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Hand Washing: A Deadly Dilemma
The Huffington Post: New Yorker essayist Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a prestigious teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. A couple years ago, he wrote a profile of his hospital's infection control team, whose full-time job is to control the spread of infectious disease in the hospital. The focus of the piece was hand washing -- or more accurately, the team's failed efforts to get doctors, nurses and others in patient care to adequately disinfect their hands. They tried everything. They repositioned sinks and had new, automated ones installed.
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Publication Bias (or, Why You Can’t Trust Any of the Research You Read)
Forbes: Researchers in Management and Strategy worry a lot about bias – statistical bias. In case you’re not such an academic researcher, let me briefly explain. Suppose you want to find out how many members of a rugby club have their nipples pierced (to pick a random example). The problem is, the club has 200 members and you don’t want to ask them all to take their shirts off. Therefore, you select a sample of 20 of them guys and ask them to bare their chests.
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Fleeing the Brain’s Fear Center
Scientific “facts” often take on a life of their own. Scientists make legitimate and exciting new discoveries, with the best tools available to them in their time, and these findings get verified and modified and cited and, eventually, repeated without question. Over time, insights get simplified for non-scientists, and translated into the plain language of introductory textbooks. If they get repeated often enough, for long enough, some of these facts even seep into the popular culture.
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Writing Things Down Can Actually Help You Lose Weight
NewsRadio 95: Could a pen and pad be more useful in weight loss than a barbell? A recent study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, found that women that wrote about what they valued the most, such as relationships, religion, or music, lost more weight than woman who didn’t write down their values. Christine Logel of Renison University College at the University of Waterloo, co-author of the study along with Geoffrey L. Cohen of Stanford University, said “We have this need to feel self-integrity. We can buffer that self-integrity by reminding ourselves how much we love our children for example,” she explained.
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Workzone: I know what he said, but what did he mean?
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Civil society demands a certain amount of diplomacy -- even if those rude co-workers in the comic strip "Dilbert" are pretty funny. But planes have crashed and patients have misunderstood diagnoses as a result of people being too polite. Indeed, the higher the stakes, the more polite people often get -- exacerbating the static that disrupts effective communication, according to an article published recently in a journal of the Washington, D.C.-based Association for Psychological Science.
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Be It Resolved
The New York Times: IT’S still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions: 1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution. 2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer. 3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.
