I recently had lunch with Richard Sprague, an engineer at Microsoft Beijing. He raised the possibility of starting a Quantified Self Meetup group in Beijing. The meetings could be held in one of Microsoft’s two brand new buildings, which are in the exact center of Zhongguancun. If you might attend, please let me know (e.g., by commenting on this post).
Author: Seth Roberts
Climate Science Humor: What if Your Model Predicts Wrongly
After noting that James Hansen’s 1988 climate model predicted too much warming in the subsequent 22 years, someone at Skeptical Science concluded:
The main reason Hansen’s 1988 warming projections were too high is that he used a climate model with a high climate sensitivity, and his results are actually evidence that the true climate sensitivity parameter is within the range accepted by the IPCC.
There is no consideration of the possibilities that (a) one or more other parameters were wrong or (b) the model — aside from parameter values — is wrong (e.g., it oversimplifies). Surely you are joking, Mr. Skeptical Science.
Thanks to Phil Price.
Drug Companies Release More Data From Drug Trials
Drug companies, in a few cases, have recently started to release much more data from drug trials. Unsurprisingly, analysis of the new data by outsiders — people who have nothing to gain from positive results — has often contradicted the drug company analysis of the same data.
One example involves the flu drug Tamiflu. The new analysis suggested that “Tamiflu falls short of claims—not just that it ameliorates flu complications, but also that the drug reduces the transmission of influenza.” Another example involved Prozac. The new analysis “ended up bucking much of the published literature on antidepressants. . . . [It]found no link between Prozac and suicide risk among children and young adults . . . Prozac appeared to be more effective in youth, and antidepressants far less efficacious in the elderly, than previously thought.”
Another reason to believe in the value of this new data is the work of Lisa Bero at UCSF. She looked at the efficacy of nine drugs using unpublished FDA data. “Nineteen of the redone analyses showed a drug to be more efficacious, while 19 found a drug to be less efficacious. The one harm analysis that was reanalyzed showed more harm from the drug than had been reported.”
I hope that the FDA will eventually require that all raw data from drug trials be publicly available as a condition of approval. (The same should also be true of journal articles, as a condition of publication.) It is abundantly clear that drug company analyses are often misleading — which harms the public.
How to Beat the Heat: Wet T-Shirt Edition
It has gotten hot in Beijing. Two days ago it was 90 degrees. Yesterday it was 84. For my (2 or 3) Beijing readers: I discovered an incredibly easy way to cool off. Take a T-shirt, get it as wet as desired, put it on. Instant cool. No need for noisy fan or air conditioner. Surely this is widely known, but I didn’t know it.
Morning Faces Therapy for Bipolar Disorder: What One User Has Learned
A friend of mine has been using morning faces therapy to improve his mood — he suffers from bipolar disorder — for 15 years. He is the first person I told about it. I recently asked him how his use of it has changed over the years. He replied:
I began the morning faces therapy in April, 1997. I can think of only two significant changes over the years in my use of the therapy: 1) I use a mirror instead of videotapes, and 2) I accept that once or twice a week I’m too tired to start as early as I’d like (so I get more sleep instead). To elaborate:
1) When I restarted the treatment in 2006 after having been hospitalized, I was too depressed to deal with videotaping. In fact, I was too depressed to get out of bed so early. The mirror solved both problems, because I could easily prop it on my mattress top. After a few days I was able to get up, allowing me to listen to music, use bright lights, etc., during the treatment.
2) Whether for lack of discipline or the proper genes, I simply can’t go to sleep early enough so that I can get up early every morning. (Granted, I haven’t tried everything, but for the sake of the argument, let it stand.) This shortcoming used to bother me a great deal. Then on October 6th, 2011, I read in this blog about someone else who didn’t always start the treatment early, because he was “too tired to get up early”. Well! It didn’t seem so bad if someone else had the same problem. Over the years I’ve found that starting 30-60 minutes late once or twice a week doesn’t seem to perturb my mood enough to cause great concern.
I asked how the therapy has helped him. He replied:
The benefits of the morning faces therapy have been both 1) quantitative and 2) qualitative.
1) I have had bipolar disorder for 27 years. With the therapy, I’ve been medication-free for 6 years, and I was on much reduced doses of medication for about 7 years. So it’s fair to say the therapy has reduced the severity of the illness by around one half. Also, the lithium that I took in part caused kidney disease, whereas, obviously, there are no side effects from looking at faces in the morning.
2) The qualitative difference seems far more important to me. I am basically content with life; I am comfortable in my own skin. I’ve never felt like this before, and life without this is empty.
Note to skeptics: you might think, well, bipolar disorder is known to go in remission, and maturity often brings contentment. But this fails to explain why stopping the treatment brings back both the illness and the essential sadness.
Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK
Nicholas Sarkozy must be kicking himself. Sometimes a bird in the bush is worth more than a bird in the hand. If only I’d waited… He struck too soon. If only he’d waited until Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) became his main opponent and then created a DSK scandal. The opposition would not have had time to regroup. DSK was careless, creating opportunities for his opponents. Edward Jay Epstein’s new book, Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK , makes clear that DSK was being monitored, presumably via his cell phones. A first-rate intelligence organization, says Epstein, can turn on your cell phone and listen to you. At one point a French journalist is given a transcript of a call that DSK made. How was this possible? the journalist asked. The answer given is that by freakish coincidence “DSK’s speaker phone was accidentally left on while his line was somehow connected to a French phone that was legally under surveillance.” Why the speaker phone should matter is not explained.
Such means of surveillance — available to those in power, but not to the rest of us — make those in power more powerful, harder to unseat. However, Epstein’s book also shows the effect of lower-tech new recording devices, especially CCTV recordings, cell phone records, and key-entry logs. They make it harder to lie. DSK’s accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, was lying, no doubt. The district attorney’s office got to “Version 3″ of her story before giving up. The discrepancies between what she said happened and the key-entry records reveal her lies beyond doubt. The new recording devices also pull two people into the story who otherwise might have remained out of it: a security guard and the head engineer at the hotel, who went into a private loading-dock area and did a kind of victory dance shortly after 911 was called. The 911 call made the matter public, which effectively destroyed DSK’s chance of elective office. They claim to not remember what they were celebrating. If it had nothing to do with the 911 call, it is exceedingly strange — another freakish coincidence — that it happened at exactly the same time.
Three Days in May is a new kind of investigative journalism in the sense that it is based on detailed electronic records (such as CCTV tapes and key-entry records) that weren’t available until recent years. Stories and movies are often set in remote locations or times to give the story a kind of freshness. Here freshness derives from the information being used. Epstein assembles hundreds or thousands of facts from these records into his story. I was interested to see a kind of power-law distribution of information value, the same thing I see in my self-experimentation: almost all of the facts tell us just a little, a very tiny fraction of them tell us a lot. Although electronic surveillance is usually considered a government tool (“Big Brother is Watching”) Epstein’s book makes a more subtle point. These records make false accusations more difficult to sustain and conspiracies more difficult to carry out without detection — and who does that help? In any case, Three Days in May is a fascinating true crime story — and the criminal is not DSK.
Overtreatment in US Health Care
In April there was a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about how to reduce overtreatment in American health care. Attendees were told:
The first randomised study of coronary artery bypass surgery was not carried out until 16 years after the procedure was first developed, a conference on overtreatment in US healthcare was told last week. When the results were published, they “provided no comfort for those doing the surgery,” as it showed no mortality benefit from surgery for stable coronary patients.
One participant said that overtreatment cost one-third of US health care spending. As far as I can tell, no one said that “evidence-based medicine” underestimates — in the case of tonsillectomies, almost completely ignores — bad effects of treatments. This failure to anticipate and accurately measure bad effects of treatments makes the overall picture worse. Maybe much worse.
Assorted Links
- The magic of mangoes. “In one double blind trial which included a low fat diet, the participants who took the mango supplements lost 5.3 per cent of their body weight while the control group lost only 1.3 per cent.” Which sounds impossible.
- Greek yogurt taste test
- Umami flavour as a means of regulating food intake and improving nutrition and health
- Babies fed breast milk have better intestinal microflora than babies fed formula. “Our findings suggest that human milk promotes the beneficial crosstalk between the immune system and microbe population in the gut, and maintains intestinal stability.”
Thanks to Melissa McEwen and Bryan Castañeda.
Interview with a Shangri-La Dieter
A few days ago I asked Mark Qualls, a 59-year-old truck driver who lives in Longmont, Colorado, about his success with the Shangri-La Diet, which he posted about.
How did you learn about it?
Freakonomics. When I read about you in that book, it made sense to me. The whole idea of a setpoint. I used to be an accountant. I weighed 290 pounds. I’m 6′ 2″. I lost 25 pounds when I started driving a truck. I’ve been there for almost 12 years. Around 260. I get a lot of exercise delivering groceries. I can eat anything I want but the idea of going on a diet makes me hungry. My doctor said lose a bit of weight but I just couldn’t do it.
How do you do the diet?
I use canola oil. I tried flax seed oil but it has a horrible taste. I have no problem taking the oil. I feel like I could do the oil for the rest of my life. At least 4 tablespoons per day. I don’t measure it. I have a jar by a sink at home, another in my truck. I take a sip, what seems about a tablespoon. I figure I’m getting at least 4 tablespoons per day. Some days I may get only 3 tablespoons.
