On the 8 Spot

I know only smart people read this blog but I think I have to give the context or subtext of this article. I am assuming that  Kristoff highlighted that the two doctors in the 3 doctor panels were both appointees of former president bush to inform the readers of how grave these results/reviews appear to be. The Bush appointees have had a long reputation proven time and time again of an ideological problem with regulation and in general government intervention of any kind. To declare make a report like this is akin to a climate change skeptic (the rational evidence based ones) warning against climate change. Now my problem with this is what the fuck do I drink when I travel?  damn.

Traditionally, we reduce cancer risks through regular doctor visits, self-examinations and screenings such as mammograms. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests other eye-opening steps as well, such as giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.

In particular, the report warns about exposures to chemicals during pregnancy, when risk of damage seems to be greatest. Noting that 300 contaminants have been detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, the study warns that: “to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’ ”

It’s striking that this report emerges not from the fringe but from the mission control of mainstream scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel. Established in 1971, this is a group of three distinguished experts who review America’s cancer program and report directly to the president.

One of the seats is now vacant, but the panel members who joined in this report are Dr. LaSalle Leffall Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Both were originally appointed to the panel by former President George W. Bush.

“We wanted to let people know that we’re concerned, and that they should be concerned,” Professor Leffall told me.

The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary.

“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

via Op-Ed Columnist – New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer – NYTimes.com.

The PLoS One study, conducted by Duarte Viana and colleagues at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, Portugal, showed that rats were able to cooperate and adjust tactics depending on the strategy of their opponent, when put in a Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario. The results shattered the idea that only humans can solve the Prisoner’s Dilemma – and may bode a whole new approach to how we think about intelligence in other species.

via Amazing rats « Naturally Selected.

I’ve written about this before but seeing that the MTRCB is still in the process of engaging in a pissing match with ABS-CBN I’m posting about how being a repeater (the “insult” hurled by Rosanna Roces on the teachers) is actually taken in light of evidence with DI (Direct Instruction) is a convoluted form of praise. To be a repeater is a form of acceptance for most teachers. I am unremarkable. I am a cog. I am a replaceable cog. To accept this is in some ways accepting that student’s learning is more important than the sense of validation that people crave from other people. Truly heroic.

In Super Crunchers, Ian Ayres argues that just such a method exists.  Overall, Super Crunchers is a light but entertaining account of how large amounts of data and cheap computing power are improving forecasting and decision making in social science, government and business.  I enjoyed the book.  Chapter 7, however, was a real highlight.

Ayres argues that large experimental studies have shown that the teaching method which works best is Direct Instruction (here and here are two non-academic discussions which summarizes much of the same academic evidence discussed in Ayres).  In Direct Instruction the teacher follows a script, a carefully designed and evaluated script.  As Ayres notes this is key:

DI is scalable.  Its success isn’t contingent on the personality of some uber-teacher….You don’t need to be a genius to be an effective DI teacher.  DI can be implemented in dozens upon dozens of classrooms with just ordinary teachers.  You just need to be able to follow the script.

Contrary to what you might think, the data also show that DI does not impede creativity or self-esteem.  The education establishment, however, hates DI because it is a threat to the power and prestige of teaching, they prefer the model of teacher as hero.  As Ayres says “The education establishment is wedded to its pet theories regardless of what the evidence says.”  As a result they have fought it tooth and nail so that “Direct Instruction, the oldest and most validated program, has captured only a little more than 1 percent of the grade-school market.”

Posted by Alex Tabarrok on September 27, 2007 at 08:20 AM

via Marginal Revolution: Heroes are not Replicable.

Read the whole thing!

Adventures in online advertising, part I

by Dean Karlan

We at IPA have recently been delving into the world of online advertising to help us spread the gospel of rigorous impact research. Being who we are, we could not resist this opportunity to run a field experiment. We designed one that would help us optimize our advertising strategy while also settling an important score: which academic institution's rep pulls the most weight in cyberspace? Our ad was simple:

Poverty Research

Breakthroughs to Fight Poverty

By [randomized] Researchers

via Adventures in online advertising, part I | Innovations for Poverty Action.

