Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.

David H. Freedman in The Atlantic:

ScreenHunter_02 Oct. 15 11.10 In 2001, rumors were circulating in Greek hospitals that surgery residents, eager to rack up scalpel time, were falsely diagnosing hapless Albanian immigrants with appendicitis. At the University of Ioannina medical school’s teaching hospital, a newly minted doctor named Athina Tatsioni was discussing the rumors with colleagues when a professor who had overheard asked her if she’d like to try to prove whether they were true—he seemed to be almost daring her. She accepted the challenge and, with the professor’s and other colleagues’ help, eventually produced a formal study showing that, for whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names. “It was hard to find a journal willing to publish it, but we did,” recalls Tatsioni. “I also discovered that I really liked research.” Good thing, because the study had actually been a sort of audition. The professor, it turned out, had been putting together a team of exceptionally brash and curious young clinicians and Ph.D.s to join him in tackling an unusual and controversial agenda.

More here.



Why do women who have anal sex get more orgasms?

William Saletan in Slate:

ScreenHunter_01 Oct. 15 10.44 Last week, I tried to figure out why more women are having anal sex and why it correlates so highly with orgasms. Since 1992, the percentage of women aged 20-24 who say they've tried anal sex has doubled to 40 percent. The percentage of women aged 20-39 who say they've done it in the past year has doubled to more than 20 percent. And 94 percent of women who received anal sex in their last encounter said they reached orgasm—a higher rate of orgasm than was reported by women who had vaginal intercourse or received oral sex.

Why? For obvious reasons—anatomical, evolutionary, and aesthetic—anal sex should, on average, be less attractive and satisfying than vaginal or oral sex. In last week's column, based on new survey data, I inferred that female orgasms caused anal sex rather than the other way around. The other acts reported by women who engaged in anal sex—vaginal intercourse, cunnilingus, partnered masturbation—delivered the orgasms. In turn, these women indulged their male partners' requests for anal sex.

Well, shame on me. Not for talking about sodomy—that taboo seems to be fading fast—but for doubting that women love it. These women are now coming forward to affirm that they're into it for their own pleasure, thank you very much.

More here.

Can there be evidence for God? Jerry Coyne vs. PZ Myers

Jerry Coyne challenges PZ Myers:

JerryCoyne Both Greta Christina and I have written about what sort of evidence would convince us of the existence of a divine celestial being. But maybe P.Z. is a tougher nut to crack. So here’s a challenge to him:

Suppose that you, P.Z., were present at the following events, and they were also witnessed by lots of other skeptical eyewitnesses and, importantly, documented on film: A bright light appears in the heavens and, supported by wingéd angels, a being clad in white robe and sandals descends onto the UMM quad from the sky, accompanied by a pack of apostles with the same names given in the Bible. Loud heavenly music is heard everywhere, with the blaring of trumps. The being, who describes himself as Jesus, puts his hand atop your head, P.Z., and suddenly your arms are turned into tentacles. As you flail about with your new appendages, Jesus asks, “Now do you believe in me?” Another touch on the head and the tentacles disappear and your arms return. Jesus and his pack then repair to the Mayo clinic and, also on film, heal a bunch of amputees (who remain permanently arméd and leggéd after Jesus’s departure). After a while Jesus and his minions, supported by angels, ascend back into the sky with another chorus of music. The heavens swiftly darken, there is thunder, and a single lightning bolt strikes P.Z.’s front yard. Then, just as suddenly, the heavens clear.

Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation—all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces?

More here. And PZ Myers responds with “Eight reasons you won't persuade me to believe in a god”:

Pz_myers I have been challenged by Jerry Coyne, who is unconvinced by my argument that there is no evidence that could convince me of the existence of god. Fair enough, I shall repeat it and expand upon it.

  1. The question “Is there a god?” is a bad question. It's incoherent and undefined; “god” is a perpetually plastic concept that promoters twist to evade evaluation. If the whole question is nebulous noise, how can any answer be acceptable? The only way to win is by not playing the game.

