Seth's Blog

Few scientific papers arouse emotion in reviewers and editors but this one — by my friend and collaborator Hal Pashler and his colleagues — must have because they allowed the use of voodoo in the title instead of spurious. Here is part of the abstract:

The newly emerging field of Social Neuroscience has drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between behavioral and self-report measures of personality or emotion and measures of brain activation obtained using fMRI. We show that these correlations often exceed what is statistically possible . . . Social-neuroscience method sections rarely contain sufficient detail to ascertain how these correlations were obtained. We surveyed authors of 54 articles that reported findings of this kind to determine the details of their analyses. More than half acknowledged using a strategy that computes separate correlations for individual voxels, and reports means of just the subset of voxels exceeding chosen thresholds. We show how this non-independent analysis grossly inflates correlations, while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams. This analysis technique was used to obtain the vast majority of the implausibly high correlations in our survey sample.

The papers shown to be misleading appeared in such journals as Science and Nature.

In the elevator in my apartment building I realized the student holding hot food had just had it delivered. She gave me the menu. The restaurant, I learned, is called Kyoto. it serves mainly Korean and Japanese food. Free delivery. The surprising part: There’s no address. And it never closes, even on holidays.

An example of the general truth that there are many more kinds of restaurants (food-serving businesses) in Beijing than in America. Today I bought sugar-coated banana on a stick from a street vendor.

Last week I went to a dinner party at a restaurant held by a non-Tsinghua professor. It was nice of him to invite me. I’d been to two similar dinner parties before and this one was so much more pleasant because the grad student sitting next to me translated what everyone was saying. Which was stuff about cigarettes, Beijing is now more expensive than Hong Kong, rumors of ranking battles, buying a house, driving drunk (you are amazed how you park and drive while drunk), for example.
Do I have delicate Western sensibilities? Everyone was served an extremely strong drink called bai jio, which is about 50% alcohol. Not everyone had to drink it, except the three graduate students. Being the youngest, each of them had to go around the table toasting each of the rest of the guests. After each toast they had to do “bottoms up” — drink the whole tablespoon-sized glass. That’s 11 bottoms-ups (or 9 since your fellow sufferers would allow you to cheat)! I couldn’t toss down one glass of the stuff, and I’m a fan of soju (20% alcohol). It is horribly strong. I drank one glass the whole evening and it was too much. The graduate students jockeyed for who would go last — they hated it. Why does this happen? I asked my translator. “We’re entertainment,” she said.

I suggested she replace the bai jio, which is colorless, with water. Amazingly this was a new idea. She did it (furtively) and the deception worked. Still, she was very happy when the dinner ended before she had finished all her toasts. Did you tell the other students? I asked. Not till later, she said. Too important. Next time, she said, she’d bring a water bottle and a can of Coke to allow for drinks with other colors.

The bai jio tradition gives a sad twist to a letter on Chinese human rights just published in The New York Review of Books. The letter is signed by “hundreds of Chinese intellectuals” — many of them professors, no doubt. It contains the following:

We see the powerless in our society—the vulnerable groups, the people who have been suppressed and monitored, who have suffered cruelty and even torture, and who have had no adequate avenues for their protests, no courts to hear their pleas—becoming more militant . . .

Or more devious.

This article says that a fat-digesting enzyme called lipase becomes inactive while sitting. The evidence, seen in the accompanying video, is extraordinary: a cloudy vial of blood (taken after a sitting meal) versus a much clearer vial of blood (taken from the same person after a standing meal.)

I found that a great increase in standing, lasting years, had no effect on my weight but I slept much better. I ate standing up much more often.

Much of my self-experimentation has been about improving my sleep — in particular, not waking up too early. I found that avoiding breakfast and standing a lot made a big difference. Currently I am studying the effect of stressing the leg muscles in other ways and will soon have more to say about this.

Now comes more evidence this matters: People who slept too little had a higher risk of coronary artery calcification.

JAMA abstract.