Letters Remain

Category: science

  • To Invest is to Aim

    In the land of financial markets, the phrase too big to fail has been brought into a new light.Ā  Two physicists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy, finding in numerous cases that 80% of a country’s market capital consisted of only a few shareholders.…

  • All About Placebo

    Wired has published what must be one of the most comprehensive articles looking at the phenomenon of the placebo effect. From its humble beginnings in WWII with anesthetist Henry Beecher to the placebo’s transition from being treated as a purely psychological trait to a physiological one; there’s some great material here. Two comprehensive analyses of…

  • Art and the Brain

    Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and writer I’ve mentioned many times, has a wonderful article in Psychology Today that looks at the field of neuroaesthetics and how the brain interprets art. All the adjectives we use to describe art-vague words like “beauty” and “elegance”-should, in theory, have neural correlates. According to these scientists, there is nothing…

  • The Ambiguity of Sex

    I’m not a big follower of athletics, but two news items have somehow made their way to my mental inbox from the IAAF World Athletics Championships in Berlin: how ridiculously fast Usain Bolt is, and the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya. On the latter, Caster is currently undergoing gender verification tests and in the process has…

  • Publishing in Scientific Journals

    Not being a professional or published scientist, the workings of academic journals are foreign to me. As a semi-regular reader of them I really should at least understand the processes involved, and that’s where My Dominant Hemisphere‘s outline of the publihing process and list of 18 interesting journal facts comes in handy. Multiple surveys have…

  • The Problem with Happiness Research

    Talking of happiness, University of California philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel discussesĀ the problem with the self-reporting of happiness for research purposes. If the intervention is obviously intended to increase happiness, participants may well report more happiness post-intervention simply to conform to their own expectations, or because they endorse a theory on which the intervention should increase happiness,…

  • The Agri-Intellectuals and the Omnivore’s Delusion

    Playing on the title of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Missouri farmer Blake Hurst pens an extremely well argued and reasoned response to the criticisms the ‘agri-intellectuals’ pile on industrial farmers and their production methodsā€”particularly those rearing livestock. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something…

  • Steve Jobs and Circular Visualisations (Not Just Pie Charts)

    Pie charts have been having a bad time of it lately* and I can’t see things improving anytime soon. In one of the better articles looking at this humble chart, Brian Suda notes not only at what you can do instead, but what improvements you can make if you’re forced to use the pie chart.…

  • Context and Aesthetic Judgements

    It’s no surprise that perceived context is important in influencing people’s decisions. A recent experiment has shown that people rate pictures as more aesthetically pleasing (and actually experience more pleasure while viewing them) if they believe they come from art galleries. Aesthetic judgments, like most judgments, depend on context. Whether an object or image is…

  • Goal Setting and Affluence

    You’ve heard of the Yale Goal-Setting Study, right? The one that goes like this: In 1953 a team of researchers interviewed Yaleā€™s graduating seniors, asking them whether they had written down the specific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the…