Science and Nature

This advice is intended for anyone interested in pursuing graduate education (toward the Ph.D.) on a full-time basis, not for part-timers or weekend scholars. Also, my graduate education was in the sciences, so some of what I say may not apply to someone in, say, management or the humanities. 1. Maintain a positive attitude...

One of the big ideas in the world of education (both K-12 and postsecondary) is the whole notion of “learning styles.” By this, we mean that people have different ways of learning and recalling knowledge and information. For example, some people consider themselves “visual” learners, which means they need to see pictures and words...

In the latest issue of Psychological Science, Chen, Cohen, and Miller report that kids from low socioeconomic status (SES) families show elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. From their abstract: Individuals with a low socioeconomic status (SES) are at increased risk for mental and physical health problems, and the relationship may be mediated...

There’s been a lot of news lately in the world of artificial intelligence. First up, was the news from IBM Research. Last month they reported that they had constructed a cortical simulator built upon the IBM Blue Gene supercomputing architecture. According to IBM, this cortical simulation is able to run at near-real-time, and possesses...

A recently published study by researchers at Johns Hopkins described the psychoactive effects of psilocybin, as well as the “mystical” experiences it can cause. The thing that was most striking about this study was that it was not new news. In fact, this is stuff that was studied intensively a generation ago. The sad...

Malcolm Gladwell’s book entitled Blink was on the bestseller list for a long time, and for good reason. It was amazing to most people that humans can do so much decision-making wholly outside the realm of consciousness, and outside the realm of what we usually think of as “reason.” Yet, these quick decisions, these...

It now appears that all of the money, over the last 10 years or so, that pharmaceutical companies have spent on new drug research and development have not really paid off. From a 20 September Reuters news story entitled “US medical research spending rises, results lag,” it appears that even though spending on medical...