  2. There's a certain unfairness in the evidence postulated for god. I used the example of a 900 foot tall Jesus appearing on earth; there is no religion (other than the addled hallucinations of Oral Roberts) that ever proposes such a thing, so such a being would not prove the existence of any prior concept of god, and will even contradict many religions. It's rather like proposing a crocoduck as a test of evolution.

More here.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

How Writers Can Turn Their Archives into eBooks

Carl Zimmer in The Atlantic:

BrainCuttings We writers always have lots of pieces in the can — stories killed for no good reason, pieces we wrote for the hell of it over a crazed weekend. In my case, I realized I had the makings of a short book about the brain. I write a column about neuroscience for Discover, and earlier this year I also wrote a piece for Playboy on some wild-eyed notions of how you'll be able to upload your brain into a computer in the not-too-distant future. Fortunately, both Discover and Playboy carry on the noble tradition of returning the rights to articles to their authors, rather than treating them as work for hire. I could bring together some of these pieces as an eBook and see if it would become something that people might actually want to buy.

The first thing I did was consult with Charles Nix, my friend and personal book design god. I cobbled together a Word file and sent it to him to show him what I had in mind. It took him a couple hours to transform it into a bare-bones eBook. If I wanted, I could have uploaded it to Kindle right then and there. But I knew that the manuscript was far from ready. I updated the older pieces with new science about the brain, cleaned up clumsy language, and sliced out repetitions.

As I learned about eBooks, I decided that they were not something I could handle completely on my own. I was not willing to abandon the most important things that go into publishing books, such as good design. Yes, we now live in an age where you can upload a Microsoft Word file directly to an eBook seller. But then you're the author of a Microsoft Word file. Who wants to be that?

More here.

Thursday Poem

When Autumn Came

This is the way that autumn came to the trees:
it stripped them down to the skin,
left their ebony bodies naked.
It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,
scattered them over the ground.
Anyone could trample them out of shape
undisturbed by a single moan of protest.

The birds that herald dreams
were exiled from their song,
each voice torn out of its throat.
They dropped into the dust
even before the hunter strung his bow.

Oh, God of May have mercy.
Bless these withered bodies
with the passion of your resurrection;
make their dead veins flow with blood again.

Give some tree the gift of green again.
Let one bird sing

by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
translation Naomi Lazard
from The True Subject;
Princeton University Press, 1987

Climate change, Deforestation and Corruption Combine to Drown Pakistan

Nathanial Gronewold in Scientific American:

Climate-change-deforestation-combine_1 Tariq Yousafzai, a water and environmental engineer with detailed knowledge of his country's water infrastructure, sees evidence of climate change in the flood disaster that inundated one-fifth of his country. But a more immediate concern of his is the massive deforestation that has silted up the waterways and left Pakistan more vulnerable to storms than ever.

The scene at this reservoir created by the Tarbela Dam and in areas to its north vividly shows what he's talking about. Long after the rains ended, the water level is still almost even with the rim of the dam, seemingly ready to spill over at any moment. Equally striking is the murky color of the water itself.

More here.

the euthyphro experiment

Socrates-Confronts-the-High-Minded-Euthyphro-e1268002568230

Hello, I’m God. Bet you didn’t expect to be talking to me on the interweb (unless, perhaps, your name is Neale Donald Walshe). I wonder if you’re one of those insufferable new atheist types? If so, I reckon you’re probably feeling a bit daft right now! I think I’d better get something clear before we start. I see myself as being a God in the Abrahamic tradition of God(s). What does this mean? Well, let’s put it this way, if you think that God is just another word for nature, or that I’m actually a pink bunny, or somesuch, then probably this activity isn’t for you. Anyhow, let’s get to it. It’s been drawn to my attention – by myself! – that a long time ago a fellow named Euthyphro got into a muddle, and ever since there has been some confusion about my nature. So I thought I’d ask you a few questions – you know, to see if we can get things straight.

more from Philosophy Experiments here.

