Category: self-experimentation

First Meeting of The Quantified Self Meetup Group

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Last night the first meeting of The Quantified Self Meetup Group took place at Kevin Kelly’s house in Pacifica. Here are my notes:

Five-Word Introductions
Kevin Kelly (KK) Magazine junkie science groupie host
Melanie Swan
Lisa Betts-LaCroix home schooling
Joe Betts-LaCroix now future earth people children
Nathan Myers software wind minerals
Lee Corbin software hobbies math chess history
David Kirby machine learning applications
Tim Ferriss athletic performance language acquisition cognition
Hor machine learning life extension
Graham Bullock product health effects
Dan Brown sleep monitoring for better rest
Paul Lindow film binaural language
Jerry Legert ontology unix physics
Peter Mortonsen design irrationality
David Duncan writer radio experimental man
Alex Bangs personal health
Alexandra Carmichael open-source health research
Daniel Reda open-source health research
Gary Wolf (GW) reporter utopian
Vivian Dissler new conceptions of health
Moor unwilling rebel leader
Rajiv Mehta tools for living
Seth Roberts sleep mood self-experimentation flaxseed
Ka-Ping Yee visualization democracy lambda graphics usability
Stephanie life-streaming ubiquitous ambient
Chris social constitution of self online
Steve complex systems accumulating evidence reflexively
Neal futurism python family jazz piano
Emil Gilliam

Kevin Kelly introduction
Like to keep broadening it, before we get to the idea of saying we’re not interested in this. Using data & measurement for self-knowledge. Revolving around numbers and measurement. And measuring ourselves. Here we’re interested in science upon yourself.

Stuff people are interested in
Actionable measurements
Mood
Self-measurements of health
Gadgets
Service providers
Using geocoding for self-analysis
How have you incorporated measurements into your life?
Where do you do your research? Where do you get your ideas?
When you have a lot of data, how do you extract something you can see from it?
What data people would be willing to share with others? What private?
Measuring the effects of measuring
Resources, other groups
Spheres beyond health – such as time use, learning, how quickly you acquire new items
How to measure learning
Aesthetics of self-documentation
What do to with the data that we gather
Can you learn too much about yourself?
Environmental data, brain scans
How quantified health can be used to collaborate w/ traditional medicine
The greater good of all this – what potential for doing good?

Stuff people are willing to talk about
I’ve tracked my time for 3 years – how to analyze
Things I’ve measured
What professional athletes do in this domain
Learning, how quickly you learn
Design principles for measuring oneself
Genes, brains, & body – the Experimental Man
Geocoding

Ka-Ping Yee: Time Tracking
Tracked use of his time. Felt like problem not making good use of time. By collecting data, would help. How much sleep. Where is my time disappearing? Wrote script that keeps little window open in screen. Types in whatever he’s doing. E.g., “at QS meeting”. Logged with time. [Question from audience: what have you learned?] not a lot. Hope to learn. Can measure how much sleep I’ve been getting. Turns out to be getting more sleep than I thought.

Roberts: this data useful if you change something. You can notice unexpected changes.
Ferriss: MeTimer: tracks web browser use
RescueTime: indicates active focus, & local applications. Fascinating. Making me more effective. Doing the right things.
Xobni: identifying email hotspots. Top 10 contacts.
???: made pie graph of where we’re spending our time & is it compatible with what we say we’re about? Do we spend our time on our kids, business, health?

Clickable menu to help track time.
Yahoo widget stopwatch. Tracking work hours.
Surprises: so much unstructured time, more time spent with kid bigger than expected. Agast to realize one project was taking so much time. I’m really doing a lot of things. Decided to focus my life more. Ultimately the most satisfying thing to me. Now I’m working on that company. Me figuring out where I’m putting my creative energy.

The challenge of assigning tags to things. Too much or too little detail. Just write in your own words.

David Kirby: time tracking mood, sent message at random times to cell phone, got a lot more honesty about activity. Extremely difficult to do in social environment. What are you doing, do you feel productive? What is the sampling period? And what is the associated honesty of the data? I became very afraid of wasting time when each message would come it.

