Author: Seth Roberts

Cargo-Cult Universities

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From an article about bureaucratic suppression of Indian higher education:

Mr. Rao says space requirements are calculated to ensure students have the room to learn. “For quality education, you need enough space — enough space for labs, for teaching. Our experts decide based on these requirements after examining world-class universities.”

Richard Feynman criticized what he called cargo-cult science — pseudo-science (including my area, animal learning) that had the appearance of science but didn’t actually work. Mr. Rao’s beliefs about what quality education requires are based, like cargo cults, on what is easy to see.

Special Days in China

Seth Roberts4 Comments

On Monday, by virtue of being a Tsinghua professor, I got a big box of apples (about 40). I haven’t figured out why. On Tuesday I got a lovely tea set that I will blog about later; it was the 15th birthday of the founding of the School of the Humanities at Tsinghua. My department is within that school. Today is Boys Day at Tsinghua University (a school-specific special day). November 1st is a nationwide day for people without boyfriends or girlfriends. It is Only One Day; in 11-1 there are only ones.

Speaking of only one, did you know that China’s One Child policy (if you have two children both parents will lose their jobs and pay a fine) applies only to cities? In rural China you can have two children. Some families have three. The central government has little control over rural areas; it would be too hard to enforce a one-child policy there.

Happiness in China: Who Wants to Be a Construction Worker?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A recent survey of happiness/life satisfaction among various groups of people in China found that Shanghai construction workers were quite satisfied with their lives. (The details are only in Chinese, as far as I know.) They were happier than middle-class Chinese, in spite of earning much less. This has nothing to do with low Chinese prices, since the construction workers paid the same prices as middle-class Chinese. The researcher who discovered this attributed it to two things: 1. They got paid every month. The construction workers came from agricultural areas where payment is less frequent: only after a harvest. The construction workers sent money home to their villages. The steadiness of their income was a source of respect. 2. Because they live far from home, they can break all the rules, including sexual rules. A middle-class Chinese man, living with his family, is more constrained.

The massive rural-to-urban migration happening all over the world, especially in China, is one of the most important events in human history. The Chinese part of this story has usually been told through the eyes of a young woman who leaves her village and finds factory work — for example, a series in the Wall Street Journal, the documentary China Blue, or the new book Factory Girls by Leslie Chang. These results suggest that the male side of the story is much different.

These findings also suggest a big problem with conventional academic economics, which revolves around measurements of money (e.g., prices, salaries, savings, GDP, the ultimatum game). If desire for respect and personal freedom motivate major economic changes, measurements of money will miss a lot.

Flaxseed Oil Alert: Don’t Take When Pregnant

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From a press release:

A study has found that the risks of a premature birth quadruple if flaxseed oil is consumed in the last two trimesters of pregnancy. The research was conducted by Professor Anick Bérard of the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Pharmacy and the Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center and Master’s student Krystel Moussally.

In Canada, 50 percent of pregnant women take prescription medication. Yet many of them prefer to use natural health products during the pregnancy. “We believe these products to be safe because they are natural. But in reality, they are chemical products and we don’t know many of the risks and benefits of these products contrarily to medication,” says Bérard.

Bérard and Moussally set out to conduct one of the largest studies ever undertaken on by analyzing data from 3354 Quebec women. The first part of the research established that close to 10 percent of women between 1998 and 2003 used natural health products during their pregnancy. Before and after pregnancy they were respectively 15 and 14 percent to use these products. The increase means that about a third of women consuming natural health products stopped during the pregnancy.

The most consumed natural health products by pregnant women are chamomile (19 percent), green tea (17 percent), peppered mint (12 percent), and flaxseed oil (12 percent). Bérard and Moussally correlated these products to premature births and only one product had a very strong correlation: flaxseed oil.

“In the general population, the average rate of premature births is 2 to 3 percent. But for women consuming flaxseed oil in their last two trimesters that number jumps up to 12 percent,” says Bérard. “It’s an enormous risk.”

The correlation existed only with flaxseed oil, yet women consuming the actual seed were unaffected. Even if more studies must be undertaken to verify these results, Bérard recommends caution when it comes to consuming flaxseed oil.

Thanks to Joyce Cohen.

