Month: August 2008

Citizen Science: What’s Your Sushi?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Self-experimentation is an example of the more general idea that non-experts can do valuable research. Another example is that two New York teenagers have shown that fish sold in New York City is often mislabeled. They gathered samples from 4 sushi restaurants and 10 grocery stores and sent them to a lab to be identified using a methodology and database called Barcode of Life. They found that “one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled . . . [and concluded] that 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores had sold mislabeled fish.”

The article, by John Schwartz, appeared in the Science section, which makes the following sentence highly unfortunate:

The sample size is too small to serve as an indictment of all New York fishmongers and restaurateurs, but the results are unlikely to be a mere statistical fluke.

This is a Samantha-Powers-sized blunder. It could hardly be more wrong. How much you can generalize from a sample to a population depends on how the samples were chosen. Sample size has very little to do with it. (John Tukey had the same complaint about the Kinsey Report: Stop boasting about your sample size, he said to Kinsey. Your sampling methods were terrible.) To know to what population we can reasonably generalize these results we’d need to know how the two teenagers decided what grocery stores and restaurants to sample from. (Which the article does not say.) If the 14 fish sellers were randomly sampled from the entire New York City population of grocery stores and restaurants, it would be perfectly reasonable to draw broad conclusions.

I have no idea what it could mean that the results are “a mere statistical fluke”.

The effect of these errors is that Mr. Schwartz places too low a value on this research. It’s impressive not only for its basic conclusion that there’s lots of mislabeling but also for showing what non-experts can do.

The end of the article did see the big picture:

In a way, Dr. Ausubel said, their experiment is a return to an earlier era of scientific inquiry. “Three hundred years ago, science was less professionalized,” he said, and contributions were made by interested amateurs. “Perhaps the wheel is turning again where more people can participate.”

Chocolate is Good For You (continued)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A just-published study compared the effects of dark chocolate (flavonol-rich) and white chocolate (no flavonols) on 19 persons with high blood pressure and impaired glucose tolerance. The dark chocolate reduced blood pressure by 4 points (both systolic and diastolic) and improved insulin sensitivity.

I really should test this myself. There is plenty of similar evidence.
Earlier post.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 6)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

On the SLD forums Heidi 555 posted this:

I’ve been standing on one foot on an inexpensive balance board or inflatable balance disc. . . . I’ve been using the balance board while doing dishes and brushing my teeth. . . .

I feel good immediately afterwards. I feel slightly better physically and emotionally. . . . I’m use to feeling better after I exercise, but typically it takes more intensive sustained exercise to get this effect.

I sleep well 60-70% of the time. . . . For the past 3 days that I’ve done the one-footed standing I’ve had excellent sleep. Last night it was especially surprising because I went to bed emotionally distraught and stayed up slightly later than I intended.

Directory.

Why Did I Sleep So Well? directory

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  1. Initial observation, 9 possible causes
  2. Another possible cause: standing on one foot
  3. Sleep almost great, narrowing possible causes to two.
  4. Sleep great again, narrowing possible causes to two
  5. Sleep great again after only standing on one foot
  6. Someone else gets similar results
  7. Technical details
  8. How long I stand
  9. Eerie coincidence
  10. Patterns of discovery
  11. Comparison to other sorts of exercise
  12. What’s a good dose?
  13. How much I’ve been standing Comparison with conventional exercise.
  14. Two more people get similar results
  15. How long I stand (continued)
  16. Replication details
  17. The amount of time needed stops increasing

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 5)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I have been sleeping much better than usual. Sharp easy-to-notice improvement. After the first time this happened I made a list of 9 possible reasons (lifestyle changes that might have been responsible). I later added one I’d overlooked: standing on one foot to exhaustion a few times.

Yesterday I stood on one foot to exhaustion four times, twice in the morning and twice in the evening. It took about three minutes each time (12 minutes total). Didn’t make any of the nine other candidate changes. And I slept much better than usual. So it is beginning to look like just that one factor is responsible. The one I almost forgot but also the one that seemed most plausible after i remembered it.