Tracking leads to optimization. As soon as she gets people to track their diet, it massively improves. Helps with eating disorders. Nigerian lawmakers tracked by journalist. Just the fact of publishing it greatly improved voting records.

Tim Ferriss: Athletes
Recorded every resistance training workout since age 15. Now 31. Diet & so forth. Go back to notebooks to see how I looked in this or that photo. Related to performance enhancement. Athletes are v. interested in relative vs absolute measurements. Body fat percentage – many different methods. All have problems. Real benefit is in measuring progress – difference up or down. I measure VO2 max. BMI is waste of time. VO2max tends not to change much. Only tested twice. Very similar in spite of different regimens. Cyclists measure to see performance maximum – can I become professional? Lots of blood testing. Every 2 or 3 tests, plus saliva-basted testing. $500-$1000 per time. Complete metabolic panel. Cortisol, estradial. Done 1st thing in morning. [Someone else: 120 things I track.] Most athletes use a laundry list of drugs. They cycle off to compete. They look at ratios. E.g., free testosterone to epitestosterone. Steriods are like antibiotics. Many of them. Betablockers: used by Chinese archer, concert pianists, entire orchestras. Subject in expts related to body heat. When does your body shut down? How to best dissipate heat? Wanted the data, would have cost $100K. Found that my ability to dissipate heat is severey reduced. Surface areas of lungs compared to surface area of skin. Brain shut down at unusually low temperature. Heat stroke susceptible. Recovery time measure of fitness. Sets, Reps, rest periods. Within rest periods you can track several things. Return to basal body temperature, heart rate, muscle tonus (galvanic skin response). Don’t believe in general intelligence or general fitness. I measure sex hormones, metabolic panels, IGF-1, indirect measures of growth hormone, free testosterone, T3 T4 TSH insulin (wide diurnal variance). How much insulin is produced, how much remains after meal. Athletes only measure something if they can act on the data they gather. I don’t want 24/7 measurement – too much data. I take a lot of experimental supplements. I like watch the response of my autonomous nervous system. Ephedrine hydrochloride. Widely studied. Yohimbine HCL: proposed as safer alternative to ephedrine. Not a selective agonist. I wanted to measure my blood pressure very closely.

You can order blood tests online & go to local places that will draw your blood & send you the results. Don’t need doctor’s prescription. Look up symptoms for whatever would require that type of testing.

Any statistical tools that will help you calibrate measurements against each other?

Templates for analyzing small data sets: couldn’t find.

Statistics packages, such as R. Google Website Optimizer. Set up experiments for website visitors. Test different pictures on your page. Ramsey 2-color theory. The known Ramsey numbers. If you know there has to be a mutual group of 5 people that all know each other, you have to have at least 43 people in the room.

Suggests data tutorial for the self-experimenter. At future meeting.
If there were a easy to use tool set, if you wanted to run experiments, finding things that were harder to find or predictions. Good tool honeypot for data. Norbert Weiner talks about that.

RescueTime can take aggregate data of 30000 people, reducing data entry from 100 items to 2 items. Hope there will be communities that will follow protocol.

Gary Wolf: Learning/Knowing
Did long story for Wired about managing 5000-item dataset. Keeps track of what you’ve learned & haven’t learned. Makes prediction about what you need to practice something to remember forever. How deeply rooted it is. Street you’ve lived on when little kid. I’m measuring 2700 index cards. Spanish vocabulary. Modal sentences for grammar learning. Maintaining at 90% remembering. What 1000 words do you need to know? Super Memo. Pieter Wozniak, Polish computer scientist. When you do your tests every day, you get 85%-90% on every test. It shows you a set of cards. If you want to learn the most, maximum efficiency is 40% efficiency. Unpleasant. 5-point rating system. Implemented physically in the 1950s. Liter System. Pimsler implements spaced repetition in background way. Index cards a metaphor – all online. You want to learn constantly for short periods of time over long time spans. What’s the lifetime limit on what you can learn? Cabbies in London: larger hippocampus. There are some glitches: learning some things can interfere with knowing other things. Cards in Super Memo that often come up. You can figure out why you’re not learning them. Everyone knows that poor sleep impares learning. How much will your performance decrease? You need a lot of sleep data & lot of learning data. We’re on edge of being able to do that.

