Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends, and a great week to the rest of you. I will not be blogging for a bit, because I’ll be vacationing in the Galapagos, with my favorite evolutionary biology books no doubt at my side.
I recently spoke with Duke University’s The Chronicle about gender pay disparity in research medicine.
Click here to see the Q&A…
Schmidt once said: “In the future, people will spend less time trying to get technology to work … because it will just be seamless. It will just be there. The Web will be everything, and it will also be nothing. It will be like electricity. … If we get this right, I believe we can…
I write frequently about the importance of perspective taking in clinician/patient interaction. Seeing the world through other people’s eyes is also a crucial moral and political skill. No surprise then that Abe Lincoln showed great perspective taking abilities. Consider these words, from an 1854 speech on slavery: I think I have no prejudice against the…
Matthew Herper and Erin Carlyle at Forbes magazine recently put together a wonderful picture, showing what kinds of diseases pharmaceutical companies are targeting now in developing new drugs. The bigger the bubble, the larger the number of drugs under development. Further to the right, the deadlier the disease. Makes for fascinating picture: Several things strike…
Interesting take on the Bay of Pigs thinking in the Kennedy administration, as summarized in Jim Newton’s book on the Eisenhower Presidency: “The entire enterprise depended on an intelligence assumption that proved false, namely, that the Cuban people would greet the invasion force as liberators and turn against Castro.” Sounds eerily familiar to the Bush…
I remember one time having a conversation with Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, about the topic of happiness and emotional adaptation, in the context of chronic disability. We were discussing emotional impact of experiencing a limb amputation. Kahneman pointed out that it is the loss of the limb that is really…