Sports Are Good for Your Mood, But a Concussion Is Not

Music is Good for Your Brain, but Don’t Blast it

When you learn to play an instrument – whether a piano, guitar, violin, trumpet, or drum – you simultaneously engage a large number of brain areas. These include areas responsible for sensation (hearing, touch, and vision), movement, and “cognitive functions” such as concentration, memory, reasoning, and decision making. Over years of training, these brain areas become better connected and you ...

GMOs: A Good but Battered Means for Sustainable Production Intensification

FAO promotes Sustainable Production Intensification (SPI), which consists of a technology menu for optimizing crop production per unit area, taking into consideration the range of sustainability aspects including potential and/or real social, political, economic and environmental impacts. The author suggests that Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) cropping is not only well aligned to SPI but a...

Why are recessions good for your health?

A series of influential papers by Christopher J. Ruhm (2000, 2003, 2005, 2008) documents that recessions are “good for your health”—or, more specifically, that state-level mortality rates are strongly procyclical. The magnitude of the correlation is economically meaningful: a typical estimate from the literature suggests that a 1 percentage point increase in a state’s unemployment rate is assoc...

How Good are Your Types?

Software engineers primarily use two orthogonal means to reduce susceptibility to faults: software testing and static type checking. While many strategies exist to evaluate the effectiveness of a test suite in catching bugs, there are few that evaluate the effectiveness of type annotations in a program. This problem is most relevant in the context of gradual or optional typing, where programmer...

Turning people into couch potatoes is not the cure for sports concussion.