David Duncan: One of brain scan tests for my book has to do with memory. As we age, we don’t forget things, we have inability to filter out. Series of faces & landscapes. Then forget faces or landscapes. Can you filter out what you’re not supposed to remember? Compare young and old. Older people can remember as well as young people but can’t filter as well. I came out right in the middle.

I’ve been doing tai-chi for a number of years. Doing for 5 min/day better than 1 weekend/month.

How do you measure learning? Not just via standardized tests. Cognitive & batteries of tests that people take. Tell you what your brain age is. Column for Portfolio. Cognitive drug research. Did better than I expected, didn’t want to take again. On website. On wine, my timing was way off. Check comment stream, people who got younger thought it was a great test. Issues with speed of server.

Rajiv Mehta: Ways This Helps
Helping people take care of their health. Individual perspective. You have some regimen in mind: chicken soup or whatever. What gets in the way of people ttaking care of their health? We forget a lot, life gets busy. Keeping detailed records impossible for vast majority. Made prototype device. Gives reminders for thigns that are scheduled. Makes easy to record symptoms moods, etc. anything you think is important health. User tracking exercise. ZumeLife.com. Tracking her carbs, glucose, medications, symptoms, shortness of breath. Speak into it. Transcription service. Things that don’t lend themselves to charts get put into notebooks. USB connected to your PC. Every day or so. NY Time article about 42-year-old person w/ diabetes. Complicated case. Lots of drugs. [can you use any category?] Right now. 5 categories: meds, biometrics, exercise (name, duration), food (carbs, points), health-status questions (how much coughing, how did you feel). Most been using: 7 months. One person had sclera derma. Intense pain, cold hands. She started measuring her pain levels, realized she was having 3 or 4 intense episodes per week. With her printout, she & her doctor said: you have a problem. Over 6 week period she went from 3 or 4 intense to    1 mild episode/week. About $40-50/month. Can’t ask people to buy a special phone. I’m not waiting for United Health Care to say it’s interesting. Institutions don’t want to deal with smart phones, they want a special device. We’ve found everyone experiments. If anybody is going to figure out what works for her, it’s her. Doctors benefit from charts. The experimenter is her. Our doctors are at best good advisors. We cannot abdicate responsibility.

Peter Mortensen: Motivating Running
If you want to help people who are not enthusiasts. Need proud & constant presence. Nike Plus Sports Band. Wear all the time I’m awake. Not just a string around my finger. I can see how much running I’ve doine in last 3 months. Also have my last run. More successful than Nike Ipod. You should hide the change you want to make. Also USB key, syncs/ with NikePlus website. Graphs, etc. Even cooler it charges battery when plugged in. I only hear I’m interested I’m wearing a nice watch, never that I’m self-tracking. Chip on shoe, Bluetooth. Impact accelerometer. It’s an attractive watch, I’m proud to wear it. Aesthetic thing. An ugly watch would not have the same effect.

Raj: If you’re sick it means something bad. If there’s going to be a device they have to be proud of it. Before Ms. L got our device she was trying to use her Treo. It got in the way. It’s rude to answer your phone if you’re having a conversation. People would get upset. This device: It’s Ms. L taking care of herself.

Nice scales for tracking weight. Cable going off somewhere. Body composition Bluetooth scale. Tonita.

Seth Roberts: Sleep
Early self-experimentation about acne. Found out stuff doctor didn’t know: really useful. Maybe would help with sleep problem: Waking up too early in the morning. Tried many things for 10 years, everything failed. All ideas were wrong. Finally got a new idea due to analyzing data, noticing less sleep when lost weight, told class, student told him about another way to eat less, required changing breakfast. Change in breakfast caused early awakening to get worse. This was the first thing that had made a difference. Led to discovery that any breakfast hurts; supported by rat research. Later found that standing a lot improved sleep. Had to stand at least 8 hr to get effect; no effect of 6 hr of standing. Great sleep when stood 10 hr but really hard to do. More recently discovered that standing on one leg to exhaustion helps. Do twice in one day. Same effect, roughly, as many hours of standing but only takes a few minutes. Now working out the dose/response function.

