monkey's uncle

I’ve been thinking some more about the issues that are raised by the debacle over Jared Diamond’s 21 April 2008 New Yorker piece and the recent announcement of a lawsuit against him.  There are many things to think about here.  Probably foremost amongst these are the ethical concerns relating to preserving research subjects’ privacy and [...]

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Brian McKenna sent around to the EANTH Listserv a couple of blog posts today detailing the trouble that Jared Diamond has gotten in about a New Yorker story he wrote a year ago on the power of vengeance.  This seems like a rather sordid affair but I think that Alex Golub should be commended for his [...]

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Nicholas Kristof has an interesting Op-Ed piece this week in the Times.  Reporting on University of Michigan Professor Richard Nisbett’s new book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Kristof argues for the general malleability of intelligence.  He writes, If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor [...]

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Scary.  A woman traveling from Blagoveshchensk to Moscow by rail died, apparently of pneumonia, and all the people riding in her carriage (about 60) have to taken to a hospital for observation and quarantine.  Officials think this could be a case of SARS.  From the RIA Novosti Report: The train was stopped in the central Russian [...]

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Every once in a while someone asks me for advice on the platform to use for developing models of infectious disease.  I typically make the same recommendations — unless the person asking has something very specific in mind. This happened again today and I figured I would turn it into a blog post. The answer [...]

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Every time I go by the Stanford Shopping Center — which is a truly absurd place, I should add — I am reminded of an event that seems like an apt metaphor for the economic melt-down, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand. I am, of course, talking about the replacement of [...]

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