Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Apple and Many Other Tech Giants Have Wall Street Disease

  The most famous Silicon Valley companies are afflicted with an illness known as financialization-untreated, they could share the fate of General Electric or Lucent.

  Like General Electric some 25 years under Jack Welch, Apple under current CEO Tim Cook increasingly represents a microcosm of the changing role of U.S. markets as they have become less a vehicle for capital provision, more akin to a wealth recycling machine in which cash piles are used less for investment/research and development, more for share buybacks (which are tied to executive compensation, elevating the incentive for, at a minimum, quarterly short-termism and, at worst, fraud and corporate looting). All in the interests of that flawed concept of "maximizing shareholder value," in which the company's stock price, rather than its product line, drives corporate decisions, determines senior management compensation, and becomes the ultimate measuring stick of success.

• 1 in 4 Statisticians Say They Were Asked to Commit Scientific Fraud

  The authors surveyed 522 consulting biostatisticians and received sufficient responses from 390.

  The absolute worst offense (i.e., being asked to fake statistical significance) occurred to 3% of the survey respondents. Another 7% reported being asked to change data, and a whopping 24% -- nearly 1 in 4 -- said they were asked to remove or alter data. Unequivocally, that is a request to commit scientific fraud.
  Of the less serious offenses, 55% of biostatisticians said that they received requests to underreport non-significant results.
  

• 3 ways to make better decisions -- by thinking like a computer

  TEDxSydney, Tom Griffiths talk with transcript.

  If you want to maximize the probability that you find the very best place, you should look at 37 percent of what's on the market, and then make an offer on the next place you see, which is better than anything that you've seen so far. Or if you're looking for a month, take 37 percent of that time -- 11 days, to set a standard -- and then you're ready to act.

• Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?

  Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

  The internet has made it so easy to gratify basic social and sexual needs that there's far less incentive to go out into the "meatworld" and chase those things. This isn't to say that the internet can give you more satisfaction than sex or relationships, because it doesn't ... [But it can] supply you with just enough satisfaction to placate those imperatives ... I think it's healthy to ask yourself: "If I didn't have any of this, would I be going out more? Would I be having sex more?" For a lot of people my age, I think the answer is probably yes.

• A time to fast

  Nutrient composition and caloric intake have traditionally been used to devise optimized diets for various phases of life. Adjustment of meal size and frequency have emerged as powerful tools to ameliorate and postpone the onset of disease and delay aging, whereas periods of fasting, with or without reduced energy intake, can have profound health benefits. The underlying physiological processes involve periodic shifts of metabolic fuel sources, promotion of repair mechanisms, and the optimization of energy utilization for cellular and organismal health. Future research endeavors should be directed to the integration of a balanced nutritious diet with controlled meal size and patterns and periods of fasting to develop better strategies to prevent, postpone, and treat the socioeconomical burden of chronic diseases associated with aging.

• The Problem With Cashless Restaurants

  Here's why restaurateurs are ditching cash in favor of credit.

  A private business like a restaurant is not legally required to take U.S. currency. Massachusetts is the exception: A 1978 law states that no retailer "shall discriminate against a cash buyer by requiring the use of credit," the Boston Globe reported.
  ...
  Going cashless has been incentivized by credit card companies like Visa, which, as part of a promotion in July, offered up to "$500,000 to 50 eligible U.S.-based small business food service owners who commit to joining the 100 percent cashless quest," per its press release.
  Companies that opted in got $10,000 from Visa for tech upgrades, a significant incentive when credit card companies can get "2 to 5 percent" of what a small business earns. (A restaurant pulling in $1 million in net sales per year may pay a credit card company up to $50,000 in transaction fees - more than what the average full-time hourly employee makes in a year.)
  

  But at least in NYC maybe this classist and racist business model will be stopped.
  NYC Politician Wants to Ban Cashless Restaurants
  

  "In an era when an increasing number of restaurants no longer accept legal tender, it's useful to think about who this system benefits most: the businesses and banks, at the expense of consumers."

