Friday, August 28, 2015

Friday Water Cooler

In the Richest Nation on Earth, a Third of Children Live in Poverty (shadowproof.com). Shameful.

Study Identifies New Eating Disorder in Men (takepart.com). Protein Powder Abuse may become a new APA diagnosis.

Aphantasia: A Life Without Mental Images (bbc.com). Take the aphantasia test.

The Emotions That Make Us More Creative (hbr.org).

Antidepressant Drug Trials Are Not Generalizable (sciencedaily.com). Inclusion/exclusion criteria for antidpressant trials have narrowed over the past five years so that the most typical patients are excluded, rendering results moot.

Facebook Should Pay All of Us (newyorker.com). Jaron Lanier made this argument a couple years ago. It's still valid today. Google, FB, Yahoo, Bing, etc. profit massively from the expropriation of personal data.

Nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer used to
grow corn have been vastly underestimated, it turns out.
Is Financial Success Genetic? (ineteconomics.org). Of course not, but the tendency is to treat everything that gets handed down in families as genetic until proven otherwise.

How the Midwest's Corn Farms Are Cooking the Planet (motherjones.com). And BTW, with oil so cheap, do we really need all that corn ethanol in our fuel now? Couldn't we, like, feed the planet with it or something?

Class War and the Lessons of History (davidbrin.blogspot.com). "The last thing the New Oligarchs want you to do is study history."

The Dark Side of Big Data: A Link Roundup (mathbabe.org). Mathbabe rocks. Check out her blog.

The Great Emerging Market Bubble (project-syndicate.org), in which Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist, identifies weak political institutions as the main culprit behind economic stagnation. In a similar vein, see:

The Antidote to Economic Anxiety Is Better Government (america.aljazeera.com).

Where's the Republican Outrage over Saudi Arabia? (fpif.org). Apparently, only Donald Trump questions the relationship with our longtime "friends," the Saudis. And it's by no means clear he does so for the right reasons.

Yep, 800,000 Bankruptcy Filings This Year (creditslips.org). But that's actually good news, because bankruptcy filings, at 2.65 per 1,000 Americans, are at a 26-year low.

Bernie Sanders Shows How to Do a 404 Page (https://berniesanders.com/404).

Join us here every Friday for all the freakonomic links you may have missed! Tell a friend.

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Have you checked out my free book Mental Health Myths Debunked? Tons of info, tons of live links, lots of straight talk about depression, meds, therapy, psychiatry, mental health trends, statistics, and more (documented, with links to sources). And you know me, I call bullshit on bogus ideas (then give URLs to the actual data). The idea that antidepressants take weeks to do anything? Myth. Most people benefit from antidepressants? Myth. Antidepressants separate from placebo in clinical trials? Largely myth. (Half the trials show separation. Half don't.) Electroshock therapy is safe and effective? Bigtime myth. But don't take my word for it: Read the science for yourself. It's all laid out (with references) in the book. Download ePub or PDF now at NoiseTrade. Tell a friend.


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