Directory.

Musical Question

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Browsing through the many cell-phone-music videos on YouTube I came across this demonstration of an IPhone piano program. The demonstrator first shows the range of the instrument, then plays Chopsticks, then plays . . . what? A piece I’ve heard many times but can’t place.

What impresses me so much about the mystery piece is how urgent it sounds. Somehow the composer has figured out what makes something sound urgent. It reminds me of a note Robert Caro, the biographer, has posted above the desk where he writes: “Is there desperation on the page?”

More. It’s Clocks by Coldplay. Thanks so much, Sam and Jeff! Only now do I manage to see that the song is identified in the comment section of the video.

The Quantified Self Meetup Group

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Gary Wolf, a writer for Wired, and Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired, have formed a San Francisco Bay Area Meetup group called The Quantified Self.

This is a monthly show and tell for people taking advantage of various kinds of personal tracking – geotracking, life-logging, DNA sequencing, etc. – to gain more knowledge about themselves. Come whare what you are doing, and learn from others. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Chemical Body
  • Load Counts
  • Personal Genome Sequencing
  • Lifelogging
  • Self Experimentation
  • Risks/Legal Rights/DutiesBehavior monitoring
  • Location tracking
  • Non-invasive Probes
  • Digitizing Body Info
  • Sharing Health Records
  • Psychological Self-Assesments
  • Medical Self-Diagnostics

The first meeting, which I will eagerly attend, will be on September 10 (Wed) evening in Pacifica. Sign up for details.

HDL and Vitamin D

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Vitamin D supplementation raises HDL enormously, says William Davis:

Add vitamin D to achieve our target serum level . . . HDL jumps to 50, 60, 70, even 90 mg/dl.

The first few times this occurred, I thought it was an error or fluke. But now that I’ve witnessed this effect many dozens of time, I am convinced that it is real. Just today, I saw a 40-year old man whose starting HDL was 25 mg/dl increase to 87 mg/dl.

Responses like this are supposed to be impossible. Before vitamin D, I had never witnessed increases of this magnitude.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Steep Learning Curve

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The phrase everyone gets wrong. Outside experimental psychology, where the term originated, I have never seen a correct usage. Learning curves show performance (e.g., percent correct) as a function of amount of training (e.g., number of trials). A steep learning curve means the organization, person, or animal quickly went from low to high performance — in other words, learning was fast.

The phrase is always used to mean the opposite (slow learning). An example from Economic Principals:

But experience has shown that high fixed costs, steep learning curves, access to delivery systems and expensively-maintained reputations are powerful deterrents to ambitious start-ups.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 4)

Seth Roberts13 Comments

I repeated the two things that remained on my list as possibilities for why I slept so well a few nights ago: 1. Looked at my face in a mirror a half-hour earlier than usual with a better sound source. 2. Stood on one foot until exhaustion (6 times). Lo and behold, I slept great. Now I’m pretty sure one of these two, or their combination, is responsible.

An unexpected twist is that I only slept 5 hours. Usually I’d still feel tired after that little sleep. But I feel like I slept 7 or 8.

I suspect the standing, not the faces, is the cause. Which would be ironic. Of the treatments I’ve studied by self-experimentation and found helpful, standing 9 or 10 hours, which greatly improved my sleep, was the most difficult. I loved what it did to my sleep. I still remember how wonderful it felt to be so well-rested the next morning. Even so I stopped doing it. As an experimental treatment, it was hard to measure how long I stood. As a lifestyle change, it was really hard to arrange so much standing. Whereas standing on one foot to exhaustion six times might be the easiest effective treatment I’ve studied (if it’s effective). Easy to measure, nothing to buy, no logistical problems.

I may try to repeat the earlier observation a few more times — as a kind of gift to myself — but now the main thing I want to do is separate the effects of the two factors, i.e., test one without the other.

Directory.