Links: Hygiene hypothesis/Grief/Computers vs. humans/ Tobacco for the poor/Genetics via Lady Gaga

Why Keeping Little Girls Squeaky Clean Could Make Them Sick (NPR)
The hygiene hypothesis: children exposed to lots of germs early in life less likely to develop allergies, asthma, autoimmune disorders. Women have higher rates of these disorders. Is that because girls are held to higher standards of cleanliness?

Grief, Unedited (NYT)
Memoirs on the loss of a spouse, such as the latest from Joyce Carol Oates, don’t teach us about typical mourning experience. Most older people whose spouse dies from natural causes recover much more quickly than we have come to expect. For many, acute grief subsides less than six months after the loss. By the author of The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss.

A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans (NYT)
As machines simulate skills that were once exclusively human, designers are faced with the challenge of rethinking what it means to be human. It’s not just about putting people out of work. Read Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, where she argues that we’re in danger of preferring sociable robots (Paro, Nursebot, My Real Baby) to real human beings. This article is about IBM’s Watson and artificial intelligence vs. intelligence augmentation.

The Computer Made Me Do It (NYT)
Review of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personalityby Elias Aboujaoude and Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the Worldby Jane McGonigal. Two opposing views.

Tobacco companies expand their epidemic of death (Lancet)
Those in the business of selling, addicting, and killing – “surely the most cruel and corrupt business model human beings could have invented” – announce stock-price-raising success in poor and developing countries.

Lady Gaga parody takes on genetics (New Scientist)
A genetics lesson to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone.”