On the 8 Spot

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.

If the various churches don’t get their act together we are going to have a century that is defined with tension between religous groups and between theist and non-theist. I ‘ve said this before but I feel that the line is about even that religions of any kind would one day be treated as simple organizations such as corporations and non-profits, and religiosity of any kind would be viewed more as a mental disability like alcoholism , or any form of substance abuse.

Neurosurgical patients get closer to God

Category: Neuroscience • Religion
Posted on: February 27, 2010 3:58 PM, by Mo

REMOVAL of specific parts of the brain can induce increases in a personality trait which predisposes people to spirituality, according to a new clinical study by Italian researchers. The new research, published earlier this month in the journal Neuron, provides evidence that some brain structures are associated with spiritual thinking and feelings, and hints at individual differences that might make some people more prone than others to spirituality.

via ScienceBlogs.com here

Remember those professors in college who dumped 4 long exam results at the end of the last meeting, or even worse those professors who didn’t give results at all. Well there is now empirical evidence that they were hurting your performance.

Kettle and Haubl asked 271 students to give a four-minute presentation as part of a university course. Their performance would be judged by their peers and it would count towards their final grade. The students were told about the date of their presentation and when they would hear about the results, with waiting times ranging from a few hours to 17 days later.

The duo found that students who anticipated the quickest feedback achieved the higher grades. On average, those who knew they would hear back later on in the day scored within the top 40% of the group. Those who thought they would hear back 17 days later received scores that skirted the bottom 40%. It seems that even the anticipation of quicker feedback can boost performance.

via Quicker feedback for better performance : Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Everytime I read something like this. It reminds me of how much Bush II policies have paused stem-cell research’s success. I don’t know but I have a feeling that this may be his greatest blunder , and if you were awake the pass 10 years you know the blunders are immense.

Add one more name to the ever growing list of diseases that have been defeated by stem cell treatments: HIV. That’s right, according to a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, a stem cell transplant performed in Germany has unexpectedly removed all signs of HIV from a 42 year old American patient. The unnamed white male was treated two years ago for Leukemia with a dose of donor stem cells and his HIV RNA count has dropped to zero and remained there since. While the treatment was for Leukemia, Dr. Gero Hutter and colleagues at the Charite Universitatsmedizen in Berlin had selected the stem cell donor for his HIV resistant genes. While there are still many questions unanswered, this is the first such case of stem cells treating HIV that has been reported in a NEJM-caliber publication. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a “cure” for HIV/AIDS, but it is certainly a remarkable and promising find. There’s more you need to know about the situation, so read on.

via Stem Cell Transplant Defeats HIV? Patient Still HIV Free After 2 Years | Singularity Hub.

Nice interesting read.

Among other things, friends are people you count on to come to your aid when you need help. If you were at a bar and a stranger started acting aggressively towards you, for example, you would expect your friends to rush over to help you rather than just stand there, mojito in hand. Contrary to our feelings of human exceptionalism, however, ours is not the only species of primate to create and maintain friendships.

For years primatologists have been puzzling over “friendship” in baboons. Across baboon species lactating females keep up close social relationships with unrelated adult males. The females are not reproductively available, and by devoting much of their attention to these females the males significantly reduce their opportunities to mate with other females, so why are these males so concerned with mothers and infants? What is the function of this behavior?

Several hypotheses have been forwarded. Perhaps friendship is a defense against infanticide, a way to reduce harassment of mothers and their infants by other group members, or a way for mothers to get their infants to bond with particular males so that they will continue to reap social benefits (such as food sharing and support during fights) as they mature. Of these, however, friendship as an anti-infanticide mechanism appears to be best-supported, especially since infanticide is a major cause of mortality among infant Chacma baboons. Baboon social groups are centered around female families that stick together, but males often move from one group to another. As a result immigrant males occasionally supplant the group’s dominant male, and when this happens among Chacma baboons the new alpha picks off the group’s infants one-by-one (hence the group’s females come back into estrus sooner). In such situations a friendship between a male and female baboon can make the difference between life and death for her offspring.

via “You just call out my name…”: Friendships in Male and Female Baboons : Laelaps.

I constanly site this during conversations with friends about traffic.  Looks just about right.

1. Road pricing trial results in the Netherlands.

Consistent with the themes in this morning’s transportation forum, road pricing is a growing tool being used by cities and states around the world to change behaviors drivers and shift the balance of transportation from car-dependent to a more multi-modal form system. Six month ago, IBM and NXP Semiconductors began a pilot in Eindhoven to implement variable road pricing based on traffic demand, time of day and type of car (i.e., size + environmental impact of vehicle). Following are some insights from the pilot:

• * Seventy percent of drivers improved their driving behavior by avoiding rush-hour traffic and using highways instead of local roads.
• * On average, these drivers in the trial saw an improvement of more than 16 percent in average cost per kilometer.
• * A clear system of incentives is critical to changing driving behavior.
• * Instant feedback provided via an On-Board Unit display on the price of the road chosen and total charges for the trip is essential to maximizing the change in behavior.

via Quick notes: Road pricing in the Netherlands & using math to reduce traffic | A Smarter Planet Blog.

Wish I’m negative for this gene. I consume about 1-3L of coffee a day, and I measure coffee by the table spoon not teaspoon so this would be ncie to know!!!!

