Saturday, March 24, 2007
Didactic Cartoon Animals
A great article/slideshow from Slate about ways that cartoon animals have been used to teach children. It contains the original "Duck and Cover" video which gets better every viewing.
Friday, March 23, 2007
heavy metal mind
The results of a study of more than 1,000 of the brightest five per cent of young people will come as relief to parents whose offspring, usually long-haired, are devotees of Iron Maiden, AC/DC and their musical descendants.
Researchers found that, far from being a sign of delinquency and poor academic ability, many adolescent "metalheads" are extremely bright and often use the music to help them deal with the stresses and strains of being gifted social outsiders.
Stuart Cadwallader, a psychologist at the University of Warwick, has found that socially awkward intelligent kids sometimes listen to heavy metal, which is "a comfort to the bright child." Read more about this breaking discovery here.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but why is it remotely surprising that teenaged geeks like heavy metal? Next, someone will demonstrate that sometimes intelligent, socially awkward kids enjoy playing video games on the internets, or prove a link between being teenaged and being angsty.
X-posted from Sparklebliss.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Drug Makers Paying Doctors...To Talk
Just some highlights from a NYT article about new laws (in some states) requiring "drug makers to disclose payments to doctors." Enjoy (linked above).
"More than 250 Minnesota psychiatrists together earned $6.7 million in drug company money — more than any other specialty. Seven of the last eight presidents of the Minnesota Psychiatric Society have served as consultants to drug makers, according to the Times examination."
"Dr. George Realmuto, a psychiatrist from the University of Minnesota, said most of the marketing associated with his lectures was packaged around his talks.
“It’s at a wonderful restaurant, the atmosphere is very conducive to a positive attitude toward the drug, and everyone is having a good time,” said Dr. Realmuto, who compared the experience to that of buying a car in a glitzy showroom. He earned at least $20,000 between 2002 and 2004 from drug makers."
“The vast majority of the time that we did any sort of paid relationship with a physician, they increased the use of our drug,” said Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, a former sales representative for Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson who left the industry in 2002. “I hate to say it out loud, but it all comes down to ways to manipulate the doctors.”
“You’re making him money in several ways,” said Gene Carbona, who left Merck as a regional sales manager in 2001. “You’re paying him for the talk. You’re increasing his referral base so he’s getting more patients. And you’re helping to develop his name. The hope in all this is that a silent quid quo pro is created. I’ve done so much for you, the only thing I need from you is that you write more of my products.”
"A 2002 survey found that more than 80 percent of the doctors on panels that write clinical practice guidelines had financial ties to drug makers."
"More than 250 Minnesota psychiatrists together earned $6.7 million in drug company money — more than any other specialty. Seven of the last eight presidents of the Minnesota Psychiatric Society have served as consultants to drug makers, according to the Times examination."
"Dr. George Realmuto, a psychiatrist from the University of Minnesota, said most of the marketing associated with his lectures was packaged around his talks.
“It’s at a wonderful restaurant, the atmosphere is very conducive to a positive attitude toward the drug, and everyone is having a good time,” said Dr. Realmuto, who compared the experience to that of buying a car in a glitzy showroom. He earned at least $20,000 between 2002 and 2004 from drug makers."
“The vast majority of the time that we did any sort of paid relationship with a physician, they increased the use of our drug,” said Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, a former sales representative for Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson who left the industry in 2002. “I hate to say it out loud, but it all comes down to ways to manipulate the doctors.”
“You’re making him money in several ways,” said Gene Carbona, who left Merck as a regional sales manager in 2001. “You’re paying him for the talk. You’re increasing his referral base so he’s getting more patients. And you’re helping to develop his name. The hope in all this is that a silent quid quo pro is created. I’ve done so much for you, the only thing I need from you is that you write more of my products.”
"A 2002 survey found that more than 80 percent of the doctors on panels that write clinical practice guidelines had financial ties to drug makers."
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Hometown Baghdad
This is a web video series, a kind of reality tv/documentary thing that follows three twentysomethings in Baghdad. They're relying on Web distribution to get the word out (they're on Salon, too), and want as many people to see/link to it as possible...The link is to their homepage, where you can see two more clips.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Anti-academic writers
An interesting article in Salon about books by writers who hate academics (particularly, those in English departments). The author is an academic, and makes some good points. Here's one:
"But I still don't understand, frankly, why people hate literary scholars for having a professional vocabulary while remaining perfectly content with economists' using "devaluation" or philosophers' using "existentialist," or physicists' talking about a "projective Hilbert space endowed with the Fubini-Study metric." These days even Tucker Carlson uses "deconstruct" and George W. Bush has developed quite a fondness for "ideology," which half my dissertation committee rejected as jargon. So what's the big deal? Have there been excesses of obscurantism and pomposity? Yes, but as our literary writers have long known, from Laurence Sterne to Herman Melville to James Joyce to William Vollmann, sometimes nothing succeeds like excess."
"But I still don't understand, frankly, why people hate literary scholars for having a professional vocabulary while remaining perfectly content with economists' using "devaluation" or philosophers' using "existentialist," or physicists' talking about a "projective Hilbert space endowed with the Fubini-Study metric." These days even Tucker Carlson uses "deconstruct" and George W. Bush has developed quite a fondness for "ideology," which half my dissertation committee rejected as jargon. So what's the big deal? Have there been excesses of obscurantism and pomposity? Yes, but as our literary writers have long known, from Laurence Sterne to Herman Melville to James Joyce to William Vollmann, sometimes nothing succeeds like excess."
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