In a recent email to the university, President Faust invited the Harvard Community to participate in the “Harvard Catalyst & InnoCentive Prize for Innovation.” This experiment in crowdsourcing seeks to bring the Harvard community together to propose new questions and suggest new answers related to Type 1 diabetes. As the website states: “This challenge is … Read more
Well, the Senate just spent a year trying and failing to pass a moderate, compromised-to-hell health reform plan. Which, incidentally, if that is comprehensive reform I’m not really sure I’d like to see their “tinkering around the edges”. However, the important thing is that they managed to defuse special interest anger by buying them off … Read more
Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic’s politics editor, just gave us a glimpse of his daily reading regime, and it surprised me. There’s an astonishing reliance on Twitter, something I’ve purposefully not used as just another source of news (I don’t want really important tweets, like what my friends had for lunch, being lost in the news … Read more
The notion that economics can explain everything about everything (re: Freakonomics) is something that I’ve always regarded as silly and kinda gross. The basic economic model — the super-rational individual relentlessly seeking out his own material self-interest — is almost embarrassingly inadequate. If you want to deal with something like the Global Financial Crisis then, … Read more