Month: April 2009
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How Poverty Affects the Brain
I’ve already noted the correlation between a low IQ and poverty, but now The Economist has a summary of how poverty and stress affects the brain. The reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop. […] To measure the amount of stress…
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How We Decide
One of my favourite science writers—the editor at large of Seed Magazine, Jonah Lehrer—has been interviewed by The Commonwealth Club about his forthcoming book, The Decisive Moment/How We Decide (UK/US titles, respectively). The video of the interview is full of excellent anecdotes (backed-up by peer reviewed research) on many topics ranging from emotional and rational…
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Good Employees and Successful Entrepreneurs
In an article profiling Google’s Marissa Meyer (employee number 20), there’s this quote on Meyer’s views with regard to hiring practices: One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.” Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of…
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Salads a Licence to Eat Unhealthily
Think [generic fast food chain] have been pro-health by offering salads on their menu (calorific value of said salads aside)? Maybe not, says new research showing that if a salad is on a menu, many are more likely to choose the unhealthy option than if the healthy choice was absent. College students were given one of two…
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Behavioural Economics and Financial Policies
The news that Obama had some of the leading behaviourists advising his campaign comes as no surprise to me, however I likely underestimated how much they influenced both the campaign and the voters. Time takes a look at this “behavioural dream team” and discusses how the Obama administration is using behavioural economics to guide its…
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Ideology Getting in the Way of Evidence-Based Medicine
Giving beta blockers to a person in the early stages of a heart attack makes sense: the drugs reduce oxygen consumption by calming and slowing the heart; something that is ideal during a heart attack. However despite evidence showing that beta blockers may actually increase heart failure, the practice of administering them continues. As Dr. David Newman…
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Making a Significant Contribution
Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run? That was the question the noted mathematician and computer scientist Richard Hamming (he of Hamming Codes fame) asked and tried to answer in a talk he gave at Bell Labs in 1986. However his educational and inspiring talk,…
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Poverty Education
In an article where the somewhat controversial philosopher Peter Singer—author of Famine, Affluence and Morality—argues that the teaching of the issues surrounding world poverty should not be confined to specialist courses and should be an educational priority*, I was shocked by the clarification of something I’ve oft wondered about the definition of poverty: The World Bank defines extreme…
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Risk Tolerance as a Competitive Weapon
After Josh Kopelman sold Half.com to eBay in 2000 he stayed on with the company to witness eBay’s defeat by and eventual acquisition of PayPal—at the time a relatively small startup. Kopeland suggests that the main reason for PayPal’s success was their risk tolerance in a number of situations: Legal Risk Paypal’s product was widely…
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Beauty as Human Reason
Human reason and abstract thought are prerequisites for the appreciation of beauty, argues Roger Scruton in his latest book, Beauty. However in his review of Beauty, Sebastian Smee—art critic of the Boston Globe—finds himself disagreeing with the sentiment. [Scruton] is swayed by Plato’s idea that beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but a call to…