• Mastodon: Decentralized, open source social network

  Follow friends and discover new ones. Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video. All on a platform that is community-owned and ad-free.

• Memory experts' beliefs about repressed memory

  What we believe about how memory works affects the decisions we make in many aspects of life. In Patihis, Ho et al. [Patihis, L., Ho, L. Y., Tingen, I. W., Lilienfeld, S. O., & Loftus, E. F. (2014). Are the "memory wars" over? A scientist-practitioner gap in beliefs about repressed memory. Psychological Science, 25, 519-530.], we documented several group's beliefs on repressed memories and other aspects of how memory works. Here, we present previously unreported data on the beliefs of perhaps the most credible minority in our dataset: memory experts. We provide the statistics and written responses of the beliefs for 17 memory experts. Although memory experts held similarly sceptical beliefs about repressed memory as other research-focused groups, they were significantly more sceptical about repressed memory compared to practitioners, students and the public. Although a minority of memory experts wrote that they maintained an open mind about repressed memories - citing research such as retrieval inhibition - all of the memory experts emphasised the dangers of memory distortion.

• Why Mathematicians Can't Find the Hay in a Haystack

  The search for hay in a haystack characterizes many different areas of math, including the subject of my most recent Quanta article, "Tinkertoy Models Produce New Geometric Insights." There I wrote about mathematicians who are investigating the relationship between geometric shapes and the equations used to describe them. In rare cases, objects can be expressed by simple equations. These are the needles, the shapes we know best: lines, parabolas, circles, spheres.

  The overwhelming preponderance of shapes resist such elegant formulation. They may be everywhere, but because you can't write down the equations that describe them, it's hard to establish that even a single one of them exists.

  In my article, I explained how techniques from a field called "tropical geometry" serve as an especially sly way of deducing the existence of these ubiquitous geometric objects-the ones that, like the irrational numbers, are everywhere, even if you can't write them down.

• How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town

  New York's empty storefronts are a dark omen for the future of cities.

  Separate surveys by Douglas Elliman, a real-estate company, and Morgan Stanley determined that at least 20 percent of Manhattan's street retail is vacant or about to become vacant.
  ...
  Walking around the Upper East Side, where I live, I find it striking how many of the establishments still standing among the many darkened windows are hair salons, nail salons, facial salons, eyebrow places, and restaurants. What's the one thing they have in common? You won't find their services on Amazon.

Various web links related to health issues.

• How some journalists got hooked by fish oil and vitamin D spin

  Some stories declared good news about the popular supplements ...

  But others reported the opposite: fish oil and vitamin D actually don’t protect against those major diseases ...

  So why did some news organizations proclaim otherwise?
  ...
  The answer may lie with a news release issued by Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where the trial was conducted.

  The release focused on a handful of secondary findings, which aren’t the primary questions researchers set out to answer.
  ...
  As we’ve written, such secondary findings need to be reported cautiously. They do not have the same statistical authority as primary findings, and are more likely to be due to chance. It’s been stated that secondary findings should only be used to help interpret the primary result of a trial or to suggest avenues of further research.

  Yet the news release featured those rosy-sounding secondary findings at the top, with wording that made them sound like proven benefits:

  PS. Unfortunately because of funding issues the great web site HealthNewsReview.org where this article appears will cease daily publication of new content at the end of 2018.

• Vitamin D supplements don't improve bone health, major study finds

  The study found that vitamin D supplements did little to help fractures, falls and bone density.

  The team concluded that vitamin D does not prevent fractures or falls, or have a meaningful effect on bone mineral density, concluding that there is little justification in taking them to "maintain or improve musculoskeletal health," adding that there is no need for more trials to explore this.

  But the research also concludes the supplement is helpful in preventing rare conditions such as rickets and osteomalacia in high risk groups, which can occur after a prolonged lack of exposure to sunshine, resulting in deficiency.

  Also see my related previous posting about Vitamin D.
• Nutrition research is deeply biased by food companies.

  How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.

