Neuroanthropology is moving! We’re joining a new Public Library of Science project: PLoS Blogs. We’ll be part of a new cluster of eleven science blogs at PLoS.

You can now find us at PLoS Neuroanthropology. Please update your subscriptions, come over and comment (or complain), and let us know what you think.

We are tremendously excited about this opportunity for many more reasons than we have space to articulate. Here we’ll touch on some of the main ones.

The Network

We are thrilled to be part of an initiative that combines serious scholars and serious writers together. That first. As a group, we share interests in science and medicine, in the public uses and misuses of knowledge, and in promoting awareness of ideas and research in a broad fashion.

This amazing new network of people includes writers we’ve followed, others we’ve admired from afar, and some new names with impressive track records. A Pulitzer Prize winner, the former editor-in-chief of Scientific American, professors at Duke and North Carolina Central University, a range of award-wining science journalists, and some top-quality science bloggers with rigorous science backgrounds – that is a great group of people. We are particularly excited to learn from the writers how to better practice this craft, and to engage with people with such an array of interests.

Anthropology within the Public Library of Science

One of the things that has us most excited, that really clinched our decision to make the move to PLoS, is that we hope we might act as a voice for anthropology in a scholarly and public forum built around science and medicine. Anthropology offers powerful insights from cross-cultural research and sophisticated integrative theory that deserve a much wider audience, one we hope to help grow here at PLoS Blogs.

As research becomes increasingly international and interdisciplinary, researchers in all fields need to confront the complexities of worldwide variation and of cultural biases, including our own. Anthropology has done this work for over a century now, and is in a wonderful position to offer the fruits of these intellectual efforts, including hard won wisdom from our own field’s mistakes, to the work of science and medicine represented at PLoS.

PLoS and Blogs

As a non-profit, ad-free adventure, PLoS Blogs also suits what we’ve done long-term at Neuroanthropology. We’ve debated that topic several times, whether to go for ad revenue, whether to join a network that might pay us. We’ve always decided no. We didn’t start doing this for money, we haven’t kept at it for money. We do it because we enjoy writing and we like sharing our ideas with a broad public.

PLoS itself has taken bloggers seriously for quite some time. It offers bloggers access to preprint versions of articles on the same terms as journalists and organizations. The PLoS team has used its own weblogs – PLoS.org, everyONE and Speaking of Medicine – to highlight scholarly content in an accessible format. As Brian Mossup, PLoS Community Manager (and many thanks for the thrill of that initial call!), says, PLoS Blogs will open up “the discussion, and debate, on science and medicine.”

Although online discussions are no longer new to academia, many of us are searching for ways to better integrate online discussion with serious scholarship to increase the quality of the former and the vitality of the latter. We want PLoS blogs, and Neuroanthropology in particular, to be a place where readers can reliably turn to find a broad engagement with new research at the intersection of brain and culture.

The Principles behind PLoS

PLoS’s Core Principles - Open Access, Excellence, Integrity, Breadth, Cooperation, Community Engagement, Internationalism, and Science as a Public Resource – resonate deeply with us.

The Principles capture how we want science to be: open, international, and public. These values resonate with the ethics of anthropology, where integrity, breadth, and community engagement are core guiding principles for our research with people around the world. These values also correspond well with our home institutions, University of South Florida and Macquarie University, where top-notch science, interdisciplinary cooperation, public education, and community contribution are all fundamental to how these universities strive to conduct themselves.

What PLoS Does

There are also some selfish reasons to be part of PLoS. The Public Library of Science is a serious and powerful voice for open-access scholarship and education. We want Neuroanthropology to be a part of that.

PLoS One, the flagship interdisciplinary journal of PLoS, is soon to become the world’s largest journal, given how it is doubling in size every year.

The PLoS family extends to 1200 academic editors. In 2010 PLoS will publish roughly 8,000 articles, providing about 10% of new articles added to PubMedCentral and 1% of new articles added to PubMed.

At a time when scholars are widely discussing the potential of open access, PLoS is leading the charge to make new research accessible to scholars everywhere. To paraphrase a well-worn hacker’s aphorism: science wants to be free. We’d like to be part of letting it loose.

