How Creativity Works
Earlier this week New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer admitted to fabricating material in his book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Being a writer, I can only assume he immediately grasped the irony. After being pinned down by Michael Moynihan of the online magazine Tablet, Lehrer confessed that some of the Bob Dylan quotes he used, “did not exist,” and others were “unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes.”
I was shocked, both as both a loyal reader of The New Yorker and as someone who wants people to think he’s a fan of Bob Dylan. I suspect Moynihan was tipped off by the fact that some sentences attributed to Dylan were nearly coherent. I may as well come clean now and admit that certain quotations attributed to me in my book Dad To Dad: Parenting Like A Pro did not exist or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. For example, where I state that I told my children, “No,” I actually said, “Ask your mother.”
A Florid Success
What would you do if you found your hospital only had a 1% rate of following a major evidence-based guideline? If you are like me, a zealot for best practices, you would sit in the doctors lounge and kvetch with your peers about how the administrators are a bunch of knuckleheads. But if you’re like Dr. Michelle Parker and her colleagues at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, you might gather a multi-disciplinary care team and determine the barriers to implementation, overcome them all, and raise your institution’s compliance rate to 100%, simultaneously acing your American Board Of Pediatrics Maintenance Of Certification Part IV.
Dr. Parker and her colleagues noted that since her hospital recommended children admitted for viral gastroenteritis start supplementation with the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG) at admission in 2007, it just wasn’t happening. After adapting the admission order set, working with the hospital pharmacy, and providing physicians with timely email reminders, Dr. Parker said, “It’s definitely become culture.” Reports do not state whether she then laughed to herself, realizing that she was, you know, talking about bacteria.
Magic Beans
What if just looking at vegetables is enough to make kids eat healthier? That seems to be the upshot of a new study in Agricultural And Resource Economics Review. The authors found that when a school cafeteria offered green beans and bananas instead of apple sauce and canned fruit cups, kids were less likely to choose sugary deserts like cookies, ice cream, or Little Debbie snack cakes, even if they didn’t actually serve themselves any of the healthy items! This phenomenon, called the “priming effect” by behavioral economists, opens a world of possibilities for those of us who want kids to eat healthier. Imagine, school cafeterias could just keep recycling the same beans and bananas for months on end instead of weeks as they do now. Complications could arise if a child actually served himself and subsequently ate one of the fruits or vegetables, but I know this much: it won’t be one of my kids.
Buckshot
Speaking of my children, now would probably be a good time for me to find those “Buckyballs” I gave them for Christmas and lock them away in a vault until the kids are in their mid-to-late twenties.
Last week the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) took the unusual step of filing suit to have the super-strong spherical magnets taken off the market due to their propensity to cause life-threatening intestinal damage when accidentally swallowed. The distributor of these admittedly-entertaining desk toys does not appear to be going down without a fight, arguing that the toy is clearly labeled as not being appropriate for anyone under the age of 14 and that the popular product has led fewer than two dozen children to undergo emergency surgery. Regardless of the outcome of this legal battle, I’m warning my kids that if they don’t find those Buckeyballs and give them to me right now I’m taking away their air rifles and M-80s for a week. If they object, I’m just going to tell them “No,” or as I pronounce it, “Ask your mom.”