Seth's Blog

• Tonsillectomies are increasing. This article calls them “unnecessary”. In fact, cutting off part of the immune system is likely to be harmful.
• Doubts about Johns Hopkins genetics research (via Robb Wolf)
• The bad record of heart surgery. “Angioplasty can save the lives of heart-attack patients. But for patients with stable coronary disease, who comprise a large share of angioplasty patients? It has not been shown to extend life expectancy by a day . . . and it’s done a million times a year in this country [America].” American health care is like a bad dream.
• Why aren’t birth control pills available without a prescription? ”The current arrangement forces women to go to the doctor at least once a year . . .  That demand may suit doctors’ paternalist instincts and financial interests, but it doesn’t serve patients’ needs.”
• Cancer: the importance of what surrounds a cell (its “microenvironment”).

Thanks to Nandalal and Bryan Castañeda.

In response to allegations that Terry Deacon, a Berkeley professor, plagiarized from Alicia Juarrero, a professor at a community college, UC Berkeley created a website that (among other things) tried to smear Michael Lissack, one of the accusers. Less obvious is that the committee that investigated the allegations ignored their core: The overlap with Juarrero is relentless. It goes on and on. Juarrero explained this to me when I asked her what she thought of the committee report:

I’m disappointed, but not surprised. Not sure what the difference is between “reckless” (which their definition of plagiarism includes) and “negligent” (which they critiqued as a “novel interpretation” of plagiarism). I’ll tell you how my cri de coeur spreadsheet came about: as I read Deacon [Incomplete Nature] I got angrier and angrier, so I decided to start the spreadsheet. The index in my own book [Dynamics in Action] is very bad (my fault, my inexperience) and so I was having a hard time finding the parallel material in my own work. I knew I had said something to that effect somewhere in the book but couldn’t remember where and couldn’t find the entry in my own index. But suddenly, a pattern emerged: All I had to do was read on a few pages or paragraphs further down from the previous “problem,” and there would be the next item. This happened over and over again in huge chunks of the work (which I highlighted to point out the big chunks of seriatim similarities) — it’s the seriatimness (!) that’s so damning and to me, clear evidence this wasn’t just someone who vaguely remembered what I had said in a talk and then reconstructed the ideas for himself. The sheer number and sequential nature of the similarities are just too improbable to be a coincidence, or two people working in the same field. He was quite clever about it. He hid it with neologisms, talking about whole-part instead of top-down causality, insisting that self-organization is not enough (and then turning around in advocating it), etc. And, of course, not discussing intentional action, which is the explicit subject of my book. (more…)

Terry Deacon is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. I have blogged about the accusation of plagiarism  (using Alicia Juarrero’s ideas without citing her) against him. In addition to the website accusing him of plagiarism, there is now a website at berkeley.edu (UC Berkeley) meant to restore his reputation. It contains the report of a UC Berkeley committee that concluded there was not enough evidence to be sure Deacon had gotten certain ideas from Juarerro, whom he had heard talk about them. Except in one instance, they could also not conclude the opposite — that he did not get certain ideas from Juarrero. There wasn’t enough evidence to be sure of that, either.

The new website attempts to discredit Michael Lissack, one of Deacon’s accusers. Here, in its entirety, is how the website describes Lissack:

(more…)

• Failure of global warming predictions. “The Met Office is unrepentant.“
• Radiation deficiency? There hasn’t been anything new about radiation hormesis in years (not counting Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile), but it is so important I will keep mentioning it.
• Unlikely fermented food: natto-coffee gelatin sandwich.
• More about the Weber heart transplant story
• Wide-ranging plagiarism by head of Toronto school board

• American Geophysical Union honors Peter Gleick.
• What does using SPSS say about you? (Via Marginal Revolution). I disagree that R users “do not care about aesthetics.” R can make much nicer graphs than other packages.
• Does the Daily Mail website get 100 million unique visitors per month? If so, did Michael Jackson sell one billion records?
• IRB difficulties, social science division
• Unsafe injections: “This can’t happen in the United States, this is a Third World thing.”
• What medication was Lanza on? “It may well turn out that knowing what kinds of guns he used isn’t nearly as important as what kind of drugs he used.”
• Aaron Swartz in his own words.

Thanks to Patrick Vlaskovits.

The panel that chose the winners of the first John Maddox Prize — Colin Blakemore, a British psychologist, Tracey Brown (Sense About Science), Phil Campbell (Nature), and Brenda Maddox — deserve a prize for Most Contentious Award. The Maddox Prize is supposed to be awarded to people who have excelled at:

any kind of public activity, including all forms of writing, speaking and public engagement, in any of the following areas:

• Addressing misleading information about scientific or medical issues in any forum.
• Bringing sound evidence to bear in a public or policy debate.
• Helping people to make sense of a complex scientific issue.

