I’m guilty, although thankfully I’ve not caused an accident (yet). The NY Times’ Jane Brody does a good job marshaling the evidence to prove what most of us already know: staring at your smart phone while...
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Numbers are tough, and when numbers meet breast cancer they don’t get any easier. A recent study in JAMA was nicely summarized in the Wall Street Journal. I created the following charts to summarize the main outcomes for...
A giant, lengthy study of screening mammography concludes that the test offers no benefit to women regardless of age… and may do more harm than good. In a 25 year follow up of nearly 90,000 Canadian women randomized to...
Apple iOS sports a “Do Not Disturb” feature If you’ve ever moved your alarm clock across the room so that you have to get out of bed to turn it off, you understand the difference between good intentions and good...
Check out the following (simple) math problem: 2 + 4 = __ Easy, right? But now suppose that just at the moment you wrote 6 in as the answer (you chose, 6, right?), the plus sign changed to a multiplication sign instead. Wrong...
According to The Huffington Post, the president and first lady have a love-hate relationship with their pastry chef: Obama says the pastry chef makes “the best pie I have ever tasted, and that has caused big problems with...
Some very exciting news today. For the first time ever, Express Scripts has quantified the hidden healthcare costs of very common behaviors related to prescription drugs. We estimate that procrastination, forgetfulness, and other...
In a previous blog entry, I shared an interesting study by Thaler and Massey showing that teams with earlier draft picks seem to do worse than those with lower picks. Ugh! What’s going on? Thaler lists a number of...
I recently spent the weekend in California with my wife, sister-in-law, and niece. My in-laws have a Wii gaming console, of which I’ve heard but never played. Suffice it to say that I played more video games during...
Gil Welch at Dartmouth goes for the throat in a New York Times editorial. Some believe that finding more abnormalities is the right strategy to improve the nation’s health, but how much it reduces death and disability is...
