In 2006, a symposium at Northwestern University discussed problems with IRB (Institutional Review Board) oversight of research. Fascinating papers based on the proceedings are available. From Federic Coe’s paper:
In 2006, the IRB ran into heavy issues with our use of scrap urine. They performed a review of our past submissions and found worrisome irregularities.
During a recent trip to Los Angeles, I continued my self-experimental activities — three mental tests, which I did once/day. On the last day of the trip, my scores were much better than usual. There was an obvious explanation: I had taken my daily flaxseed oil (4 T) closer to the time of the test — 4 hours before rather than 12 hours before. This suggested that flaxseed oil has an effect that happens fast and diminishes quickly. Earlier observations had implied that the effect at least a few days to wear off completely.
Back home, I wanted to measure this effect. I started testing more often. With a two-answer (yes-no) test, I saw the short-lived effect a few times. But accuracy was relatively low (about 90% correct) due to anticipation errors. I switched to a new test that measures how fast I count letters.
After doing the new test about 70 times, my performance was fairly constant. I resumed trying to measure the short-lived effect. At 3 pm six days ago I drank 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil. Here are the results:
The blue line shows when I took the flaxseed oil. Within a few hours, reaction time sharply decreased. The improvement slowly went away.
Two big conclusions: (1) Here is a new way to see the effect of flaxseed oil. My earlier experiments took a few weeks; this took a few days. (2) Low between-test variability. The cluster of points around the time of the first meal is an example. The one point below the cluster is a counter-example — I have no idea why it was low all of a sudden. But that is rare. Almost always erratic points suggest explanations. During the second meal I drank a sugar-sweetened drink, forgetting previous observations that these drinks lower reaction time for a few hours (no doubt because they increase blood glucose levels).
This experiment has one big flaw, which is that after I took the flaxseed oil I started making more frequent measurements. A year ago, I made the same mistake with my balance experiments. There is a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle here: The measurement itself — the test — causes learning. Learning lowers the baseline.
I’ll fix this mistake and a few others and do the experiment again.
Kaiping Peng, a friend of mine who is a professor at Berkeley, recently said to me that professors have an unusual place in our society: They are expected to tell the truth. Hardly anyone else is, he said. But what happens when they do?
The most impressive professorial truth-telling in my lifetime has been The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003) by Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern. It’s mainly about male homosexuals but it also discusses male-to-female transsexuals, not all of whom are homosexual. The “controversy” — actually a defamation campaign — after its publication is described in an excellent new article by Alice Dreger, another Northwestern faculty member.
The serious truth-telling in the book is in the chapters about transsexuals, in which Bailey brought into public view the ideas of Ray Blanchard, a Toronto researcher. Blanchard had proposed that there are two types of transsexuals: homosexual and autogynephilic — in other words, that all or almost all transsexuals fall into one of these two categories. I’m going to call them Type 1 (homosexual) and Type 2 (autogynephilic). Both are men who become women or who want to become women; but they are otherwise quite different. There are many surface differences — so many that it is no surprise that, as Bailey says, the two types almost never mix socially. Type 1 appear far more like other women than Type 2, who sometimes resemble men wearing dresses. As children, Type 1 acted feminine; Type 2 did not. Type 1 often work in occupations full of women, such as beautician and hairstylist; Type 2 usually work in male-dominated professions, such as policeman, truck driver, scientist, engineer, and computer programmer. Type 1 usually start living as a female before age 25; Type 2 usually start much later, after age 40. Type 2 have usually been married (to a woman); Type 1 have not.
Blanchard proposed that these surface differences derive from a difference in motivation. Type 1 transsexuals are sexually attracted to men; changing their sex will help them attract men. (They prefer straight men to homosexual men.) Type 2 transsexuals are sexually aroused by thinking of themselves as a woman; this is why they seek sex-change surgery.
Blanchard’s typology, well-known to sex researchers, had not reached the public when Bailey’s book was published. “When I have tried to educate journalists who have called me as an expert on transsexualism, they have reacted uncomfortably,” wrote Bailey. “One said: “We can’t put that in a family newspaper.”
I watched some of this Flash art. I especially liked Scene3.
This is the most moving YouTube video I have ever seen.
Background here.
Several years ago I visited Alaska with a friend. We stayed in Juno. One day I visited a nearby glacier. A visitor’s center had a slide show about the glacier, with taped narration from a park ranger. The glacier came out in the winter, he said, and retreated during the summer. He spoke about plants and animals nearby. It was all very factual and flat but you could tell the speaker cared a lot about the glacier. How rare, I thought. Not the emotion — people care about lots of things — but its expression.
Joyce Cohen, the New York Times real-estate columnist — her column is The Hunt – blogs at HuntGrunt, one of my favorite blogs. Part 1 of this interview.
SR: Why did you start?
JC: Because HuntGrunt was too good a name not to use. Also, I started at the time we had The Walk-through. [A Times real-estate blog.] The Walk-through was on WordPress and WordPress sucks. It’s all buggy and glitchy. I had to teach myself HTML to even do it. It was while I was doing that that I came up with HuntGrunt.
SR: Did you think of HuntGrunt?
JC: My very first entry tells you that. You can’t make a diminutive from my name. You can’t make a diminutive from “The Hunt” either.
SR: You’d be JCo. Like JLo.
JC: No one’s ever called me that. HuntGrunt came from Property Grunt. Property Grunt would write to me — to me and about me. He’s a Corcoran broker. Property Grunt was his name and all of a sudden HuntGrunt came to me.