KK: looking for people who want to blog on the blog itself. If you’d rather just share a comment or idea just mail it to us (GW & KK).

GW: lot of dry timber waiting for a spark here. Value of this meeting, can something bigger grow out of it?

Bodymedia.com making their gadget available to retail. Measures body temperature, galvanic skin response. $399 plus $20/month. 2. Body computing comfernece at UCSF Oct 25. internal 3. 23&me has dropped their price. Version 2. 1/3rd price.

Send stuff to KK & GW to post on blog.

More Gary Wolf’s account.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 12)

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Over the last week I’ve found that standing on one foot till it becomes difficult just twice during the day is enough to produce much better sleep that night. Maybe the effect is larger with three times but not enough to make much difference.

It now takes 8-10 minutes of one-leg standing (with the other leg stretched back behind me) before it gets difficult. When I started, it took 2-3 minutes.

Directory.

A Hidden Benefit of Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Today I met a Unix consultant named Jerry Lugert who has done a lot of self-experimentation. He made a point I hadn’t heard before: When you start to measure something carefully, you become a lot more motivated to improve it. In practice, this means when you start to measure something at home every day or often in contrast to having it measured every six months when you see a doctor. One of his examples was blood pressure. He became a lot more motivated to lower his blood pressure when he measured it himself. Another example involved using chemstrips to measure his urine. He used them to measure both his hydration and the amount of protein in his blood.

The usual idea is that knowledge is power. Sure, if you measure your blood pressure every day you can better control it than if you measure it once per six months. That’s obvious. This is different: knowledge is motivation. If you measure your blood pressure every day you’ll want to control it more than if you measure it every six months. That’s not obvious at all and way more important.

This idea is so close to my idea about connoisseurship (which Jerry of course hadn’t heard of) I wonder if the mechanism is the same. I believe connoisseurship arises from side-by-side comparisons of very similar items: close-in-time comparisons of two orange marmalades, for example. Or two vanilla ice creams. Or two cheddar cheeses. Or two merlots. Etc. It’s obvious that if you make these close comparisons you’ll become better at discrimination — e.g., better at discriminating varieties of vanilla ice cream. What interests me is the hedonic change: making these comparisons causes you to care more about the dimension. You get more pleasure from the good stuff and less pleasure from the bad stuff. Connoisseurs are basically people who will pay more for this or that than the rest of us. (When income or wealth is equated.) Not because they’re snobs or showing off — because they derive more pleasure from it. This is part of a theory of human evolution.

Rudy Guiliani, Sarah Palin and Self-Experimentation

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Sometimes I’m surprised how much there is to blog about. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Guiliani bashed community organizers:

[Obama] worked as a community organizer. [Said with a disparaging emphasis on “community organizer”] . . . Barack Obama has never led anything, nothing, nada.

So did Palin:

In this world of threats and dangers, it’s not just a community and it doesn’t just need an organizer.

The interesting thing about community organizing is that (a) anybody can do it (no need to be elected) and (b) you can organize about anything. This wide net, this all-inclusiveness, makes it a way that new ideas can become powerful. Self-experimentation is very similar: (a) anyone can do it and (b) you can study anything. You don’t need anyone’s approval, the research can be very cheap, the ideas you test can be conventional or wacky. Only if you believe that the already-powerful know everything should you disparage activities that help new knowledge come to light.

Too Much Flaxseed Oil

Seth Roberts12 Comments

I recently got the following email:

I’d like to advise caution about the use of excessive omega-3s, such as flax and fish oil. I discovered that too much of these oils can induce an omega-6 deficiency, since both n3 and n6 oils compete for the same enzymes in the biosynthesis pathways of prostaglandin precursors. In susceptible people, of which I am one, this leads to insomnia, psoriatic lesions, and when combined with food avoidance (e.g. Atkins-like diets, etc.), can lead to loss of immunological tolerance to food antigens. It turns out that n6 arachidonic acid is critical for the development and maintenance of oral tolerance (Newberry, 1999).

