In spite of the best efforts of statistics faculty everywhere, people constantly want to infer causality from correlations. Even though we can point to ridiculous examples, such as the strong positive correlation between ice cream sales and the murder rate (both increase in warm weather), some people just don’t get Read more…
Physicians at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO surgically applied a grid of electrodes on the surface of a 14 year old boy’s brain in order to locate the focus of his troubling seizures. While waiting to observe a seizure in action, the docs tried something Read more…
We are not surprised to find that aggression is a trait that is easily bred in animals. Spanish fighting bulls and pit bulls are the end result of careful selection of the most aggressive members of their species. Back in 1983, Lagerspetz and Lagerspetz bred the most aggressive mice in Read more…
An alert student forwarded me a rather bizarre report from MSNBC about a discussion among British psychiatrists about the use of the label “schizophrenia.” According to these psychiatrists, schizophrenia “has no scientific validity, is imprecise and stigmatizing.” Labeling is always an issue in psychopathology. We have to have some agreement that Read more…
Advertisements during football games often feature a stereotypical view of men who love football and women who love to shop. Now it appears that men and women are about equally likely to be “compulsive shoppers.” (Now I’m waiting for research on “compulsive football watching.”) A recent survey of over 2500 Read more…