Assorted Links

Thursday, 31 July 2014Friday, 1 August 2014 - 3 Comments

These final assorted links were found in draft mode. – Amy

Postdoc leaves academia (fMRI emotion research). “I actually ran into that process in three different labs, two of which were at TopUniversityA with PIs who I highly revered and respected. It’s just how it goes in those fields…remove all of the negative results, don’t actually report the ridiculous number of fishing expeditions you went on (especially in fMRI research), make it sound like you mostly knew what you were going to find in the first place, make it a nice clean story. When my colleagues (from a well-known, well-respected emotion research lab) were trying to talk me into removing all of the negative results and altering what my original hypothesis was, literally saying “everyone does it…” that was it for me. I had a sinking feeling that everyone did do it that way and that I couldn’t trust the majority of work I had to depend on/reference myself. The level of denial in psychology and human neuroimaging research that this process just clogs the system with useless BS is something I just can’t stomach.” Devastating criticism — especially finding the same thing in three different labs. I believe nothing involving fMRI and psychology. My friend Hal Pashler wrote about this. At UC Berkeley, the fMRI machine used by psychology researchers malfunctioned for years. Nobody noticed. Only when someone from UC Davis got different results at Berkeley was the problem detected.
interview with me about the Shangri-La Diet. The questions do a good job of making the mechanism clear.
Little or no benefit of antidepressants when children are asked

Thanks to Nile McAdams and Alex Chernavsky.

Monday, 21 April 2014Wednesday, 23 April 2014 - 8 Comments

Assorted Links

High priced drugs
Indiegogo QS-related scam. “Founded by CEO Isabel Hoffman, whose big thing before this was anti-aging medicines, and CTO Stephen Watson, a York University math professor.” Hoffman was the University of Toronto’s Alumni of the Year in 1995. Also this and this.
omega-3 helps children with ADHD
Seoul traditional restaurants. The best guide to Seoul restaurants I have ever seen.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen.

Wednesday, 16 April 2014Wednesday, 16 April 2014 - 7 Comments

Assorted Links

How not to govern a university
Smelly fish popular in Korea. “Extremely chewy texture.”
Popular pain killer associated with doubled risk of atrial fibrillation
Hunter-gatherer microbiome
interview of me in Chinese

Thanks to Tyler Cowen.

Wednesday, 9 April 2014Tuesday, 8 April 2014 - 9 Comments

Assorted Links

how to self-experiment with resistant starch. See comments.
A list of health benefits of honey says nothing about sleep
Someone says “I told you so” about the demise of Better Place, the Israeli car-battery-swap company. Better Place raised an insane amount of money, something like $1 billion.
Behind the New York Times series on health care costs. “The social media team analyzed the remarks and discovered that there were deep frustrations about the cost of inhalers and medications for asthma, the most common chronic condition affecting people of all ages.” There should be deep frustration that anyone still has asthma. The notion that figuring out what causes asthma is possible — and will cost about a million times less than continuing to buy inhalers and medicine — has not occurred to enough people.

Thanks to Tuck.

Tuesday, 8 April 2014Monday, 7 April 2014 - 3 Comments

Assorted Links

Kimchi in crisis. “Interest is waning among younger people. Yet despite struggles at home, kimchi is becoming more popular around the globe.”
Timing of light and sleep — association with body weight. Thin people wake up earlier than fat people. The reason may be that thin people sleep less than fat people. The paper references two studies that increased morning light and asked if weight changed. One found no effect, the other a significant reduction in body fat.
I don’t have chronic fatigue syndrome, I have Lyme disease
Go to the bottom of this entry (Ignored Expert) and click on Real Life for real-life examples of ignored experts.
Success using probiotic to cure eczema

Thanks to Casey Manion, Phil Alexander, Viorel Tulica, Melody McLaren, Christian Pekeler, Donna Warnock and Tom Passin.

Friday, 4 April 2014Tuesday, 1 April 2014 - 4 Comments

Assorted Links

Website designed to measure drug side effects
“Natural” wine. “Ambient yeast alone are capable of taking his fermentations to completion.”
Sophisticated study of macronutrient composition in mice

Thanks to Tucker Max and Barnaby Kerbel.

