I should start my own blog carnival…

…and it shall be called “stuff that Sci thinks is cool”. We can call it STSTIC (like ‘statistic’, only with misplaced letters, or maybe more like “Stastic…”) for short.
Welcome to the first issue of “Stastic”, wherein Sci gets all Spastic and Ecstatic (SEE the combination now?!) about the things she missed on the blogsphere. And she missed a LOT. When I finally got up the gumption to look at my rss feed, I found I had missed well over 500 posts. I almost went into seclusion at that point. It took me several hours to get through them all (admittedly my internet was being horrid). But there were a lot of gems. Clearly, when people are relaxed in between semesters (though ‘relaxed’ is a relative term), they can churn out some amazing stuff.

The Evidence Gap: Do Treatments Even Work?

When I saw this article in the NY Times, I literally ignored everything else around me for about ten minutes straight. Working in drug abuse research (as I do), I get a lot of questions from people asking a) what they can do to get off drugs, b) how different drugs work, and c) why don’t drug abuse treatment programs ever seem to work, or work only for the stars who get to go to Cirque Lodge. And every year or so (it seems, maybe it’s six months), the NY Times puts out an article on drug treatment programs and how they’re doing, and mostly about how they’re not doing well, and should be doing better.
This article however, had a bit of an edge of hope. I always appreciate that, it’d be nice to know that my entire career is not in vain, wouldn’t you agree?