The Office of Managament and Budget said that Orszag was traveling today and couldn’t provide additional details-including whether he’d learned anything about his genetic predisposition to other diseases. But ScienceInsider guesses that he was referring to a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) called rs762551 that modulates a caffeine metabolizing enzyme in the liver. Those with a “slow” metabolizing version who drink a few cups of coffee a day are at a higher risk of heart attacks.

via The Latest Buzz: Orszag Budgets for Caffeine Genetic Marker – ScienceInsider.

Read the part of the post not quoted here. This is interesting but I think that a major problem to this is that cabbies are like salesmen in a way their actions translate to easily measurable stuff, other professions on the other hand are not as easy to measure. Take for instance bankers. How do you isolate how hard they work versus the money they get. The structure of compensation really is counter to what we want to measure. This is I believe the most important factor : Most of what people do cannot be tracked to what they earn. I believe how easy it is to see our actions translated to income  the easier the more similar people become to the actions of the New York cabbies.

Taxis and Taxes

What’s the difference between high earners and New York cabbies? This question is central to the issue of whether the new 50% tax rate will actually raise revenue.

I ask it because of this new paper (early version here) by Orley Ashenfelter and colleagues.

They studied how New York cab drivers changed their labour supply in response to the higher incomes caused by fare rises. And they found a negative elasticity, of around minus 0.2. That means a 10% rise in cabbies’ revenue per mile caused them to work 2% less.

This means we have a backward-bending labour supply curve, because the income effect outweighs the substitution effect.

Now, if what’s true of cabbies is also true of bankers, this implies that higher taxes on the rich might indeed raise revenue. This is because the immediate effect of such taxes is to reduce peoples’ incomes, so if the income effect is powerful – as it is for New York cabbies – they will work harder to recoup the money.

Hence my question: in what ways do high earners differ from cabbies?

via Stumbling and Mumbling: Taxis and Taxes.

Working Right

Research reveals that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the key to loving what you do. So how do you get them? There are different answers to this question, but the strategy that I keep emphasizing on Study Hacks has two clear steps:

1. Master a skill that is rare and valuable.

2. Cash in the career capital this generates for the right rewards.

The world doesn’t owe you happiness. Your boss has no reason to let you choose your own projects, or spend one week out of every four writing a novel at your beach house. These rewards are valuable. To earn them, you must accumulate your own career capital by mastering a skill that’s equally rare and valuable.

It’s important, however, that you cash in this capital, once accumulated, for the right rewards. The word “right,” in this context, is defined by the traits of SDT. In other words, once you have something valuable to offer, use it to gain as much autonomy, competence, and relatedness as you can possibly cram into your life.

via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do.

Read the whole thing. Interesting thought, even if a product doesn’t work, advertising does. This is why we need to force the candidates that we like to advertise more. If your for Gibo, for Noy, for Gordon, for Villanueva, we can’t let the Villar (aka Arroyo 2) to win.

Btw1: except for the Ampatuan misstep Gibo’s brand of campaigning is really good, though not good enough. I especially like the way they highlighted the aviator credentials (Believe this is good for the girls). Gibo has the hottest wife they need to get her to do more shows/commercials. Although Gibo’s interview highlights his intelligence I believe as the GMA2’s popularity boost has shown its about virality, Last Song Syndrome etc.

Btw2: Noy’s advertisements are dull and kind of self centered. I fail to get “Di Ka Nag Iisa”. Campaigns should be about the candidate showing us he/she is worth voting. Di ka nag iisa was made as if you want us to convince you to run. Come on, fix your message/Public Relations team, they seem to be too full of themselves.

Bt3: I’ve written about this before but Gordon should be highlighting his nickname. We need a more fun campaign.

Bt4: I believe that Eddie should just point his followers to any of the three other candidates (Gibo/Gordon/Noy). Religion and Government should not mix.

Btw5: I think that in the next Presidential Forum the other candidates should gang up on GMA2(Just love that GMA2 is like 7ABS hehehe) in the passive aggressive way we Filipinos excel at. Everyone should keep saying. Hindi ako magnanakaw, di ko gagamitin ang pera ng gobyerno para sa pansarili kong kapakanan, etc etc. Though I fear only Bro Eddie can say this because he is a relatively new politician, and all politicians are liars (well not all but close enough).

The 10:23 campaign against homeopathy raises a question: given that homeopathy doesn’t work, why is there such strong demand for it? A new paper by Werner Troesken (ungated draft pdf) sheds some interesting light on this.

He studies not homeopathy but US patent medicines in the 19th century. Despite being practically useless, these enjoyed spectacular long-run growth – Professor Troesken estimates that spending on them grew 22 times faster than US GDP between 1810 and 1939. Why?

The answer, he says, is that demand for them was inelastic with respect to failure – people kept buying them even though they didn’t work. This was because the medicines offered enormous consumer surplus; the products were cheap, but the benefits they offered were huge; there’s an analogy here with Pascal’s wager. As a result, when a product failed to work, consumers downgraded the probability that patent medicines generally would work, but still saw a positive expected gain from buying them; the small chance of a big improvement in one’s health is worth paying for.

via Stumbling and Mumbling: The demand for quacks.