Accidental Blogger
A general interest blog
Category: Educational, Cultural & Social Matters
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Carefully crafted, teary-eyed sentiments indeed. As well they should be, given the outrage poured on Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to stop giving grants to the Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening and preventative education. This could mean a huge drop in liberal contributions to the Orgy of Pinkfulness that the Komen Foundation sustains…
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What do Zeno’s paradoxes have to do with test reliability? The issue is the nature of reality – at least as far as test theory is concerned. Thinking of abstractions as reality is a problem for psychological test theory. It is very hard not to imbue them with reality, especially when they are very useful…
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“Validity is successful use for an intended purpose. Reliability is the expectation of validity based upon history of repeated use. Reliability is dependent upon validity. You cannot have a test that is reliable without it, first, being valid. For 100 years, psychological science got it backwards.”
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Travel to tribal portions of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is fairly restricted, and access to particular local tribes is (in theory) hard to accomplish. Rationales for isolating these peoples are probably varied – lack of disease resistance, the desire to protect unusual cultures blending into Rousseau-style noble savage stuff, the interesting genetic structure of…
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As usual, being familiar with the living conditions in much of the Third World, I say that this makes a lot of sense.
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Los Angeles just got a little less interesting. The landmark bookstore on Melrose has closed. According to the story, it may or may not reopen as a bricks-and-mortar operation. God forbid it only tries to keep virtually afloat. I've never cared to read books about spirituality, except for a traipse through Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography (prompted by…
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Swedish author Henning Mankell (of 'Wallander' fame) posits in the New York Times that better than calling our species Homo sapiens would be to call us Homo narrans, or Man the Storyteller. "It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo…
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The reactions of several columnists from nearly ten years ago, when the MSM met the upstart Blog. Some were prescient, others dismissive. Note William Safire's grudging acceptance that the "minor" phenomenon would at least enter the lexicon. In an upbeat Independence Day column in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, the incurable optimist, wrote about all…
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Why do we give to charities or causes from which we expect nothing more tangible than the usual warm fuzzy satisfaction? There are sociological and now evo-biological explanations for our altruisms. Most of us give for simple reasons – compassion, willingness to share, support for a worthy cause. Sometimes we also give for more mundane monetary or social reasons – tax breaks or…
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A documentary film about life on the streets and slums of my hometown Delhi, India.
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I read about amma and her saree, and I see the Ukrainian and Polish babuskas, the aunties and uncles of my childhood. And there are the low, fleece lined boots and apron from beneath another woman’s sweater.
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We just find ourselves here. With our individual birth we just “wake-up” and discover ourselves in the midst of an extraordinary world of beauty and sorrow. All around us we see exquisite and exquisitely subtle orders played out effortlessly. From the lazy descent of fall leaves to the slow unfolding of cloudscapes in empty blue…
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A recently launched blog about life in Gaza by Radhika Sainath. Radhika's blog was brought to my attention by my daughter who is a friend and erstwhile colleague of the author.
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I am only now done with the October 17th New Yorker – I read the magazine at a leisurely pace and in its paper version. The two book reviews published in the issue caught my eye and elicited two completely disparate reactions. Adam Kirsch's commentary on David Lodge's novel A Man of Parts, a thinly disguised biography of H.G. Wells is delightful, both because the book in question describes the prolific literary…
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From the National Academies: "A new data network that integrates emerging research on the molecular makeup of diseases with clinical data on individual patients could drive the development of a more accurate classification of disease and ultimately enhance diagnosis and treatment, says a new report from the National Research Council." (Courtesy of DocuTicker's DocuBase.) Careful…
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