Interesting Articles: September 2007

Psychology:
* Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach (Washington Post). A clear article summarizing psychological literature on why myths remain, and why it's often not a good idea to try to counter a myth. If you don't feel like reading it, listen to the story The Truth of False (WNYC's On The Media via NPR).
* The Marketing Sí Change (WNYC's On The Media via NPR). An interesting piece about the ways in which marketers target hispanics and how it's different from targeting anglos. I especially enjoyed the discussion of the problems translating the Got Milk campaign into Spanish and how they decided to fix it. That part starts at 2:50. If you're interested in the topic, read the lengthy original article, How Do You Say 'Got Milk' En Español? (New York Times). The radio segment is simply a few of the article's highlights.

Technology:
* The Sex Drive (WNYC's On The Media via NPR). One often hears about pornography being a major impetus of technology, pushing the advancement of, for example, the printing press, photography, and motion pictures. This radio segment is interesting because it describes how pornography isn't pushing the edge of the latest technology: Web 2.0. Sure, pornography's at the forefront (in fact, judging by the segment, pornography's using more Web 2.0 interactivity and community features than I expected), but it isn't driving the technological improvements.

Economics:
* The Wealth of Nations: A country's competitive edge can spread industry to industry, like a disease (Science News). This is the sort of research I want to do: discover interesting patterns from mounds of data.

Mathematics:
* Ancient Islamic Penrose Tiles (Science News's MathTrek). I'm not surprised to hear that old architectural designers implicitly used knowledge of complex mathematical techniques. Nonetheless, it's still an interesting story about how Islamic buildings managed to have such large and perfect decorative patterns.

Biology:
* Rethinking Bad Taste: How much mimicry is outright cheating? (Science News). It's nice to see such fairly realistic, outside-the-lab biology studies. If you want a copy of the article, ask.

Health:
* Believers gain no health advantage (Science News). Surprisingly, a study found no psychological advantage to holding spiritual beliefs--i.e., there's no belief-in-god placebo effect. The abstract of the source article, Spirituality, religion, and clinical outcomes in patients recovering from an acute myocardial infarction (Psychosomatic Medicine), is freely available.

Other:
* Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site (New York Times). In short, if there were some interesting articles I've mentioned that you previously couldn't read because of the Times's old policy of only leaving articles freely available for a couple of weeks, you can read them now. And you can read the columnists for free, too.