Sociologist describes grim realities of academic science
Science writer Beryl Benderly reviews sociologist Joseph Hermanowicz’s penetrating study of academic science. It’s uncomfortable stuff for people whose life trajectories are headed straight in that direction (like me). Here’s the article. Here’s a quote: ut there’s no mystery about why so many aspirants to research careers lack an accurate idea of where they’re headed. In fact, Hermanowicz writes, accepting an unrealistically rosy image of one’s future is a basic step on the road to beco

Comments on study of human behavior
Relative to those of other organisms, human behavioral modules are flexible in their applicability to new problem domains. Compared to the universally optimizing decision strategies available to homo economicus, though, our behavioral modules are narrowly constrained. One strategy that has been available for decades is to model bounded rationality as the costs of search, a fruitful theoretical strategy. But as neurobiology, human behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology become more sophisticated, the adaptive problems that the human brain’s mental modules evolved to solve will become better defined. Once those problems are defined sufficiently, we might be able to make

Recession Psychology
In the May edition of New York Magazine, Jennifer Senior wrote that Kathleen Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, is preeminent among them, and for the sake of better understanding both the past and the future of our city, it’s useful to start by looking at what she’s found. Just thinking about money made her subjects less likely to help strangers struggling with their belongings. Just handling money made her subjects less sensitive to physical pain. My favorite experiment of hers, though, was one in which she divided her subjects into groups, one of which

Dollar Store = Credit Limit Decrease
Computer Scientist Panos Ipeirotis writes that An interesting example of a company deriving policy based on their predictive model is American Express. They realized that the feature “customer buys in a 99c store” is correlated with higher delinquency rates. So, AmEx decided to decrease the credit limit for such customers. Of course, the result will be that potentially affected customers will stop visiting such stores, decreasing the value of this policy for AmEx. Furthermore, this action may cause even mo

Benefits of Tort Law
The New York Times reports today that the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses. . . Baby Einstein, founded in 1997, was one of the earliest players in what became a huge electronic media market for babies and toddlers. Acquired by Disney in 2001, the company expanded to a full line of books, toys, flashcards and apparel, along with DVDs including “Baby Mozart,” “Baby Shakespeare” and “Baby Galileo.” The videos — simple productions featuring music, puppets, bright colors, and not many words — became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a th