One of the books I’d gotten when I’d started thinking seriously of freelance writing a couple of years ago was Media Bistro’s first book — “Get a Freelance Life” by Margit Feury Ragland. I didn’t note it when I mentioned Media Bistro a few days ago, but the website includes sections for jobs and profiles, [...]
My prior comment on the infungibility of scientists reminding me about the work of economist W. Brian Arthur that I’d read about in Mitchell Waldrop’s book “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos”. Arthur is noted for his work on increasing returns in economies, and how these increasing returns magnify small, [...]
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 [...]
The RIAA has framed the issue of music sharing as piracy. While that fits their interest in preserving a traditional business model, the indicators are increasing that the real issue is about a cultural change in how information is gained, used, and shared. While a result of technology, the effect is both a cultural change [...]
Years ago, I became fascinated by James Burke’s series Connections. Burke had the ability to string a chain of interrelations from the problem of pumping water out of silver mines in medieval Czechoslovakia to the construction of the atomic bomb. This post runs in that tradition, going from RIAA lawsuits to a potential consequence of [...]
In his Times Eye on Science Blog of 11 July, Michael Lemonick addresses the issues of Saving American Science, the theme of a recent meeting by the Aspen Science Center. The theme of lagging U.S. innovation in science and technology has been rising as a concern for several years now. Congressman Frank Wolf provides some [...]
In my last post, I’d included a quote by Danny Hillis on the massive increases of different uses of computers brought on by the staggering increases in power coupled with similar decreases in size — specifically, a computer in every doorknob. I was going through some receipts today when I noticed that a book I [...]
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 [...]
My wife is a fabric “junkie†who has increasingly been using the Internet to shop on the long-tail of the distribution of what’s available. According to a recent press release the HAPTEX project at the University of Geneva is working to make such remote purchases even more satisfying by providing a virtual feel of the [...]
With a few days more than a month to go until Winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the days are getting short. Even at noon, the sun is a lot closer to the horizon than it was a month or two ago. For many, the lack of light also triggers a set of depressive symptoms [...]
