In 2004, two 14-year-old New Zealand girls found that a blackcurrant drink made by GlaxoSmithKline, the giant company, contained almost no Vitamin C — contrary to advertising that boasted of its Vitamin C content. Today the company was fined about $150,000 (US).
Author: Seth Roberts
Language That Should Exist (punctuation)
I showed something I’d written to Marian Lizzi, my editor at Penguin. She advised me not to quote someone: “It sounds like you’re sneering at them,” she said. She was right — it did sound that way, although I didn’t want it to. Unfortunately, there was no alternative punctuation that conveyed neutrality or respect. It was sneer or nothing.
So here’s my proposal: Let the number of apostrophes indicate degree of respect for the speaker. Like this:
1. Single quotes = disrespect. Example: ‘Has a good chance of working’? You can’t be serious.
2. Double quotes (normal American usage) = neutral. Example: “We’re running out of working waterfront,” said Jim Barstow.
3. Triple quotes = respect. Example: According to a recent research report, “‘40% of the subjects failed to seek help.’”
4. Quadruple quotes = great respect. Example: According to Jane Brody, cataract surgery “”can be life-changing.””
For the Skeptics
From the Shangri-La Diet forums:
This is week 5 for me, and I have lost 7 pounds so far.
I am a 37 year old mother of two — 5′6″ and started at 191 — the heaviest I have ever been in my non-pregnant life, with a BMI that fell in the “obese” category. I heard about Shangri-La from another woman, whom I dislike. I thought the whole thing sounded ridiculous, so I set out to prove her wrong. I replaced the two sodas I used to drink each day with two cups of sugar water, each 12 oz and 140 calories, exactly the same as the soda. This meant I was not changing my diet at all (other than removing the caffeine, sodium, colors and flavoring in the soda). I didn’t purposely reduce my calorie intake, and I didn’t change my exercise habits.
I’m amazed at the results. I’m much less hungry. I don’t crave sweets or soda (the way I have my entire life) — in fact, I haven’t had a soda in weeks now and I don’t miss it. I’m eating a reasonable portion size at meals and it’s easy.
It is an experimenter’s dream, by the way, to produce a big effect with tiny change, and a theorist’s dream to have a counter-intuitive prediction confirmed.
Agrees With Me About College
According to Bryan Caplan, “our [higher] educational system is a big waste of time and money.” He is writing a book about this — yay! He attended college at the place I know the most about — UC Berkeley. Here is why it is a big waste of time. Professors can only teach what they know. All they truly know how to do is how to be a professor. At a research university, that mainly involves doing research. Berkeley professors can teach how to do research, sure, but that has little to do with what most Berkeley students will do after they graduate. So a lot of time is wasted. It is most unfortunate to (a) require all students to imitate professors and (b) to rank them according to how well they do so.
In response to Caplan, Catherine Johnson says her undergraduate education was useful. But she became a nonfiction writer — very close, in the big world of work, to what professors do. That’s one of those exceptions that prove the rule.
I think practically everyone learns well if any of three conditions are met:
Most university classes, however, fulfill none of these conditions. On the face of it, university classes teach; but crucial details are missing. It’s like butter and margarine. Margarine is supposed to be as good as butter but it’s not. There is a superficial resemblance but margarine lacks crucial vitamins that butter contains. Because university classes lack crucial elements, they are forced to use grades, tests, and fear of failure as motivation. These motivators don’t work very well, as Alfie Kohn among others has pointed out. Sort of for the same reason Humpty-Dumpty couldn’t be put back together again.
Omega-3 and Mood Disorders
I subscribe to the Arbor Clinical Nutrition Updates. It is a nice way to slowly learn more about recent nutrition research. A partial subscription is free. Last week’s topic was omega-3 and mood disorders. The update summarized three articles:
1. Appleton KM. et al. Effects of n–3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids on depressed mood: systematic review of published trials. Am J Clin Nutr 2006;84:1308 –16. This meta-analysis of 12 clinical trials found that omega-3 fats significantly reduced depression.
2. Frangou S. et al. Efficacy of ethyl-eicosapentaenoic acid in bipolar depression: randomised double-blind placebo-controlled study. Br J Psychiatry. 2006 Jan;188:46-50. This experiment found that an omega-3 fat helped persons with bipolar disorder.
3. Hallahan B. et al. Omega-3 fatty acid supplementation in patients with recurrent self-harm: Single-centre double-blind randomised controlled trial. Br J Psychiatry. 2007 Feb;190:118-122. This experiment found that omega-3 fats reduced a depression score.
I recently reviewed an article for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that found that omega-3 fats did not reduce depression scores. Unfortunately the article was not accepted for publication. I hope it gets published somewhere else.
{self-experimentation, Internet, . . .}
For the non-set-theorists, I’m using braces to express set membership:
pets = {cats, dogs, . . . }.
A week ago self-experimentation and the Internet struck me as wildly different. Self-experimentation is a tiny method of inquiry. The Internet is a gigantic physical network. Self-experimentation: one person alone. The Internet: everyone together.
