Monthly Archives: January 2009

Book Notes

The Amateur Gourmet: On Learning the Basics →

Do you want to become a better teacher or learner? First, try making a batch of tomato sauce.
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The Cost of Fearing Strangers →

So which would scare you more: an Amer­i­can Mus­lim fam­ily you knew noth­ing about or the guy from your church who had just gone through a divorce? You would prob­a­bly get this wrong; most of us are ter­ri­ble at risk assess­ment. Stephen J. Dub­ner on why the things we fear the most are sim­ply irra­tional:

Why do we fear the unknown more than the known? That’s a larger ques­tion than I can answer here (not that I’m capa­ble any­way), but it prob­a­bly has to do with the heuris­tics — the short­cut guesses — our brains use to solve prob­lems, and the fact that these heuris­tics rely on the infor­ma­tion already stored in our mem­o­ries.
And what gets stored away? Anom­alies — the big, rare, “black swan” events that are so dra­matic, so unpre­dictable, and per­haps world-changing, that they imprint them­selves on our mem­o­ries and con us into think­ing of them as typ­i­cal, or at least likely, whereas in fact they are extra­or­di­nar­ily rare.

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Weekend Food Blogging: Chocolate Chip Cookies
Field Notes

Weekend Food Blogging: Chocolate Chip Cookies →

Chocolate chip cookies need just a few ingredients, and are easy to make. I've paired them with a suitably complementary simple web layout.
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Tech Law Crystal Ball →

What’s in store for Canada in 2009 in the area of tech­nol­ogy law and pol­icy? Michael Geist’s month-by-month blow pre­dicts entrenched posi­tions, slow, com­prised progress on issues like copy­right reform and net neu­tral­ity, only to be inter­rupted and dis­placed off the agenda by a Novem­ber elec­tion (the fourth in six years). Funny in a laugh-instead-of-cry kind of way.

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Drug Companies, Doctors and Corruption →

Clin­i­cal tri­als are bro­ken. In her review of three recently pub­lished books about the col­lu­sion between influ­en­tial doc­tors and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies, Mar­cia Angell reveals the sys­tem­atic biases inher­ent in the very sci­en­tific method designed ensure best med­ical prac­tices. Knowl­edge trans­la­tion rests on the assump­tion that evidence-based research must make its way into prac­tice. Her con­clu­sion is sickening:

It is sim­ply no longer pos­si­ble to believe much of the clin­i­cal research that is pub­lished, or to rely on the judg­ment of trusted physi­cians or author­i­ta­tive med­ical guide­lines. I take no plea­sure in this con­clu­sion, which I reached slowly and reluc­tantly over my two decades as an edi­tor of The­New Eng­land Jour­nal of Medicine.

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