Ever been talking to someone when they all of a sudden said: “To be perfectly honest . . .” I don’t know about you, but I don’t find that phrase reassuring. In fact, it kind of makes me wonder how honest you were being with me before you said that!
Leibniz once described music as an “occult exercise in mathematics performed by a mind unconscious of the fact that it is counting.” As someone currently working through some late Beethoven piano masterpieces, this description makes a lot of sense to me. Now if I can only find enough practice time to make my performances more…
A very disturbing new study was just published, in which physicians viewed a video of a patient with back pain asking for OxyContin. Twenty percent of docs said they would prescribe that med under that circumstance: …Too often, doctors prescribe potentially dangerous medications to patients who shouldn’t be getting them, and what they prescribe is…
Back in early February, Brown authored an article on the North Dakota oil boom. It is a great piece of reporting. Also, a fine bit of writing, as captured by this sentence: In a way, of course, this kind of frontier is as much a state of mind as an actual place, a melancholy mood…
I recently read Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die, which recounts the controversial history of Bayes theorem in the world of statistics. To oversimplify quite a bit, Bayes theorem requires those using it to make an initial guess about, say, the probability that one outcome is more likely than another, and then…
When New Jersey decided to hike its minimum wage by some 20 percent in 1991, David Card and Alan Krueger recognized a tremendous opportunity to test how the minimum wage affects employment.
read more
View original post and comments at Scientocracy
I recently spoke with Duke University’s The Chronicle about gender pay disparity in research medicine.