2.3 million page views per month. That’s what the PLoS sites average as a whole. If that’s not enough, PLoS emails Table of Content alerts to 100,000 readers on different weekly and monthly intervals. Its Twitter stream has 4300 followers; its Facebook group, 7000 fans. We’re both thrilled and humbled to be able to join such a vibrant community and will do everything in our power to return the trust.

Even though PLoS has been an innovator in the creation of the new Article Level Metrics Program, we know deans like their traditional journal impact factors right now. And here PLoS is strong. PLoS Biology has the highest impact factor in Biology, according to the Journal Citation Reports. PLoS Medicine is ranked sixth in Medicine, just after the major medical journals in the United States and Britain like the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet.

Those are serious numbers in the impact game. The point is not simply that PLoS is successful, but that it’s changing the rules of that game. They’ve created this success using the power of online and open access and creating networks of scholars to ensure high quality.

PLoS Blogs and the Future

PLoS has revolutionized open-access, peer-reviewed scientific publishing since its founding in 2003. It opened up the world of academic publishing, making new research widely accessible regardless of whether a reader had access to a leading research library. We hope, and even believe, that blogs can go through a corresponding transformation, albeit in a different direction. Science blogging has different challenges and potentials for success.

Blogs have become an important channel for the popularization of science, often at an intermediate depth, between the level of the expert specialist and the most unfamiliar public or general readership. Because science blogs are so nimble, writers can respond quickly, posing questions, offering critiques, seeking connection and writing in open-ended fashion. We can comment as science stories unfold, responding both to the research and to popular versions, helping to highlight why findings are particularly interesting or exposing when someone’s over-reaching from the results.

For anthropologists, and for those interested in brain-culture relations, blogs are especially important because they provide a forum for synthetic work, a place where theorists and scientific analysts can try to draw conclusions from diverse sources and types of data. Although it may sound dry, the informal format can allow us to speculate and float ideas that might not yet be substantial enough to support a more traditional academic paper or book.

Finally, science blogs are fun, hopefully for the reader as much as the writer, as the rules for academic writing are relaxed and we can exercise our (sometimes warped) senses of humor. At Neuroanthropology, we like to think that anthropologists are particularly well suited for the role of online entertainment: nothing is quite as entertaining as the range of human oddity, including our own.

Recent controversies in the realm of for-profit science blogs and concerns about the business models for online publication suggest that, as with open-access publishing, a not-for-profit organization, founded on principles of community responsibility and accessibility, might offer the best way to bring together diverse talents.

We hope that PLoS can do for science blogging what it has done for academic journals, encouraging innovation and cooperation, offering an alternative model for supporting science, by people who are passionate about research.

Here are our top 100 posts – 10% of our overall content, given that we just hit 1000 posts.  For the nitpickers, I included some of our pages in the actual list of posts.  So there’s more than 100 in the table.  But for actual posts, it is 100!

One note – the stats are based on on-site visits as registered by WordPress.  The syndicated views are a different story, but WordPress doesn’t make it easy to tabulate those.  But the #1 post based on both onsite and syndicated views looks to be Greg’s recent “We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?”

This is it, post #1000! Neuroanthropology is now the house of 1000 posts, a veritable host of long-tail zombie content sure to infect the entire internet. Well, at least those synergistic people who are still alive out there after surfing for too long.

Yes, it has indeed been the most shocking tale of neuroanthropological carnage ever seen!

All I can say is that Greg and I certainly didn’t anticipate this when we started this site in December 2007. It’s been a great ride.

Some stats for that time. According to WordPress, we’ve managed 858,400 onsite visits since then.

On top of that, we have over 1500 Google Reader subscriptions for neuroanthropology.net and another 380 through our old feed of neuroanthropology.wordpress.com. Throw in the people at Bloglines, and we have more than 2000 subscribers.

Alexa, the Web Information Company, ranks us as #599,463 in worldwide traffic. Sounds impressive, when there has to be millions and millions of sites out there.

But then you dig into the statistics. “Our data comes from many various sources, including our Alexa users; however, we do not receive enough data from these sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful.” So, being number 600,000 just isn’t meaningful. Was it supposed to be?

