Seth's Blog

From the New York Times:

Last December, a British journal that specializes in crystal formations announced that it was withdrawing more than 70 papers by Chinese authors whose research was of questionable originality or rigor. . . . “Even fake papers count because nobody actually reads them,” said Mr. Fang, who is more widely known by his pen name, Fang Zhouzi, and whose Web site, New Threads, has exposed more than 900 instances of fakery, some involving university presidents and nationally lionized researchers.

Recently a Tsinghua colleague asked me to fix the English in his paper. Most paragraphs required a few changes every sentence but here and there were whole paragraphs with no mistakes. Presumably he copied them from somewhere else. The material in them was boring — it was like copying from the phone book — so it was hard to care (he wasn’t taking credit for anyone else’s ideas) but I wonder if he realized how obvious it was. I don’t mean this is typical. I have looked at several other papers by Chinese authors and found no patches of perfect English.

The article begins with a false claim by a Chinese doctor — and of course these are truly damaging. In my experience, false claims by American doctors are common. An example is my surgeon recommending an operation that, she said, evidence showed would benefit me. There was no such evidence. One value of self-experimentation is that you can find out if a medicine works, rather than take your doctor’s word for it. I became impressed with self-experimentation when it showed me that an acne medicine (tetracycline, an antibiotic) my dermatologist had prescribed didn’t work. Not at all. He didn’t express any doubts when he prescribed it. Call it forensic DNA testing (e.g., The Innocence Project) for the rest of us.

Perhaps the Chinese people, faced with even more false claims than Americans, can benefit even more from self-experimentation.

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

Since I discovered that butter makes my brain work better, I have been eating half a stick (60 g) per day. Usually half in the morning and half in the evening. It is hard to eat by itself but easy to eat with other foods. I’ve tried a dozen ways of doing this. My top three additions:

1. Pu’er tea. The most convenient. As convenient as drinking tea. Put the butter in hot tea, wait till it melts. I can eat at least 20 g of butter in one cup of tea. Butter tea is common in Tibet. Thanks again to Robin Barooah.

2. Cherry tomatoes. The healthiest and fastest. Slice the tomatoes in half lengthwise, eat each half with a similar-sized piece of butter. It is like that classic Italian combination, mozzarella and tomatoes.

3. Thin-sliced roast beef. The most delicious. Wrap a piece of butter with the roast beef. However, I already eat plenty of meat, it is hard to get thin-sliced roast beef in Beijing, and it is so delicious I end up buying a lot of thin-sliced roast beef.

None of these additions affects brain function (measured by arithmetic score), as far as I can tell, although I suppose the tea wakes me up.

I applaud it. The winner developed in vitro fertilization, which has helped millions of parents. In contrast to last year’s prize for telomere research, which has helped no one. Notice what in vitro fertilization is not: It is not taking a powerful poorly-tested drug for the rest of your life — the drug industry’s preferred answer to all problems. It is not expensive (given the benefits). Unlike health care in general. It is not dangerous, unlike many drugs and surgeries. It is not molecular biology. It is barely science (uncovering cause and effect). If the prize were given for research like this year after year, many biologists who now dream of winning a Nobel Prize would stop dreaming. It is not a typical Nobel Prize. They waited so long to award it that the winner became demented. Above all, the prize-winning work was not mainstream medical research. The winner and his collaborator endured “an unremitting barrage of criticism”, unlike almost any other medical researcher.

The award is unflattering to medical ethicists, who did a lot to try to prevent the prize-winning work.

The National Post, a large Canadian newspaper, has a long article about quantitative self-tracking. Overall I like it. It looks at the subject in five or six ways, it focuses on examples of self-tracking rather than people generalizing about it, and, best of all, it includes actual data.

I wasn’t so pleased with the treatment of my work. First, the graph showing my butter data was wrongly labeled and the dividing line between before butter and during butter put in the wrong place. (These mistakes have been fixed.)  Second, the description of my acne experiments — my dermatologist prescribed Medicines A and B, I found that only B worked — misses the point. True, I found that B worked better than A but far more interesting is that Medicine A (an antibiotic) didn’t work at all. Contrary to what I believed. Antibiotics are dangerous. How many people are taking dangerous drugs with no benefit? Third, the written description of my butter research doesn’t say the main point: butter improved my brain function in the sense that I did arithmetic faster. Instead it says I found butter was better than “standing on something painful”. A billion people would like better-functioning brains. None of them care whether butter is better than standing on something painful.

I pointed out the last two problems to Kathryn Carlson, the author of the article. She replied that in the future she would call me to go over the accuracy of the relevant parts of the article. I had considered asking the people who made the graph to show it to me but had thought because they had my graph of the same data in front of them, they couldn’t go wrong.

A good lesson for me.

“The first third is for everyone, the second third is for experts, and the final third is for the lecturer.” Haha! From the excellent BBC documentary The Story of Maths.