What effect has it had?
I feel like I’m in control. I stopped drinking sweet tea, used to drink tons of it. For 20 years. I’ve been able to stop. I couldn’t stand drinking water. Now that’s all I drink. That’s all I’ve had for two months. The most bizarre thing to me in the world. I deliver to convenience stores. All they have is soda pop and doughntuts and all that kind of stuff. I’d stop and have a doughnut and chocolate milk. Now I can go without it. I still think about it but now I can say no.
What about weight loss?
I’m down from 255 to 229 – a little over 2 months. I don’t really try that hard. I pretty much eat what I want. On two days per week I try to eat hardly anything. Unless I almost eat nothing, I stay at the same weight. It’s not hard to do it – to eat almost nothing. Almost any time of day or night I think “I could eat something”. But then it’s okay not to. It gives you willpower – that’s how I explain it to people. Find the book and read the whole thing, I tell them. They need to understand the whole concept before they start taking oil.
Any downsides?
Eating is enjoyable to me. My mom is a great cook. My wife is a great cook. I like to eat. It’s emotionally satisfying thing to eat stuff. But when I take the oil I can not eat. Now I eat slower. To try to enjoy the little bit of food you do it. You’re not going to eat 3 more times today. I tell myself, I’m going to enjoy every bite of this cottage cheese. Because that’s all I’m going to eat today. The social part I miss. It’s a social part of your life that you don’t have any more. Most of the time I’ve gone to eat with people since I started, I go ahead and eat something because I don’t want to be a jerk about it. I still lose weight. That will be a day where I don’t lose weight when I go out to eat. To lose weight I have to have a day when I don’t eat anything. Today is a day where I told myself I want to lose 1 more pound. I ate breakfast with a friend,. There’s nobody who expects me to eat with them. My wife’s away.
How do other people react?
My wife’s a skeptic about the whole thing. She doesn’t think I can’t keep the weight off. One lady at church, she got the book right away. She’d lost 50 pounds eating 1000 calories per day. She started the oil. She’s gung ho about it. We see each other Sunday: how much did you lose this week? we ask.
Effect of Vitamin D3 on My Sleep
I have blogged many times about biohacker Tara Grant’s discovery that she slept much better if she took Vitamin D3 in the morning rather than later. Many people reported similar experiences, with a few exceptions. Lots of professional research has studied Vitamin D3 but the researchers appear to have no idea of this effect. They don’t control the time of day that subjects take D3 and don’t measure sleep. If the time of day of Vitamin D3 makes a big difference, measuring Vitamin D3 status via blood levels makes no sense. Quite likely other benefits of Vitamin D3 require taking it at the right time of day. Taking Vitamin D3 at a bad time of day could easily produce the same blood level as taking it at a good time of day.
I too had no idea of the effect that Grant discovered. I had taken Vitamin D3 several times — never in the morning — but after noticing no change stopped. I tested Grant’s discovery by taking Vitamin D3 at 8 or 9 am. First, taking it at 8 am, I gradually increased the dose from 2000 IU to 8000 IU. Then I shifted the time to 9 am. The experiment ended earlier than I would have liked because I had to fly to San Francisco.
When I woke up in the morning I rated how rested I felt on a 0-100 scale, where 0 = not rested at all and 100 = completely rested. I’d been using this scale for years. Here are the results (means and standard errors):
Vitamin D3 had a clear effect, but the necessary dose was more than 2000 IU. If Vitamin D3 acts like sunlight, you might think that taking it in the morning would make me wake up earlier. Here are the results for the time I woke up:
There was no clear effect of dosage on when I got up. Shifting the time from 8 am to 9 am may have had an effect (I wish I had 3 more days at 9 am).
Many people have reported that taking Vitamin D3 in the morning gave them more energy during the day. I usually take a nap in the early afternoon so I measured its effect on the length of those naps:
Maybe my naps were shorter with 6000 and 8000 IU at 8 am. It’s interesting that 4000 IU seemed to be enough to improve how rested how I felt but not enough to shorten my naps.
What do these results add to what we already know? First, the large-enough dose was more than 2000 IU. (A $22 million study of Vitamin D3 is using a dose of 2000 IU.) The dose needed to get more afternoon energy may be more than 4000 IU. Second, careful experimentation and records helped, even though many people found the effect so large it was easy to notice without doing anything special. For example, these results suggest the minimum dose you need to get the effect. Three, these support the value of supplements. Many people say it is better to get necessary nutrients from food rather than supplements. However, supplements allow much better control of dosage and timing and these results suggest that small changes in both can matter. I cannot imagine this effect being discovered with Vitamin D3 in food.