Let us go to Technorati, a popular tracker of internet usage. They give us an authority of 587 right now. That sounds very authorative. Until you see that Huffington Post has the most authority. Uh oh.

So how about URL Fan, i.e., how popular is your site? They have us at #30294 out of 3,783,534 websites. We were just beat out by jcpenneycouponsfreeshipping.com for spot #30293. Darn.

How about our own analysis of success? Sorry, I’m busy! But go check out our old post, Neuroanthropology @ 500,000. I went into details there on our top posts, search terms, and more and Greg and I both reflected on what has made the site popular.

Just one last thing to do. Create a post for our top 100 posts. Go see what we’ve done!

I love traveling in Colombia – one of the best places I’ve ever visited, with so much to do and see. And a nice place to make home as well! So here are some travel articles to whet your appetite!

The beautiful photo to the right was taken by Carlos Andres Rivera, and is a shot of Popayán, Colombia – that’s where I taught for a semester a few years back. Sr. Rivera has an entire Flickr site of his photos on Popayán.

Seth Kugel, Old Friends, White Water and Roast Ants in Colombia
A trip to Santander, “known as Colombia’s adventure tourism hot spot”

Seth Kugel, In Colombia, Pillories and the Lonely Planet People
Next Seth heads to Popayán (one of my favorite Colombian cities, of course) and its beautiful surrounding region, from visiting the Guambiano indigenous people to the magnificent archaeological site San Agustín

Stephen Ferry, Showcase: It Couldn’t Be, but It Is
Photographic blog post on Sucre, Colombia – just some great shots

David Carr, Villa de Leyva, a Graceful Window on Colonial Colombia
A beautiful colonial town fairly close to Bogotá, one of the gems of the country.

Anand Giridharadas, Love and Cartagena
A guide to a weekend trip to Colombia’s best known tourist city, a spectacular coastal city complete with fortified walls. And if you want to know where to eat, see For Foodies, Cartagena Is Now on the Map

Anand Giridharadas, 36 Hours in Bogotá, Colombia
Touring the best of Colombia’s capital and largest city! Get the photo tour in A Weekend in Bogotá

Kevin Gray, Before Night Falls
A long meditation on a trip to Bogotá, going from a Cold Play concert to Sunday brunch in Usaquén while nursing a hangover

Juan Forero, Ex-Rolling Stones Manager Emerges In South America
From Rolling Stones to Ratones Paranoicos! Andrew Loog Oldham now works in Bogotá – nice piece from NPR, complete with the radio segment, online video, and more

Matthew Fishbane, Above the Clouds in a Secret Colombia
El Cocuy National Park – a place I’ve always wanted to visit. The roof of the Andes, including peaks above 17,000 feet

Alison Ince, A Volcanic Mud Bath in Colombia
Soaking in the mud at Volcan del Totumo near Cartagena

Beth Lizardoon, The Other Side of Colombia
A trip near Santa Marta, another great Colombia coastal city, complete with rafting trip

Grace Bastidas, A Drug-Runners’ Stronghold Finds a New Life
Medellín reborn!

Cali Travel Guide
The Wikitravel Site!

Mongabay.Com, Colombia – Highlights of 2010
A whole bunch of photos from people traveling to Colombia, slated to the nature side

Australian Businessman Dick Smith has just launched the Wilberforce Award for a young person under 30 who can demonstrate “leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy”. The media launch was spicy and the sexy photo shoot may have momentarily inspired a population rise. Maybe not the result intended. But moving our minds above our navels is a must in the campaign for the future of a Sustainable Australia and a Sustainable Planet. The $1million prize is nothing compared to the prize of a Sustainable future!

Details about how to win the award are available on DVD. The first step is to listen to the podcast from “Big Ideas” by Professor Tim Jackson which was delivered before a capacity audience (hmmm… the Prof obviously arrived just in time): Prosperity without Growth

Read the rest of this entry »

Virginia Heffernan over at the New York Times has an essay today, Unnatural Science, which launches two strong attacks on science blogging: its naivete and its corruption.

