Category: Assorted Links

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Craig Fratrik and Bryan Castañeda.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts10 Comments
  • Correlation between fat intake and brain-test scores. “Those women who reported the highest saturated fat intake also had, on average, the worst scores on reasoning and memory tests.”
  • How many iPads does it take to change a textbook market? A perfectly good physics textbook is now available for free download (pdf). The author of the post, a physics professor at William and Mary named Marc Sher, does not understand what’s going on when he refers to “the textbook publishers’ price-gouging monopoly” and their “outrageous practices”. Textbooks cost so much because students can be forced to pay that much. This has nothing to do with publishers, I submit, and everything to do with the power professors have over students. Sher would reply: All the textbooks are expensive. And I say: So what? If students could choose not to buy $200 textbooks, none would be sold. Zero. And future years would see no more $200 textbooks.

Thanks to Jonathan Graehl.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts11 Comments
  • A good example of how misleading drug-company-sponsored analyses of drug trials can be. Independent reanalysis by Daniel Coyne, a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, reached opposite conclusions. Good work, Coyne.
  • Coke contains a carcinogen.
  • “I used sunflower seeds to lose weight.” Someone else used them to reduce addictions. The link between the Shangri-La Diet and reduction of non-food addictions (smoking, coffee) fascinates me. People start SLD to lose weight and say they become less addicted to smoking, coffee drinking, and so on. One possibility is that by reducing hunger, SLD reduces discomfort. Addictions gain strength from discomfort, often resemble self-medication.
  • Steve McIntyre replies to Gavin Schmidt’s claim that McIntyre’s beliefs resemble “classic conspiracy theory”. I used to watch a lot of football — when the 49ers won most of their games. (I am a classic fairweather fan.) I get a similar pleasure reading Steve McIntyre’s posts as I did from watching 49er games.
  • Congratulations, UCLA press office! A study that measured the effect of omega-3 by comparing two groups of rats — one gets omega-3, the other doesn’t — is called a study about the evils of fructose (both groups got a high-fructose diet). I am surprised the scientists involved didn’t object to this misrepresentation. The study supposedly shows — according to the press office — that fructose is bad because performance went down when the rats were switched from standard lab chow to a high-fructose diet. Let’s say you start with a diet (standard lab chow) that has a barely adequate amount of omega-3. You feed both groups lab chow for several months. Then you do an experiment in which both groups get 60% of their calories from the lab chow and 40% of their calories from a diet that contains no omega-3. Performance is likely to decline due to insufficient omega-3 no matter what the new diet contains.

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment
  • Anti-cancer effect of ginger in mice experiment.
  • Food safety in China.
  • An egregious error in the New York Times. The correction issued by the Times is funny. It says a certain survey, whose results were used, “was not based on a representative sample”. If that is the standard, then no number in the NY Times should be there. They are never based on representative samples. GNP, heights, distances, etc. Plus journalists select what to report — and not in a representative way. Perhaps the paper should consist entirely of blank pages, ads and what are called “thumbsuckers” (fact-free opinion pieces)? I wrote something for Spy that included a representative description. My editor changed it to be funnier.

Thanks to Song Chen and Edward Epstein.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Tucker Max.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  • Probiotics reduce/prevent diarrhea caused by antibiotics. News article. The abstract says “The pooled evidence suggests that probiotics are associated with a reduction in AAD [antibiotic associated diarrhea].” It should say that the evidence suggests — very strongly, in fact — that probiotics cause a reduction in AAD (because there is no plausible alternative explanation of the association). This mistake is so elementary it is like saying 2 + 2 = 3. And JAMA is one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.
  • Living without money. The author was much healthier than when he lived with money. Among the many possible explanations is that dumpster food, old enough to allow microbes to grow on it, is healthier than fresher and therefore more sterile food.
  • Not just farms. Children who grow up on farms have fewer allergies and less asthma than children who grow up in cities — important support for a modified version of the hygiene hypothesis (and my umami hypothesis). This study finds that living near other sorts of biodiversity provides similar benefits.

Thanks to Brody, Jazi Zilber and Mark Griffith.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Hal Pashler and Bryan Castañeda.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Thanks to Melissa McEwen and Bryan Castañeda.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • The corruption of science by research grants. This reminds me of a BBC documentary called something like Science Under Attack. It was hosted by a Nobel Prize winner (Biology) named Paul Nurse. Part of it was about “climate change denialism”. If you don’t believe that humans are dangerously warming the planet, Nurse implied, you are somehow attacking science. When people who win Nobel Prizes cannot see that AGW is a crock, something curious has happened.
  • Edward Jay Epstein interviews DSK. “”Thank you so much for your interest in this case,” he says.”
  • Researcher discovers new treatment for her own vertigo. ” A University of Colorado School of Medicine researcher who suffers from benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) and had to “fix it” before she could go to work one day was using a maneuver to treat herself [the usual treatment] that only made her sicker. “So I sat down and thought about it and figured out an alternate way to do it. Then I fixed myself and went in to work” and [thereby] discovered a new treatment for this type of vertigo.”

Thanks to Melissa Francis.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.