Can you really educate or stimulate serious interest in economics with a music video?  I was dubious.  From 1984 to 1994, I wrote a column for Media and Methods analyzing music videos for their use in education (Joan Logue’s dream-like video for Paul Simon’s “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song,” Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms”).  Back then, the teacher popping in a rare videocassette of a music video was cool, hip, and sexy.

Eventually, however, I decided that in fact there was no educational value in music videos.  At one time, showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up a “Young Goodman Brown” discussion stimulated students but by 1994, videoland was where students already spent most of their time; no buzz.  So the Keynes vs. Hayek vids looked stale and artifactual to me.

However, since YouTube arrived in 2005, maybe lower production costs and vast accessibility have revived music video with a disruptive potential.  Just last week, The New Republic editor Jonathan (“I hate George W. Bush”) Chait penned a sniffy refutation of “Fear the Boom and Bust.”  Yes, a completely straight-faced fisking of . . . a rap music video.

Yo, J-Chay, it’s two old econ dudes acting like gangsta rappers.  Laffs, namean?  Your sermon to the TNR choir disses the vid but thanks for driving more page views!

So maybe Chait should fear the educative possibilities of YouTube, even if Neil Postman was right that electronic media turn everything into entertainment. Perhaps right now millions of entertained fanboys are reversing their course down the road to serfdom having been schooled up by “Hayek’s” rap

The question I ponder is who plans for whom?
Do I plan for myself or leave it to you?
I want plans by the many, not by the few.”

Mos def.

A new study has now possibly linked sexual orientation with cancer. The study was conducted by survey, which is not the strongest design. Participants were asked to report their sexual orientation, whether or not they ever had cancer, and the current state of their health. The study concluded NO difference in cancer prevalence between straight or gay women. However, gay men were 1.9 times as likely to have received a cancer diagnosis as straight men.

According to Reuters, the authors suspect that women also have a higher risk of cancer (even though their own data shows the exact opposite). The authors also appropriately warn us not to generalize the results of the study.

That’s good, because studies like this should not be reported by the mainstream media. Why? Because it’s really hard to draw firm health conclusions from studies based on surveys.

For instance, what if a particular group of people is more likely to go to the doctor than another group? That would skew the results. One of the authors contends that gay people are LESS likely to go to the doctor. But, that would seem to contradict the data. In this study, 8% of gay men had received a cancer diagnosis, but only 5% of straight men had. If gay men were indeed less likely to go to the doctor, then wouldn’t one expect to see fewer cancer diagnoses among gay men, not more?

And, if sexual orientation is linked to cancer, then why is there no difference in the prevalence of cancer between straight and gay women?

Studies like this are very necessary, but are only preliminary. Until follow-up studies can confirm (or refute) the results, the media would be well-advised to avoid them.

Alex B. Berezow is the editor of RealClearScience. He holds a Ph.D. in microbiology.

Muller acknowledges that as of now, there is still no consensus on the state of warming, and that the skeptics have made legitimate criticisms of the methods used in research so far. He seeks to produce results untainted by political influence and, according to the Guardian, is strictly interested in scientific accuracy. ”Science has its weaknesses and it doesn’t have a stranglehold on the truth, but it has a way of approaching technical issues that is a closer approximation of truth than any other method we have,” he said.

Naturally, this won’t stop those who find fulfillment in their lives by making an issue out of “underrepresentation” wherever they can find it, but the work Sommers cites demonstrates that individual women who want to succeed in science can do so.

American colleges and universities still graduate well-trained engineers-to-be, but even this bastion of rigor is on the slippery slope of trading off excellence to placate the multicultural gods.

This post by Melinda Moyer describes how so-called “green” household cleaners aren’t any less toxic than regular household cleaners.  In fact, almost any product can claim to be “green” because there are no laws regulating that.  From the piece:

The core of the problem is that there are no laws regulating green marketing, so a company can say its product is all-natural or non-toxic without having to prove anything or even disclose its ingredients on the bottle.

What about organic farming?  Isn’t that supposed to be “green,” too?  Not really.  A recent article by John Stossel in Reason describes how free-range beef, which is marketed partially based on how good it is for the environment, actually emits more greenhouse gases than regular farming methods.  And another article from Discovery News reports on research from the University of Copenhagen which concluded that organic vegetables aren’t any healthier than conventional vegetables.

So, what we’ve got is an industry selling you an idea:  The idea that “natural” is good, and “unnatural” is bad.  This misleads the public into rejecting modern technology and conventional agricultural practices, including techniques like genetic modification.

Does that make organic and green products a scam?  I don’t know, but they sure are expensive.

Alex B. Berezow is the Editor of RealClearScience.  He holds a Ph.D. in microbiology.

Absent its scientific basis, anthropology would be little more than colorful travel literature (travelogues) occasionally mixed up with political hucksterism and theoretical obscurantism. But anthropology has never been only a science, and it ought to be sufficiently broad-minded to embrace the poetics of culture and some of its music as well.

After Peter published his piece on the story, it was covered by Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education and a number of blogs, including Nature.com, picked it up.

So gamers learn to master a game which unfolds in “nested feedback loops” of increasing duration.  Gamers succeed by learning what works only through suffering serial failure, the same way an apprentice learns from failing at what the journeyman does well.  But classroom education, Wright says, causes students to avoid failure by teaching them as many rules as possible.  Theory, too, he says, insulates you from failure.  Worse, theory often results in schemas that are not derived from the experiential world (which explains why businessmen run countries better than professors).

From online play data, Wright discovered that The Sims players actually enjoy exploring failure states because by hitting walls and discovering limits, they can build a model of the game’s “possibility space.”

Life, Wright warns us, allows limited opportunities to build reality-based behavioral models, but we can take advantage of two “educational technologies” to increase our store of experience:  toys (play) and stories (the experience of others).  He calls his games “toys” because they don’t involve winning and losing; Spore, for example, teaches basic biological principles through play.

One can’t help wondering if Basic Skills education might be redesigned so as to produce learning through play, failure, and nested feedback cycles.

The IAC strongly rebuked the IPCC for making various pronoucements based on “little evidence,” for “vague statements,” and for not “expressing clearly” or giving the proper “perspective” on climate-related issues.

The Capital Research Center (whose work I have long followed and respected) rightly deems the IPCC’s modus operandi ”shoddy” and concludes — devastatingly:

What does the best evidence now tell us? That man-made global warming is a mere hypothesis that has been inflated by both exaggeration and downright malfeasance, fueled by the awarding of fat grants and salaries to any scientist who’ll produce the “right” results.

The warming “scientific” community [as the Climategate emails reveal] is a tight clique of like-minded scientists and bureaucrats who give each other jobs, publish each other’s papers — and conspire to shut out any point of view that threatens to derail their gravy train.

Such behavior is perhaps to be expected from politicians and government functionaries. From scientists, it’s a travesty.

And, so it is, that we all come tumbling down:

In the end, grievous harm will have been done not just to individual scientists’ reputations, but to the once-sterling reputation of science itself. For that, we will all suffer.