Recently, an American I know–a dyed in the wool Republican opposed in every sense to single payer healthcare–got sick in Canada. The kind of sick where he had to be admitted to hospital. He didn’t get sick in a city so he didn’t have access to a fancy teaching hospital either. Instead he was admitted [...]
Does it really make sense that people should be denied access to medication that would save their lives just because they don’t have the money to afford it? This post by David Ng at The World’s Fair gives a good overview of why pharmaceutical companies with patents on lifesaving HIV medicine won’t make them available [...]
No words for this: Watch live streaming video from pdf2011 at livestream.com (via: Brain Pickings)
Gotta run to present a poster but here are a couple excerpts from a great article at The New Republic about Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?: In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one [...]
Robin Hanson who blogs at Overcoming Bias always has interesting ideas and interesting ways of looking at things. Take a look at this scenario (written in conjunction with Katja Grace): Consider two possible civilizations, stretched either across time or space: Time: A mere hundred thousand people live sustainably for a billion generations before finally going [...]
I’m only a little bit into it but so far I’m loving More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel. It’s recipe is perfectly tailored to my interests. It’s a book about international development work that really pushes randomized control trials (RCTs) for evaluation of aid projects and employs behavioural economics to market [...]
From a post of mine at the beginning of the year: I wonder what a difference it would make if every single high-school student was exposed to a few weeks of learning about double-blind RCTs [randomized control trials] in grade 9 or 11 or whatever grade you learned biology in. I actually think it would [...]
…although I’m willing to bet no one has ever had a car crash because they were focusing on a pickle and not the road. If you’ve been anywhere near the news recently, you’ve no doubt heard that the World Health Organization has classified cell phones as possibly causing cancer. Cell phones, according the WHO are [...]
This is an idea discussed at length in many books and essays but here’s a quick rehash on how and why the brain believes what it does (from Science-Based Medicine): The brain is a belief engine. It relies on two processes: patternicity and agenticity. It finds meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. It [...]
Guest post by Madeline Doyle In a Radarlake post a few weeks ago, Jeremy commented that in Canada we are obsessed with our international reputation. During Canada’s recent electoral campaign, I was at candidates’ debate and someone asked the candidates what their party planned to do to regain Canada’s place on the world stage. Only [...]