I asked her for details. She replied:

I started taking 2 tablespoons of flax oil daily with meals, and this was my exclusive added fat source for several months; I also got fat from meat and dairy. This was back in 2001. The insomnia happened almost immediately, and the psoriasis and “cellophane-like” skin developed over several weeks. I quit the flax oil after 3 months, but this was around the same time that I learned of Atkins and the Weston Price foundation- so, I cut back on carbohydrates and added fish oil and “whole foods” to my diet. It’s not clear what exactly happened around that time, but I started to descend into chronic illness: chronic flu-like symptoms, blood-sugar fluctuations, disordered sleep schedule, arthritis in my wrists and toes, rapid weight gain, etc. (And I should mention that before that I was an invincible young woman grad student, an outdoorsy athlete, was proud to never get a cold, and only mildly overweight.) I dealt with it as best as I could, since I was also trying to do my PhD thesis in engineering. I also quit taking any dietary supplements, because nothing seemed to help and I would often get weird side-effects from simple things like calcium supplements. On the advice of a physician in 2004, I added more carbohydrate back to the diet (re-introduced wheat carbs) and got hit with some frightening digestive complaints (cramps, vomiting, IBS symptoms.) It looked a lot like celiac disease, but all of the tests were negative. I didn’t have the proper genetic markers for celiac disease, either, but a strict gluten-free and dairy free diet helped nonetheless.

The GI symptoms were much better by 2005 after going gluten and dairy free, but I was still not well. What gave me the “aha moment” was taking a random dose of fish oil during that time, and having an immediate relapse in symptoms. Then I started researching arachidonic acid (the “bad” n6), with the question of “well, what is it good for, then?” That’s when I found the Newberry paper, and it dawned on me that I had inadvertently created an n6 deficiency by overdoing it on flax/fish oil. I also became quite an expert on essential fatty acid metabolism. What I had likely done was impair my ability to tolerate the introduction of new foods. I knew that my problem wasn’t gluten per se, because I would develop symptoms soon after adding exotic foods (coconut milk, pork, tapioca flour, etc.) to replace the eliminated things like milk and wheat flour.

Here are the three things I did to get well:

1) After discovering the Newberry paper, I decided to focus on acquiring pre-made sources of arachidonic acid in the diet. I found that the best source of pre-formed arachidonic acid is egg yolks and poultry, and I looked to worldwide intakes of AA to gauge my dose. It turns out that the French get a good daily dose of AA (190mg for women), and I settled on 2 egg yolks per day (65mg each) plus incidental sources. This is where I really turned the corner on feeling well.

2) I avoided known problem foods temporarily. I consulted with Jonathan Brostoff on food intolerances, and he said that the immune system requires about 6 months to “forget” its hypersensitivity to a food antigen before it can be re-introduced. I did the gluten and dairy free diet for 3 years in total, and added back foods on an experimental basis once I had been on the egg-yolk regime for a year.

3.) Finally, a gastroenterologist called my problem IBS, which is a catch-all trash diagnosis. However, I had been thinking in terms of celiac disease for a long time, and after doing searches on IBS I came across some new information about a probiotic that was supposed to help with IBS. I tried Bifidobacterium infantis (Align) for 2 months last winter, and it put me over the top. This was around the same time that I tried gluten and dairy for the first time in 3 years, and I was able to introduce it with no problems.

Today, I feel that I’m back to 100% and cured, except for the weight that I acquired during the illness. (I stopped gaining after going gluten free, but could never lose anything.) My propensity to experiment on myself led to some serious consequences, but I discovered something that relatively few people know about the importance of omega-6s.

Keep in mind that deficiency of omega-6 is very rare and overconsumption very common (e.g., the Israeli Paradox). In 2002, the Japan Society for Lipid Nutrition recommended reducing linoleic acid (LA) intake; LA is the short-chain omega-6 fatty acid, found in high concentrations in many vegetable oils, such as soybean oil. LA is converted to AA in the body.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 10)

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Long ago, talking about scientific discovery, Pasteur said “chance favors the prepared mind.” In my case, I now realize, this generalization can be improved on. The underlying pattern can be described more precisely.

