The collection of Google Talks at YouTube is the best collection of stuff I’ve found to listen to while I look in the mirror every morning. The best (so far) of the best:
Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics:
Jessica Livingston, author of Founders at Work:
Reed Hundt, author of In China’s Shadow:
Dr. Erika Schwartz, a New York internist, rightly chastises the New York Times for a long article about stroke (part of a series on major causes of death) that says nothing about prevention. Schwartz attributes the over-emphasis on treatment to relative cost: Treatment is far more expensive than prevention. Memo to Gina Kolata: Don’t follow the money.
This is a genuine problem with self-experimentation: It costs almost nothing. No status-enhancing grant is required to do it. One of many ways that science is at odds with human nature.
A few days ago the New Yorker website added magazine-quality material to only the website. Stuff just as good as the stuff in the magazine, but not in the magazine. This is a first for The New Yorker and perhaps for any magazine. The never-before-broken rule has been that the website-only stuff is inferior or at least subsidiary to the printed stuff.
The particular item is humor by James Collins, who used to write for Spy. Brilliant writer. I read his pieces over and over. I especially liked one about friendship (“The Nature of Friendship Today”). “My social life was paying off,” it began.
The New Yorker website doesn’t have a good place for Collins’s piece on the home page. It is listed under “Shouts & Murmurs” but there is no indication that, unlike the other Shouts & Murmurs links, which precede and follow it, it is online only. Well, yes, Jackie Robinson was a first baseman, but to describe Jackie Robinson as a first baseman is incomplete.
I suspect my old editor, Susan Morrison, is behind this just like I think she was behind the New Yorker line-crossing a few weeks ago. Incidentally, the printed Shouts & Murmurs (about a creative astronaut) is very good.
Jane Jacobs said dozens of things that impressed me, this most of all:
You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. You can’t prescribe decently for something you despair in. . . . I think people [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.
She had noticed that people who hate cities or who despair of cities make bad prescriptions for them.
It was a long time before I realized this comment applied to me. I used self-experimentation to improve my sleep and mood and to lose weight. Unlike most health researchers, I wasn’t trying to solve other people’s problems — I was trying to solve my own. No wonder I persisted in spite of many failures.
Similar advice. Another example.
Yesterday I deliberately spent almost all day indoors. I didn’t change anything else. This morning I woke up feeling less refreshed than usual. Here are the last three days:
Day 1: Try to spend lots of time outdoors (in the shade). Result: Wake up feeling more refreshed than usual.
Day 2: Try to spend lots of time outdoors (in the shade). Result: Wake up feeling more refreshed than usual.
Day 3: Try to spend as little time outdoors as possible. Result: Wake up feeling less refreshed than usual.
My belief is increasing. Via Google I found this:
Person 1: During the warm months of the year, I swim …a lot! . . . The amount I sleep during swimming season can increase by 1-2 hours.
Person 2: Your probably sleeping longer due to all the extra calories and physical exerction you use by swimming.
Person 1: Nah, it’s the same physical exertion year round for me. I exercise year round. But in the warm months, my exercise takes me outside where I am exposed to sunlight instead of artificial indoor light. That’s how I know it’s the sunlight that helps me sleep better.
I also found this:
We have found that people who are outdoors more have fewer sleep problems.
From an interesting mini-book about the dangers of sleeping pills (apparently the new ones cause cancer). I haven’t yet found the study it refers to.
I blogged earlier about comparing flaxseed oil and nothing: here are the balance and arithmetic results. I also used a paper-and-pencil memory-scanning task that I described earlier. Here are the flaxseed vs. nothing results from that task:
The difference was even clearer — t = 8 — than with the other measures (balance, t = 7; arithmetic, t = 6). It took about three days of no flaxseed oil before its effect completely wore off, but only one day of resumption to reach full strength again — the pattern seen several times earlier.
The test took 5 minutes/day, twice as long as the arithmetic problems but only half as long as the balance test. The equipment demands are mild: printer, pencil and paper (in addition to computer).
I’ll discuss the implications in a later post.
From this week’s BMJ:
The saga began in the late 1980s when Dr Chalmers was preparing a systematic review of epidural anaesthesia. He noticed that much of the text and data in a 1974 paper co-authored by Professor Kurjak were identical to those in a paper from a different group of authors published three years previously.
He reported his observations to the editor concerned and to Professor Kurjak’s university [Zagreb University]. Both requested that the matter be handled discreetly.
In 2006 Dr Chalmers discovered that Professor Kurjak continued plagiarising. A report in 2002 showed that he had taken material from a Norwegian doctoral thesis and published it under his own name as a chapter in a book on fetal neurology.
Likewise, Dr. Ranjit Chandra continued his misdeeds long after someone complained to his employer, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Memorial University and its President, Axel Meisen, deserve some sort of award for now claiming Memorial did nothing wrong when it allowed Chandra to continue.
More here. An editorial by me about how well universities handle this sort of thing.
In an airport a few weeks ago, chatting with a stranger, I told her about my self-experimentation. When I stand a lot, I sleep better, I said. She said that sunlight had the same effect on her: When she sunbathes, she sleeps better. Better how? I asked. More deeply, she said.
I had found that morning sunlight (an hour, say) helps me sleep. Her idea was different: No one sunbathes in the morning. She was saying that the amount of sunlight matters independent of the time of day.
This was fascinating because I remembered two days, prior to studying the effects of standing and morning light, after which I had slept very well (i.e., woken up feeling very well-rested):
1. A day when I went to many artists’ studios to look at their work (an event called Open Studios).
2. A camping trip.
Both days I was on my feet a lot. But both days I was also outside a lot, I realized.
Yesterday I gave her idea a test: I spent more time than usual outside — about three hours more, I’d guess. I spend a lot of time sitting in cafes writing; yesterday I sat outside instead of inside.
This morning I woke up feeling unusually well-rested. This bears more investigation.
We found that simply recorking an unused bottle of wine and placing it in the refrigerator is quite effective, but the use of the VacuVin pump was a noticeable improvement.
Details here. Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell, I use a Vacuvin-like pump.
Jane Jacobs has said:
You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. . . . People [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.
Emphasis added. This applies more widely than I might have thought. Here is an example:
Two gourmet chocolate companies. Two pay-per-click ad campaigns. Two very different results.
Charles Chocolates — a small artisanal chocolate manufacturer in Emeryville — spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads over a three-month period last year and sold fewer than five boxes of chocolates. Meanwhile, Lake Champlain Chocolates — a rival chocolatier based in Vermont — sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolates each year from pay-per-click ads.
What accounts for that difference?
With 100 employees, Lake Champlain is far larger than 25-person Charles Chocolates. And with an annual pay-per-click budget of $100,000, it also spends far more on ads than Charles Chocolates did. But that doesn’t really explain the difference. When Lake Champlain started experimenting with pay per click in 2002, its budget for all forms of marketing was just $5,000.
What Lake Champlain did have was an inquisitive employee who threw himself into learning everything about how pay per click works — mastering arcane details and strategies about keyword bidding . . . Middings was fascinated by a medium that seemed the reverse of conventional marketing. . . . Middings taught himself the tricks of the trade. He developed a list of 70,000 — seventy thousand — keywords to bid on.
Jane Jacobs on the food industry and scientific method.