This Book Will Change Your Life*

There are many books, but buying this book will truly change your life.*
*In that that you will 1) have less money and 2) have the book.

Partial Truths

In my Critical Inquiry class I teach a section on applying critical thinking skills to the news. One of the things I warm my students about is being aware of partial truths. That is, when a story presents only some of the facts while leaving out others that might be quite relevant to interpreting and [...]

ROTC and Universities

Years ago, when I was a liberal undergraduate attending a meeting about peace, I saw a professor looking at the ROTC brochures with contempt. I do not recall the exact words, but it was clear he was upset by the ROTC and believed they should be expelled from campus.
In the 1960s and 1970s schools [...]

Marines vs Berkley

The Daily Show’s Rob Riggle went to Berkley to investigate why the city wants to get rid of the Marine recruiting center. The is video entertaining but also raises some interesting issues.
Mr. Riggle, a former Marine, did the usual Daily Show approach to such mocking interviews: sarcastic yet blended with reason and insight.  [...]

Online Medical Records

Google and Microsoft have plans to get into the health data business. The basic idea is that people would permit their medical records (or parts of them) to be copied onto servers controlled by Google (Google Health) or Microsoft (Microsoft Vault).
There are numerous advantages to having your medical records available online. One is that you [...]

Race, Gender and Prison Populations

America is a world leader in many ways. Unfortunately, one of these ways is in the percentage of the population in prison. According to recent statistics there are 2,319,258 Americans in prison. This is about 1% of the adult population. This puts us ahead of all other countries -even China (1.5 million in [...]

The Press & McCain

As almost everyone knows, the New York Times launched an attack on Senator McCain. The full text of the article can be found here.
While I believe that the media has an important role to play in exposing corruption and misdeeds on the part of politicians, journalists need to base such exposures on adequate evidence. [...]

Habituation

Amy Sutherland has a book coming out entitled What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage. In this book she discusses how a wife can use the training techniques developed for animals (such as Shamu, the famous killer whale) in order to get her husband to do what she wants. It must be noted [...]

Ripping Books

Copying movies and music is old news. It is easy to do and all attempts to prevent it seem to be doomed to failure. It can probably even be proven that any encryption scheme must be such that it can be bypassed.
One medium that has done well in resisting copying is the printed word. While [...]

Seduction and Manipulation

Reading through the Books section (by Jennie Yabroff) of the February 28, 2008 Newsweek (pages 58-59) I happened to note that Nina DiSesa has a new book out. This book is titled Seducing the Boys Club. In her book she argues that women should use in the workplace the same tactics they use to [...]