Efficiency Measurement Update

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Here is another example of the efficiency graphs I’ve blogged about (here, here and here). The line is the current day; it shows how well I’m doing compared to previous days. It goes up when I work, down during breaks. The number in the right corner (“77″) is the percentile of my current efficiency (at the time the graph is made) compared to measurements within one hour (e.g., a measurement at 2 pm is compared to previous measurements between 1 pm and 3 pm).

The blue points come from before I started the feedback; the green points, afterwards. The red and black points are the final points of a day (that is, at quitting time). That the green points are above the blue points suggests that the graphical feedback helped. Here is a better way of seeing the effect of the feedback.

I didn’t expect this, as I’ve said. It is not “the effect of feedback”; before the graphical feedback, I’d gotten non-graphical feedback. It is a comparison of two kinds of feedback.

Why was the new feedback better? Here’s my best guess. It helped a little that it was pretty (compared to text). It helped a lot that it was in percentile form (today’s score compared to previous scores). This meant the score was almost never bad (from the beginning the percentile was was usually more than 50) and yet could always be detectably improved (e.g., from 68 to 70) with a little effort. I wish I could get such continuous percentile feedback in other areas of life – e.g., while treadmill running. I think feedback works poorly when it is discouraging or unpleasant and when it is too hard to improve. When I taught a freshman seminar at Berkeley, I got feedback (designed by a psychology professor) that was so unpleasant I stopped teaching freshman seminars. Because it came only at the end of the term, it was hard to improve — you’d have to teach the class again to get a better score. Moreover, it compared your score to everyone else’s. I think I was in the lower 50%, which I found really unpleasant. There was no easy way to give feedback about the feedback; maybe it is still in use.

In contrast, I love the feedback shown in the upper graph. Not only does it really help, as the lower graph shows, it leaves me at the end of the day with a feeling of accomplishment.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Thanks to Peter Spero and VeganKitten.

Roche is Deceptive and Evasive

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In an article about Tamiflu, an anti-flu drug developed by Roche, Helen Epstein writes:

[Non-Roche researchers] noticed yet more discrepancies between the articles that had appeared in scientific journals and Roche’s internal documents, many concerning the drug’s safety. According to published articles, no potentially drug-related serious side effects—or “serious adverse events” as they are called—were reported in the papers describing two Roche-sponsored clinical trials in which 908 people took Tamiflu; but according to Roche’s unpublished documents, three “serious adverse events” that were possibly related to Tamiflu occurred in these trials.

In 2008, an article in the journal Drug Safety, signed by a group of Roche authors, claimed that rats and mice, both given a very high dose of Tamiflu, showed no ill effect. But according to documents submitted to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare by Chugai, the Japanese Roche subsidiary, the exact same dose of Tamiflu killed more than half of the animals. As they died, the rats exhibited many of the same central nervous system symptoms that Hama had described in his case series on the Japanese children.

That’s deceptive. Here’s evasive:

“Do the ‘full study reports’” containing all five modules exist?” I asked my correspondent at Roche. “A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer will do.” In reply, she did not say “yes” or “no,” but repeated her claim that the Cochrane group had all the information it needed to analyze the Tamika studies.

This sort of thing is why I don’t trust drug companies. They’re dishonest again and again, with trivial consequences. Epstein’s article would have been even better had she given the names of the Roche employees she criticizes (the authors of the deceptive studies, the evasive correspondent).

Personal Science and Lyme Disease

Seth Roberts13 Comments

Here is a website devoted to a new way to cure Lyme disease: ingesting large amounts of Vitamin C and salt. The website is vague about who made it but it certainly isn’t a for-profit enterprise. It begins:

After 13 years of suffering with Lyme disease, a possible cure has been stumbled upon. A cumulative effect of much research has produced the possibility that salt and vitamin C may be all that is needed to beat this elusive illness. Without going into a lot of detail, our theory is that Lyme is not just a bacterial disease, but also an infestation of microfilarial worms. . . From experimenting with the treatment of salt and vitamin C, we settled on a dosage of 3 grams of salt and 3,000 mg of vitamin C, each dose taken 4 times per day. . . . The Treatment can be grueling; taking it with food may aid in digestion. The results [= the improvement] should be almost instantaneous.

Unsurprisingly, people a naive person might think would be interested turned out to be not be interested:

We have tried on three occasions to get help [= interest in our findings] through the CDC to no avail. The responses were things such as: thanks, we’ll forward to a lyme researcher; or, we don’t accept contributions or downloads from individuals; or, these pictures are obviously fakes. . . . We tried the university routine. A public health researcher put us onto a microbiology chair, who sent us to a CDC parasitologist, who said he wasn’t a clinician and suggested a pathologist. . . . We tried the most noted lyme sites on the web. We were disappointed that most of them seem more concerned with fundraising than disease.

Which sounds like “we” is one person — a man. In any case, I hope “they” will allow outsiders to contribute experiences, perhaps by adding forums to the site. This is terrific work.

Ten Years of Weight Measurements

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Alex Chernavsky, whose Shangri-La Diet experience I described recently, has recorded his weight for almost ten years, with the results shown in this graph. During that period, he’s changed his diet and exercise several times.