SR: You’re the pure artist who has an idea and has to use it. Your blog is a way of drawing attention to the phrase HuntGrunt.
JC: Without the name HuntGrunt, I’m not sure it would exist. I’m not sure there would be much resonance.
Meeker initially assumed that the solution to the nation’s highway sign problem lay in the clean utilitarian typefaces of Europe. One afternoon in the late fall of 1992, Meeker was sitting in his Larchmont office with a small team of designers and engineers. He suggested that the group get away from the computer screens and out of the office to see what actually worked in the open air at long distances. They grabbed all the roadsigns Meeker had printed — nearly 40 metal panels set in a dozen different fonts of varying weights — and headed across the street to the Larchmont train station, where they rested the signs along a railing. They then hiked to the top of a nearby hill. When they stopped and turned, they were standing a couple hundred feet from the lineup below. There was the original Highway Gothic; British Transport, the road typeface used in the United Kingdom; Univers, found in the Paris Metro and on Apple computer keyboards; DIN 1451, used on road and train signage in Germany; and also Helvetica, the classic sans-serif seen in modified versions on roadways in a number of European countries. “There was something wrong with each one,” Meeker remembers. “Nothing gave us the legibility we were looking for.” The team immediately realized that it would have to draw something from scratch.
A little bit of self-experimentation went a long way. From a wonderful story in the NY Times Sunday Magazine about highway signage. Like all good stories, there is struggle.
Over several years Meeker and Pietrucha went to meetings at the Federal Highway Administration; they would end each one by setting up a row of sample highway signs in the long hallways of the agency’s headquarters. The government’s own engineers were impressed with Clearview, but any immediate progress was slowed by the inevitable forces of inertia and bureaucracy in Washington. “We’d go in each time excited,” Meeker says of their presentations to federal officials. “And we’d leave each time thinking, ’Why did we even bother?'”
But it ends happily.
At a reading, the novelist Dennis McFarland said that the hardest part of writing The Music Room had been after breaks in writing it. Before he could resume, he had to reread what he’d written so far. This became so painful that he forced himself to never stop.
Because of a break due to wrist problems, I’m going to backtrack a little. When my wrist started to hurt, I had been learning a new way to measure brain function. It’s a reaction-time task that I can do almost anywhere. On each trial I see four letters. For example:
The task is to respond as fast as possible how many of the letters are from the set {A, B, C, D}. In this case the answer is 4, so I would type “4″.
Here is another possible display:
The correct answer is 3. The possible answers are 1, 2, 3, and 4; I just leave my fingers resting on those four keyboard keys.
As soon as I respond to one display, the next appears. Each test has 4 blocks of 50 displays (= 200 trials) and takes about 4 minutes.
I slowly got better — faster and more accurate. This graph shows how my reaction times decreased:
When I started the task, I had to hit Enter after typing the answer (e.g., type “3″ then hit “Enter”). After 50 tests, I learned about an R function that got rid of the need to hit Enter after typing the answer. I could just type the answer (e.g., just type “3″).
This shows how my accuracy improved:
The points become more widely spaced around July 24 because at that point I started learning another reaction-time task. After I hurt my wrist I decided I was trying to do too much.
From The American:
Rich Karlgaard, the technology entrepreneur who is publisher of Forbes, tells the story of a trip he took with Microsoft’s Bill Gates in the early 1990s. On the flight, he asked Gates, “Who is your chief competitor?”
“Goldman Sachs” was Gates’s surprising reply.
Gates went on to explain that he was in the “IQ business.” Microsoft needed the best brains available to make top-shelf software. His primary rivals for the smartest kids in America were elite investment banks such as Goldman or Morgan Stanley.
“Microsoft must win the IQ war,” Gates said, “or we won’t have a future.”
Contrast this with open-source-leader Eric Raymond’s beliefs (expressed in this talk) about software development. He repeats the idea that “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow” — implicitly meaning enough diverse eyeballs. That I am writing this with Firefox gives some sense of who (Gates or Raymond) was more realistic.
Part 1. Charles Murray vs Charles Murray. How important is IQ?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The many-hour BBC documentary Planet Earth, mentioned earlier, takes viewers way off the beaten track — deep into giant caves, for example. But humans — and human evolution — creep in.
Non-human primates are shown a dozen-odd times during the series. Only once do we see them walk erect: When baboons wade into a flooded area of Africa. This adds credence to the Aquatic Ape theory of human evolution, which assumes our ancestors came to walk upright because it helped them walk in water. David Attenborough, Planet Earth‘s narrator, made an excellent radio show about the Aquatic Ape theory.
The Aquatic Ape theory explains all sorts of physical differences between man and our closest primate ancestors — why we walk upright and they don’t, for example. My ideas about human evolution are about what happened next. I try to explain ways we differ mentally from other primates — we speak, for example. The core idea of my theory is that the human brain has changed in many ways to promote occupational specialization. For example, language — single words — began because it facilitated trade; it was the first advertising. (I think of a Guatemalan market where someone shouted “toothpaste” over and over. He was selling toothpaste.)
The magic of occupational specialization also comes up in Planet Earth. The “Planet Earth Diaries” (Making-of) section of “Seasonal Forests” describes filming baobab trees using a unique hot-air balloon designed for photography by Dany Cleyet-Marrel and piloted by him. Twice he flies into trees by mistake. “Many of Planet Earth‘s finest images would have been impossible without devoted and passionate specialists like Dany,” says Attenborough.