  In a new book, Unsavory Truth, Marion Nestle - a nutrition researcher at New York University, writer, and longtime crusader on conflicts of interest in food science - charts dozens of fascinating examples like this, from the likes of Hershey and Coca-Cola, to the Corn Refiners Association and the Royal Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Inc. Through her investigation into how money flows from companies and trade groups to labs, she shows how pervasive the problem is - and why it's distorting how we think about health.
  ...
  Food companies don't want to fund studies that won't help them sell products. So I consider this kind of research marketing, not science. People who do the studies say the conduct of their science is fine, and it well may be. But research on where the bias comes in says the real problem is in the design of the research question - the way the question gets asked - and the interpretation of results. That's where the influence tends to show up.

• Who's rating doctors on RateMDs? The invisible hand of 'reputation management'

  Ottawa physician shocked to learn he could pay site to hide bad ratings.

  RateMDs offers doctors two special plans to enhance their presence on the site. The "Promoted" package costs $179 US per month and includes banner ads that will appear on competing doctor's pages.

  And for $359 US per month the doctor can buy the "Promoted plus" option. Both packages allow doctors to hide up to three unfavourable comments - a feature called "Ratings Manager."

  But if a doctor stops paying, those unfavourable ratings will reappear.
  ...
  Forman's company (GlowingMDs) advertises its service to doctors with the line: "Reclaim your reputation." For a monthly fee of $229 plus HST the company provides a ratings template that doctors offer to patients to complete after an appointment. "We then take all of those reviews, good or bad, from the doctor, and we then post it to RateMDs in effect on the doctor's behalf."

• Study: Artificial sweeteners toxic to digestive gut bacteria

  According to a study published in the journal Molecules, researchers found that six common artificial sweeteners approved by the Food and Drug Administration and 10 sport supplements that contained them were found to be toxic to the digestive gut microbes of mice.

• Eating too much added sugar increases the risk of dying with heart disease

  Over the course of the 15-year study on added sugar and heart disease, participants who took in 25% or more of their daily calories as sugar were more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as those whose diets included less than 10% added sugar. Overall, the odds of dying from heart disease rose in tandem with the percentage of sugar in the diet-and that was true regardless of a person's age, sex, physical activity level, and body-mass index (a measure of weight).

• Study: A Daily Baby Aspirin Has No Benefit For Healthy Older People

  "We found there was no discernible benefit of aspirin on prolonging independent, healthy life for the elderly," says Anne Murray, a geriatrician and epidemiologist at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, who helped lead the study.
  ...
  There is still strong evidence that a daily baby aspirin can reduce the risk that many people who have already suffered a heart attack or stroke will suffer another attack.

• Cornell Food Researcher's Downfall Raises Larger Questions For Science

  The gold standard of scientific studies is to make a single hypothesis, gather data to test it, and analyze the results to see if it holds up. By Wansink's own admission in the blog post, that's not what happened in his lab.

  Instead, when his first hypothesis didn't bear out, Wansink wrote that he used the same data to test other hypotheses. "He just kept analyzing those datasets over and over and over again, and he instructed others to do so as well, until he found something," van der Zee says.
  ...
  Large datasets can be prone to p-hacking, Althouse says. "Let's say you flip a coin a million times. At some point you're going to get 10 heads in a row." That does not mean the coin is weighted, even though looking at that sliver of data makes a random result look like it's not due to chance.

• Researchers reveal how disrupting gut-brain communication may affect learning and memory

  Our "gut instinct" may be more literal than we thought, with memories of where the best food is found potentially mediated by signals from our gut to the hippocampus

  Inside our gastrointestinal tract lies a massive mesh of neurons often referred to as our "second brain." While this neuronal control system primarily works to independently manage our digestive system, it also has been found to directly communicate with the brain via a long nerve, called the vagus nerve.
  ...
  The researchers hypothesize that this mechanism evolved to help us remember where we found particularly good sources of food, and aided in navigating back to those specific locations. This is the first time scientists have revealed such a novel, and explicit, connection between gut signals, the vagus nerve, and hippocampus memory activity.