Rise of Medical Expertocracy

3/31/12.

Drs. Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman:

"Should everyone take vitamin D, and if so, how much? At what age and how often should a woman have a mammogram? Should a healthy man be screened for prostate cancer, and if cancer is diagnosed, how should he be treated?..."

"...For patients and experts alike, there is a subjective core to every medical decision. The truth is that, despite many advances, much of medicine still exists in a gray zone where there is not one right answer. No one can say with certainty who will benefit by taking a certain drug and who will not. Nor can we say with certainty what impact a medical condition will have on someone's life or how they might experience a treatment's side effects. The path to maintaining or regaining health is not the same for everyone; our preferences really do matter..."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577311641531125820.html?KEYWORDS=groopman

The World's Leading Laugh Scientist

3/30/12. No joke.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/121946

Documentary on Bullying

3/30/12.

Joe Morgenstern:

"Bully" doesn't dwell on the bullies themselves. That's fair enough; we know what they do and, at least in a general sense, why they do it. The subjects of this valuable documentary are the bullied, those who suffer cruel and all-too-usual punishment in our middle schools and high schools for being different and defenseless. One of them, a 16-year-old girl named Kelby, offers a different way of looking at rain. "The world," she says, "has taken in so much sadness that it can't hold it anymore." Watching the film may cause scattered showers in the region of the eyes, but it should also provoke dismay with a succession of school administrators who respond to the problem of bullying by denying it, sidestepping it or shrugging it off with an attitude that a grief-stricken father in rural Georgia characterizes as "kids will be kids, boys will be boys, they're just cruel at this age."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577311351616032244.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopBucket

Brain Wiring - a No-Brainer

3/29/12. Research report from the National Institute of Mental Health.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/science-news/2012/brain-wiring-a-no-brainer.shtml?utm_source=govdelivery&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govdelivery

The Trayvon Martin Tragedies

3/28/12.

Juan Williams:

"The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has sparked national outrage, with civil rights leaders from San Francisco to Baltimore leading protests calling for a new investigation and the arrest of the shooter.

But what about all the other young black murder victims? Nationally, nearly half of all murder victims are black. And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Where is the march for them?..."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577307613183789698.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Back to the Future

3/27/12.

Thomas Sowell:

"When a 1942 Supreme Court decision that most people never heard of makes the front page of the New York Times in 2012, you know that something unusual is going on.
What makes that 1942 case -- Wickard v. Filburn -- important today is that it stretched the federal government's power so far that the Obama administration is using it as an argument to claim before today's Supreme Court that it has the legal authority to impose ObamaCare mandates on individuals.

"Roscoe Filburn was an Ohio farmer who grew some wheat to feed his family and some farm animals. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined him for growing more wheat than he was allowed to grow under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which was passed under Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce..."
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/03/27/back_to_the_future_113627.html

The Brain on Love

3/26/12.

Diane Ackerman:

"A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you..."
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/the-brain-on-love/

Obamacare and the Constitution

3/26/12. Richard A. Epstein, a Professor of Law at New York University Law School, describes how the individual mandate unravels the core of the health-care law.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/112101

Why Won't They Listen?

3/26/12. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers a corrective intellectual and emotional experience for our conflicts of visions expressed in liberal and conservative politics.

Some say a liberal is a conservative who has been mugged by reality. Others observe that a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?_r=2&nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20120323&pagewanted=all

The Tradgedy of Trayvon Martin

3/26/12. Heather MacDonald puts this tradgedy in perspective.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/294357/why-manipulate-tragedy-trayvon-martin-heather-mac-donald

Between 'Jersey Shore' and Rick Santorum

3/25/12.

Kay Mymowitz,

"...How do you explain a country that makes an unabashed Catholic social conservative a leading presidential candidate while devouring a reality show about the smuttiest bumping and grinding ever to hit prime time?..."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577299424128682402.html?KEYWORDS=hymowitz

Are Straight People Born that Way?

3/24/12.

"Time for a thought experiment: Are straight people born that way? When I put the question to a number of sexology colleagues, they thought it a good question -- indeed, a hard question..."
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/are-straight-people-born-that-way/254592/

The Five Best Books: Psychological Mysteries

3/23/12.

Jane Harris:

1. Pale Fire

By Vladimir Nabokov (1962)

'A Jack-in-the-box, a Fabergé gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem . . . an infernal machine . . . a cat-and-mouse game." Thus, upon its publication in 1962, one critic described this extraordinary novel. "Pale Fire" is all this and more: both a satire and a mystery; a daunting intellectual challenge but one that has many rewards for Nabokov fans, not least the satisfaction of his gorgeous prose and the way that this book turns us all into detectives. The novel presents a long poem by recently murdered American poet John Shade, with a commentary written by Shade's friend Charles Kinbote, an academic from a country named Zembla. Kinbote claims to have been entrusted with preparing the dead poet's manuscript for publication. But how reliable a narrator is he?...

2.
3.
4.
5.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203358704577235631790801346.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Joseph Epstein: Old Age and Other Laughs

3/22/12.

