Month: September 2012

Does Too Little Vitamin K2 Cause Prostate Cancer?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

People with unusual genomes often resemble canaries in a coal mine: More sensitive than the rest of us to bad environments. This is illustrated by a new study of prostate cancer/genome associations.

Repeating earlier work in Europeans, they compared the genetic profiles of Japanese groups of prostate cancer sufferers with non-sufferers. . . . The joint numbers included 7,141 prostate cancer sufferers and 11,804 non-sufferers. The most recently identified loci are on chromosomes 11, 10, 3 and 2. . . .The locus on chromosome 2 is linked with GGCX, a vitamin K-dependent [actually, vitamin K2] enzyme that regulates blood clotting [Vitamin K2 does not regulate blood clotting], bone formation and cancer biology. Japanese foods such as natto and seaweeds are rich in vitamin K, which is thought to protect against cancer. Interestingly, the association of this SNP with prostate cancer was significant in all populations except for the Japanese in the USA, indicating that environmental factors, such as diet, are involved.

Here is the paper. Why would the correlation not show up for Japanese in the USA? Maybe because Japanese in the USA all get too little Vitamin K2.

Neither the press release nor the article make clear what I am saying: These results make it a lot more plausible that Vitamin K2 protects against prostate cancer. A lot of mainstream nutritional advice is based on epidemiology. The K2/prostate cancer connection is especially interesting because it does not suffer from the usual problems of epidemiology: difficulty measuring intake (do you have any idea how much K2 you consume?) and vast confounding (Vitamin K2 intake is probably correlated with many other things).

Unaccountable by Marty Makary

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The not-yet-released book Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care by Marty Makary, a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, may or may not make good arguments — I haven’t read it — but it certainly begins with a good story:

Harvard surgeon Dr. Luctan Leape at a national surgeon’s conference . . . opened the gathering’s keynote speech by looking out over the audience of thousands and asking the doctors to “raise your hand if you know of a physician that you work with who should not be practicing because he or she is dangerous.”

Every hand went up.

The author, Marty Makary, asked the same question at his talks and got the same response. Both of them — Leape and Makary — should have started asking “What fraction of the surgeons you work with are unfit to practice?”

I wonder how the rest of us can identify those unfit-to-practice surgeons. My experience has taught me not to trust a surgeon who says I need surgery.

Early Immune Warning System: A Bit of Evidence

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I have proposed that three things — a tendency to touch each other (e.g., shake hands), a tendency to touch near our mouths, and our tonsils — together form an early warning system for our immune system. The early warning system helps the immune system get tiny exposure to microbes circulating in the community. It performs self-vaccination. Like ordinary vaccination, exposure to tiny amounts of Microbe X protects against exposure to a large amount of Microbe X.

In Daniel Everett’s anthropological study of the Pirahã people (Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, 2009) he says the Pirahã “all touch one another frequently” (p. 85). “They loved to touch me too.” He has never seen kissing but “there is a word for it, so they must do it.” This supports the idea that a tendency to touch others is widespread.

If this theory is true, reducing microbe exposure to zero (e.g., sterile food) is a seriously bad thing. It’s been proposed that the polio epidemics of the first half of the 1900s were caused by cities becoming too clean.

Evidence from ants.

 

The Terry Deacon Affair

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Terrence Deacon is a professor of anthropology at the University of California Berkeley — at the moment, chair of the anthropology department. (Deacon, like me, is interested in the evolution of language.) How unfortunate for the department, especially his graduate students, that he has recently been accused of using vast amounts of another person’s work without giving her credit. It isn’t easy to see the overlap, maybe because Deacon is a terrible writer (“by far the most unreadable book I have ever encountered” said a reviewer of one of his books), but there appears to be no doubt of the similarity and Deacon’s exposure to the work he is accused of not citing. Deacon says he doesn’t remember it.

When I brought unquestionable examples of plagiarism by Leslie Iversen, an Oxford professor, to the attention of Julie Maxton, the Registrar of Oxford University, she dismissed them (“honest error” — appearing to say that Iversen didn’t know that word-by-word copying is wrong). In this case there is no word-by-word copying but the failure to cite is far more upsetting to the persons not cited. What may have been copied is more abstract (“deeper”, you could say) and therefore more important.

