Tue Mar 31 12:05:36 EDT 2015

Items of Interest

Various web links I found to be of interest recently:

  • Homeopathy won't cure you, researchers conclude

    Is this news?

    After a years-long review of hundreds of studies, Australia's top medical research agency has concluded that homeopathy is essentially useless for treating any medical condition.
    ... Although several studies have shown that homeopathic "remedies" have no detectable amounts of the original substance left, homeopaths believe the tinctures retain a "memory" of the original substance and are thus effective.
    ... They say they found no reliable evidence that any homeopathic treatment led to health improvements that were any better than a placebo.
    And the researchers say the studies that did find homeopathic remedies effective were either so poorly designed, or so poorly conducted, that they were too flawed to be considered reliable.

  • Hospitals Are Robbing Us Blind

    Forget Obamacare. The real villains in the American health care system are greedy hospitals and the politicians who protect them

    Whether you’re for Obamacare or against it, you can’t afford to ignore the fact that America’s hospitals have become predatory monopolies.

  • What's Changed about the Standard of Living?

    It's Complicated. But Hopeful.   By Megan McArdle

    This list illustrates why public policy seems to be struggling to come up with a plan of attack against our current insecurities. The welfare state is relatively good at giving people money: you collect the taxes, write a check, and now people have money. The welfare state has proven very bad at giving people stable jobs and stable families, a vibrant community life, promising career tracks, or a cure for their drug addiction. No wonder so many hopes now seem to be pinned on early childhood education, far in excess of the evidence to support them: it is the only thing we have not already tried and failed at.
    But I think this list illustrates the poverty of trying to measure living standards by staring at median wages. Many of the changes of the last century show up in that statistic, but others, like the time no longer spent plucking chickens, or the joys of banishing lye from the pantry, appear nowhere. Nor do the changes in job and family structure that have made the lives of people who are indisputably vastly materially richer than my young grandparents were, nonetheless feel much more precarious. We look into the numbers and think we're seeing hard facts. But in fact, like someone reading tea leaves, we are projecting our intangible impressions onto an ambiguous picture.

  • Why the Idea That a Big Cyber Attack Could Create a Huge Tech Armageddon Is Pure BS

    It turns out that all the talk of cyber Armageddon was a load of bunkum. An elaborate propaganda campaign which only serves as a pretext to sacrifice our civil liberties and channel an ocean of cash to the defense industry.

  • Will Misogyny Bring Down The Atheist Movement?

    The continuing debate over a murky sexual encounter at a 2008 convention for cheekily anti-establishment skeptics underscores a broader dilemma: How can a progressive, important intellectual community behave so poorly towards its female peers?

    Also see, Atheism's shocking woman problem: What's behind the misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?.

  • Genetic Data Tools Reveal How Pop Music Evolved In The US

    ... and show that The Beatles didn't start the 1964 American music revolution after all

    Instead, they say that the evolution of music between 1960 and 2010 was largely constant but punctuated by periods of rapid change. "We identified three revolutions: a major one around 1991 and two smaller ones around 1964 and 1983," they say.
    The characters of these revolutions were all different with the 1964 revolution being the most complex.
    ... Another question hotly debated by music commentators is how British bands such as the Beatles and The Rolling Stones influenced the American music scene in the early 1960s. Mauch and co are emphatic in their conclusion. "The British did not start the American revolution of 1964," they say.


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