Increasing my brain capacity so that silly research projects no longer need to be funded I have been on many plane rides recently and I never sleep. Thus, I watch a lot of movies and television shows on my flights. I never go to the movie theatres anymore […]
Everyone has a year-end retrospective. Let’s join that bandwagon. Here is a retrospective on some of the events and studies that highlighted the psychological, scientific and health context of the times. Some events went viral (Item number 1); some studies went relatively unnoticed (as most research articles do). […]
Have you seen the latest research out of University of California, Berkeley (my alma mater-but don’t hold that against me or the article) on animal social behavior? As a social psychologist, I have been trained to be interested in group behavior and its social consequences –the field did […]
Today I celebrate not going on a business trip by heading down to Jersey. I will cross the river, despite the “swamp gas” misgivings, because I managed to get out of having to go on what promised to be a god-awful trip. It would have been yet […]
Cuba is a land of contrasts. A totalitarian regime ruling over a friendly, open people. Extreme poverty by American standards, coupled with effective public health efforts. An educated public that often cannot put its education to use. Cuba: A mix of low technology such as cars from the […]
At a Happy-hour “Goodbye” outing last night, many of us at the table (with our basil lemonades in hand) pondered the question what happens now after the International AIDS Conference. What changed and what changes are to come? Are we going back to the humdrum of old? Was […]
Last week’s buzzword at the International AIDS Conference is marriage. Not the gay marriage debate currently raging in the United States, but rather the marriage of biomedical advances with behavioral interventions as the next step forward in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Certainly, biomedical advances alone are not enough, […]
It’s not a coincidence that “meaningless” is synonymous with “academic”. Since the collapse of the academic job market in the 1970’s, universities have been cranking out doctoral students across a wide range of fields. And as the graduate student population sells, the relevancy of academic research shrinks. Smaller […]
Brazilian cardinal Claudio Hummes once said, “We know that social exclusion is closely tied to the new economic world order, globalized, with free and open markets, which isn’t bringing prosperity or social justice to all.” The degenerative effects of this social exclusion even extend to public health. How else […]