Month: March 2009

Organize by Function

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Andrew Gelman makes an excellent suggestion:

At the airport they have different terminals for different airlines, with flights leaving from all over the place. Why not have a simpler system, where all the flights to Chicago leave from one section of the airport, all the flights to L.A. leave from another section, and so forth?

Flight as commodity. He adds:

Imagine a bookstore where the books were arranged by publisher and you had to look at the Random House books, then the Knopf books. etc.

A big bookstore in Beijing called Bookstore City is organized like this. On the other hand, the last 20 years of American retail have seen the rise of the opposite of Andrew’s suggestion: Whole stores devoted to one brand, such as Apple or Nike or Samsung.

Some Beijing stores (or collections of stores) are hyper-organized-by-function. An electronics mall near me contains dozens of booths, each with a big selection in a narrow niche, such as laptop cleaning products, videocams, computer cables, laptop bags, disk drives, and so on. Whereas an electronics superstore might sell ten different laptop bags, the laptop-bag booth probably had 60 different ones. Not so different from the Beijing Zoo. This is why I love shopping in Beijing. It really is a shopper’s paradise.

Sellers want brands so that they can charge more (and perhaps feel better about themselves). Buyers, unless they want to show off, want commodities for low cost and convenience. Nobody brags about what airline they flew. Until airlines start giving away cool t-shirts and tote bags, Andrew’s idea makes sense.

JAMA Editors Go Nuts

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Emory University professor Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff was, you should remember, a respected psychiatric researcher. One of the most respected. What this says about academic psychiatry — and perhaps all academic medicine — is scary to think about.

Now comes a second episode along these lines: JAMA editors attack Jonathan Leo, a professor at Lincoln Memorial University, for daring to publish an article pointing out an undisclosed conflict of interest — exactly Nemeroff’s problem. In the most self-righteous editorial I have ever read, Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA‘s Editor in Chief, and Phil Fontanarosa, the Deputy Executive Editor,

  • say that Leo should not have contacted the New York Times
  • “A telephone conversation intended to inform Leo that his actions were inappropriate transformed into an argumentative discussion as Leo continued to refuse to acknowledge any problem with his actions.”
  • tell Leo to never submit anything to JAMA due to “his apparent lack of confidence in and regard for” the publication
  • “We felt an obligation to notify the dean of Leo’s institution . . . We sought the dean’s assistance in resolving the issue . . . “
  • “Our tone in these interactions was strong and emphatic . . . seriously . . . responsibility . . . fair process . . . integrity of science . . . We regret . . . “
  • make it more difficult to report future conflicts of interest

To make sure everyone understood this wasn’t temporary insanity, Catherine DeAngelis made similar comments to the Wall Street Journal:

“This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”

Yes, nothing is less important than an unreported conflict of interest in JAMA.

The JAMA editorial, published a week after the WSJ article, claims that DeAngelis didn’t call Leo “a nobody and a nothing” but since the WSJ has not fixed the supposed error I conclude that the editorial claim of quote fabrication is wrong — not to mention highly implausible.

In their editorial, the JAMA editors write that “a rush to judgment [that is, Leo pointing out the conflict of interest himself rather than deferring to them] . . . rarely sheds light or advances medical discourse.” Au contraire. This “rush to judgment” has shed a hugely unflattering light on the very powerful doctors who run JAMA — and thus an hugely unflattering light on a culture in which such people, like Nemeroff, gain great power.

Plagiarism in Chinese Academia

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I was glad to read this article in the Christian Science Monitor about an attempt to reduce plagiarism among Chinese professors.

The latest fraud to rock Chinese academia centers on He Haibo, an associate professor of pharmacology at the prestigious Zhejiang University. [Not very prestigious, since I haven’t heard of it.] He now admits to copying or making up material he submitted in eight papers to international journals and has been fired, along with the head of his research institute. The affair has drawn particular attention because a world-renowned expert in traditional Chinese medicine, Li Lianda, lent his name as coauthor to one of the fraudulent papers. His tenure will not be renewed when his contract expires soon, the president of Zhejiang University has said.

The Beijing Sport University, one of three sport universities in the world, is near my university. It has a Ph.D. program. To get a Ph.D. you must submit three books! As one of their graduate students told me, no way you can do that without plagiarism. He had noticed that a book by one of his professors was simply a copy of another book.

