April 16, 2013, 4:55 am
By Beth McMurtrie
A Congolese girl carried a box of food aid last December at a refugee camp in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images)
About one in 10 children in sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 5 is starving, and nearly 40 percent are physically stunted because of chronic malnutrition. The situation in South Asia is even more dire. Yet global shipments of food aid have declined steadily since the late 1990s. In short, there’s not enough food to go around.
So if you ran a relief agency, how would you use your limited resources to save the most lives?
A Stanford researcher may have an answer, though it’s one that at first blush might sound cruel: Deliver food only to the children most likely to benefit from it. His conclusion led The Atlantic to run an article with the headline “The…
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April 4, 2013, 4:57 am
By Tom Bartlett
Colin Purrington
Colin Purrington wrote a funny, helpful guide about designing scientific posters. It has loads of practical tips (don’t make it too long, use a nonserif font for titles, etc.) and jokes about the mating habits of cute red pandas. The guide has been remarkably popular—he estimates it’s been viewed about two million times over the years—and he gets e-mails thanking him all the time. It has become a claim to minor fame.
Sometimes people, um, borrow his guide without giving him credit. This happens fairly regularly, and when he finds out about it, he sends an e-mail asking them to take it down. Usually they do. But when he sent an e-mail to the Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research, asking that a roughly 1,200-word, near-verbatim, uncredited chunk from his guide be removed from the…
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March 27, 2013, 6:44 pm
By Tom Bartlett
When you’re about to have your first child, parents of actual, free-from-the-womb kids will chuckle knowingly and warn that you have no idea what you’re in for. Read all the books, attend every class, but you can’t really anticipate the wonder and the challenge. I found this to be annoying and untrue. Turns out it’s a lot like what the books say, and pretty much what I’d imagined. In a good way. But still.
A forthcoming paper, “What Mary Can’t Expect When She Is Expecting,” by L.A. Paul, a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is stirring conversation even before it has appeared in the journal Res Philosophica. The paper is a 30-page knowing chuckle with footnotes, and it doesn’t do justice to what we’ve learned from the (admittedly imperfect and sometimes contradictory) social science about parental happiness.
Paul argues that you can’t…
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March 11, 2013, 5:47 pm
By Tom Bartlett
Very few of us would argue that “it’s OK to kick a puppy in the face.” That’s not a nice thing to say. Here’s an even less nice thing to say: “I wish my parents would drown.” Maybe they never got you the sweet BMX bike you begged for, sticking you instead with that banana-seat Schwinn, but desiring their terminal submersion is a bit much. If there are advocates for kicking puppies and drowning parents, they (wisely) tend to keep those foul opinions to themselves.
Now consider this statement: “I dare God to make my home catch fire.”
It’s a little different, right? You’re still imagining a terrible event, but this time you’re invoking the supernatural. If you believe in God, and you believe that he answers your prayers, then you might worry that the Almighty would reduce your bungalow to cinders. But what if you don’t believe in God? You wouldn’t give it a second thought, right?…
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February 27, 2013, 5:34 pm
By Marc Parry
Scholars are increasingly taking a quantitative approach to history. You see that in the writing of the Stanford archaeologist-historian Ian Morris, whom I profiled in this week’s Chronicle Review, and in the work of even more radical quantifiers like Peter Turchin, a biologist at the University of Connecticut whose burgeoning discipline of “cliodynamics” is featured in a sidebar to the Morris article.
Yet scholars have experienced earlier infatuations with number-heavy history, notably the 70s-era boom-and-bust of “cliometrics.” And now we can quantify it.
In response to the Chronicle Review articles, Mr. Turchin graphed the evolution of quantitative history by tracing how frequently some relevant terms appear in Google’s enormous corpus of digitized books. What he found might be of interest to historians and social scientists, who sometimes tell different stories about what…
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February 14, 2013, 8:30 pm
By Paul Basken
Boston — Scientists have a hard enough time getting people to understand what they’re talking about.
Their thoughts can be complicated. Their sentences can be laden with jargon. And their conclusions can offend political or religious sensibilities.
And now, to make things worse, readers have an immediate forum to talk back. And when some readers post uncivil comments at the bottom of online articles, that alone can raise doubts about the underlying science, a new study has found. Or at least reinforce those doubts.
The study, outlined on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, involved a survey of 2,338 Americans asked to read an article that discussed the risks of nanotechnology, which involves engineering materials at the atomic scale.
Of participants who had already expressed wariness toward the technology, those who…
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January 16, 2013, 9:01 am
By Paul Voosen
Like many scientific disciplines, mental health is a fragmented place, with individual researchers plugging away on their favorite disorders, like depression, often without regard to how the disease connects to, say, physical health, let alone molecular biology.
So just where is it that a group of scientists studying the intersection of Buddhist meditation and human-cell aging is supposed to publish?
Alan Kazdin, a Yale psychologist, has decided it will be in his new journal, Clinical Psychological Science. Started this month by the Association for Psychological Science, the journal is an attempt to provide a high-profile home for interdisciplinary research that pushes the study of mental health in new—and curious—directions.
“We’re doing the science of mental health, broadly conceived,” Kazdin says.
The director of the Yale Parenting Center, Kazdin formerly edited…
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December 19, 2012, 7:08 pm
By Tom Bartlett
In 1995 a study in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology estimated that Americans used guns to defend themselves 2.1 million to 2.5 million times a year. That sounds like a lot, too much really—and the authors, Gary Kleck and Marc G. Gertz, acknowledge that, though they argue that it’s “not implausibly large” when you consider that there are 200-million-plus guns in the United States.
Nearly two decades later, that statistic has been recited countless times, and it often comes up in the aftermath of a horrible mass-shooting incident, like the one last week in Newtown, Conn., to make the case that on the whole firearms actually save lives and that gun-control advocates fail to see the big picture.
When Bob Costas recently argued, in response to a football player’s killing his girlfriend and himself, that “handguns do not enhance our safety,” the executive director of the…
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November 5, 2012, 6:38 pm
By Tom Bartlett
Sam Wang
If you watched Meet the Press this past weekend, you learned that the presidential election was “statistically tied” and could be a “photo finish.” The Associated Press predicted a “nail biter.” The Philadelphia Inquirer threw up its hands, saying the vote was just “too close to call.”
Sam Wang begs to differ. By day, Wang is a neuroscientist at Princeton University, where his lab uses lasers to monitor the chemical signals of cells in the cerebellum. He co-wrote a recent paper that found that mathematics and science majors are more likely than humanities students to have a sibling on the autism spectrum.
But in the evenings, after his wife and 5-year-old daughter are in bed, the 45-year-old turns his attention to polls. Since 2004, Wang has used his considerable data-crunching chops to forecast…
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November 1, 2012, 5:37 pm
By Josh Fischman
Academics are often called out of touch or cloistered, and are condemned for pursuing research that’s irrelevant to daily life. New research, however, points to a powerful exception:
Simply by publishing an academic paper, a professor can demolish your investment strategy.
Buy stocks that recently did well, focus on firms that reinvest profits—it doesn’t matter. If a finance scholar writes about your strategy, over the next decade or so your returns will shrink by more than one-third.
That’s true for 82 different strategies that have been described in finance journals, say David McLean, a visiting associate professor of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, and Jeffrey Pontiff, a professor of finance at Boston College. The duo describe their findings in a working paper that has been presented at several finance conferences this year…
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