She starts with the recent controvery over at ScienceBlogs, the so-called PepsiGate where the Seed organization gave Pepsi its own blog on par with all the other science blogs there. PepsiGate then led to the departure of many prominent science bloggers from ScienceBlogs. This is where Heffernan calls science bloggers naive, not used to being part of the media:

I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that they still fume about adjacencies, advertorial and infomercials. Most writers for “legacy” media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard.

But the heart of Heffernan’s critique is actually the way science bloggers behave – too much vindictiveness and bigotry, not enough science.

But the bloggers’ eek-a-mouse posturing wasn’t the most striking part of the affair. Instead, it was the weird vindictiveness of many of the most prominent blogs. The stilted and seething tone of some of the defection posts sent me into the ScienceBlogs archives, where I expected to find original insights into science… And while I found interesting stuff here and there, I also discovered that ScienceBlogs has become preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling. Maybe that’s why the ScienceBlogs ship started to sink… Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd.

She in particular highlights PZ Myers, one of the most popular science bloggers out there:

PZ Myers revels in sub-“South Park” blasphemy, presenting (in one recent stunt) his sketch of the Prophet Muhammad as a cow-pig hybrid excited about “raping a 9-year-old girl.”

And though science bloggers of all stripes are jumping to defend science blogging, and to insist that Heffernan has it wrong (posts at Neuron Culture, WordYard, NeuroDojo, The Thoughtful Animal, Deltoid, A Blog Around the Clock, Pharnygula, Mike the Mad Biologist), Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Brian Switek, and EvolutionBlog; It’s Not a Lecture and Uncertain Principlies say some similar things to here), there is enough ring of truth in what she says.

As Bora has well-described in discussing ScienceBlogs, PepsiGate, and his departure from Seed, science bloggers are now part of the media. I recall very distinctly the thrill of building an audience, of realizing we had an audience beyond the classroom and a small group of colleagues. One way to take that is, yes, scholarship means something! Another is, I mean something! Popularity and arrogance can inflate our own commentary.

Heffernan’s reaction to the content and style of ScienceBlogs came from an outsider’s perspective. As she writes in a comment at Neuron Culture:

I have no training in science. My surprise at ScienceBlogs was akin to the surprise a scientist who might feel if he audited a PhD seminar on Wallace Stevens. Why aren’t they talking about “Anecdote of the Jar”?! Why are they talking about how “misogyny intrinsic to the modernist project”? I saw political axe-grinding bring the humanities almost to a standstill in the 1990s. I thought science was supposed to be above that!

In one sense it’s not at all surprising, science is as political as anything else. But her expectation, and her disappointment, is also part of the story:

With notable exceptions, blogging, as a form, seems to me to have calcified. Many bloggers who started strong 3-5 years ago have gotten stuck in grudge matches. This is even more evident on political blogs than on science blogs. In fact, after being surprised to find the same cycles of invective on ScienceBlogs that appear on political blogs (where they’re well documented), I started to think the problem might be with the form itself.

Grudge matches and invective make for high popularity in our society today. Heffernan’s done some of that herself in kicking up a hornet’s nest from on high. But what she wrote, and why, also deserves attention.

Science does have its problems at multiple levels. Greg took on medioce and bigoted science blogging in Language extinction ain’t no big thing?. I took on the Netporn/FanFiction Survey controversy in Sex, Lies and IRB Tape. Other blogs also do critical inquiry, from Mind Hacks and The Neurocritic on the science side to Somatosphere and Open Anthropology on the anthropology side. But Heffernan adds a new dimension, calling out people who have let themselves get corrupted by being able to shout and undercut and slander without much critique from those who know better.

I do think she misses the point that the problems at ScienceBlogs have been building over time, and that the decision by many bloggers to leave is their own way to protest and to critique what has happened at one of the dominant places in science blogging. They took action. But science is also about discourse by people. Blogs are now one of the most prominent ways that scholars engage in discourse among themselves, with students, and with the wider public. And there Heffernan takes on the role of Marcellus in Shakespeare:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Edge has just posted a new seminar, The New Science of Morality. You get lots of access to interviews, links to papers, videos, exchange of views, reactions from the press, and more. Quite stimulating.

