Brainstorm readers: We’re excited to call your attention to The Conversation, The Chronicle’s new home for opinion and ideas online. Building on Brainstorm and Innovations, it includes many of the regular contributors you have seen over the years and offers new ones as well.

Please follow us there. We hope to enlighten and entertain, and we also hope to hear from you. Feel free to reach us at onlineopinion@chronicle.com.

In my previous post, I talked about how my experience in changing my way of sneezing taught me how hard it is to change a habit even in instances where we know it would be better for us if we did. Habits don’t merely concern things like the way we sneeze, however.  For example, habits writ large are what define a culture, for a culture is nothing but a vast collection of shared habits that go by the more lofty designation “customs.” And though it’s not apparent at first glance, habits a…

Jenny Dyck Brian

Is it a conflict of interest for a bioethicist to work as a paid consultant for the pharmaceutical industry?

In recent weeks I have posted my conversation with Jenny Dyck Brian of Arizona State University, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on corporate bioethics boards.  (See parts one, two and three.)  Today we reach the final installment.

Q: A lot of people outside bioethics seem shocked when I tell them about academic bioethicists working for pharma.  But within the field,…

“Texas Cow Poke” by Clotee Pridgen Allochuku via Flickr/CC

Sometimes I find it useful to think about things that bear no obvious relation to one another. For example, I’ve recently been thinking about sneezing, cars, and cows, and a connection to the problem of climate change has occurred to me.

First, sneezing. When I was young, I was taught to cover my mouth with my hand whenever I sneezed. Good girl that I am, I followed this rule until a couple of years ago, when I read that in order not to …

You have got a fever, your body aches, and you feel dreadful. What should you do? The traditional answer is: “Take two aspirin, drink lots of fluids, get to bed and call me in the morning if you don’t feel better.” Could it be that this is just the wrong advice? That the last thing you should do is reduce your temperature with aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever? Is it, to use a phrase, nature’s way of fighting illness?

This is very much the position of a small group of biologists and medics who ar…

I know you’re already sick of reading about MOOC’s. But I’m afraid there’s no avoiding them. In The Chronicle this morning, UCLA philosopher Pamela Hieronymi argues:

Education is often compared to two other industries upended by the Internet: journalism and publishing. This is a serious error. Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas.

And so forth, before concluding:

Can technology make education less expensi…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Those of us engaged in teaching, writing and speaking about science are participating in a Great Deception – well-intended, to be sure, but a deception nonetheless. The gist of that deception is that we teach science as a list of established findings rather than what it really is: The world’s best and most rewarding process of “finding.” Students and the general public are for the most part receptive to learning about science, but all too often, thi…

In the most recent American Freshman Survey, the top reason for going to college was “to be able to get a better job,” with 85.9 percent of respondents rating it as “very important.” Only half of the respondents rated “to make me a more cultured person” as “very important” (50.3 percent).

No wonder the humanities now collect only around 12 percent of bachelor’s degrees, including history.  (See the Humanities Indicators project for handy compilations of data.)  According to the MLA, all the fore…

Iconic phrase from the old TV show, Dragnet; now reduced to an endangered species (Wikipedia)

I have a great fondness for experiences, ideas, certain people, many animals, places, even some things. And I assume you do, too. Among these sources of delight, respect, and appreciation, I would include regular old-fashioned facts, although with the full recognition that not all of them are equally verifiable, or even equally definable. Nor are they equally pleasant, although part of the pleasure come…

It’s been almost half a century since Apollo 11 carried Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong to the moon. I remember running to make sure I’d catch the actual landing on television. Like many who heard Neil Armstrong’s first words when he walked on the moon, I heard them incorrectly. They are much more moving the way he actually said them: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” That a single man was walking on the moon was a magnificent idea, even th…

Protesters in front of Pennsylvania Station on Aug. 2, 1962 (Photo by Eddie Hausner/The New York Times. Click on image to get to source page.)

In 1882, New York Central Railroad president William Henry Vanderbilt declared, “The public be damned.” Although one might think this sentiment an anachronism that went away with the demise of 19^th-century robber barons, it’s actually a perennial problem for democracies whenever private owners own what function as public spaces.

Here’s an example of wha…