Good reading

This morning I read an interesting article in the NYT Magazine on how to get doctors to wash their hands. The piece is written by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, and in it they tell the story of how one hospital ultimately managed to increase handwashing among doctors from 65% to nearly 100%. The key turned out to be having the doctors put their palms on a culture plate and then turning the resulting images into a screen saver that was put on every computer in the hospital.

I was intrigued by the social psychology bent of the approach and article, so I went to Dubner and Levitt's website and read another very interesting article about bagels and human nature. I've become more and more interested in recent years about the power of economics, especially when it incorporates a social science perspective, and I really wish I'd taken more courses in it while I was in college. Anyway, those two articles really piqued my interest, so off to the library I went and picked up a copy of Freakonomics, along with The Tipping Point (which I own, but cannot find), and a play by Tom Stoppard. Time to dig into some good reading and get my brain going again!