The Missing

J. Malcolm Garcia in Guernica:

GhaafarsSon_575 Amina kept all the flowers her husband Masood gave her over the years. She kept the first bottle of perfume, the first scarf. She believes he will be back as strongly as she believes in God. Tomorrow or the day after or next week or next month. She doesn’t know when, but someday. She must believe this to stay motivated. If she is a fool, okay, let her be a fool. For years she was unaware of the miseries of the world. She decorated their Rawalpindi home, painted pictures and wrote poetry. She never read newspapers. They met in 1977 when she stopped by a gallery he administered and inquired about hanging some of her paintings. He could organize things in an instant.

They married and had children. They loved to go hiking on weekends. They enjoyed impulsively packing up their son and daughter and driving into the countryside with no specific destination in mind. When it snowed in the mountains they would go skiing on a whim, leaving behind the congestion of city life with all its problems and politics. Masood was openly critical of corruption and of his government’s ties with the War on Terror, but otherwise he was not a political person.

Nor was she—until he disappeared.

More here.

Love takes up where pain leaves off

From PhysOrg:

Lovetakesupw Intense, passionate feelings of love can provide amazingly effective pain relief, similar to painkillers or such illicit drugs as cocaine, according to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study.

“When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of , there are significant alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of ,” said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Pain Management, associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of the study, which will be published online Oct. 13 in . “We're beginning to tease apart some of these reward systems in the and how they influence pain. These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine — a primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward and motivation.” Scientists aren't quite yet ready to tell patients with chronic pain to throw out the painkillers and replace them with a passionate love affair; rather, the hope is that a better understanding of these neural-rewards pathways that get triggered by love could lead to new methods for producing pain relief.

More here.

the human chain

TLS_McDonald_730184a

Human Chain is a book that is serious about its own visionary burden. Like Caolite inside his fairy hill, the poet remembers being in a dugout “under the hill, out of the day / But faced towards the daylight, holding hands” where an imagined camera angle will “Discover us against weird brightness”. The light here, and in other poems, is that of “the dome of the sky” over Virgil’s Lethe, and some of the finest achievements in the volume look straight into that efflorescence, not least the central sequence, “Route 110”, in which the Aeneid ghosts memories of Heaney’s home and youth, ending with “the age of births”, where a grandchild is “one / Whose long wait on the shaded bank is ended”. Family, and the love in a family, provide Heaney with his own governing pietas. The human chain of the title is partly that formed by the generations, and if this gives a poignancy to the poet’s vivid evocations of memory – the kinds of long look at the past which he knows can feel like a last look – it also makes triumphant sense of the centrality of the Virgilian father to Heaney’s imaginative scheme. Heaney knows that if memory is a way of meeting the paternal shade again, it is at the same time the confirmation of ultimate parting – that the riverbank field may offer a glimpse of the future, in the generations to come, but must also confirm the finality of oblivion in the waters of Lethe.

more from Peter McDonald at the TLS here.

The Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter

From his childhood in segregated Mobile, Alabama, to his run-ins with a nay-saying scientific establishment, the engineer Lonnie Johnson has never paid much heed to those who told him what he could and couldn’t accomplish. Best known for creating the state-of-the-art Super Soaker squirt gun, Johnson believes he now holds the key to affordable solar power.

Logan Ward in The Atlantic:

ScreenHunter_03 Oct. 14 11.30 In March 2003, the independent inventor Lonnie Johnson faced a roomful of high-level military scientists at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. Johnson had traveled there from his home in Atlanta, seeking research funding for an advanced heat engine he calls the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter, or JTEC (pronounced “jay-tek”). At the time, the JTEC was only a set of mathematical equations and the beginnings of a prototype, but Johnson had made the tantalizing claim that his device would be able to turn solar heat into electricity with twice the efficiency of a photovoltaic cell, and the Office of Naval Research wanted to hear more.

