By Bryan Schatz | Mother Jones | February 11, 2015

Inquistr | February 6, 2015

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that competent adults with intolerable and “irremediable” suffering should have the right to commit suicide with the help of doctors. The Canadian high court ruled that provincial and federal lawmakers have one year to create legislation to address its ruling. Until new legislation is made, the federal ban on doctor-assisted suicide is still in effect, but if lawmakers fail to address the new ruling by establishing proper legislation within a year, doctors will be permitted to assist with suicides of suffering Canadians. Continue reading »

February 5, 2015 | Katie Couric | Yahoo! Global News

CLBB Advisory Board member and President and Executive Director of Partners in Health Ophelia Dahl spoke with Katie Couric about the measles outbreak and ongoing vaccination debate in the US. Dahl’s father, author Roald Dahl, penned a letter in 1986 about the death of his oldest daughter, Olivia, who was stricken with measles before a vaccine against it was available. Both Dahl and her father called on the public to respect scientific consensus that the vaccines are safe. She stressed the importance of getting good information about science and data and said that even “a little bit of bad science is a dangerous thing.”

In an exclusive interview, Ophelia Dahl, daughter of Roald Dahl, sat down with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric to discuss the letter her father wrote that captured the world’s attention this week, the sister she never knew and the anti-vaccination debate that’s taken over the country.

Roald Dahl, the author of such beloved stories as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “James and the Giant Peach” and “Matilda,” lost his eldest daughter, Olivia, to measles in 1962, when she was just 7 years old.

Her death left the author heartbroken. “He traveled everywhere with a small silver photograph frame with a picture of her inside… Whenever he went on vacation, he took this with him and would put it up in the room wherever he was,” Ophelia recounted.

He penned a public letter in 1988 as a plea to parents and children to take advantage of the vaccine that came too late for his own daughter.

“He thought if he talked about his own personal experience, that would awaken the slumber he felt people were in,” said Ophelia.

At a time when a current measles outbreak is fueling nationwide fear, the letter has resonated with millions of people. Twenty-seven years after Roald Dahl wrote that “parents who now refuse to have their children immunized are putting the lives of those children at risk,” the number of parents choosing not to have their children vaccinated is growing, and the anti-vaccination debate continues.

Read the full article and watch video interview with Ophelia Dahl at Yahoo! Global News.

By Maria Konnikova | The New Yorker | February 4, 2015

R.T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.

R. T. was a student in a class taught by Ulric Neisser, a cognitive psychologist who had begun studying memory in the seventies. Early in his career, Neisser became fascinated by the concept of flashbulb memories—the times when a shocking, emotional event seems to leave a particularly vivid imprint on the mind. William James had described such impressions, in 1890, as “so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues.” Continue reading »

By Matt Stroud | Bloomberg | February 2, 2015

This article features interview with CLBB Co-Director Judith Edersheim, JD, MD. Dr. Edersheim’s 2014 paper, “A Polygraph Primer: What Litigators Need to Know,” written with Ekaterina Pivovarova, Justin Baker and Bruce Price, about the accuracy of the polygraph test, is cited.

By the beginning of February 1935, defense and prosecution attorneys in the criminal trial of Tony Grignano and Cecil Loniello were at a crossroads. The two men stood accused of attempting to kill a sheriff in Portage, Wis., and all of the evidence was circumstantial—the word of the sheriff against the word of the defendants. But Judge Clayton F. Van Pelt thought he could change that.

The judge had heard about the work of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University’s School of Law, where Professor Leonarde Keeler had spent more than a decade tinkering with a portable device to measure the responses of skin and blood pressure during questioning. In the hands of a trained expert, Keeler said, the device could help identify whether someone was telling the truth. While the Keeler Polygraph had been a showpiece at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, it had never been used in a criminal trial. On Feb. 2, 1935—exactly 80 years ago—Keeler used his polygraph test and determined that Grignano and Loniello were likely lying. The professor and his machine ended up persuading the jury. Continue reading »