Month: June 2007

Science in Action: Omega-3 (a surprise!)

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I have always stopped self-experimenting when I travel because so much changes. Surely I will sleep differently, etc., far from home. However, it is not so obvious my arithmetic speed (how fast I do arithmetic problems such as 6 + 3) will change. I am measuring arithmetic speed as part of my study of omega-3 (directory).

I recently spent a week in Los Angeles. For the first time I continued self-experimentation while traveling. When I arrived I bought a bottle of flaxseed oil. I continued to take 4 T/day and did the same mental-function tests I do at home: arithmetic, memory-scanning, and balance. I have described these tests in other posts.

My balance was much worse in Los Angeles, apparently because what I see during the test changed (because the floor and other surroundings are different). I hadn’t realized how much that mattered. My arithmetic and memory-scanning results were roughly the same as the results at home — that is, until the last day. This graph shows arithmetic speeds:

arithmetic speed

This graph shows memory-scanning results:

memory scanning speeds

The sudden improvement on the last day — also clear in the balance test — was a big surprise. It was too large to be due to practice, nor could it be due to being in LA — the previous 5 measurements were also in LA. It did, however, have a ready explanation: The previous night I had gotten back late and had forgotten to take the oil. So instead of taking 4 T at 11 pm I took it at 7 am. I did the tests at about noon. Instead of 8 or 9 hours between oil ingestion and test, in this case the difference was 5 hours.

If this explanation is correct, there is a short-lived effect of flaxseed oil on brain function — present 5 hours after ingestion but absent or weaker 8 hours later. Which, as a scientist, makes me say “Wow!” If this effect exists, it’s a new tool, the most precious and powerful thing in science. I can use it to compare amounts of flaxseed oil, oils (e.g., fish oil), and foods (e.g., salmon).

My current way of measuring omega-3 effects requires one/day tests repeated for weeks. When I reduced the amount of flaxseed oil I was taking from 4 T/day to nothing, it took more than a day with the lower dose before performance even went down, and many more days before performance stabilized. This meant that experiments had to last several weeks. If the new effect exists, it will allow much faster experiments.

Michael Moore and Jane Jacobs

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Sicko is a great movie, one of the most emotion-evoking films I have ever seen. In this interview

Moore says something that is at the heart of Sicko:

They [HMOs] are required by law . . . to maximize profits for their shareholders. That’s what the law requires them to do. The way they can maximize profits is to deny care, is to not pay out claims. The more claims they pay, the less profit they make. You should never have the idea of profit enter into a health decision. We wouldn’t allow it for the fire department or the police department. We wouldn’t say, well, you know, we’ve got to be sure the fire department posts a profit. We wouldn’t turn it over to a private company, have investors invest in it, say, well, some people are going to get fire protection and other people aren’t. We wouldn’t allow that, would we? It would be immoral.

This is what Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs is all about. Jacobs argued that there are two sets of “moral” rules — one appropriate for “guardians” (such as firemen, police and doctors), the other appropriate for “traders” (business people) — and that the two should not be mixed. When guardians follow commercial rules or when traders follow guardian rules, bad things happen. Sicko is about the bad things that happen when doctors follow commercial rules and how these bad things are avoided when (in other countries) doctors follow guardian rules.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 9: clinical trials again)

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An article in this week’s BMJ about problems with clinical trials makes some of the points I made in a recent post. The article is based on a London conference held last week. In my post, I said the evaluation of the Shangri-La Diet going on at the SLD forums was in many ways better than a clinical trial.

At the conference, a speaker complained that

key groups of participants were often excluded from clinical studies

I pointed out that anyone could post at the SLD forums.

Doug Altman, professor of statistics in medicine at Oxford University, said that the presentation of statistical results of clinical trials “lacked transparency and precluded any further analysis.”

I said that the forums are more transparent.

Paul Glasziou, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, warned that many clinical trials described treatments that were difficult to replicate in normal clinical settings.

I said that the forums were more realistic — meaning that the treatments being tested were closer to what actually could happen.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 8: spiritual experts)

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“Religion is extremely important to the Tibetans,” says Wikipedia, but what does that mean? The Tibetan Buddhism entry is no help. Last night at dinner, however, I did learn what it means, at least in part. Tibetans spend a vast amount of time on religious observances — what the observer (Bryan Ng, a Berkeley engineer) called a “religion tax.” One example was a well-observed month-long annual religious festival. Another was a sensationally slow method of travel: Take a step or two, bow down, lie down on the ground, get up, take another step, bow down, and so on. This method is used to cover long distances, such as 20 miles or more. The extremely devout do this along highways.

