https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/placebo-are-you-there/

Very interesting piece - a translation of a 2015 French paper that argues we colloquially overstate the placebo effect by quite a lot. The authors argue that many studies reporting a large effect fail to take into account statistical and other factors, and suffer from methodological flaws. Basically, drug studies can be sloppy.

(I'm having a lot of trouble writing content posts. SAD is in full swing, Arisia is heating up and consuming lots of my extra hours, and now I'm down with a cold. Yay, go me.)

Two articles I've read recently that impressed me.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/

Ta-Nehisi Coates continues to be fantastic in talking about race.

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http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/using-science-to-reform-toxic-player-behavior-in-league-of-legends/

How one game company used "science" - that is a combination of gleanings from social science and psychology - to modify player behavior. It's a brilliant piece of work.

Science Friday has a bit on with Oliver Sacks that includes some advice on distinguishing hallucinations. For example, he says, if you see a sky-blue cow up in the air, that's a hallucination.

And that reminds me of an old piece of advice (which I know I've shared with several of you):

When you are tripping, all cars are real. If you see a purple car with pink polka-dots on it coming at you out of the sky, get out of the way. You might be hallucinating the sky.

I believe I first heard this from someone at Senior House, but darned if I can remember who it was.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psi-vid/2012/09/25/science-its-a-girl-thing-can-you-create-a-better-video/

You may recall a couple weeks back I pointed to a critique in Scientific American related to ways in which attempts are being made to attract more girls (and women) into science. Now there's a chance at the above URL for you to show you can do it better. For science!

Elinor Ostrom was the only woman to win the Nobel prize in Economics and one of the few non-economists to win it. Her work expanded our understanding of how "tragedy of the commons"-type problems could be handled.

I had a brief brush with her early "Governing the Commons" as part of my dissertation research. I had not realized until I read some of the obits for her just how prolific she had been in the last two decades, particularly working on areas such as informal economies and knowledge economies, though she's best known for hands-on work with physical systems like community grazing fields and village-level irrigation systems. Unlike a lot of economists she didn't just sit in her office and create mathematical formalisms. She did real field work in Africa and Asia.