Random links
- Ig Nobel prizes check out monkeys' behinds, spill their coffee: Prizes once again tap a rich vein of science's weird side.
- Amongst this year's winners include analysis of how to walk carrying a cup of coffee, demonstrations of the ability of chimpanzees to recognize their companions from pictures of their posteriors (a study which I'm guessing won't be repeated in human populations), and the physics of ponytails.
- Are Hospitals Less Safe Than We Think?
- "Harvey Fineberg, M.D., president of the Institute of Medicine and former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, has said that between 30 percent and 40 percent of our entire health-care expenditure is paying for fraud and unnecessary treatment. ... A 2010 New England Journal of Medicine study concluded that as many as 25 percent of all hospitalized patients will experience a preventable medical error of some kind, and 100,000 will die annually because of errors. If medical error were a disease, it would be the sixth-leading cause of death in the country."
- Globalization, Brain Drain and Development
- "This paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain ... brain drain (or high-skill) migration is becoming the dominant pattern of international migration and a major aspect of globalization. ... The recent empirical literature shows that high-skill emigration need not deplete a country’s human capital stock and can generate positive network externalities. Three case studies are also considered: the African medical brain drain, the recent exodus of European scientists to the United States, and the role of the Indian diaspora in the development of India’s IT sector."
- Let My Love Open the Door: The Importance of Raising Chivalrous Boys and Feminist Girls
- "The second part of my dream is that as my daughters are enjoying their equal pay, equal opportunity, equal treatment lives they are also having gentleman open doors for them, pay for dinner on their first date and even, wait for it, have a chair pulled out for them in a dining room." Given the word "feminist" in the title, think of something slightly different than equal when you read the word "equal." "Chivalry" and "equal treatment" seem contradictory. One of the comments that "she wants to raise selfish, double-standard bearing hypocrites as daughters" seems to sum up this article quite well.