The Chinese government wants to reduce the influence of religion, he said. Goods imported into Tibet from China via the new railway should increase commerce, for example. The power of the Chinese government makes it likely they will succeed.

My Theory of Human Evolution (music video edition)

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This clever and attractive music video creates images out of repetition of dice numbers — pictures of dice showing 1, 2, etc. It illustrates the general point that we like to see identical or nearly-identical things side by side. A vast amount of decoration (wallpaper, rugs, packages, posters, architectural details) takes advantage of this.

It’s a curious propensity because we don’t see this pattern in nature: we don’t see identical things side by side, neatly lined up. So the propensity did not evolve so that people will prefer Place X to Place Y. It’s a propensity that causes us to place similar things side by side — if we have a doll collection, for example, to put our dolls side by side rather than far apart.

When we put things side by side it is far easier to notice small differences. Noticing small differences is the first step toward caring about small differences, deriving pleasure and displeasure from them — becoming a connoisseur, in other words. Connoisseurs pay more for “fine” stuff than the rest of us — wine connoisseurs pay more for wine, for example. In human prehistory, I theorize, connoisseurs supported artists and artisans, who were the first material scientists.

The pleasure we take from identical things side by side evolved because it increased connoisseurship. Supermarkets should do more side-by-side sampling of different products in the same category — different balsamic vinegars, for example.

Directory for this series.

My Theory of Human Evolution (directory)

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posts

The Twilight of Expertise (part 7: education experts)

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The education improvement program — merit pay for teachers as part of a larger package — promoted by the Milken Family Foundation received a big public boost last week with this NY Times article about a similar program in Minnesota.

A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession. . . Minnesota’s experience shows . . . that an incentive plan created with union input can draw teacher support.

The plan that is gaining support was devised by Lowell Milken, according to Jana Rausch, who works for the Milken Family Foundation on this initiative. Before he started the foundation, Lowell Milken was a lawyer. As far as education goes, he is self-taught. Yet the program he devised seems to be working better than other programs. Of course many people have proposed merit pay for teachers; but it is the Milken Family Foundation that has managed to make it work. We need engineers to build a better plane. But we do not need education experts, apparently, to build better schools.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 6: psychotherapy, continued)

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Among the community of psychotherapists, according to Dr. Marion Arom, a psychotherapist friend of mine, “it is common knowledge that in many traditional therapies, if the therapy fails — if the desired change doesn’t occur — it’s due to client resistance or lack of motivation to change or unconscious motivation. The role or skill of the therapist is not examined, ever.”

Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs has a chapter about the failure of highly-respected professions to police themselves.

Directory of Twilight of Expertise posts.

Learning to Write Better

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From the SLD forums:

I just had a great victory. My daughter is having her friends over so we are making friendship cookies. . . . I was feeling miserable for the first time since starting SLD [Shangri-La Diet] like I wanted to eat a whole bunch of them and totally binge out. I ate a few crumbs that fell off and couldn’t get them out of my mind (I haven’t had this problem in 6 wks.). I went ahead and decided to eat just one of the yummy delights. . . . After one I was so very full I actually didn’t want anymore! DO YOU REALIZE WHAT THIS MEANS? I mean, wow! I can actually have just one cookie. I never ever ever have been able to do that before.

I like to think the Internet is improving my writing by showing me many examples of how to do it. This quote is half of a well-written few paragraphs. The other half would be the general rule that Michel Cabanac discovered: If your set point is lower than usual you will feel full sooner than usual, as this quote illustrates. (The Shangri-La Diet had lowered her set point.) Interesting idea + emotion-charged example = good writing. Blogs are another example. As I’ve said before, they are full of good writing. You don’t blog about stuff you don’t care about.

Books — part of the great wide non-Internet — suffer by comparison. I recently started reading a book about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. I was favorably disposed: Chez Panisse is a great achievement, I am very interested in food and changes in food, it took place near my house, I had attended a nice reading given by the author. In spite of all this, I stopped after a few chapters. The book is very well written in a nuts-and-bolts way. However, it lacks emotion — the author didn’t care passionately about his subject and it shows. The book had come about because Alice Waters’s assistant had approached him and asked him if he was interested in doing such a book. He took a long time, he did a careful and thorough job, but no amount of time or care or editing could fix the problem that he didn’t feel strongly enough.