective, “I can’t read everything, so I probably left out something, so mention it in the comments, OK?” list of […]
Susannah Cahalan was just another ambitious New York kind of girl–a fast-rising cub reporter at the New York Post and fabulous gal about town–when something surprising happened. She lost her […]
I write here about the Risk Perception Gap, when we worry too much about smaller risks and not enough about bigger ones. More than just an interesting example of […]
Americans have always disagreed, about a lot. Somehow though, we’ve managed to get along with each other while we do. Why, then, has disagreeing become so nasty, so fierce, […]
The problem of scientists manipulating data in order to achieve statistical significance, labelled p-hacking is incredibly hard to track down due to the fact that the data behind statistical significance is often unavailable for analysis by anyone other than those who did the research and themselves analysed the data.