Back toward the end of last year, I’d posted a short piece about the book Three Cups of Tea, profiling Greg Mortenson’s work building schools in remote parts of Pakistan. NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof just wrote a column about Mortenson — It Takes a School, Not Missles. Kristof also extends the discussion and a [...]
At just over two weeks since my lay-off from LLNL, the lab is already starting to seem a memory seen through the aerosol-induced haze of distance. By focusing and working intensely on other endeavors, such as networking () and the general bibliography, I’ve deliberately accelerated my own psychological perception of the passing of time. Simply [...]
The Massage Therapy Foundation (MTF) is launching a new peer-reviewed, open-access, online journal — the International Journal of Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork: Research, Education, & Practice. The first edition is scheduled for August. As co-chair of the MTF’s Best Practices Committee, I submitted a 33 page paper to the editor today covering the committee’s work [...]
An episode of Freakonomics embodied the concept that creating explicit requirements replaces prior tacit requirements. In this episode, a day-care center in Haifa imposed an explicit fine for late pick-ups by parents. In contradiction to the expected decrease in late pick-ups, the explicit fine replaced the tacit penalty of parental guilt and the number of [...]
Over the last 15 months, I’ve been working as part of the Massage Therapy Foundation’s Best Practices Committee on defining a protocol for creating evidence-based guidelines for massage therapy. Fairly early on in the process I did a draft literature review of existing criteria for guideline creation. Recently, I’ve been thinking of how to define [...]
The November/December issue of the journal Health Affairs covers the topic of Will Employer Coverage Endure? There’s further discussion that health coverage isn’t the same as the traditional concept of insurance in the Health Affairs Blog. The California Healthcare Foundation has also provided free access links to several of the articles from their page on [...]
I recently subscribed to a couple of Time.com RSS feeds on science and health. On the health side, In Perils of the Lonely Brain, Jeffrey Kluger writes about research on how feelings of isolation negatively effect executive function. In What We’ll be Dying From, Michael Lemonick notes a World Health Organization report on the top [...]
A recent press release by the Karolinska Institutet, a medical university in Sweden, notes a study revealing that stress in early life can be a major factor in later development of chronic fatigue syndrome. The study looked at 20,000 Swedish twins surveyed in 1973 and again in 1998. The scientists also noted a correlation between [...]
This Sunday, being the 3rd Sunday in November, is the World Day of Remembrance for road traffic victims, according to the World Health Organization (WMO).
“In a split second, a traffic crash transforms forever the life of a family. Behind each statistic, there are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandchildren, colleagues, classmates [...]
At a recent Earth Systems Science Partnership (ESSP) conference in Bejing, one of the plenary sessions was on the Importance of an Interdisciplinary Approach to Earth System Science. The description of the session noted the importance of continued research and mitigation strategies to offset negative impacts of global environmental change.
There is no doubt that humans [...]