What proved interesting to me is the inherent duality in the discussion. There is a marked division between the assumed basis for this research and what many of the main researchers are actually saying. The assumed basis is in evolution and functional biology:

A realistic biology of the mind, advances in evolutionary biology, physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, psychology, engineering, the chemistry of materials… For the first time, we have the tools and the will to undertake the scientific study of human nature… Using babies, psychopaths, chimpanzees, fMRI scanners, web surveys, agent-based modeling, and ultimatum games, moral psychology has become a major convergence zone for research in the behavioral sciences.

But the researchers themselves often sound a lot more like neuroanthropologists, taking into account culture, relying on cross-cultural research, thinking about the dynamics of development and the interaction of nature and nurture. There’s no ethnography yet, which would really help in getting at how people and institutions think and act morally in reality. Still, the researchers’ work shows that many of these people are not in the “morality as a naturalistic brain module that simply acts on the world” camp.

Here are some examples:

Jonathan Haidt: “Morality is a social construction, but it is constructed out of evolved raw materials provided by five (or more) innate “psychological” foundations… Each culture’s morality is unique, but an aspect shared by all five-foundation moralities is that they do not regard society as a social contract created for the benefit of individuals. Rather, they see society in more organic terms, as an entity that is of value in and of itself, and they think the building blocks of society are not individuals but rather groups and institutions.”

Sam Harris: “I propose that answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a “moral landscape” — a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to states of the greatest possible wellbeing and whose valleys represent the deepest depths of suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving — different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc. — translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels — ranging from biochemistry to economics — but they have their crucial realization as states and capacities of the human brain.”

Roy Baumeister: “The human being was designed by nature for culture: That is, the distinctively human traits are those that enable us to participate in this new kind of social life, namely culture. Culture is humankind’s biological strategy. To understand human traits, therefore, it is useful to ask how each trait would have been selected for as a way of helping an individual flourish in this new kind of social environment.”

David Pizzaro: One of my primary interests is in how people arrive at judgments about moral responsibility. Most people seem to have intuitions about what sorts of things matter when determining whether a person deserves blame (or praise) for any given act. In another ongoing set of studies, we have demonstrated that moral reasoning can be influenced by motivations that may have nothing to do with moral concerns… I am particularly interested in specific emotions (anger, disgust, fear, etc.), and on “visceral” affective states (e.g., thirst, hunger, sexual arousal) and their impact on how we process information, how we remember events, and how these emotions impact our moral judgments.”

Elizabeth Phelps: “My primary focus has been to understand how human learning and memory are changed by emotion and to investigate the neural systems mediating their interactions. I have approached this topic from a number of different perspectives, with an aim of achieving a more global understanding of the complex relations between emotion and memory. As much as possible, I have tried to let the questions drive the research, not the techniques or traditional definitions of research areas… It is my belief that having focused questions and a broad approach to answering these questions has enhanced the overall quality of my research program and the cross-disciplinary relevance and appeal of my work.”

Joshua Knobe: “Over the past few years, a series of recent experimental studies have reexamined the ways in which people answer seemingly ordinary questions about human behavior. Did this person act intentionally? What did her actions cause? Did she make people happy or unhappy? It had long been assumed that people’s answers to these questions somehow preceded all moral thinking, but the latest research has been moving in a radically different direction. It is beginning to appear that people’s whole way of making sense of the world might be suffused with moral judgment, so that people’s moral beliefs can actually transform their most basic understanding of what is happening in a situation.”

To be sure, there were researchers at the Edge seminar who are fully in the evolution/innatist camp. But nonetheless, the younger researchers seem to embrace a wider and more natural approach to studying morality. And by natural I mean understanding that we are biological and cultural beings, individual and social, with the interaction between the developing person and a rich social and material environment central to how we understand our own nature.

I would encourage more serious thinking about culture, and not just the brain and psychology. Take Knobe’s statements, about “people’s whole way of makign sense of the world might be suffused with moral judgment.” That’s a statement familiar to most cultural anthropologists. The question becomes, How? It’s not as simple as saying culture imprints it on people, not at all. Pizarro’s work on disgust and visceral experiences points to embodiment and complex interactions to understanding how moral thinking gets developed inside a person.