Projected onto the wall was a PowerPoint collage summing up some highlights of Johnson’s career: risk assessment he’d done for the space shuttle Atlantis; work on the nuclear power source for NASA’s Galileo spacecraft; engineering help on the tests that led to the first flight of the B-2 stealth bomber; the development of an energy-dense ceramic battery; and the invention of a remarkable, game-changing weapon that had made him millions of dollars—a weapon that at least one of the men in the room, the father of two small children, recognized immediately as the Super Soaker squirt gun.

Mild-mannered and bespectacled, Johnson opened his presentation by describing the idea behind the JTEC. The device, he explained, would split hydrogen atoms into protons and electrons, and in so doing would convert heat into electricity. Most radically, it would do so without the help of any moving parts.

More here.

Amos Oz and Sari Nusseibeh on Mideast Peace

Sari Nusseibeh and Amos Oz were jointly awarded the Siegfried Unseld Prize in Berlin on September 28, 2010. “A Tragic Struggle” and “The Magic Within Us” are drawn from their acceptance speeches.

From the New York Review of Books:

A Tragic Struggle by Amos Oz

ScreenHunter_02 Oct. 14 11.24 When I was small my parents told me: One day, not during our lifetimes but during yours, our Jerusalem will develop into a real city. I didn’t understand what they were telling me. Jerusalem was the only real city in my life then—even Tel Aviv was just a dream. But today I know that when my parents said “real city,” they meant a city with a river in the middle and bridges over it—a European city. And in Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s they nearly succeeded in creating a little Europe, with good manners—Frau Doktor and Herr Direktor, peace and quiet between two and four in the afternoon, and red shingled roofs. I know that my parents’ love for Europe is called unrequited love. And I know that this feeling of love unrequited by the land of one’s birth is also felt by millions of Israeli Jews who fled or were expelled from Islamic countries—from Iraq, Morocco, and Egypt. Jewish Israel is a refugee camp. Palestine is also a refugee camp.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragic struggle between two victims of Europe—the Arabs were the victims of imperialism, colonialism, repression, and humiliation. The Jews were the victims of discrimination, persecution, and finally of a genocide without parallel in history. On the face of it, two victims, especially two victims of the same oppressor, should become brothers. But the truth, both when it comes to individuals and when it comes to countries, is that some of the worst fights break out between two victims of the same oppressor. The two sons of an abusive father will each see in his brother the face of his cruel father.

More here.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Michael Dummett on Frege

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Gottlob Frege was one of the founders of the movement known as analytic philosophy. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Frege expert Michael Dummett explains why he is so important for philosophy.

Listen to Michael Dummett on Frege (13 mins 20 secs)

Click on the grey panel below to hear a short anecdote: Michael Dummett recalls meeting Ludwig Wittgenstein for the first and only time:

When Dummett met Wittgenstein (1min 27 secs)

China, India, and the West

0691129940-195Simon Tay in Foreign Affairs:

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the economies of North America and Europe remain fragile while those of Asia continue to grow. This is especially true in the cases of China and India, which both boast near double-digit rates of growth and have therefore inspired confidence around the region. But too many commentators discuss China and India with breathless admiration — extrapolating, for example, that growth will continue at a breakneck pace for decades. In doing so, they treat emerging economies as if they were already world powers, echoing the hubris that preceded the Asian currency crisis of 1997-98.

Pranab Bardhan's Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India is a welcome corrective to that view. It succinctly summarizes the challenges facing China and India, including environmental degradation, unfavorable demographics, poor infrastructure, and social inequality — threats that the leaders of China and India understand. Even as others have lavished praise on China, and Chinese citizens have grown stridently nationalistic, Chinese President Hu Jintao and others in the current leadership have been cautionary. As Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in 2007, the country's development is “unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” In India, meanwhile, although the government has orchestrated campaigns to highlight the country's growth and reform, its plans to develop roads and other infrastructure are a prominent and expensive recognition of the country's enduring gaps.

