cheapesthostings2

MSNBC recently reported that a new study suggests "U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth". (I learned of this on Rationally Speaking .) The study itself is Open Access, so all the details are freely available . The scatterplot illustrates the strong association the authors found. Now, the authors were reasonably cautious in how they interpreted their findings. The trouble is, the general public may not be. A common error is to conclude the study shows that religiosity causes higher teen birth rates. But correlation does not imply causation . It could be that higher teen birth rates cause religiosity. Or perhaps a third, unidentified factor causes both. But isn't the strength of association still impressive? It is. But what if, as I just suggested, there are other variables involved? Such confounding variables (or confounders, as they are commonly known) can wreak havoc on this...

U.S. health care spending per capita is the highest in the world. Yet, as The Economist notes , "America lags behind other wealthy countries in the overall performance of its medical system". It might seem ironic then, that the same magazine has stated that the U.S. "offers the best health care in the world." But keep reading: If you are lucky enough to have proper insurance and be admitted to the Mayo Clinic, the UCLA Medical Centre or Johns Hopkins, you will enjoy outstanding treatment. Unfortunately, as the tens of millions of uninsured and underinsured have discovered, America offers some of the most unreliable, costliest and least equitable health care in the world too. The U.S. spends around 17% of its GDP on health care. This compares to Canada where we have a publicly-funded system, and spend around 9% . Now there are lots of complexities here and I don't mean to oversimplify. The Canadian health care system is far from perfect, although I think most ...

I first wrote about the mysteries of consciousness on this blog back in February 2006 . This prompted me to do some reading on the philosophy of mind, and in March 2006 I wrote more about consciousness. Though I didn't mention it directly in that post, a very compelling argument concerns what are called philosophical zombies . I would put the argument like this. First, ask yourself: Is it conceivable that there could be a thing that appears to be human but in fact has no conscious experience? In other words, a biological machine, identical to a human in every way, except that it has no free will, feels nothing, experiences nothing. To put it bluntly, a zombie . If your answer is no, then I would ask this: How can you know that some of the "humans" around you are not in fact zombies? Is there a device available that will measure consciousness? Granted we have tools that can measure aspects of the complex electrical and chemical activity in the brain. But complex electric...