Month: June 2007

Shopping Notes

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1. At a Vietnamese take-out place near Berkeley I got a can of sugar-cane juice. Some flavor, but very close to sugar water. From Taiwan. Which makes sense: In a Hong Kong store I saw cans of pure sugar water.

2. At Trader Joe’s I bought a package of trail mix called “Omega Trek Mix with Omega Fortified Cranberries.” (A new use of omega, by the way.) It contained “500 mg Omega-3 Fatty Acids Per Serving.” Sold only by Trader Joe’s. Not saying which omega-3 fats is a problem; so is lack of refrigeration. I could do a bio-assay, I realized: using the tests I have blogged about, such as balance and arithmetic, I could determine how much of the mix I had to eat to have the same effect as 1 tablespoon of flaxseed oil.

3. At Trader Joe’s I asked the checkout clerk what parts of her job she liked the best. “If we card a secret shopper, we get $15 for lunch,” she said. Lunch here? I asked. Lunch anywhere, she said. Whereas Dell employees detest secret shoppers. A tiny glimpse of a better future.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 4)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I was interviewed today by a writer for Wired Online. She said the Shangri-La Diet forums resembled open-source software. It’s a good point; at the SLD forums, a large number of people from all over the place are slowly but surely improving the diet (which is essentially an engineering problem). Because of their improvements, the paperback is about 10% different from the hardback. I’m not a weight-control expert; the people who contribute to the SLD forums are even less so.

The SLD forums can also be compared to a clinical trial of the diet. A large chunk of SLD forum posts are about how well the diet is working, which is what clinical trials are about. A clinical trial of the Shangri-La Diet (or almost anything) requires experts. Only weight-control experts could raise the money (hundreds of thousands of dollars) and have access to the necessary facilities. Anyone can start a forum.

Which is better? In two ways, a clinical trial is better than forums evaluation: 1. (major) You keep track of everyone who starts the trial. 2. (minor) Better measures. More accurate scales, blood tests, standardized food tracking. In six ways, forums evaluation is better than a clinical trial. 1. (major) More realistic. For example: the diet is more flexible, each dieter uses his or her own brain power to figure out what to do. 2. (major) Better reporting of side effects (both positive and negative). With forums, more brainpower goes into their detection. 3. (major). More transparent. Anyone can read the forums to find out what happened. Raw data from clinical trials is almost never available. 4. (major) Speed. Forums are much faster. 5. (major) Cost. Forums are much cheaper. 6. (major) Openness. Anyone can report his/her results on the SLD forums. Clinical trials, on the other hand, are closed to almost everyone.

I use both Firefox (open source) and Internet Explorer (not open source). But I use Firefox far more.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

The Twilight of Expertise (part 3)

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Do you need to be an expert on Topic X to write a serious (i.e., non-celebrity) well-paid well-publicized book about it? Less and less. As I said earlier, I am not a weight-control expert. Mickey DeLorenzo, a Philadelphia “multi-media developer” (website designer?) is even less of a weight-control expert. However, he used his Wii to lose 9 pounds in six weeks (story and data) and is working with an agent from a well-respected agency to write a book about it. The publicity started with digg.

You already knew you no longer have to be an expert on Topic X to write a well-read encyclopedia article about it.

Part 1. Part 2.

Thanks to Elaine Smith.

Thorstein Veblen on the Importance of Spell Check

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From The Theory of the Leisure Class:

As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found . . . is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.

Much of my first year in college I spent reading Veblen. It seemed fresh and smart then; it seems fresh and smart now.

The Clouded Crystal Ball

Seth Roberts2 Comments

“Does eating influence brain function?” begins a 1974 Scientific American article titled “Nutrition and the Brain” by 2 MIT professors. It is mainly about how changes in carbohydrate affect the brain — especially what happens after a carbohydrate-rich meal. A few studies of protein variation are discussed. Nothing about the effects of varying fat intake, although the brain is mostly fat.

