An entrepreneurial miracle in the world of family physicians

Via kottke.org, here is a doctor who will only make house calls, charges little, finds cheap sources of medications for you, and generally seems like a menace to the health industry behemoth corporations. Hope he succeeds and is widely imitated. You can even make an appointment on his website, via his Google calendar. It is instrumental for his business model that he can communicate with his patients via SMS, IM, video conferencing, and the like.

Wanna sell your house? List it at a realistic price

Via Greg Mankiw’s blog, I found this well-written piece by Austan Goolsbee (the economist with the best name of all).

On the perils of “managing” science

You cannot manage a creative process without reducing its quality, at least if by “manage” we mean the now-dominant approach of trying to measure everything and assign it a rank. Nevertheless, the science establishment pretends otherwise, and universities are run more and more as businesses. Via Greg Mankiw’s blog (here is his brief post), I found an excellent short article written by the zoologist Peter A. Lawrence. Just yesterday I was hanging out with fellow faculty members in a reception and I was railing against trying to measure everything in academia. Lawrence’s article says it much better than I could. There is also an interesting blog on doing good science, and it has a post on Lawrence’s article.

What may be causing the bees to disappear

It is well known that bees have been disappearing en masse. This Nature article gives an explanation; I am definitely not an expert, but it sounds plausible.