Wednesday, 2 April 2014Saturday, 29 March 2014 - 3 Comments

Assorted Links

Oncology researchers make too much of very little.
deadly delays in newborn blood testing. Do hospital employees = government employees?
University of Western Australia refuses request for data because requester “made inflammatory statements on [his] weblog . . . including attacks on the character and professionalism of University staff.”
Benefits of fermented food. “Once all the grains in her diet were fermented, she began to feel normal — for the first time in years.”

Thursday, 27 March 2014Wednesday, 26 March 2014 - 7 Comments

Assorted Links

difficulties of personalized risk assessment
Drugs cause falls in old people. When drugs were stopped, falls went down — in one case, by two-thirds.
University of Western Australia, in response to a complaint, allows researcher to “investigate” himself.
Food and mental illness
“I have stage 3 melonoma. . . . I have the ability to speed read . . . I found one very promising study.”
Translator strikes back
Masha Gessen, one of my favorite writers, on Pussy Riot

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

Saturday, 22 March 2014Saturday, 22 March 2014 - 44 Comments

Assorted Links

American Physical Society expresses uncertainty about AGW (anthropogenic global warming).
Kyoko Miyake, talented documentary maker. I really liked Brakeless.
Interview with Renata Adler. “The following thirty-two pages, in place of my essay–my most “controversial” essay, in some ways, closely argued–were from a cookbook.”
The modern diet, in graphs. Note the huge increase in soybean oil. Sugar isn’t the only foodstuff to have increased a lot over the last 50 years.
Blame doctors for the heroin epidemic. “Until recently, the system was rigged to encourage doctors and dentists to give out opioids with reckless abandon.”

Thanks to Casey Manion.

Friday, 21 March 2014Monday, 17 March 2014 - 19 Comments

Assorted Links

Why I am anti-Komen. “Do you think individuals who donated to Susan G. Komen foundation knew their money would be used to sue other charities who want to raise money like Prom was doing? . . . Once national news shone a spotlight on Komen’s bullshit move, they backed off.”
Cardboard standing desk
Alex Chernavsky finds no effect of soy on brain speed
Probiotic helps children. Notice that the study was done in Mexico City.

Thanks to Melody McLaren.

Friday, 14 March 2014Monday, 10 March 2014 - 6 Comments

Assorted Links

Magnesium associated with reduced arterial calcification
Sarno method for treating muscle pain compared to other methods. “My surgeon who had been an NBA team physician assured me I had a 90% plus chance of returning to my life as it had been. However, eight weeks after the surgery I was WORSE.”
Are old people in Great Britain living shorter lives because of prescribed drugs?
Some cancers detected by mammograms apparently disappear without treatment.

Thanks to Steve Hansen.

Saturday, 15 February 2014Monday, 10 February 2014 - 4 Comments

Assorted Links

Acne fixed with raw honey. “I ditched the antibiotics and started using raw honey on my current breakouts and under the skin pimples.”
“Fussy critiques of science experiments” are used to discredit good science — an example being Tyrone Hayes’s work showing that atrazine is dangerous. One “fussy critique” complained about a misspelled word. Was this a secret signal that the author of the critique had a gun pointed at his head?
once again, a drug company (Boehringer Ingelheim) hides important information
German city emphasizes sleep
powerful heart doctor accused of plagiarism

Thanks to John Batzel, dearieme and Adam Clemans.

Sunday, 9 February 2014Monday, 3 February 2014 - 8 Comments

Assorted Links

Sugar for insomnia
Japanese pickle prevents flu in mice
Interview with Edward Jay Epstein
contact lenses that measure blood sugar
Duke University blunders badly in China. No one wants to attend its new campus in Kushan. A friend of mine called the campus a “real-estate scam”.

Thanks to Phil Alexander, Joseph B. and John Batzel

Friday, 7 February 2014Friday, 31 January 2014 - 4 Comments

Assorted Links

Probiotics for colicky babies
Edward Jay Epstein on diamonds (video). “I bought a diamond for $1500. A day later I tried to sell it. People were offering me one-fourth or one-fifth the price.”
Internet spreads much better treatment for clubfoot
Marion Nestle, an NYU professor and frequently-quoted food expert, says it is a “myth” that “what you eat is more important than how much you eat.” The concept of a body-weight set point was first proposed in about 1950.

Thanks to Carl Willat.

Thursday, 30 January 2014Wednesday, 15 January 2014 - 4 Comments

Assorted Links

Benefits of yacon syrup
MIT & Aaron Swartz
A job search in the English Department at UC Riverside
Watch out for iron overload. You may be eating too much iron.
Scoliosis successfully treated without surgery. “Surgery was recommended as the only option to help her recover.”

