This NYT story points to a large scale Gallup poll, first published in Foreign Policy, which showed that there is no marked difference between the Islamic "radicals" and "moderates", and if anything "radicals" (people who tend to end up as suicide bombers) are better educated and more prosperous than the "moderates". Assuming the methodology of the poll is right, the obvious explanation for this would be that education in these nine Islamic countries is acting as an enabler in Islamic radicaliztion; not a hard conclusion to comprehend given that most "revolutionary" movements in the last century have been lead by disaffected college students.

This story on Cingular's moronic attempt to teach adults "text speak" in order to bond better with their teenagers makes my inner "social conservative" go ballastic. Time to take down Robert Bly's "The Sibling Society" to immunize myself against what a historian in that story observed: "“we see this return to this earlier world where kids are not trained to be adults, but where adults and kids mingle and where kids are precocious and adults are childish.”.

This story on prostate cancer is one among the slew of troubling stories (here is the one from yesterday concerning dialysis treatments) that I have read in the recent days, all of which raise issues that lay at the intersection of medical ethics and capitalism. The questions I want answered or to be able to answer are: To what extent should doctors be allowed to be profit-maximizing capitalists when it comes to treating medical conditions that have multiple treatment regimes with similar outcomes but highly variant payoff structure? Are these questions even discussed and debated within the medical community and in medical education, or has it simply become a bleating herd following the money? These issue also tie in with the pervasive marketing practises (soft emotional TV ads, "Mongol horde" sale force tactics etc) of pharam companies, which operate under even severe market imperative of bringing new, and thus even more profitable drugs to market even if the older (and generic) drug regimes are as good if not better. Hard questions to answer, I know, in an economy where disease or illness easily swamps health as a market sector in size.

"Cingular's moronic attempt to teach adults "text speak" in order to bond better with their teenagers makes my inner 'social conservative' go ballastic."

LOL I know what you mean (no pun intended). This reminds me of my friend, who is TAing an undergradute class at Cal. She had to teach her students how to write a professional email b/c so many of them would email her as though they were texting their friends, i.e., 'R U going 2 B in Office hours 2day?' I tell you, these cellphone companies are contributing to the stupidization of America. :)