How to Brew Tea

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I have brewed thousands of cups of tea. Always: 1. heat water. 2. add to cup. 3. add tea. 4. wait fixed duration (e.g., 5 minutes). 5. remove tea. 6. drink. Sometimes I put the tea in the water then heated both in the microwave. After getting tea education at Slow Food Nation, I started making sure the water was about 165 degrees F when I added the tea.

My Tsinghua office has a source of hot water. Now I do this: 1. add water to cup. 2. add tea. 3. drink. (I’m using green tea. This wouldn’t work so well with teas that need higher brewing temperatures.) I don’t worry about length of brewing. Much simpler. I bought a cup with a cover but while taking off the wrapping dropped the cover and broke it. You don’t even need a cover (at least for some teas). The secrets are (a) as the water cools, it stops brewing the tea — you don’t have to worry about timing and (b) the leaves sink to the bottom so you don’t need to take them out to avoid drinking them.

The interesting question is why nobody told me this. I have heard tea experts talk six or seven times. It certainly means their expertise is less necessary — the cynical explanation. The less cynical explanation is that most people don’t have access to hot water of the right temperature and/or most people don’t drink green tea.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 17)

Seth Roberts12 Comments

The story so far. Standing on one foot till exhaustion twice during the day vastly improved my sleep that night. I slept longer and, especially, woke up much more rested.

Theory. I have a theory about what’s going on. When muscles are stressed — used until some of the muscle fibers break — two things happen: 1. More muscle fibers grow (= you become stronger). Everyone knows this. 2. A chemical is released by the muscle that travels to the brain and increases depth of sleep. This is a new idea. The big picture is that sleep is controlled by many things; this is one of them. Morning light is also important but that is pretty obvious, at least to sleep researchers. Morning light appears to control both the timing and depth of sleep. These muscle-produced hormones appear to mainly affect depth of sleep; I don’t notice any change in when I sleep. The evolutionary rationale is plain: We grow muscles better when we’re asleep. If we need to grow muscles more than usual, we need more sleep than usual.

New data. I want to understand what the effect depends on. What makes it weaker or stronger — especially stronger? As my legs grew stronger, the effect became slightly weaker, presumably because it was harder to produce new muscle growth in a practical amount of time. My main measure of the effect is how rested I feel when I awake. I assess that on a 0-100 scale where 0 = just as tired as when I fell asleep and 100 = completely free from tiredness. I reached scores of 100 years ago when I was on my feet for 9 or 10 hours during the day and once or twice on camping trips. Standing that much is impractical so 100 appeared impossible to reach regularly. In Berkeley, during the months before I discovered this effect, this score averaged about 95. After discovery of this effect, it was usually 99 — a big easy-to-notice improvement.

But 99 was impossible to maintain because as my legs got stronger it started to take a really long time to exhaust them. I shifted to standing on one bent leg. This obviously reduced how long I needed to stand to produce exhaustion but it was less effective (presumably because fewer muscles were involved). When I shifted from standing one-legged however I wanted (two bouts/day) to standing with the leg bent most or all of the time (four bouts/day), the scores went down to 98 or 97. After a week or so of bent-leg standing I started using the cycle 50 seconds bent, 10 seconds straight; I repeated this as long as I could.

Here is a graph showing how long I stood.

standing duration

The interesting point is that the strength increase finally levelled off at a bearable amount of time, yet the effect has persisted. If I spend about 8 minutes 4 times a day watching TV or a movie (and standing on one bent leg at the same time) I can substantially improve my sleep. This is practical. It’s the easiest exercise I’ve ever done. No special equipment. Watch TV at the same time. Big benefit. I’ve tried other muscle-building exercises, including push-ups done two different ways, jump-roping, and something vaguely resembling a biceps curl done with a thick rubber band. None has had a detectable effect. For example, after a day with jump-roping and two bouts of one-legged standing, I sleep about as well as after a day with just two bouts of one-legged standing.

Can I say again how wonderful it is to wake up totally rested? It seems almost within my grasp.

Previous posts about this.