At first, the complaint was dismissed. “I have concluded that the information available to me does not warrant appointment of an Investigative Officer under our campus faculty disciplinary procedures. The conduct you have alleged would not constitute a violation of the University of California’s Faculty Code of Conduct,” wrote Janet Broughton, Vice Provost, on May 27, 2011.

Later (December 12, 2011), Robert Price, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, responded, ” The fact that certain concepts or phrases used by Dr. Deacon in the article you provided are the same or similar to concepts that appear in chapters from your book is not evidence of plagiarism, as these concepts may not be unique to your work. Perhaps the way you use these concepts is unique, which then would constitute plagiarism.” This understates the evidence, which is a long series of similarities.

Finally, the fact that outsiders find the claims (of failure to give credit) credible appears to have convinced Price that something must be done. “The continuing public dispute that your claims have generated lead me to believe that such an investigation [of the claims] is necessary in order to “clear the air””, wrote Price. After being successfully pressured to investigate, Price, a political science professor, in a September 3, 2012 letter reveals a lack of understanding of social pressure:

I wish to make crystal clear to you, your associates, and to all those to whom you are communicating that the University of California, Berkeley has not found that Professor Deacon has engaged in any form of research misconduct. The sole reason for undertaking an investigation are the claims made by you and your associates. [Contradicting what he said earlier — that the “continuing public dispute” led to the investigation.] . . . The idea that you would use my communications with you [“use” in the sense of posting on a website] and the ongoing examination of your allegations by UC Berkeley as part of what increasing strikes me as a vendetta against Professor Deacon is reprehensible.

My letter to Alicia Juarrero [who complained] ends with this paragraph: “Our University policy on research misconduct, as well as the federal regulation on which it is based, require that all stages in the research misconduct investigation procedure are treated as strictly confidential. (UCB “Research Misconduct: Policies, Definitions and Procedures,” item IC and Federal Regulation 45CFR93.108). I expect that you will adhere to this requirement.” Rather than adhere to the stated requirement of confidentiality, Dr. Juarrero shared the letter with you and you, in turn, posted it on your website. What purpose is being served other than to make it appear that Deacon is guilty of something before even a single one of your claims has been validated? This sort of tactic will be familiar to those who remember the history of Joe McCarthy.

“What purpose is being served”? Uh, making the accusations harder to ignore? As for McCarthy, he made accusations without supplying evidence (“In this envelope [which he didn’t open] I have the names of 80 Communists in the State Department”). That is not happening here.

Why Alicia Juarrero Got Mad at Terry Deacon. New Terry Deacon Website.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Thanks to Tucker Goodrich and Allan Jackson.

Independent Discovery That Walking Catalyzes Learning

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Two years ago I discovered that if I walked while studying Chinese flashcards (using Anki), both activities — walking and studying — became easier. I could walk much longer on my treadmill and I could study much longer. Walking made studying more pleasant and vice-versa. Around the same time, Jeremy Howard, the president of Kaggle, made the same discovery independently. In an email to me, he writes:

I came up with the idea accidentally a couple of years ago – I needed to go to the gym every day, and that included 30 minutes on a cross-trainer (but I only managed to do 15 min most days). I needed something to do to keep me amused, so I brought along my PC and started doing my Anki whilst on the cross-trainer. I discovered I could do my cross-trainer for at least twice as long, and my Anki results were better too. Later I added treadmill walking to my Anki study too.

He says more about it, including how much it helped him, in a QS talk.

As Nabokov says in Pale Fire,

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

Learning methods that use this effect are going to have a big advantage over learning methods that don’t.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Bryan Castañeda and Alex Chernavsky.

Marginal Revolution University: A Hidden Advantage

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have started Marginal Revolution University, intended to be a set of online classes that will “communicate [their] personal vision of economics”. One selling point is the content will be designed for online delivery, rather than being recordings of lectures.