This paragraph, however, amused me:

Stearns [a Yale professor who taught at Beijing University] says that he and his colleagues at Yale “do not believe letters of recommendation from Chinese professors, for we know that many of them are written by the students themselves,” and merely signed by their teachers.

He thinks letters from Berkeley are different? My system for writing letters of recommendation was more nuanced, after I learned that students had great trouble writing these letters. I met with the student and we wrote it together. This had two great advantages: 1. It showed the student in the best possible (i.e., truthful) light. 2. It was easy. Trying to write a good letter by myself was tough.

Thanks to Sheila Buff.

Bacteria and Learning?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Do bacteria-laden foods improve learning? A recent study:

The ability of dietary manipulation to influence learning and behavior is well recognized and almost exclusively interpreted as direct effects of dietary constituents on the central nervous system. The role of dietary modification on gut bacterial populations and the possibility of such microbial population shifts related to learning and behavior is poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to examine whether shifts in bacterial diversity due to dietary manipulation could be correlated with changes in memory and learning. Five week old male CF1 mice were randomly assigned to receive standard rodent chow (PP diet) or chow containing 50% [raw] lean ground beef (BD diet) for 3 months. As a measure of memory and learning, both groups were trained and tested on a hole-board open field apparatus. Following behavioral testing, all mice were sacrificed and colonic
stool samples collected and analyzed by automated rRNA intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA) and bacterial tag-encoded FLX amplicon pyrosequencing (bTEFAP) approach for microbial diversity. Results demonstrated significantly higher bacterial diversity in the beef supplemented diet group according to ARISA and bTEFAP. Compared to the PP diet, the BD diet fed mice displayed improved working (P = 0.0008) and reference memory (P < 0.0001). The BD diet fed animals also displayed slower speed (P < 0.0001) in seeking food as well as reduced anxiety level in the first day of testing (P = 0.0004). In conclusion, we observed a correlation between dietary induced shifts in bacteria diversity and animal behavior that may indicate a role for gut bacterial diversity in memory and learning.

Previous studies had found that changes in diet changed behavior. This article says that changes in diet can produce changes in bacterial diversity and these bacterial changes might have caused the behavior changes.

Eventually I will stop eating lots of fermented food and see what happens. Perhaps my arithmetic scores will get worse.

Autism and Digestive Problems

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A new study in Pediatrics has a brief but useful summary of the evidence linking autism and digestive problems. Here’s one study. Here’s a review, with this abstract:

Recent publications describing upper gastrointestinal abnormalities and ileocolitis have focused attention on gastrointestinal function and morphology in [autistic] children. High prevalence of histologic abnormalities in the esophagus, stomach, small intestine and colon, and dysfunction of liver conjugation capacity and intestinal permeability were reported. Three surveys conducted in the United States described high prevalence of gastrointestinal symptoms in children with autistic disorder.

There is also evidence that immune dysfunction is associated with autism.

I believe that few people in America eat enough bacteria — in practice, this means not enough fermented food — and that this causes digestive and immune problems. A vast number of people will say, “of course, good food is really important, bad food causes X, Y, and Z” — where X, Y, and Z can be practically anything. The difference between my views and theirs is the prescription: They inevitably think that people should eat more fresh unprocessed food. (Usually fruits and vegetables, for some curious reason.) Fermented food, of course, is not fresh and not unprocessed.

The Singapore Borders and the Power of Books

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Around 1996, Borders opened a bookstore in Singapore. With about 50,000 books, it was much larger than any existing bookstore on the island. Freight cost about $1/book, a big improvement over the shipping costs if you bought a book online. Singapore, of course, is a very crowded place. Space was precious. You couldn’t own a lot of books because you didn’t have much space. One result was books were sold shrink-wrapped. The Borders books, however, were not shrink-wrapped. A great bookstore is like a great library — but only if the books aren’t shrink-wrapped. The first customers in the Singapore Borders would bring a book to the front desk and ask for the shrink-wrapped copy. But there was no shrink-wrapped copy.

Singapore newspapers started editorializing about how to behave in the new bookstore: Careful with the books. Handle them gently. They were trying to acclimate their readers to non-shrink-wrapped books. Why did editorial writers throw their weight behind a new business? Bruce Quinnell, the head of Borders at the time, thinks it is because they thought the new bookstore was such a wonderful thing. Thousands and thousands of books that had never before been on that island. Books are a commercial product but no other commercial product would inspire such a response.

The Singapore Borders was a huge success, at one point leading the entire chain in sales, and as far as I know is still thriving.