Lunch at the Labs

Some web links I found to be of interest:

• Rand Paul's reasonableness
  The Economist takes Frank Bruni of the New York Times to task concerning his comments about Rand Paul.

  Rand Paul has not triangulated his positions on foreign policy, civil liberties or the war on drugs by starting from the GOP consensus and then tacking toward the bipartisan center. Rather, he had been moving mostly toward the Republican Party's standard line, beginning from a more thoroughly libertarian starting point. This has put Mr Paul nevertheless well to the left of mainstream Democrats on a number of issues, but also to the right of mainstream Republicans on others. Apparently this has left Mr Bruni, and no doubt many other unreflective liberals, somewhat confused.

  and

  Were Mr Bruni better supplied with what Keats called "negative capability"--the ability to abide "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"--he might have been able to rest content with the observation that Mr Paul is, from a standard liberal's perspective, both better and worse than your typical ideological conservative.

• How "Breakthrough Medical Findings" Disappear
  by Keith Humphreys in the The Reality-Based Community blog.

  diets and remedies are announced by scientists with regularity, yet in most cases subsequent research can't replicate the original "breakthrough".

  and

  Why does this happen? Small studies do a poor job of reliably estimating the effects of medical interventions. For a small study (such as Sacks' and Leng's early work in the top two rows of the table) to get published, it needs to show a big effect - no one is interested in a small study that found nothing. It is likely that many other small studies of fish oil pills were conducted at the same time of Sacks' and Leng's, found no benefit and were therefore not published. But by the play of chance, it was only a matter of time before a small study found what looked like a big enough effect to warrant publication in a journal editor's eyes.

• Our brains, and how they're not as simple as we think

  Brightly coloured brain scans are a media favourite as they are both attractive to the eye and apparently easy to understand but in reality they represent some of the most complex scientific information we have. They are not maps of activity but maps of the outcome of complex statistical comparisons of blood flow that unevenly relate to actual brain function. This is a problem that scientists are painfully aware of but it is often glossed over when the results get into the press.

  and

  You can see this selective reporting in how neuroscience is used in the media. Psychologist Cliodhna O'Connor and her colleagues investigated how brain science was reported across 10 years of newspaper coverage. Rather than reporting on evidence that most challenged pre-existing opinions, of which there is a great deal, neuroscience was typically cited as a form of "biological proof" to support the biases of the author.

• Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past

  To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works--namely, that rate matters. That evolution can be fast, slow, or in-between, and understanding what makes the difference is far more enlightening, and exciting, than holding our flabby modern selves up against a vision--accurate or not--of our well-muscled and harmoniously adapted ancestors.

  and

  If they had known about evolution, would our cave-dwelling forebears have felt nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal, when life was good and the trees were a comfort zone? Scavenging prey from more-formidable predators, similar to what modern hyenas do, is thought to have preceded, or at least accompanied, actual hunting in human history. Were, then, those early hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from the lion that caught it was superior to that newfangled business of running it down yourself? And why stop there? Why not long to be aquatic, since life arose in the sea? In some ways, our lungs are still ill suited to breathing air. For that matter, it might be nice to be unicellular: After all, cancer arises because our differentiated tissues run amok. Single cells don't get cancer.

• Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

  Steven Brill's much publicized Time magazine article examining the problem of rising medical bills, including who is responsible for the high prices and profiting the most. (Full article only available to subscribers.)

  Taken as a whole, these powerful institutions and the bills they churn out dominate the nation's economy and put demands on taxpayers to a degree unequaled anywhere else on earth. We now spend almost 20% of our gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.

• The Brain Is Not Computable

  Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis says Kurzweil's Singularity isn't going to happen.

  human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can't be replicated in silicon. That's because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells

  and

  the human brain creates models of tools and machines all the time, and brain implants will just extend that capability

Some web links I found to be of interest:

• Beware the Big Errors of `Big Data'

  Nassim Taleb opines:

  Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.

  and

  if I generate (by simulation) a set of 200 variables -- completely random and totally unrelated to each other -- with about 1,000 data points for each, then it would be near impossible not to find in it a certain number of "significant" correlations of sorts. But these correlations would be entirely spurious.

• 2013 Edge Annual Question : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

  Over 150 of the world's greatest minds answer the Edge question of the year.
  
  Edge is an online salon for intelligent conversation (unlike TED).

• That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think

  Domestic and feral cats are significant predators of a wide range of prey species.

  the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States -- both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it -- kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

• That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer

  Jared Diamond on the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.

  Consider: If you're a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you'll be dead within a few years.

• The Placebo Phenomenon

  Researcher Ted Kaptchuk searches fpr the real ingredients of fake medicine.

  researchers have found that placebo treatments--interventions with no active drug ingredients--can stimulate real physiological responses, from changes in heart rate and blood pressure to chemical activity in the brain, in cases involving pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even some symptoms of Parkinson's.

  and

  even patients who knew they were taking placebos described real improvement, reporting twice as much symptom relief as the no-treatment group.

• Germs Are Us

  An article in The New Yorker, Annals of Science describes how some bacteria and other microorganisms make us sick while many others keep us alive.

  We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.