Blog Posts (7)
April 25, 2013
Recently Mayor Michael Bloomberg learned that his Big Gulp ban had been blocked by a state Supreme Court judge for arbitrarily targeting these consumer goods without a legal rationale. Determined to combat the obesity epidemic, Bloomberg will no dou...
April 3, 2013
Now that states have decided what they are going to do about health insurance exchanges—those new shopping carts created by Obamacare to help consumers find health insurance who do not get it through their employers—the really tough part begins. ...
March 20, 2013
A dozen years ago, my wife filled out an NCAA bracket on a popular website. Out of more than 1 million entries, she finished somewhere around 17th.
Think about it: 17th out of a million. Clearly I married up! I mean everyone says their spouse is ...
March 1, 2013
One of the dangers of studying behavioral economics and psychology is that the ideas follow you around pretty much everywhere you go. I was reminded of that when some of my students came back from a mid-class bathroom break to tell me they thought th...
February 20, 2013
Notice anything unusual about this CT scan?
On the upper right side is an image of a gorilla. According to a new study, 83% of radiologists missed this image.
They had been looking through a series of scans, looking for “pulmonary nodules”—growt...
February 1, 2013
In last Sunday’s New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote a powerful op-ed about the environmental impact of airplane travel. She made many cogent arguments, ones that very much struck home with me. But in making her point, she played with mathema...
January 18, 2013
In a 1967 experiment, psychologists trained pigeons to peck a red key to get food. (Pigeons were huge back then, research wise!) Then they tested whether the pigeons could learn to delay gratification. They set up the pecking booth so that those ...
