Globally Rational

You are browsing the archives of 2008 April.

//Yesterday, I wrote about how we’re incentivizing scientists to stop innovating. In that post, I promised to suggest some solutions today. Here are some things we can do to foster increased scientific innovation:

We should require institutional research boards (IRBs) to include more scientifically knowledgeable personnel, so that decisions can be made by scientists […]

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//In today’s world, a culture of innovation is integral to advancement at the same rate that we’ve seen in the past century, especially in the medical field. Unfortunately, some scientists have done a few unethical things in the past; because of this, we’ve decided to severely restrict all scientific research. Here is how […]

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//About 200 years ago, the mathematician Thomas Robert Malthus famously wrote an equation predicting that the human population would soon reach the planet’s ecological carrying capacity, causing many of us to die off because of the lack of food and resources (just like what we have often seen with other species). He expected it […]

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//Today, Israeli forces attacked a Hamas leader’s house and killed his 14-year old daughter, among other civilians. This is a few days after Hamas offered Israel a 6-month cease-fire, which Israel is planning on rejecting because they don’t want to talk to Hamas. What I’d like to know is this: what exactly is […]

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//This is the first post from Zartošt, who will (hopefully) be posting regularly in the future. It is the outlook on life of a young man who lives in a free state but is restricted by societal standards.
For freedom, guns fire. For freedom, revolution spreads. For freedom, men kill. For freedom,men die. The sound […]

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//Many people in the US say that you should “support our troops” so that they don’t have to use a more controversial phrase like “support the war.” This leads to a sort of emotional connection between a person and the war in Iraq, and we tend to think something along the lines of “well, […]

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//Ever since online stock brokerages like E*TRADE started to show up in the mid-1990’s, the stock market has almost turned into a form of gambling. A few years later in 2000, the market plummeted because tech stocks were overvalued.
Everybody was talking about stocks back then, and rightfully so. The technology sector was booming […]

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//This is a continuation of the “parsing a country song” series, which I started a couple of weeks ago; click here to see the first article. Here is the third stanza and the chorus:
Now this nation that I love has fallen under attack.
A mighty sucker punch came flying in from somewhere in the […]

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//Anybody familiar with the US medical system would completely support New Zealand’s junior doctors in their recent strike. After all, American resident physicians (our counterpart to the Australian “junior doctor”) are overworked (recently, the government limited the work week to 80 hours) and underpaid (~$40,000/year) despite the fact that they’re licensed physicians. They […]

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//Which comes first in a country: the immigrants or the economic success?
It’s like the chicken-and-egg paradox. If there was no promise of success, then immigrants wouldn’t come; meanwhile, if there were no immigrants, there wouldn’t be enough people to succeed (in cosmopolitan countries like the US). Of course, there are exceptions to the […]

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