Blog Profile / assertTrue
| URL : | http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Technology / Programming | |
| Posts on Regator: | 369 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.7 | |
| Archived Since: | March 20, 2009 | |
Blog Post Archive
Antidepressants, Tap Water, and Autism
Fathead minnows and contaminated tap water
provide clues to the rise in autism.
Now that U.S. doctors are treating 27 million people a year for depression and writing well over 250 million prescriptions per year for antidepressants, we shouldn't be surprised to find psychoactive drugs showing up in our drinking water. Show More Summary
Lies, Damn Lies, and Autism
As medical and epidemiological mysteries go, autism is surely among the most shocking and tragic. Autism has been on the rise for decades, but now it's reached unbelievable levels. In 1975, only one in 5000 children in the U.S. was affected by autism. Show More Summary
Off the Wall Novel-Writing Prompts
Your assignment: Write a full-length novel using one of the following prompts. A portal to another reality is discovered in a Mayan temple. Two scientists decide to enter the portal. One comes back.A modern-day Viking community is found living in a remote section of Newfoundland. Show More Summary
Do Lung Cancer Warning Labels Cause Cancer?
Smoking in Japan: few warnings, little cancer.
A few days ago, I wrote a piece called "Lung Cancer and the Power of Suggestion," in which I put forward the seemingly ludicrous hypothesis that cancer warnings on cigarets might actually...Show More Summary
A First Lesson in Programming
Yesterday I talked about teaching yourself programming. I said it's something anybody who understands "if/then" can do; you don't have to be a math whiz or a major-bigtime geek to learn to read and write code. I also said that today I'd present a first programming lesson. Show More Summary
How to Learn to Code (a Guide for Non-Geeks)
The other day I was reading an article in The Atlantic called "How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code." It tells how the author, an ordinary mortal named James Somers, decided he wanted to learn how to code, so he bought a huge tome called Beginning Visual C++ and just started reading it. Show More Summary
What should we be worried about?
Happiest countries (darkest red is happy, pink less happy). Yesterday I went to edge.org to read all the smart people's essays in answer to the prompt: "What Should We Be Worried About?" The posters are all bright people ("thought leaders," you might say) and I expected to read a lot of great essays. Show More Summary
Menthol Cigarets Cause Less Cancer
Tastes great, less cancer.
The scientific literature unequivocally shows that menthol cigarets cause less cancer than ordinary cigarets, and yet this information (which could save lives, obviously) is being withheld from the public by FDA, which conducted some of the research.
NCI estimates that 159,480 Americans will die of lung cancer in 2013. Show More Summary
Lung Cancer and the Power of Suggestion
Is it possible that today's high lung cancer rates are in large part due to the power of suggestion? Might the presence of Surgeon General warnings on a pack of cigarets actually cause people to expect to get cancer, and then see their...Show More Summary
Believe the Results, Not the Conclusion
Early in my writing career I was fortunate to be able to spend three hours interviewing Linus Pauling, the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes. One of many things I learned during that interview process that have stayed with me ever since has to do with interpretation of scientific results. Show More Summary
How to Get a Blog to Go Semi-Viral
This blog just completed its best-ever 30 days for traffic: 205,000 page-views. I've tried to figure out why certain posts went semi-viral (and others didn't). Here's what I've learned.The most popular posts from Jan 3 to Feb 2 were:How...Show More Summary
Why Science Can't Be Trusted
Funnel graph for a meta-analysis of studies
involving Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
I was shocked yet greatly intrigued to encounter a paper on PLoS called "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," by John P. A. Ioannidis, professor and chairman at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine. Show More Summary
Drug Companies: Stop Hiding Your Data
In one of the harsher comments to my earlier post on the use of "mystery placebos" in drug-company (and other) research, a post that got well over 32,000 visits, someone took me to task for alleging that pharmaceutical companies are evil, even though that's not what I said in the post. Show More Summary
Test-Driving Adobe's Business Catalyst
Even though I work for Adobe, I want to give as honest an appraisal of Business Catalyst as possible here. So I need to stress up front that these are my opinions, not those of the company.
Normally, I spend my time using and/or documenting Adobe's 800-pound gorilla of the Web Content Management space, Adobe CQ. Show More Summary
Waiting for Elsevier to fall
My partner Sally has been working on a mental illness memoir lately, and she keeps digging up really mind-blowing research papers online (like this one involving 45,570 Swedish conscripts, showing that cannibis is almost certainly a risk factor, in young Swedes at least, for later development of schizophrenia). Show More Summary
What Ostracism Really Means
It's a little embarrassing, but I only recently learned what ostracism is. Or used to be. Ostracism (Greek ???????????, ostrakismos) was a formal political practice, in ancient Athens, by which citizens of the city-state would in essence hold a referendum on who was the biggest jerk in town. Show More Summary
Are You a JavaScript Guru? Try This Test
Think you know JavaScript? Really? Are you sure? Try the following quick quiz. Guess what each expression evaluates to. (Answers given at the end.) 1. ++Math.PI2. (0.1 + 0.2) + 0.3 == 0.1 + (0.2 + 0.3)3. typeof NaN4. typeof typeof undefined5. Show More Summary
A Strong First Paragraph
I recently picked up a copy of the revised edition of Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac by Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, a superb collection of reminiscences by Jack Kerouac's contemporaries, given crystalline coherence...Show More Summary
More Easy Ways to Improve Your Writing
A while ago, I wrote about some easy ways to pump up your writing. It turned out to be a fairly popular post (though nowhere near as popular as my January 15 post on "How to Write an Opening Sentence," which got a bewildering 37,000 page-views). Show More Summary
Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills?
Is this really what a placebo amounts to?
Over the weekend I was reading some medical studies involving placebos. The experimental protocols were of the standard double-blind type in which a control group gets a placebo without either...Show More Summary