Joseph Epstein:

"I recently bought something called catastrophic health insurance for my college-student granddaughter—a policy that has a high deductible but is in place lest, God forfend, she needs to undergo a lengthy and expensive hospital stay. The insurance agent who sold it to me is a man named Jack Gross, whom I occasionally see walking around the streets of my neighborhood and who always greets me, often with a new joke. Being an insurance salesman and having me there in his office, Jack couldn’t resist asking me if my wife and I have assisted-living insurance, a policy designed for older people that pays for caregivers (or minders, as the English, more precisely, call them), thus allowing those suffering from dementia or other devastating conditions to avoid nursing homes. Assisted-living insurance is very expensive, especially if one first acquires it in one’s 70s, the decade my wife and I are now in.
“
Thanks all the same, Jack, but we have no need for assisted-living insurance,” I said. “We have pistols.”

“Great,” he replied, nicely on beat. “I just hope when the time comes to use them you are able to find them.”

The problem with that amusing response is that it has an uncomfortably high truth content..."

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/old-age-and-other-laughs/

Advice from Einstein

3/22/12.

On life's highest ideals:

[E]verybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/einstein-on-kindness-our-shared-existence-and-lifes-highest-ideals/254768/

How Does the Brain Secrete Morality?

3/22/12.

Ronald Bailey:

“The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile,” asserted 18th century French physiologist Pierre Cabanis. Last week, the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies convened a conference of neuroscientists and philosophers to ponder how our brains secrete thoughts about ethics and morality. The first presenter was neuroeconomist Gregory Berns from Emory University whose work peers into brains to see in which creases of gray matter those values we hold sacred lodge. The study, “The Price of Your Soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values,” was just published in thePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/21/how-does-the-brain-secrete-morality/singlepage

TED

3/22/12. A Web site of dazzling enertaintment, state of the art knowledge. and fascinating stories and ingenius information that may change your life.

Noel Bairey Merz: The single biggest health threat women face

Myshkin Ingawale: A blood test without bleeding

T. Boone Pickens: Let's transform energy -- with natural gas

Mark Raymond: Victims of the city

Scott Summit: Beautiful artificial limbs

Brené Brown: Listening to shame

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod

Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries

Deep ocean mysteries and wonders

Questions no one knows the answers to

The cockroach beatbox

Larry Smith: Why you will fail to have a great career

Kelli Anderson: Design to challenge reality

A TED speaker's worst nightmare

Jennifer Pahlka: Coding a better government

 

http://www.ted.com/

The Family Meal and The Good Life

3/21/12. World famous expert on positive psychology, Professor Christopher Pedersen discusses what would a positive psychologist recommend for the family meal and good parenting.

Professor Chistopher Pedersen:

"I recently prepared a lecture on parenting from a positive psychology perspective. Although psychologists have had much to say about parenting, often the focus has been on eliminating undesirable actions on the part of kids, like talking back, tantrums, and tattling. These behaviors are of course annoying, but what about encouraging desirable actions? A depressed child after all seems well-behaved, if by that we mean one who causes no hassles, at least in the short run. But parents want their children to be more than moribund. They want them to be happy and socially engaged, animated and motivated, accomplished and of course kind and decent. What does psychology have to say about the positive in children?.."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-good-life/201203/the-family-meal

10 of the Most Surprising Findings from Psychological Studies

3/22/12.

Psychology has a reputation for being the science of common sense, or a field that simply confirms things we already know about ourselves.
One way of battling this misconception, explains Jeremy Dean — a PhD candidate in psychology and master of ceremonies at the always-awesome PsyBlog — is to "think about all the unexpected, surprising, and just plain weird findings that have popped out of psychology studies over the years." Here are ten of his favorite examples.

http://io9.com/5894500/10-of-the-most-surprising-findings-from-psychological-studies

Brian Lamb's America

3/20/12.

David Brooks:

The quintessential C-SPAN moment came during a Booknotes program in 1991, while host Brian Lamb was interviewing Martin Gilbert, the author of a biography of Winston Churchill. Gilbert was talking about the interplay between private scandal and public life when the following exchange took place:

GILBERT: When Churchill was 20 and a young soldier, he was accused of buggery, and, you know, that's, you know, a terrible accusation. Well, he ended up prime minister for just quite a long time.

LAMB: Why was he accused of buggery and what is it?

GILBERT: You don't know what buggery is?

LAMB: Define it, please.

GILBERT: Oh dear. Well, I -- I'm sorry. I thought the word we -- buggery is what used to be called a -- the -- an unnatural act of the Oscar Wilde type is how it was actually phrased in the euphemism of the British papers. It's -- you don't know what buggery is?

Over the twenty years that C-SPAN has been in existence, its founder Brian Lamb and his colleagues have pioneered a distinct interviewing style. The questions are flat, short, and direct. And they are centered around facts. The guests might be longwinded or erudite or both, but usually what sets them off is some six-word question about a specific fact. You get the impression that if Brian Lamb were called in to interview Jesus the first questions out of his mouth would be: "It's said you fed the multitudes with loaves and fish. What kind of fish was that? How many people does it take to make up a multitude?",,,

 

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/010/645fudii.asp