Many of you have heard me tell Scott stories. Scott is the craziest and most articulate person I know, full of life and energy, a real pleasure to have as a colleague and friend. Scott has conducted research in deception, including counter intelligence and other applied work, and has strong opinions on many topics, including the inefficiency of current lie detection methods and the pointless nature of torture (three cheers for evidence based opinions!). I had been planning to interview Scott about his research, and to post the audio here, but last Thursday, his dazzling light was extinguished in a fatal motorcycle accident involving a truck.

While Scott was an expert in deception, his work was far reaching and included work in persuasion and cryptography among other topics, and he even gave lectures with his partner (an expert in eating disorders) about the parallels between totalist organizations (e.g. cults, terrorist organizations) and eating disorders (in the ways they take over your mind and control your life).

Scott was passionate about making things better for people at all levels, from the small daily puns and compliments he paid his colleagues to the zeal and fervor he brought to our research, and the energy devoted to combating human rights abuses.

A partial list of Scott’s publications from his time at RAND can be found here:

http://rand.org/pubs/authors/g/gerwehr_scott.html

Check out this website, spoofing the cosmetic industry’s “no animal testing” logo.

As funding becomes ever more politicized and as we seek to reach a wider, more interdisciplinary audience, the words and symbols we choose to represent ourselves and our science become of greater and greater importance.

In two recent conversations with David Hemenway, I learned about how to get more bang for our buck in keeping people safer, and about a cool statistical insight that helps explain things ranging from why your classes are larger than “average” to why its hard to reduce the number of cars on the road.

Listen to the audio:

Public Health Success Stories

Why Your Classes are Larger than Average

Recent work by Bob Kaplan and Dominick Frosch suggests that when patients and doctors work together to make decisions, everyone wins.  More…

A few of us in the psychology department at UCLA have decided to combine our blogging efforts. Our site, which is probably going to be more psych oriented than what you’ll find here, can be found at http://PsychInAction.Wordpress.com

Enjoy!