If you are in anyway interested in gene patents (we should all be) read the whole thing!

A federal judge on Monday struck down patents on two genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The decision, if upheld, could throw into doubt the patents covering thousands of human genes and reshape the law of intellectual property

via Judge Invalidates Human Gene Patent – NYTimes.com.

Automatic, unconscious self-control

The results showed that, when participants were thinking concretely, they tended to unconsciously see candy bars in a positive light and apples in a negative light. But this was reversed when participants were thinking abstractly. Just as predicted, abstract thinking automatically made people unconsciously think of candy bars as the devil’s own food.

To back this up they asked participants in the two conditions whether they would like an apple or a candy bar, right now. They found that when participants were thinking in a concrete low-level way, they chose the apple over the candy bar only 50% of the time. But when they were thinking abstractly this percentage shot up to 76%. Not bad for such a simple manipulation.

via How to Increase Your Self-Control Without Really Trying | PsyBlog.

Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour

Category: Consciousness • Psychology
Posted on: March 22, 2010 8:30 AM, by Ed Yong

Like it or not, the golden arches of McDonalds are one of the most easily recognised icons of the modern world. The culture they represent is one of instant gratification and saved time, of ready-made food that can be bought cheaply and eaten immediately. Many studies have looked at the effects of these foods on our waistlines, but their symbols and brands are such a pervasive part of our lives that you’d expect them to influence the way we think too.

And so they do – Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe have found that fast food can actually induce haste and impatience, in ways that have nothing to do with eating. They showed that subliminal exposure to fast food symbols, such as McDonalds’ golden arches, can actually increase people’s reading speed. Just thinking about these foods can boost our preferences for time-saving goods and even nudge us towards financial decisions that value immediate gains over future returns. Fast food, it seems, is very appropriately named.

via Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour : Not Exactly Rocket Science.

No Comment. hehehe.

The community they look at is a public online forum with free registration, financed by advertisements, in which men grade and categorise their sexual encounters with female escorts. The community appears large with over 10,000 buyers and more than 6000 sellers all of whom use anonymous nicknames. The study covers a period of 6 years from when the community was set up in 2002 until 2008.

The study throws up both expected and unexpected results. Among the expected results is the discovery that the geographical connections between buyers and sellers vary as an inverse square law rather than a power law as in many other internet mediated networks. That’s not so hard to explain given that buyers or sellers have to travel to each other.

Another discovery is that a high rating for a particular sex worker is a good predictor of high ratings in the future. That’s the kind of rich get richer effect that is seen in many internet phenomena (also known as the Matthew effect). However, average or poor ratings don’t seem to affect future ratings either way.

via Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Patterns of Prostitution Captured in Social Network.

Researchers confirmed what others have already established: The less time people spend alone, the greater their sense of well-being. But the point, and the important finding, is the relationship between well-being and substantive conversation over small talk. They found that people who have more deep conversations than chit-chat are happier. The happiest people spent less time alone and more time talking, but they also had more than twice as many substantive conversations and one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest people.

via . Chit-chat, happiness, and you

Hehe

Is Weight Loss Associated with Increased Risk of Early Mortality?

Category: Obesity Research
Posted on: March 15, 2010 11:42 AM, by Peter Janiszewski

The current recommendations from major health organizations stipulate that if an individual has a BMI in the obese range (>30 kg/m2), they should be counseled to lose at least 5-10% of their body weight. This advice appears to make some sense given that increasing body weight is generally associated with heightened risk of various diseases, and that reduction of body weight usually improves levels of risk factors for disease (e.g blood pressure, triglycerides, etc). However, the literature has been much more complicated in terms of the effect of weight loss on risk of early mortality.