The OJ Group

Seth Roberts6 Comments

At the CBC in Toronto, Sarah Kapoor, who did a story about the Shangri-La Diet, started what she called “the OJ group” — OJ meaning Ordinary Journalism. Journalism about ordinary life, like The Hunt.

Were formation of the OJ Group a chess move, I would give it two exclamation points. 1. It points out a major problem with standard journalism: Too much of it is about famous and powerful people doing boring things. 2. It gathers support. It is a way of persuading others and learning from them. 3. It criticizes by creating — as Michelangelo advised. My self-experimentation — about everyday concerns such as sleep, mood, and weight — might be called Ordinary Science. It is science about ordinary life using methods of ordinary life.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen argued that we care enormously about status display. The upper (leisure) classes display their status by conspicuously avoiding useful work (e.g., long fingernails) and by conspicuous waste (e.g., hood ornaments). Academics display status by avoiding work on useful questions. Such work is dismissed as “applied”, in contrast to “pure” research. The status of scientific work also depends on dimensions that Veblen doesn’t mention: 1. It is higher status to have someone else do something than to do it yourself. 2. Expensive research is higher status than cheap research. Thus my self-experimentation had three strikes against it: low-status topics, low-status participants (I’m not ordering anyone around), and low-status cost (cheap).

In journalism, like everywhere else, there is status by association. Writing about high-status people is higher status than writing about low-status people.

Fat and Anesthesia

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A new theory of nerve conduction takes as its empirical starting point the hundred-year-old observation of a strong correlation between the solubility of a chemical in olive oil and its anesthetic potency. The more soluble, the more potent. Olive oil was used to mimic the cell membranes of nerve cells. Such observations — a certain type of fat is a useful model of the whole nervous system — make it even more plausible that dietary fat affects brain function, as my omega-3 observations suggest.

The authors of the new theory believe that when anesthetics enter a nerve cell, they tend to solidify the fats in the cell. This makes the cell less responsive.

Outside a Chinese Test Site

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In China, a two-day annual test, which ended Friday, determines what college high school graduates will attend. Outside a test site, an AP reporter heard this:

Wang said she has been cooking foods for her son that are considered particularly good for worn-out students, with plenty of vegetables and less grease.

“Oily foods, it’s bad for the brain, it makes the brain slow down,” she said.

Astute observation. Regular readers of this blog know that certain oily foods (those high in omega-3 fats) have the opposite effect. But I suspect Ms. Wang is right, that most oily foods (high in omega-6) do slow the brain down, perhaps because they replace omega-3 with omega-6.

Academic Horror Story (Tulane University)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A few weeks ago, the manager of a New Orleans art gallery told me a story that I wish had surprised me.

When he was a senior at Tulane University, he took a Political Science class about the British Political System. For his term paper he wrote about the functions of the British Cabinet. The night before the final he got a phone call. It was from the Tulane honor board: He was charged with plagiarism. He was devastated, and did badly on the final.

The next semester a hearing took place. At the hearing, he listened to a tape of his professor’s testimony. The professor recommended that he be expelled: Not only had he plagiarized, the professor said, he had flunked the final. The supposed plagiarism was that he had listed ten functions of the British Cabinet without giving a source. He had believed that this was common knowledge, such as saying the sky is blue, and thus did not need a source. He had not copied word for word — he had paraphrased his source. The honor board gave him an WF for the course — withdrawal with an F.

The charge of plagiarism is absurd. It isn’t even obvious that the student did anything wrong — he is correct that you don’t need to reference “the sky is blue.” The telling part of this story is not that an individual professor was cruel and stupid — it is that a committee of professors backed him up.

Another case — this time at Memorial University of Newfoundland — where a committee of professors did exactly the wrong thing with awful consequences for an innocent person. The current Memorial administration now defends this!

A website about how IRBs (institutional review boards) abuse their power. IRBs are university-wide committees that oversee research. They consist mostly of professors.

So you can see why I wasn’t really surprised.