They don’t mention another advantage. Before I was hired at Berkeley, I went there for a series of interviews. One was with a group of graduate students. One of them asked, “Which do you like better, teaching or research?” “I like research better,” I said. The graduate students smiled. You’re supposed to say you like them equally.

At Berkeley I met plenty of professors who liked teaching small classes. I never met a single professor who liked teaching large classes. (That included me — I didn’t like teaching them.) Berkeley has recently joined Harvard and MIT to form EdX, a nonprofit company that will offer online classes. “We are deeply committed to public education,” said Berkeley’s chancellor. Well, that might sound good or it might sound pro forma, but either way few of Berkeley’s professors want to teach the classes that EdX would offer, such as Introductory Psychology. Unless a class with 100,000 students is more personal than a class with 500 students. Whereas Tyler and Alex must want to do what they’re doing. No one is pushing them to do it.

 

 

 

Bic For Her and Personal Science

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Bic’s new line of pens (Bic for Her) was greeted with scorn by Amazon reviewers. David Vinjamuri, experienced in brand marketing, guessed that the reason for the debacle was that the persons who approved the product were quite different than the persons expected to buy it.

Brand companies are not good at assigning authentic consumers [= consumers of their brands] to work on their brands. They [wrongly] assume that [their] lack of personal experience with the product can be made up [for] by lots of analysis. It is very, very hard to imagine that the people who made the decision to launch “Bic for Her” were the same [people] expected to buy them. And that’s why the huge majority of consumer brand launches fail. There are lots of ways to make an awful mistake, but some of the worst could be avoided if consumer companies were staffed by actual consumers.

Health care has the same problem. In health care, the persons who devise a new treatment (a new treatment for acne, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, whatever) are usually 100% distinct from the persons expected to use that treatment. For example, roughly 0% of acne researchers have acne.

If Vinjamuri is right — and I think he is — this explains a lot about the awfulness of modern health care — the terrible side effects of Accutane, for example. And it explains why personal science works so much better. When personal scientists search for a solution to a health problem (e.g. acne), they are 100% the same as the people who will use the solution. No wonder the solutions they find are so much better than what a doctor would prescribe.

New Walking-Catalyzes-Learning Results

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Two years ago, I discovered that if I walked on a treadmill while studying Chinese flash cards, it became much easier. Without walking, I could barely study 10 minutes without getting exhausted and stopping. If I walked at the same time, however, I could study much longer — say, 60 minutes. Huge difference. Walking on a treadmill made studying Chinese pleasant. This was stunning because walking on a treadmill by itself was boring and studying Chinese (or any other dry knowledge) is supposed to be boring. I concluded that walking created a thirst for dry knowledge, which studying Chinese satisfied. My evolutionary explanation was that this linkage evolved to push us to explore our surroundings. My posts about this.

In an April 2012 QS talk, Jeremy Howard reported the same thing.

I discovered that if I am walking on a treadmill at 1.2 miles per hour at a 1 degree incline I have an error rate of about 5%. Whereas if I don’t [walk on a treadmill] it’s about 8%. I also know that I can do that for an hour. Whereas normally if I’m just sitting down I can just do it 20 minutes. . . . And at the end of that hour I was ready to do something else. Whereas at the end of 20 minutes, normally I’d [audience member: “Take a nap”] Yeah, I’d be totally ready for a rest . . I also discovered I was 40% faster [at learning].

He added, “I love my Chinese every day.” More recently, someone named Adam posted on the QS forums that he’d had a similar experience:

As Jeremy Howard mentioned in his talk, SRSing (is that a word?) is exhausting. Like him, after a period of about 20 minutes, I often reach a level of fatigue that makes it difficult to continue studying. I first read about the “treadmill method” on Seth Roberts’s blog & found it highly effective. Like Mr. Howard, I could study for hours without become bored . . . The only problem here is that I don’t have easy access to a treadmill. My gym is quite far & it is impractical to go there every day, while I desire to SRS every day.

That two other people noticed such a big effect is good reason to think that it will be true for most people.