The first winners, announced in November, were Simon Wessely, a British psychiatrist, and Fang Shi-min, a Chinese journalist. Criticism of Fang is here. Criticism of Wessely is here (in the comments) and here. One of his papers is here. Wessely is best known for promoting the use of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat people with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). In particular, “he and his colleagues demonstrated substantial overlap in symptoms between chronic fatigue syndrome and clinical depression. . . . He subsequently developed a treatment approach using cognitive-behavioural therapy techniques, which in many cases brought about substantial improvement.”

The puzzle is that this is considered significant. Maybe people with CFS are depressed because they have CFS? Maybe this is why CBT helps them? A statement explaining the reward does not answer this objection. As for Fang, I have no idea if he deserves the prize. I would be surprised if members of the prize committee could judge for themselves the accuracy and value of his work.

• Interview with Jane Jacobs about The Nature of Economies. “Canada should seriously study Iceland.”
• A month with no electric light. The post is titled “a month with no artificial light” but candles are used.
• Adventures in nutritional therapy. “A record of my successes and failures trying to solve a bunch of health annoyances without resorting to prescription drugs.” I’ve linked here before but there’s lots of new stuff.
• Did you know that the inventor of the Heimlich maneuver did AIDS research?
• Falling off the 5:2 diet program (fasting 2 days per week), popularized by the Horizon TV program Eat Fast and Live Longer. It produced only a little weight loss and the other benefits were invisible.
• Great article about the connection between childhood lead exposure and adult crime rate.

Thanks to Hal Pashler.

• A Mathematician’s Lament about how mathematics is taught (pdf). A little abstract. What about student diversity?
• Ten strange self-experiments.  One is different from the rest. “As a teenager, Frederick Hoelzel adopted a strange method of weight-loss. He curbed his appetite by eating non-caloric food substitutes such as corn cobs . . . . His favorite meal was surgical cotton cut up into small pieces, which became part of his daily diet.”
• More about the Terrence Deacon case
• Denmark rescinds fat tax
• Interview with Marty Makary about his book Unaccountable. Medical mistakes, he says, are the #3 cause of death in the United States.

Thanks to Casey Manion.

• Unusual fermented foods, such as shio koji (fermented salt, sort of)
• David Healy talk about problems with evidence-based medicine. Example of Simpson’s paradox in suicide rates.
• The ten worst mistakes of DSM-5. This is miserably argued. The author has two sorts of criticisms: 1. Narrow a diagnosis (e.g., autism): People who need treatment won’t get it! 2. Widen a diagnosis (e.g., depression) or add a new one (many examples): This will cause fads and over-medication! It isn’t clear how to balance the two goals (helping people get treatment, avoiding fads and over-medication) nor why the various changes being criticized will produce more bad than good. Allen Frances, the author, was chair of the committee in charge of DSM-4. He could have written: “When we wrote DSM-4, we made several mistakes . . . . The committee behind DSM-5 has not learned from our mistakes. . . .” That would have been more convincing. That the chair of the committee behind DSM-4, in spite of feeling strongly about it, cannot persuasively criticize DSM-5 speaks volumes.
• The Lying Dutchman. “Very few social psychologists make stuff up, but he was working in a discipline where cavalier use of data was common. This is perhaps the main finding of the three Dutch academic committees which investigated his fraud. The committees found many bad practices: researchers who keep rerunning an experiment until they get the right result, who omit inconvenient data, misunderstand statistics, don’t share their data, and so on.”

• The Data Vigilante
• Unnecessary wisdom tooth extractions
• How American medicine is destroying itself (their title, not mine). “Look at the “breakthroughs” that have been predicted for such scientific sure things as stem-cell technology and medical genetics—but have yet to be realized. . . Our [= American medicine's] main achievements today consist of devising ways to marginally extend the lives of the very sick.”
• New kind of light bulb, matches sunlight much better. I believe building lighting will eventually  match sunlight during the day and not match it (removing the blue light that controls circadian clocks, such as the clock that puts you to sleep) after sundown. Improving sleep and health.
• Exposure to pesticides used to purify water correlated with allergies. Water with fewer microbes may be more dangerous than water with more microbes.
• Diabetes: the epidemic. Unlike other major causes of death — heart disease, stroke, and cancer — diabetes is increasing quickly.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Alex Chernavsky.