Baumeister indicates that we are actually cultural animals, not moral ones, and that we have mechanisms designed to interact with our social-cultural milieu. But what sorts of mechanisms? And how do complex interactions among groups of people and environments create the sort of social construction of morality that Jonathan Haidt advocates (construction albeit with biological and psychological components!)? These sorts of questions need to also be part of the new science of morality.

The moral consequences of this sort of research is also important. It is something I critiqued a couple years back in the post Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct, writing:

To help you make a final decision [about what he is selling], a linguist like Pinker will surely appreciate a little content analysis of his New York Times essay, “The Moral Instinct.” The word “science” appears ten times in the article, often in close association with “moral” or “morality.” How about Bill Gates helping out? “Help” appears six times, four of those times about how selfish genes can get ahead through reciprocal altruism. And justice? You guessed it. Zero, zilch, nada.

Also, I can’t resist this final quote from Robert Trivers, posted way, way at the bottom of the Edge seminar:

“If i fuck a goat i may feel ashamed if someone saw it, but absent harm to the goat, not clear how i should respond if i alone witness it.”

Link to Edge’s The New Science of Morality Seminar

Link to my critique of Steven Pinker’s The Moral Instinct

An excellent editorial today in the NY Times – Economics Behaving Badly by George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel. The basic gist – behavioral economics, while important, has limits; traditional economics still matters greatly for policy; behavioral economics is being used in politics as an avoidance mechanism (hmm, sounds behavioral?) when traditional economic solutions would be better though politically more difficult.

So to repeat:

[Behavioral economics] has its limits. As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address. Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics.

They use two main examples – obesity and conflicts of interest in medicine, like the drug industry giving lavish gifts to doctors.

Take, for example, our nation’s obesity epidemic. The fashionable response, based on the belief that better information can lead to better behavior, is to influence consumers through things like calorie labeling — for instance, there’s a mandate in the health care reform act requiring restaurant chains to post the number of calories in their dishes.

Calorie labeling is a good thing; dieters should know more about the foods they are eating. But studies of New York City’s attempt at calorie posting have found that it has had little impact on dieters’ choices.

Obesity isn’t a result of a lack of information; instead, economists argue that rising levels of obesity can be traced to falling food prices, especially for unhealthy processed foods.

To combat the epidemic effectively, then, we need to change the relative price of healthful and unhealthful food — for example, we need to stop subsidizing corn, thereby raising the price of high fructose corn syrup used in sodas, and we also need to consider taxes on unhealthful foods. But because we lack the political will to change the price of junk food, we focus on consumer behavior.

As they point out, behavioral economics tries to understand how and why people behave irrationally, using elements from psychology to examine deviations from rational choice. The general prescriptions from this policy approach are to manage how options are presented and to present better information so that people better understand the real costs and benefits. Loewenstein and Ubel don’t go so far as to say that these policy solutions still remain rooted in rational man assumptions – individual choice, better information, costs and benefits – but it is rather obvious. And that’s part of the problem.

Behavioral economics reinforces the individual and rational biases there in psychology and economics, rather than addressing community, institutional, and meaningful aspects of people’s lives. In this sense, it’s not too surprising that the pay-off from behavioral economic solutions is not that great.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain recently promoted behavioral economics as a remedy for his country’s over-use of electricity, citing what he claimed were remarkable results from a study that reduced household electricity use by informing consumers of how their use compared to that of their neighbors.

Under closer scrutiny, however, tests of the program found that better information reduced energy use by a mere 1 percent to 2.5 percent — modest relative to the hopes being pinned on it.

Compare that with the likely results of a solution rooted in traditional economics: a carbon tax would instantly bring the price of energy into line with its true cost and would unleash the creative power of the marketplace to generate cleaner energy sources.

Still, it’s quite refreshing to have two such distinguished professors saying that what matters is looking at the true costs of things. Nothing irrational about that!

George Loewenstein is a professor of economics and psychology; here’s his webpage in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. You can access a lot of his publications through the live links in his cv – it downloads as a Word document and the one I clicked one then led to a pdf.

Peter Ubel, a physician and behavioral scientist, looks like he’s just moved to become a professor of business and public policy at Duke (he still has a live listing at Michigan’s Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine). But he does have his own website, peterubel.com.

And finally their editorial – Economics Behaving Badly.