About, Anonymity, Privacy and Disclaimers

Hi, this is Swivelchair. I work in the biopharma area. Not a scientist, not a journalist, mostly in the business aspects.  I have a science and business background, and have been involved in a variety of biotechnology-related ventures. All posts, opinions, etc. are my own, and don’t represent anyone else’s views. To perhaps state the obvious, never make any medical or financial decisions based on any blog by anyone you don’t know, including this one.

This blog is about the science underlying human behavior. My belief is that there is probably biology behind most behaviors.   Dysfunctional behavior — as in the header above: narcissism, psychopaths, obesity and addiction — can probably be explained by biology at some level, and the posts here make an attempt to connect the dots.  The posts are perhaps oversimplified, and any technical corrections are of course welcome.

Anonymity:  Lately, I’ve heard more and more people complaining about anonymous bloggers, and they have a point. Where anonymity is used to make hit-and-run attacks or to conduct some sort of a smear campaign, it is misused  — and I certainly do not support that at all. My feeling about maintaining anonymity:  First, because I actually have a job that involves maintaining a fair amount of decorum, I prefer to remain anonymous in order to speak freely without the fear of retaliation.  If you publish or speak publicly, I consider my comments of what you’re saying to be within the realm of reasonable use of your identity, but if you regret what you’ve said or posted on YouTube or whatever, let me know, and I’ll more than likely remove.

In complaining, something done often and with great detail on this blog, I try to focus on the information, rather than the person or organization. If anyone has any complaints or feels the treatment is unfair, e mail me.  If anyone spoken about in the posts or by a commenter feels that they would like the information removed, please e mail me. This is frustrating mostly to those who wish to discredit based on the identity of the writer, rather than the content of the information. So, for those who are frustrated and wish to believe that I have no credibility on any subject, conjure up whatever image of me you like, if it makes you feel better about yourself.

As far as the long tradition of anonymity in freedom of the press — see the Electronic Frontier Foundation page that goes through the US and international historical, policy, and legal bases.

Privacy:  I have no idea who anyone is unless you identify yourself. And even then I usually don’t believe you. I don’t sell or share any data intentionally, although I do capture the analytics through commercial services.   From these services, I can see if you are logging on from the server at  a  “.edu” or “.com” or “.gov”  but that’s about it. Because we don’t sell anything, we are not secured or encrypted in any way, and we don’t feel like we need that. I rely on third party platforms (WordPress.org and my hosting service) to provide the back end.

Disclaimer:  Nothing blogged here is advice in any aspect of your life whatsoever. Do not make any health, financial, relationship or medical decisions based on this blog, period full stop.   We take no responsibility for any aspect of your life.

Although we do try to slog through the scientific literature, we make no representations as to our accuracy — in fact, sometimes we’ve been flat wrong. If that happens,  put that in our comments section and we’ll correct, and consider this a pre-emptive apology.

As stated elsewhere, we do go over the top in our analysis, and we know that — that’s why we view this blog not as a research journal but more of a tabloid.  This blog is not a “journal club” but rather more practical as our own attempt to explain inexplicable behavior of those in our orbit.  You all know where to get science journalism and academic research. If you take our analysis, and use that in  your term paper, and then your professor gives you an “F”, don’t blame us.

All users are responsible for their own use of the ideas and electrons from this blog.  As far as the technicalities, we don’t believe we carry any kind of virus but we just use the blogging platforms others provide, so who knows.  If someone says we’re plagiarizing, we highly doubt it because we don’t really see anyone else blogging about what we are here, but please let us know – we’re more than happy to give credit where credit is due.  We try to provide links/citations for quoted materials, and if we’ve missed yours, let us know.

Mumbo jumbo:  Attribution license — copy, share, derivative works, just attribute to this blog — thanks much. From CreativeCommons.org:

Neurological Correlates by Neurological Correlates is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.     Based on a work at neurologicalcorrelates.com.     Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://neurologicalcorrelates.com/wordpress.

More to come, thanks for stopping by — I hope this is useful and entertaining –

Swivelchair

My e mail: swivelchairmedia [at]  gmail.com