Word: metas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...prepare yourself for a sequel. Instead, what you get is the same saga, different narrative. Characters die in one book and not the other, have sex in one and suffer tormented lust in the other. Individually, each novel is well crafted and compulsively readable. Together, they're a meta-authorial head game that makes you rethink the nature of fiction and your attachments to it. I'm still not over them...
...study published on June 16 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) now threatens to send researchers back to the drawing board. The meta-analysis of 14 prior studies concludes that the so-called depression gene - a variant of a serotonin-transporter gene called 5-HTTLPR - may not be associated with an elevated risk for depression, as many researchers had believed. "Knowing whether or not you have this gene is irrelevant," says the study's co-author Kathleen Merikangas, a genetic epidemiologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, who adds that future studies of genetic risk factors...
Merikangas' meta-analysis has plenty of its own detractors, particularly among the scientists whose work it refutes. "This article ignores the complete body of scientific evidence," says psychologist Caspi, who sent TIME.com an e-mail appended with 22 citations of studies that support his findings. "In the past six years, extensive research in experimental neuroscience using both animals and humans has validated the original report by showing that the 5-HTTLPR short allele-carriers are excessively vulnerable to stress," he says...
...Meta-analyses can be a steamroller," says Alexandre Todorov, a genetic epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., whose 2007 peer-reviewed study was included in the JAMA piece. (While Todorov's study found an association between the gene and depression, it was based on a different variant - the long allele as opposed to the short one.) "If you have three studies and two find nothing and the third finds something significant, that does not mean that the third study is not real...
...Johnson sent a tweet to his more than 500,000 followers on Twitter, informing them that he had written this week's cover story about how Twitter is changing the way society communicates. That tweet is also this week's cover image. I know this is all a bit meta and like trying to capture digital lightning in a jar, but we thought it was a way of illustrating how new platforms and social networks are changing the way we communicate and live...