But then I read this fresh essay by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, managing editor of the on-line journal First Monday. Thanks to Ghosh, I now see two similarities between self-experimentation and the Internet:
1. Both are growth media. They encourage things to grow. Self-experimentation helps develop new ideas about health. The Shangri-La Diet is an example; so are my ideas about mood. The most influential example is diabetes self-monitoring, which grew from self-experimentation by Richard Bernstein. The Internet, of course, has helped many things grow, especially new businesses (Ebay, Google), new forms of interpersonal communication (blogs, forums, chat rooms, MySpace), and new forms of collaborative work (Wikipedia, open-source software).
2. They encourage the growth of similar things. Self-experimentation doesn’t equally encourage all ideas about health; it especially encourages very low-cost ones. My self-experimentation led me to realize the benefits of skipping breakfast (improves sleep), seeing faces in the morning (improves mood), and standing a lot (improves sleep). The Shangri-La Diet costs almost nothing — less than nothing if you count the money saved on food. Ghosh points out that the Internet has especially encouraged the rise of businesses where the basic transaction does not involve money. Stuff is “given away” (that is, no money changes hands); payment is in terms of reputation. Both self-experimentation and the Internet are focusing intellectual attention on how people lived and thrived many thousands of years ago.
An SLD Milestone!
Yesterday there were more than 10,000 hits to the Shangri-La Diet forums. (There were 11,061 hits, up from about 8000 the day before.) The last time there were more than 10,000 hits was November 22. Unlike all previous >10,000 days, this one wasn’t due to an article or interview, as far as I know.
It feels like reaching a new level in this strange but addictive game.
Life is Complicated
Yesterday morning I listened to Ira Glass. Yesterday evening I listened to Bill McKibben. And I reflected:
1. Bill McKibben wrote a whole book, The Age of Missing Information (1992), about the malign influence of TV. He spent a year watching a single day’s output of the 100-odd channels of one cable company. TV makes people self-centered, he decided.
2. Ira Glass said we are living in a Golden Age of Television and listed a handful of current shows — including The Wire, The Daily Show, Colbert, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway, Entourage, House, and “anything with Ricky Gervais” — in support of his claim. He has just spent a year starting a TV version of This American Life.
3. Bill McKibben wrote an article (in The Nation) praising This American Life to the skies.
I think of McKibben and Glass as the two Boy Geniuses of American intellectual life. (Curiously I cannot think of any Girl Geniuses.) Both of them did great work while really young. When McKibben was in his twenties, he wrote a long series of editorials in The New Yorker that were inspiring. (They were unsigned. I found out who wrote them by writing to the magazine.) His first book, The End of Nature (1989), about global warming, was prophetic. I think it was the very first general-audience book on the subject. As for Glass, This American Life was terrific right from the start, twelve years ago. He was 36 when it started.
At the Berkeley Farmers’ Market
Yesterday I went to the Berkeley Farmers’ Market and had a very interesting conversation with one of the vendors.
1. Whole Foods had called her and asked her if she would like to put her product in their stores. No thanks, she said. “Are you kidding?” they said. No, she said. She didn’t want to put her product in their stores because she didn’t want that sort of volume. She was more interested in supporting smaller stores. She told me that Whole Food’s increased interest in local vendors had come about because of Michael Pollan’s criticism of Whole Foods in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. (Pollan had coined the term Big Organic and wondered which side — the more virtuous or the less virtuous — Whole Foods was on.)
2. The vendor next to her, The Fatted Calf, who sell salami, beef jerky, sausage, duck confit, and other meat products, had been forced to stop selling to stores and restaurants when someone called the USDA to complain that they didn’t have an office for the USDA inspector. That’s right: no matter how small your business, you must have an office for the USDA inspector. It’s an absurd burden to put on a small business. As I have heard others say, big businesses welcome government regulation. Because they can afford it and their potential future competitors, now tiny, cannot. Supposedly the regulation protects consumers; it may or may not but it certainly protects big businesses. (Does requiring an office for a USDA inspector protect consumers? I think not.) We need organic consumer protection. The current version is like heavy-duty insecticide. It kills small businesses.
Science in Action: Omega-3 (old data re-analysed)
A few months ago I did a little experiment to test my belief that omega-3 was affecting my balance. I replaced fats high in omega-3 (flaxseed oil and walnut oil) with a fat low in omega-3 (sesame oil). Here is a new analysis of the data:
The raw data are the same. The new analysis differs from the earlier analysis in two ways: 1. How the number for each day is computed. The old analysis dropped the first 5 trials and took the mean of the rest. The new analysis fits a regression line to balance as a function of trial to estimate an effect of trial and subtract it, then takes a mean of all the trials. 2. Allowance for improvement. The new analysis, as the graph shows, fits a slope to all the data. The improvement over days is subtracted from each day’s score before the two conditions are compared.
The old analysis gave t = 4.1 (p = very tiny). The new one gives t = 6.3 (p = very very tiny). Big improvement!
Directory of my omega-3 posts.