A more contentious claim offered by Bardhan is that internal reform — not the global market — has been the key driver of both countries' growth. Rather than focusing on India's information technology sector or China's export-led industrialization, Bardhan highlights less glamorous domestic sectors. Examining the rural economy — in which a majority of Chinese and Indians work — he concludes that growth is driven from below. He shows, for example, how China's steepest reductions in poverty had already happened by the mid-1980s, before the country began attracting sizable foreign trade and investment. The main causes of China's decline in poverty, Bardhan argues, were investments in infrastructure and reforms to town and village enterprises, which are predominantly agricultural.

The book thus suggests that the fates of China and India are in their own hands — and do not depend on the West, as many assume. If that is correct, then these giants can continue to grow despite the global economic crisis, towing much of Asia along with them. This would have great implications for geopolitics and economics. To the contrary, however, neither China nor India can ignore external conditions.

On France, Gobineau, Colonialism and the Roma

Muncean_468x117 Valeriu Nicolae in Eurozine:

On 28 July, French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced a series of measures to deal with Roma communities in France. These include plans to shut down around 300 illegal camps, the expulsion from France of all Roma from Romania and Bulgaria who have committed public offences, an exchange of policemen between France and Romania, and targeted checks by the fiscal authorities on Roma who possess expensive SUVs.

Two days later, in a declaration on the Roma, Sarkozy said he wanted to revoke the French citizenship of immigrants with French passports who endanger the life of police officers. The government then started to fly Roma back to Romania. Most were ineptly “bribed” not to return with euro 300, a measure that makes little sense given that most of these Roma, just as high-ranking French officials, will promise whatever it takes to take advantage of whatever is on offer. The collection of biometric data in an effort to ensure Roma do not return to France is both expensive and irrelevant.

Blatant racism

Targeting Roma alone – or, indeed, migrants from Romania, Bulgaria or elsewhere – cannot be seen as anything but racist. If the same policies were applied equally to all French citizens involved in cases of bribery, nepotism, corruption, financial mischief, embezzlement – fancy words for robbery and other crimes – a good part of the French political class would have to be expelled or lose their citizenship.

If we believe French media coverage of the Bettencourt scandal, in which it is alleged that the French President received campaign funds above the legal limit, even the president himself might be sent back to Hungary or Greece. Former junior ministers in his cabinet, one of whom flew to Martinique on a charter jet for just over euro 116 000, and another who bought over euro 12 000 worth of cigars, all paid for with public money, might also be forced to emigrate if the French government were to treat all criminals equally.

Wednesday Poem

My Legacy

The business man the acquirer vast,
After assiduous years surveying results, preparing for
…… departure,
Devises house and lands to his children, bequeaths stocks,
…… goods, funds for school or hospital,
Leaves money to certain companions to buy tokens,
…… souvenirs of gems and gold.

But, I, my life surveying, closing,
With nothing to show to devise from its idle years,
Nor houses nor lands, nor tokens of gems or gold for my
……. friends,
Yet certain remembrances of the war for you, and after you,
And little souvenirs of camps and soldiers, with my love,
I bind together and bequeath in this bundle of songs.

by Walt Whitman
from Walt Whitman Complete Poetry and Collected Prose
Viking Press, 1982

Cancer-gene testing ramps up

From Nature:

Cancer_Genomes-8920 In an approach that many doctors and scientists hope will form the medical care of the future, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has for the past year and a half been offering people with cancer a novel diagnostic test. Instead of assessing tumours for a single mutation that will indicate whether a drug is likely to work or not, the hospital tests patients for some 150 mutations in more than a dozen cancer-causing genes, with the results being used to guide novel treatments, clinical trials and basic research. This form of personalized medicine tailors treatments on the basis of the molecular and genetic characteristics of a patient's cancer cells, potentially improving the treatment's outcome.

Now Britain is set to test whether an entire health-care system is ready for the approach. Plans were unveiled this week to deploy broad genetic testing for selected cancer patients in Britain's government-run health-care provider, the National Health Service (NHS). This form of 'stratified medicine' uses genetic information to group patients according to their likely response to a particular treatment.

More here.