Month: December 2008

Beijing Shopping (photo mall)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

To get a light meter (to measure the intensity of morning sunlight) I went to Beijing Camera Equipment City (official website). On the ground floor were 50-odd small shops. They sold the stuff in any camera store, except far more various: cameras, lenses, cases, tripods, flashes, and so on. Some specialized by brand (e.g., Canon), some by product (e.g., tripods). About 10 stores sold the light meter I wanted (Sekonic L-308S). One didn’t have it in stock, but they could get it. How long would it take? Five minutes. That is, they would buy it from another vendor and resell it to me. The sequence of prices (in yuan) I was quoted was 1450 ($212), 1300 (same vendor as 1450), 980, 950, 940, 930, 920 ($135). One vendor wouldn’t sell it at 920, so perhaps that was a good price. Online I would have paid about $170.

One store had a discontinued model. The meter in the box (Gossen) didn’t match the box (Sekonic)! I would have gladly bought a Gossen but the manual in the box was for a Sekonic.

The second floor was . . . software. Fancy dresses (often wedding dresses), fancy dresses for children, costume jewelry, frames, colorful textiles, displays of the work of professional photographers. The smallest shop sold bags to carry home a fancy dress. All the photography-related stuff that ordinary photo shops don’t carry.

The Missing Heritability of Height

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In a special section of Nature on personal genomics, Brendan Maher writes:

This year, three groups of researchers scoured the genomes of huge populations (the largest study looked at more than 30,000 people) for genetic variants associated with the height differences. More than 40 turned up.

But there was a problem: the variants had tiny effects. Altogether, they accounted for little more than 5% of height’s heritability — just 6 centimetres by the calculations above. Even though these genome-wide association studies (GWAS) turned up dozens of variants, they did “very little of the prediction that you [can] do just by asking people how tall their parents are”, says Joel Hirschhorn at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led one of the studies. . . .

There could be scarier and more intractable reasons for unaccounted-for heritability that are not even being discussed. “It’s a possibility that there’s something we just don’t fundamentally understand,” Kruglyak says. “That it’s so different from what we’re thinking about that we’re not thinking about it yet.”

Still the mystery continues to draw its sleuths, for Kruglyak as for many other basic-research scientists. “You have this clear, tangible phenomenon in which children resemble their parents,” he says. “Despite what students get told in elementary-school science, we just don’t know how that works.”

I don’t think it’s so mysterious. My self-experimentation led me again and again to find unsuspected environmental causes for various problems. I believe the answer is this: The heritability estimates were overestimates. As one researcher put it, “Heritability estimates are basically what clusters in families, and environment clusters in families.” Variations in environment make far more difference than variation in genes.

What the researchers “don’t fundamentally understand,” I believe, is their own tendency toward religious thinking — the tendency, shared by all of us, to believe what we’re told regardless of the (lack of) evidence for it. The notion that genes make a big difference in practice is one of those beliefs, repeated endlessly by genetics researchers (James Watson is fond of repeating it), that are supported by poor evidence at best. Obesity, it should be obvious, is an environmental disease if there ever was one. Yet Jeffrey Friedman, a researcher at Rockefeller University, is studying the genetic basis of obesity.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Corruption of Doctors by Drug Companies

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Several books about this have appeared recently and are reviewed by Marcia Angell here. It’s a good review, especially a good summary of the books, but I was really surprised by this:

Members of medical school faculties who conduct clinical trials should not accept any payments from drug companies except research support, and that support should have no strings attached, including control by drug companies over the design, interpretation, and publication of research results.

She expects a researcher who depends on drug companies for research support to be honest? Why? If you don’t get favorable results your grant won’t be renewed. Under this system it will be survival of the most corrupt. A reformer proposed this.

I think it’s a lot like too much humanitarian aid. Supply free milk to a needy area for too long and you wipe out the local dairy industry. Judging from this stunning proposal, the drug companies have wiped out whole medical schools. The doctors who work in them are no longer capable of doing independent research. This is worse than corruption, it’s enfeeblement.

A Self-Experimental Near-Miss

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I am developing tests to measure how well my brain is working. Brief tests I can use daily. My experiences with flaxseed oil make me suspect that sometimes our brains work better and/or worse than usual for many hours or days at a time and this goes unnoticed. If these instances of better or worse function could be detected, maybe we could figure out their causes — and thereby improve how well our brains work by getting less bad stuff and more good stuff. In the case of flaxseed oil, I noticed that one morning my balance was much better than usual. I noticed this only because I was doing something unusual: putting on my shoes standing on one foot. I verified that observation with a better test of balance and later found that flaxseed oil improved my performance on several mental tests, such as speeded arithmetic.

