A recent study conducted by Baylor College of Medicine revealed some more scary statistics: Over 2000 HIV-positive Texas inmates were released between 2004 and 2007. Nearly 95% did not maintain continuous anti-retroviral treatment after their release.
Sporadic treatment has serious consequences: this is how drug-resistant strains develop. Furthermore, without continuous treatment, the level of virus in […]

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2008/06/health_social_n.html
The link above leads to a blog featured in Business Week titled, “Health Social Networking.” The author, Catherine Holahan, discusses the positive effects of social networks by allowing people to easily access different sources of information. Catherine tells the story of Keith Schorsch and what led him to founding his social network named Trusera. Trusera […]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/03/23/acai.berries.scam/index.html

Suppose you’re a cash-strapped entrepreneur with no society-enhancing skills and a loose sense of morals, looking to make a quick buck.  What to do?  Easy — sell snake oil!  Throughout the years, people have always been ready to open their wallets for the latest magic elixir, believing whatever claims have been made about it as […]

When was the last time you withdrew money from an ATM? It’s amazing that in less than one minute, you can withdraw money from a Bank of America ATM while vacationing on spring break in Florida even though your money was deposited hundreds of miles away with an HSBC in New York. All of this […]

Today in class we discussed Information Cascades, citing Shark Attacks as an example. Although at first I thought this example to be somewhat silly, my news researched showed that, in fact, many more shark attacks occur than one may think. After a brief search, I found at least four examples of shark attacks that […]

One of the most recognized hallmarks of this generation’s youth is being ‘plugged-in’— in other words, competently juggling the tech world’s most recent gadgets, cell phones, and portable music players as well as negotiating the internet, blogs, instant messaging, and networking sites with almost inborn savvy.   All this has created a new virtual world for […]

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/4/370
In recent years a lot of attention has been given to obesity, a well understood health problem. But some people have begun to refer to obesity as an epidemic, and not just a personal issue. The idea behind an epidemic is that it spreads, via contact, from person-to-person. If obesity is an […]

Although people do not think much about how they use terms in everyday language, it is interesting to consider what is meant when somebody is disgusted of something. Most people are “disgusted” when eating sour or bitter food or when seeing horrible pictures. People sometimes use “disgust” to refer to immoral situations, where they strongly […]

According to a recent study by Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist from Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution, the impact of social networking websites on children can cause problems for their developing brains.  While these websites, which include Facebook and Twitter, were the primary cause, they were far from the only, […]

Last semester I took Econ 301 (Microeconomics), and I specifically remember taking out the first problem set and seeing the bold-faced heading of the third problem “The Market for Kidneys.”  The problem was an exercise examining how the demand for kidney transplants could never be satisfied because the supply of kidneys consists […]