The first change was to a low-carb diet (Atkins-like, with lots of meat and fat). He made this change after reading Gary Taubes’s New York Times article “What If It’s Been A Big Fat Lie?”. As advertised, the low-carb diet caused him to lose a lot of weight but — not as advertised — after about a year he started to regain the lost weight. For other reasons, he changed to a vegetarian and later a vegan diet. They slowed down the weight regain but did not stop it. In 2005 and 2006 he managed by walking a lot — in 2006, 90 minutes/day or more 5 or 6 days every week — to lose almost 30 pounds, but then his weight resumed creeping upward. Then he lost about 30 pounds due to the Shangri-La Diet. He did the diet by drinking 3.5 tablespoons of flaxseed oil instead of lunch. He drank a glass of water afterwards to get rid of the flavor.

I have never seen a weight record this long. It suggests several interesting points:

1. A low-carb diet, as advertised, quickly produces substantial weight loss.

2. Not as advertised, the weight loss is followed by regain after a year or so. This implies that studies of low-carb diets and weight loss need to last several years to give a clear picture of how much weight loss to expect.

3. Low-intensity long-duration exercise (walking for 90 minutes almost daily) causes substantial weight loss. This isn’t surprising.

4. … but it is surprising the effects of the exercise appeared to last at least a few years after the exercise was stopped. I have never seen this reported.

5. The Shangri-La Diet worked well. Alex did the diet somewhat differently than other people so it was not obvious this would be true.

6. After he stopped losing weight on SLD, his rate of weight gain was roughly the same as his rate of gain before he started the diet.

Google Uses My Credit Card Without Telling Me

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Last week, while looking at Google Voice I noticed a button that said “Get $10″. I thought it meant “get $10 credit for trying it” so I pushed the button. Ten dollars credit showed up. Since Google Voice is free for the calls I make I had no use for $10 credit but maybe someday….

A few days later I happened to look at my credit card bill. Google had billed me $10! I didn’t even know they knew my credit card number! It hadn’t been required for the $10 transaction. I haven’t consciously used Google Checkout. I haven’t given it to them in any other connection. Talk about data mining…

When I go to Account Settings listed under my Gmail address, one of the sections is My Products, meaning My Google Products. Under that is listed Google Checkout, although I’ve never signed up for it and (I thought) never used it. So why is it there? I looked in Google Checkout. The Google Voice $10 transaction is the only transaction listed. As far as I can tell, this proves I didn’t use Google Checkout in the past (say, 4 months ago) and forget about it. Google really did get and use my credit card number without telling me, much less asking me.

My credit card company quickly gave me a refund.

 

The Global Warming Test

Seth Roberts19 Comments

One episode of A History of Ancient Britain, the recent BBC series, is about the Ice Age. If you know there was an Ice Age, you should grasp that the Earth varies in temperature a lot for reasons that have nothing to do with human activity. To measure the effect of recent human activity on global temperatures, you need to know what the Earth’s temperature would have been in the absence of human activity. Then you find the effect of humans by subtraction (actual temperature – predicted temperature assuming no human activity).

That’s hard to do. Because the non-human effects are so large, you need a really accurate model to “control” for them. No such model is available. No current climate model has been shown to accurately predict global temperatures — the IPCC chapter called “Climate Models and Their Evaluation” (informal title: “Why You Should Believe Them”) is the most humorous evidence of that. Lack of accurate predictions means there is no good reason to trust them. (That the models can fit past data means little because they have many adjustable parameters. “With four parameters I can fit an elephant,” said John von Neumann.) The case against the view that humans have dangerously warmed the climate (sometimes called AGW, anthropogenic global warming) is that simple.

Because it is so simple, “the other side” consists of saying why 2+2 really does equal 20 or whatever. Sure, many people say it, so what? When I was an undergrad, I gave a talk called “The Scientific ____ “. I said usage of the term scientific without explaining what it meant was a sign of incompetence and a reader could safely stop reading right there. That isn’t terribly helpful, because few people use scientific that way. My grown-up version of this test is that when someone claims AGW is true, I stop taking them seriously as a thinker. I don’t mean they can’t do good work — Bill McKibben is an excellent journalist, for example. Just not original thought.

 

 

 

What I’m Watching

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  1. The Killing (the American version on AMC). The best TV is getting smarter and smarter and this is an example. It seems formulaic (combine good acting, good writing, good visuals, suspense . . . ) but the formula is so effective and well-executed I am drawn in.
  2. The Good Wife. The last drama standing.
  3. The Spice Trails. The global and historical origins of pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, saffron and vanilla.
  4. Civilization: Is the West History? Pleasantly conceptual. Why did China decline, while Europe rose? Why did democracy do so much better in North America than South America?
  5. A History of Ancient Britain. Through the eyes of an archeologist.

 

My Treadmill Desk

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In 1996 I put a treadmill in my office so that I could work standing up. My goal was better sleep (the more I stood, the better I slept), not weight loss (the usual reason for a treadmill desk). It was hard to walk a lot. Mostly I stood still. It was noisy, too — my neighbors complained. When the treadmill broke I didn’t replace it.

Now I walk on a treadmill for different reasons: to lower blood sugar and learn Chinese. Above is my current setup. I use the laptop to study Chinese (using Anki) or watch TV or movies. Studying Chinese while walking is much easier than studying Chinese while standing still or sitting. I have used flashcards but Anki (shown on the computer screen) helps space repetitions optimally. The headphones (Bose noise-reduction) are for TV and movies. I don’t need them for Anki.