Some News Items Worthy of Taking Note

A quick summary of some of the newsworthy items that appeared in the news in the past week:

Alexis Madrigal of Wired's Science blog writes about a report published by the Committee for Economic Development, a nonprofit, nonpartisan thinktank in San Francisco, that prescribes openness in medicine, including open-access publishing of research data, as a means for improving the healthcare system. For a copy of the full report, click here. For more on Alexis' article, click here.


Sara Robinson does a great job of blasting the straw bogeymen in her first of her series, Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, where she refutes the ten biggest myths about Canadian health care. [Hat tip to Mike the Mad Biologist, who blogged about it first and commented in his blog: "Despite conservative claims to the contrary, we do ration healthcare: many lower middle-class and unemployed people don't get to have any."]. Full article here.


Want to learn more about what makes you unique? Check out New Scientist's Personality Factors: "[F]ive key thermostats account for most of the variation in personality. These big five - extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness and agreeableness - define five axes along which all individuals fall. Your personality, as measured by one of the many available questionnaires, consists of five different scores. Since each axis is continuous and they are independent of one another, there are countless unique personality configurations." For the whole enchilada, click here. (Subscription required)

And although, this article from New Scientist isn't related to healthcare ethics, it does bring up some fascinating philosophical questions: Will 2008 be the year of time travel? , like if you had a chance to go back in time and stop horrific things from happening (the classic example is eliminating Hitler to avoid WW II), should you? (Subscription required).

Happy Reading!