Contact High — Architecture in Helsinki A couple years ago CBC Ideas did a 24-part series called How to Think About Science (you can listen to the entire series by clicking on the link). It had some high points but it had many, many low points including interviews with people like Rupert Sheldrake–who has [...]
I often like to post music at the end of my posts because I like spreading good music (or what I consider good music) as much as I like spreading good ideas (or what I consider good ideas). I’m going to start posting the music at the beginning of the post so it’s easier to [...]
It’s sort of common sense to think that more choice is always a good thing but more and more people are beginning to question this assumption. I don’t have any of these references handy but a couple examples are Atul Gawande, in his book Complications, talks about how giving patients more choice has some important [...]
I just spent four days at the 3rd North American Congress of Epidemiology which is a meeting of four major epidemiological societes–i.e. there were a lot of people there and a lot of talks. Tara Smith over at Aetiology has a good recap of how an otherwise wonderful conference was weak on social media but [...]
And I watched 60 seconds of Miss USA contestants answering a question about whether evolution should be taught in school. Now I’ll never sleep again…
We need to continue to remind ourselves that neither development work nor global health, has a silver bullet. This is main message from what I’ve read of More Than Good Intentions so far and Esther Duflo, co-author of Poor Economics, echoes this sentiment in an interview in the Economic Times (via: Poverty Action): Q: You [...]
Sorry I didn’t get a chance to post earlier today but I was at a conference where I didn’t have access to the internet. I heard something today that only an academic would say. I was asking someone about his poster and he kept using the phrase, “four seasonal period.” After a while I finally [...]
David Freeman, the author of the book Wrong, has a new article in the The Atlantic called “The Triumph of New-Age Medicine” that Matthew Herper at Forbes aptly calls: Wrong: The Magazine Article. Herper, Dr. Steven Novella at Neurologica and Orac at Respectful Insolence have written excellent take-downs of this article pointing out that mainstream [...]
PhD Comics did this wonderful RSA-like animation of a short discussion about why we know essentially nothing about the universe–like how we have no idea what makes up 75% of the universe. Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
It’s been pretty serious on RadarLake for the past while so I’m going to tone it down a bit today. Recently, the University of Alberta’s Dean of Medicine allegedly plagiarized his commencement address from Dr. Atul Gawande. At least he picked a good source to plagiarize. If you’re at all interested in medical non-fiction, Gawande–part [...]