I’ve made several discoveries because two things came together, as Pasteur said, with one element a kind of chance and the other a kind of knowledge. The two elements were:

  1. I did something unusual.
  2. I knew something unusual.

Here are the discoveries and how they fit this pattern:

1. Breakfast. Discovery: Eating breakfast caused me to wake up too early more often. Did something unusual: I copied one of my students, who told me about his experiences during office hour. This eventually led me to vary my breakfast. Knew something unusual: I had detailed records of my sleep. The combination made it clear that breakfast was affecting my sleep.

2. Morning faces. Discovery: Seeing faces in the morning improves my mood the next day. Did something unusual: I watched a tape of Jay Leno soon after getting up. Knew something unusual: From teaching intro psych, I knew there was a strong connection between depression and bad sleep.

3. Standing and sleep. Discovery: Standing a lot reduces early awakening. Did something unusual: I arranged my life so that I stood a lot more than usual . Knew something unusual: I had detailed sleep records. They made the reduction in early awakening easy to see.

4. Sleep and health. Discovery: At the same time my sleep greatly improved, I stopped getting colds. Did something unusual: To improve my sleep I was standing a lot and getting a lot of morning light from a bank of lights on my treadmill. Knew something unusual: I had records of my colds going back ten years.

5. The Shangri-La Diet. Discovery: Drinking sugar water causes weight loss. Did something unusual: I went to Paris. Knew something unusual: I had developed a new theory of weight control.

6. Flaxseed oil and the brain. Discovery: Flaxseed oil improves my mental function . Did something unusual: One evening I took 6-8 flaxseed oil capsules. Knew something unusual: I had been putting on my shoes standing up for more than a year and knew how difficult it usually was. The morning after I took the flaxseed oil capsules it was a lot easier.

7. Standing on one foot and sleep. Discovery: Standing on one foot improves my sleep. Did something unusual: In order to stretch my quadriceps, I stood on one foot several times one day. Knew something unusual: I knew that if I stood a lot my sleep improved (Discovery 3).

The unusual actions ranged from things as common as foreign travel (Paris) and stretching to the extremely rare (watch a tape of Jay Leno soon after waking up). The unusual knowledge ranged from quirky and casual (knowing how hard it is to put on shoes standing up) to sets of numbers (sleep records) to generalizations based on numbers (what scientific papers are about) to the sort of stuff taught in science classes (a theory of weight control) to the sort of knowledge derived from teaching science classes (connecting depression and bad sleep). To call this stuff unusual knowledge is actually too broad because in every case it’s knowledge related to causality.

Only after Discovery 7 (more precisely, this morning) did I notice this pattern. Read the discussion section of this paper (which is about Discoveries 1-5) to see how badly I missed it earlier.

More on Discovery 6. Discovery 7.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 9)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

From Nassim Taleb’s web notebook:

I was going to have dinner with Seth Roberts in San Francisco. So, out of curiosity, I tried his diet [ clipping my nose and consuming two large tablespoons of flaxseed oil ] . . . When someone who observed me with a noseclip asked: “what are you doing?” , I gave my answer “trying to be healthier.” It elicited a smile: “Why don’t you dance outside on one leg for ten minutes? That too may work very well.”

Strange strange coincidence.

Why Did I Sleep So Well? directory.

Suppose You Write the Times to Fix an Error (part 2)

Seth Roberts17 Comments

The Roberts-Schwartz correspondence continued. I replied to Schwartz:

“Dining establishments”? [His previous email stated: “Four restaurants simply cannot represent the variety of dining establishments in New York City”] I thought the survey was about sushi restaurants. Places where raw fish is available.

Quite apart from that, I am sorry to see such a fundamental error perpetuated in a science section. If you don’t believe me that the teenagers’ survey was far better than you said, you might consult a friend of mine, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics at Columbia.

John Tukey — the most influential statistician of the last half of the 20th century — really did say that a well-chosen of sample of 3 was worthwhile when it came to learning about sexual behavior. Which varies even more widely than sushi restaurants. A sample of 4 is better than a sample of 3.

Schwartz replied:

The survey included 4 restaurants and 10 stores.

The girls would not disclose the names of any of the restaurants, and only gave me the name of one store whose samples were not mislabeled. Their restaurants and stores might have been chosen with exquisite care and scientific validity, but without proof of that I could not say it in the article.

