Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

Thaler and Sunstein invite us to enter an alternative world, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Using colorful examples from the most important aspects of life, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. Nudge offers a unique new take—from neither the left nor the right—on many hot-button issues, for individuals and governments alike. This is one of the most engaging and provocative books to come along in many years.

Praise:

"... both important and amusing, both practical and deep ... [a] gem of a book ... a must-read."

"... utterly brilliant ... it will knock you off your feet."

"... engaging, informative, and thoroughly delightful ..."

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

I had an occasion calling for bacon themed food and my mind immediately turned towards the famed bacon mat. I needed something a little more single-serving though, so I decided to attempt bacon cups.

If those cherry tomatoes turn out to be too sweet, just add a little bacon salt.

bacon cups | not martha

Eric G. Wilson:

We're a nation obsessed with being happy, but sometimes feeling bad can do you some good.

What makes us melancholy, Keats concluded, is our awareness of things inevitably passing -- of brothers dying before they reach 20; of nightingales that cease their songs; of peonies drooping at noon. But it is precisely when we sense impending death that we grasp the world's beauty.

Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.

This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I'm not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide.

On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I'm valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie.

From the archive:

What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Also, a Saturday poem:

Ready

An enemy without borders
hate without boundaries
a people, perverted
a religion, betrayed
a nuclear power in chaos
madmen, bent on creating it
leaders assassinated
democracy attacked
and Osama bin Laden,
still making threats.
In a world where
the next crisis
is a moment away
America needs a leader
who's ready.

The miracle of melancholia

David Gracer eats bugs. Not any old crushed, oozy, sidewalk kind of bug, but insects selected just like any other food — for sustenance and taste. He eats them sautéed, filleted and roasted. And he thinks you should eat them, too.

It's called entomophagy.

Man Bites Insect

Health care costs in the United States have grown substantially for decades and are expected to continue to grow in the future. For the federal government, rising health care costs constitute the principal challenge of fiscal policy–no other single factor will exert more influence over the long-term balance of the federal budget. The effects of rising health care costs are not limited to public programs, however. Private payers have experienced similar growth in costs.

This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) paper–written at the request of the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Budget–describes the historical growth in spending on health care in the United States. It examines the factors that determine health care spending and how they have contributed to spending growth over time. Special emphasis is given to the largest single factor driving spending growth–the greatly expanded capabilities of medicine brought about by technological advances in medical science over the past several decades. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of continued technological change for future growth of health care spending.

Technological Change and the Growth of Health Care Spending

Enjoy that burger, you rain forest killer.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

How many species lost per bite, I wonder?

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler

A new study links increased miscarriage risk to caffeine consumption, but other experts say a cup or two a day is fine. What's a coffee-loving mom to do?

Caffeine Linked to Miscarriages

Research suggests that, except among high-risk heart patients, the benefits of statins such as Lipitor are overstated.

If the drugs were used more rationally, drugmakers would take a hit. But the nation's health and pocketbook might be better off. Could it happen? Will data on NNTs, the weak link to cholesterol, and knowledge of genetic variations change what doctors do and what patients believe? Not until the country changes the incentives in health care, says UCLA's Hoffman. "The way our health-care system runs, it is not based on data, it is based on what makes money."

Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?

Oliver James is an assiduous trawler of the densest psychological and psychiatric studies to retrieve the nuggets of wisdom buried therein. He's also a modern day missionary, fired with a passionate desire to relieve the growing emotional suffering in rich countries, which has led the World Health Organisation to predict that depression is on track to become the second most widespread disease, after heart disease, in the developed world by 2020. His writing career has been an attempt to marry these two impulses (which can often tug in opposite directions) and thus bring to a wider public the growing body of research, particularly in the US, into what constitutes human well-being and why it appears to be in decline.

The big question

Andre Elisseeff leads a research team at IBM’s Zurich Research Lab that in September demonstrated a prototype system that will allow doctors to view their patients’ electronic health record (eHR) using three-dimensional images of the human body. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine, the system maps the information in a patient’s eHR to a 3-D image of the human body. A doctor first clicks the computer mouse on a particular part of the image, which triggers a search of the patient’s eHR to retrieve the relevant information. The patient’s information corresponding to that part of the image is then displayed, including text entries, lab results, and medical images, such as magnetic resource imaging. The doctor can zoom in on the image to retrieve selective information or narrow the search parameters by time or other factors.

“The 3-D coordinates in the model are mapped to anatomical concepts, which serve as an index onto the electronic health record. This means that you can retrieve the information by just clicking on the relevant anatomical part. It’s both 3-D navigation and a 3-D indexed map,” explains Elisseeff.

Elisseeff makes clear that the mapper engine is not just a 3-D imaging system. In addition to connecting to a patient’s eHR, the images displayed are linked to the 300 000 medical terms defined by the SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine) international standard, a copy of which the mapper engine accesses from a local database. “It is impossible for doctors to remember all these terms, and they will need some assistance in the near future. Medical standards are at least as complicated to doctors as normal medical terms are to patients,” Elisseeff notes.

Furthermore, Elisseeff says, “The SNOMED terminology is also a knowledge repository. It is how we include the medical knowledge into the mapper engine, how we tell the computer that a finger is a part of the hand or that flu and fever can be related. The glue between graphical objects and the electronic health record is fundamentally based on this computerized medical knowledge. This is the core of our work. The visible part of the application is the 3-D model. But the most challenging part is building the links such that they are clinically relevant.”

“You can think of it as being like Google Earth for the body,” is how Elisseeff frames the mapper engine. “We see this as a way to manage the increasing complexity that will come in using computers in medicine.”

Visualizing Electronic Health Records With "Google-Earth for the Body"