One test I am using is a typing test: On each trial I type a random sequence of six letters four times. For example, if the sequence is “rksocn” I would type rksocnrksocnrksocnrksocn”. At the moment the measure of performance is how fast I type the 24-letter sequence. Each session consists of ten trials.

Here are the results so far:

old analysis

Each point is a mean over the ten trials; the error bars show standard errors. I was glad to see there was little sign of learning after the first few sessions. Having to correct for learning would make comparison of different days more difficult.

Because I am collecting a lot of data, I could look at these data more carefully. It took me a little while to do an analysis where I corrected for the difficulty of each string: Some will be easier to type than others. My first attempt at correction involved adding a factor for each letter: does the string contain an “a” (factor 1)? Does the string contain a “b” (factor 2)? And so on. This correction made a big difference: The residual mean square was almost cut in half (= sensitivity was doubled). After correcting for this, I got new estimates and standard errors for each test session:

new analysis

Uh-oh! The new analysis revealed there had been something unusual about the second-to-last test session — my typing had been distinctly slower than usual. Something I ate? Unfortunately, by the time I did this analysis I could no longer remember what might have been different.

Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience

Seth Roberts22 Comments

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.

The Museum of Tap Water (part 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

As I noted earlier, Beijing has a museum devoted to tap water — apparently the only one in the world. Another translation of its name is the Beijing Water Supply Museum. It was incredibly hard to find. None of a dozen people in the neighborhood knew where it was. It is on the grounds of the government company that supplies tap water. While I was there, there was only one other visitor, an American. Like me, he’d noticed it on Google Maps.

I loved it. One of the exhibits was called “10-Day Imperial Approval”. Permission to start the water company (around 1910) was requested from the Emperor. Approval came in a lightning-fast ten days from the Emperor’s mother on yellow paper. Only the Emperor, his father, and his mother were allowed to use yellow in decorative ways. The penalty for breaking this rule was death. In the early days of the water company, slips of paper gave you permission to collect your water in a bucket. A photo of an early president of the company (thin, young, shaved head, high-collar traditional shirt) made him look more like a dashing criminal than a captain of industry.

For anti-terrorist reasons, there was nothing about how the water was processed.

Museums are usually devoted to the rare, beautiful, and intricate, which why a museum of tap water sounds like a joke. When Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker‘s architecture critic, devotes his best-buildings-of-the-year list to nine show-off buildings and an art exhibit — none of them advancing the art of making the houses and workplaces where we spend most of our lives — I am glad to see agreement that something is missing.

The other visitor was in Beijing to visit his sister, a high school exchange student, living with a family that speaks no English, who had checked the wrong box on her visa application and was unable to come home for Christmas. She was having a great time and now wanted to apply to a college with a Flagship Program — you go to the American school for two years and then a Chinese school for the last two years. What a sea change! Americans treat another country as equal. Americans grasp that someone else might have something to teach us. At Berkeley a few years ago, the psychology department had a day-long get-together to discuss various issues. About a meeting about one of them, I suggested that we look at how other departments had handled it; maybe we could learn from them. Bad idea, I was told, they’re supposed to copy us.

Chinese Takeout Beijing Style

Seth Roberts5 Comments

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.

A Chinese Dinner Party

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

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.

The Benefits of Standing: The Clear Vial on the Right

Seth Roberts4 Comments

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.

A Second Opinion: You’ve Been Poisoned by Your Doctor

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

In a wonderful profile of master diagnostician Dr. Thomas Bolte, this especially pleased me:

Many of the patients Bolte sees are victims of iatrogenic, or doctor-caused, illness. Simply put, they have been misdiagnosed, overmedicated to the point of sickness, or given treatment inappropriate to their conditions. On occasion, this has led to shouting matches with more conventional docs, like the dermatologist colleague who burst into Bolte’s office one day and harangued him—in front of another patient—for telling the mom of an acne-ridden teen to stop feeding her child so much junk food. There’s no evidence that diet has anything to do with acne, the dermatologist shouted. Bolte begged to differ and cited the literature. “The pharmaceutical industry has trained even doctors to believe that there’s a pharmaceutical answer to everything,†he says, shrugging.

A large fraction of Bolte’s patients have been poisoned. They get better when the poison is stopped. The mother of a friend of mine was near death — so near that her children decided to put her in a hospice. By mistake her six or seven medicines were stopped. And she recovered! Her medicines were what had been killing her.

The technical term for such horrors is drug interaction.

Thanks to Dave Lull.