I wrote:

I realize the NY Times has an “answer every letter” policy and I am a little sorry to subject you to it. Except that this was a huge goof and you caused your subjects damage by vastly undervaluing their work. Yes, I knew the survey included 4 restaurants and 10 stores. That was clear.

As a reader I had no need to know the names of the places; I realized the girls were trying to reach broad conclusions. They were right not to give you the names because to do so might have obscured the larger point. It was on your side that the big failing occurred, as far as I can tell. Did you ask the girls about their sampling method? That was crucial info. Apparently The Times doesn’t correct errors of omission but that was a major error in your article: That info (how they sampled) wasn’t included.

He replied:

I could have been more clear on the subject of sample size, but I did not commit an error. Neither do my editors. That is why they asked me to write a letter to you instead of writing up a correction.

I don’t feel I have been “subjected to” anything, or that this is some kind of punishment. This is an interesting collision between the precise standards of someone with deep grounding in social science and statistical proof and someone who tries to write intelligible stories about science for a daily newspaper and a general interest audience. But I am not sorry that you wrote to me, even a little sorry.

i wrote:

“I did not commit an error.” Huh? What am I missing? Your article had two big errors:

1. An error of commission. You stated the study should be not taken seriously because the sample size was too small. For most purposes, especially those of NY Times readers, the sample size was large enough.

2. An error of omission. You failed to describe the sampling protocol — how those 10 stores and 4 restaurants were chosen. This was crucial info for knowing to what population the results should be generalized.

If you could explain why these aren’t errors, that would be a learning experience.

Did you ask the girls how they sampled?

His full reply:

We’re not getting anywhere here.

Not so. After complaining he didn’t have “proof” that the teenagers used a good sampling method, he won’t say if he asked them about their sampling method. That’s revealing.

Something similar happened with a surgeon I was referred to, Dr. Eileen Consorti, in Berkeley. I have a tiny hernia that I cannot detect but one day my primary-care doctor did. He referred me to Dr. Consorti, a general surgeon. She said I should have surgery for it. Why? I asked. Because it could get worse, she said. Eventually I asked: Why do you think it’s better to have surgery than not? Surgery is dangerous. (Not to mention expensive and time-consuming.) She said there were clinical trials that showed this. Just use google, you’ll find them, she said. I tried to find them. I looked and looked but failed to find any relevant evidence. My mom, who does medical searching for a living, was unable to find any completed clinical trials. One was in progress (which implied the answer to my question wasn’t known). I spoke to Dr. Consorti again. I can’t find any studies, I said, nor can my mom. Okay, we’ll find some and copy them for you, she said, you can come by the office and pick them up. She sounded completely sure the studies existed. I waited. Nothing from Dr. Consorti’s office. After a few weeks, I phoned her office and left a message. No reply. I waited a month, phoned again, and left another message. No reply.

More. In spite of Dr. Consorti’s statement in the comments (see below) that “I will call you once I clear my desk and do my own literature search,” one year later (August 2009) I haven’t heard from her.

Science in Action: Why Did I Sleep So Well? (part 8)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

My recent experience suggests that if I stand on one foot until it becomes slightly difficult about four times/day I will sleep much better. Two days ago I measured how long those four bouts of one-foot standing actually were: 6.2 (left foot), 4.3 (right), 4.8 (left), and 5.2 (right) minutes. The median is 5.0 minutes. When I started doing this, about two weeks ago, each bout was about 2 minutes.

It doesn’t seem to matter when I do them. Now I do two in the morning and two in the evening. Fits perfectly with a subway commute. You’ll want to be forced to stand.

In the evening I have a pleasant sense of anticipation: I will fall asleep and wake up feeling really good. I have never before felt this way. I have slept this well before, when I stood 9 or 10 hours/day. The sheer difficulty and all-consumingness of doing that, I now realize, got in the way of anticipating the benefits.

Something else curious is that one-foot standing leaves no mark — I can’t tell at 3 pm how many bouts I’ve done so far just by noticing how I feel. Unlike water or calorie consumption: If I don’t drink anything I’ll get thirsty. If I don’t eat anything I’ll get hungry. But if I don’t get enough of this particular byproduct of exercise I’ll never notice.