Watching the Election Returns

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I watched the election returns Wednesday morning in a totally packed Beijing cafe. Two McCain supporters, maybe 80 Obama supporters. I had to leave a little early; what I had thought was a dinner invitation was a lunch invitation, I had learned the day before. I sat next to two students from Harvard studying at Tsinghua. They found Tsinghua students more passive than Harvard students. I told them the story about the Berkeley prof who liked teaching Tsinghua students but not Berkeley students. Do Harvard profs like teaching? I asked. Their answer was vague. They told me about Tsinghua students, not to mention Harvard students, agonizing over the personal statements required with grad school applications. I told them that I’d seen thousands of those statements and no one in my department (at Berkeley) cared about anything but (a) do you want to be a professor? (the correct answer is yes) (b) do you want to work with me (the prof reading it)? and (c) your research experience. Once I came upon one that was unusually interesting and well-written and I said, “hey look at this person” but no one else agreed with me. When Obama was projected to win Ohio I figured he would win. The cheers of the crowd when the Ohio win was announced reminded me of when I watched a World Cup final, France versus Brazil, in a room full of French students and France scored a goal.

Thank god we have a president who understands Jane Jacobs.

Natural versus Unnatural Learning

Seth Roberts6 Comments

My criticisms of undergraduate education (e.g., here) have three bases:

  • my experiences at UC Berkeley. Both sides — faculty and students — disliked the situation. I accidentally found a way that worked much better.
  • my theory of human evolution. My theory explained what I saw at Berkeley, and a lot of other stuff. It says that learning specialized job skills is a basic part of being human. Our brains have been shaped by evolution to make this happen.
  • the everyday observation that people successfully learn specialized job skills all the time and did so long before colleges. Or any schools.

Set up by people who didn’t understand how learning works — the crucial ingredients — colleges teach poorly, just as malnutrition is common.

At Berkeley I was a teacher. In Beijing I’m on the other side — a student — in a different but similar learning situation: learning Chinese. We learn languages naturally, without any special structure, just as people learned job skills. There is the same broad dichotomy: between language learning via official channels, involving classes and textbooks, and natural language learning that happens without any classes and textbooks. So there should be a better way to learn Chinese than via a textbook or a class or even a tutor.

What that is, I’m trying to figure out. For reading, flash cards may work. I’m starting with food words — I see hundreds of them every time I eat a meal (in the student dining halls) — and sign words and the preset messages on my cell phone. Listening and speaking is harder. When I get better maybe I can watch TV but now I can’t understand any of it. I always enjoy my Chinese lessons but they happen without context. During the day I may want to say “Where is ______?” but my lesson happens much later, when the motivation has gone. Maybe I will get a tape recorder show I can record what people say to me and then play it for my teachers to translate.

Beijing Shopping

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In Moscow on the Hudson, the Robin Williams character, a Russian defector, goes into a New York supermarket and faints: So many brands of breakfast cereal! Whereas my head merely spun when I shopped for headphones and encountered hundreds of choices in a building near me. It’s an electronics mall, full of office-sized booths each with a different owner and product line. Maybe eight specialize in headphones. In Berkeley I live miles from a Circuit City where I might find four or five headphones I’d consider. Radio Shack is closer; they might have two or three possibilities. In Beijing several of these electronic malls are near me.

During my Chinese lesson with the girl who sold me my cell phone I told her that after the lesson I was going to shop for headphones — the electronics mall is across the street. How much do you want to spend? she asked. About $40, I said. Because you are a foreigner, they may cheat you, she said. Her boss went away and came back with two choices. One was $40, the other about $60. After the lesson I went to the mall. I found the $40 headphones. Price: $9. Before bargaining. I went back to my teacher and told her what had happened. She spoke to her boss. She came back and said: Maybe it wasn’t the real product. As if someone would counterfeit a brand (Somic) you’ve never heard of. It was exactly the same item.

“One bed two dreams” is a Chinese proverb. Here the two dreams were $9 and $40. In One Billion Customers, James McGregor writes, “The Chinese will ask you for anything because you just may be stupid enough to agree to it.” It has nothing to do with being a foreigner. “In China business, the expectation is to be cheated,” says McGregor. A friend of mine graduated from Beijing University, one of the top two schools in the country, with a finance major. She got a real estate job in Shanghai, her home town. When she got there her salary was half of what she had been promised.