Saturday, 25 January 2014Saturday, 11 January 2014 - 5 Comments

Assorted Links

Hermann Goering and Jane Jacobs (also this)
Dietary fiber may prevent asthma — very important finding because the two seem unrelated
cheap convenient lab tests. Unfortunately you still need a doctor to order them.
intermittent fasting on the Diane Rehm Show
pollutants and brain damage

Thanks to Gerry Mandel, Casey Manion and Jeff Winkler.

Wednesday, 22 January 2014Thursday, 23 January 2014 - 11 Comments

Assorted Links

A very common knee surgery ($14 billion per year spent on it in America) turns out to be no better than sham surgery in many cases. Plainly this supports critics of medicine who say there is overtreatment. To be fair there is good news: 1. At least this particular operation wasn’t contraindicated by high school biology. 2. The study was done and published. 3. And publicized widely enough to influence practice.
Heart guidelines based on fake research probably killed tens of thousands of people. Making useless knee surgery look good.
“The time you’re taking to help this girl, you could be …” A great talk by Jessica Alexander about ten years working for NGOs. Her book is Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid.
On EconTalk, Judith Curry, the climatologist, makes the excellent point that it is weird to call someone who believes climate questions are more complex than portrayed a “denier”. In every other use of the term, a denier is someone who avoids recognizing complexity, i.e., the opposite. On the other side of the ledger, Curry makes an elementary physics mistake when she says that as an ice cube floating in your drink melts, the water level of your drink rises. (It stays the same.)

Thanks to Allan Jackson.

Saturday, 18 January 2014Saturday, 11 January 2014 - 13 Comments

Assorted Links

Dangers of Splenda. Never use it in baked goods.
Overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder. “So many medical professionals benefit from overprescribing that it is difficult to find a neutral source of information. . . . The F.D.A. has cited every major A.D.H.D. drug, including the stimulants Adderall, Concerta, Focalin and Vyvanse, for false and misleading advertising since 2000, some of them multiple times.”
David Suzuki, prominent environmentalist, former genetics professor, founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, once voted the greatest living Canadian, is asked a question about climate change that turns out to be surprisingly hard.
Confucius Peace Prize. Awarded to Putin because Russia makes China look good?
Top 10 retractions of 2013. There is a website for retractions (Retraction Watch) but no website for discoveries that could have been made but weren’t, except maybe this blog. I’m not joking. I am far more alarmed by lack of progress than retractions.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Monday, 13 January 2014Thursday, 9 January 2014 - 3 Comments

Assorted Links

Stephen J. Gould, evolutionary theorist: appearing to be smart
“A revolution is when you change your thinking.” I agree. Via Danielle Fong.
Brain glycogen. Not all glycogen is in the liver.
Ethiopians (in Ethiopia) don’t eat dessert. Evidence that traditional diets may not be optimal.
Katherine Reid on how dietary changes eliminated her daughter’s autism (talk)
The Floyd Leg. A shockingly simple great idea.
Eric Lander, a professor at MIT and Harvard, says we should spend a lot of money on genomics without providing examples where it has been helpful. “The rate of progress is just stunning,” says Lander, again without examples. Perhaps he borrowed this style of argument from the Nobel Prize press office. I am sorry to see James Fallows, the interviewer, be so credulous. Dear Dr. Lander: Why is it that doctors have no clue what causes heart disease or diabetes or depression or a dozen other major diseases — but think they do? Is more money for genomics going to help with that?

Thanks to Edward Edmonds and Bert Sutherland.

Wednesday, 1 January 2014Thursday, 19 December 2013 - 10 Comments

Assorted Links

Girl brain-dead after tonsillectomy. No doubt her parents were not told (a) your tonsils are part of your immune system, an essential part of your body, and (b) tonsil removal is associated with a 50% higher death rate. As I said here, an “evidence-based” evaluation of whether tonsillectomies are good or bad failed to mention both of these things, along with a ton of other negative evidence.
Reverse graffiti. I think of this blog as reverse graffiti.
Interview with Peter Higgs. “Believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.”
UC Berkeley Psychology Department fires staff employee (in his 24th year), apparently for union activities. “Francis Katsuura created a Cal Agenda account to track all time that Paul Haller attended bargaining [sessions]. No other department has created such an account.”

Thanks to Matt Cassell.