Sunday, June 28, 2009

A review of Shop Class as Soulcraft, a book about an academic turned motorcycle mechanic, about the value of working with your hands:

Most of his students were there only because they had heard that Latin could help boost their SAT scores — and that, Crawford says, was a shame. "I'm quite sure that if I'd been able to take some of these kids aside and say, let's build a deck together, or let's overhaul this engine, they would have perked right up. I think there's a question of, What sparks that love of learning?"

I'm intrigued by this book, but I'm not sure it says anything really new.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The academic publishing process is painful and annoying. So maybe I should create a fake journal to publish my stuff:

Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.

Elsevier is rapidly losing my respect.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Hacking the high-security locks that protect the Pentagon:

One by one, brand-new Medeco locks were unsealed. And, as the camera rolled, one by one these locks were picked open. None of the Medeco-3 locks lasted the minimum 10 to 15 minutes necessary to qualify for the "high security" rating. One was cracked in just seven seconds.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Onion usually focuses on the funny-and-false niche. But you can file this in the sad-and-true category:

According to the report, staring blankly at luminescent rectangles is an increasingly central part of modern life. At work, special information rectangles help men and women silently complete any number of business-related tasks, while entertainment rectangles—larger and louder and often placed inside the home—allow Americans to enter a relaxing trance-like state after a long day of rectangle-gazing.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Atul Gawande explains why health care costs so much in McAllen, Texas:

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

It's all about incentives. Maybe we should require doctors to take out annuities on all their patients.