The feeling of certainty might be our default setting. We spend most of our mental life confirming our opinions, even when those opinions involve complex issues. We believe we understand […]
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Very few countries allow direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies, but in those that do (New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S.), the medicine-buying public has been brainwashed to believe that mental […]
Can the study of art history stop looking like ancient history itself? Can it transcend the old approaches and embrace the digital world? As digitized as art history has become […]
Fellow pseudonymous neuroblogger Neuroskeptic(to whom I owe a great deal in inspiration) has published a fantastic piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ($) on the benefits to science of anonymity. Last November Neuroskeptic became […]
First things first – I’m not a doctor, but the surprise new rules issued by the GMC (the British regulator for doctors) still worry me. Not just because I might perhaps one day […]
Last week, voters in Los Angeles County passed a referendum requiring male actors in adult films to wear condoms in scenes depicting vaginal or anal intercourse. Measure B was an […]
The New York Times reports that an MIT statistics professor has found that flying on a commercial jet has never been safer. Not that it was ever that much […]
Update (Jan, 2014): Amir’s patent application (search for no. 12/743357) has been rejected due to prior art by Mathews and MacLeod. Update (Feb, 2013): Following this blog post Amir corrected two […]
To celebrate her Jubilee year, the Queen had a large chunk of Antarctica named after her; possibly upsetting the Argentinians and Chileans.
Several years ago Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid teamed with violinist, composer and neuroscientist Dave Soldier to explore popular music preferences in the United States. They determined what music people […]
Here’s a little philosophy/psychology experiment you can try for yourself. It just takes a few minutes, and the rest of this post will make much more sense if you do […]
One year ago I wrote an article for Big Think with the title walking across campus whilst sitting on your couch in which I introduced my readers to the AnyBot, […]
Leaving aside a few notable exceptions, the reactions to the latest UN Conference on Sustainable Development—Rio+20, as it’s widely known—read like a collective obituary for global governance. Mark McDonald catalogued […]
I’ll be honest. I’d hoped to hold out a bit longer before falling back on this staple of any Asian culture column, but it was unavoidable in this case. The […]
First of all, I am not an analyst nor do I own any stock in any public company. The last time I did invest in a promising Internet company ended […]
The weekend is a good time to get some culture, and since there are a lot of things lately that I’m enjoying, I figured I’d write one completely miscellaneous post […]
Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, “that […]
Richard Dawkins, the most famous “atheist” on the planet, has argued “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other.”
Following the demise of cap and trade legislation, green group leaders acknowledged that despite spending several hundred million dollars to pass the bill, they were unable to create public demand […]
I’d be happy to make a bet with real money that Marx was just plain wrong about immiseration, and will continue to be proved wrong.
As our political and media systems rapidly evolve, social scientists are revisiting and updating existing models, theories, and methods for investigating the effects of the media on political attitudes and […]
Today marks the start of the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s great scientific meetings. Many of the panels held in Vancouver […]
This semester I am teaching a doctoral seminar on the important questions and trends related to media, technology and democracy. In this post, I introduce several major topics and provide […]
In the global quest for superpower status, who represents you? Delphi Fellow Parag Khanna argues that in the future, we will all be diplomats.
Like a biblical parable, the typical human-behavior experiment is easily told and easily reduced to a message: People who pay with credit cards were more likely to have potato chips […]
Public opinion about climate change, observes the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, can be compared to “waves in a shallow pan,” easily tipped with “a lot of sloshing but not […]
However you feel about the right way out of the U.S. government’s struggles over its debt ceiling, I think we can all agree that the week past has not been […]
Einstein “finally concluded that time travel might be inherent in his equations,” but dismissed the notion “on physical grounds.”
Climate change campaigns in the United States that focus on the risks to people in foreign countries or even other regions of the U.S. are likely to inadvertently increase polarization […]
Here it is, the answers to your volcanic questions for Dr. Clive Oppenheimer. His new book, Eruptions that Shook the World, comes out this week and I’ll have a review […]