Archive for March, 2008
Thursday, March 20th, 2008I know you’ve heard about this, and you’ve read about it, and you’ve seen clips, and you’ve read the transcript. Most of you have probably watched the whole thing. But if you haven’t then please, please do.
If you can watch that, and read things like this and this, and not want desperately for the man to lead the country for the next four years, then I don’t know what to tell you. Except maybe that we can’t be friends anymore.
Saturday, Belle Waring wrote,
Tonight I made the dough for cinnamon rolls in my Kitchenaid stand mixer so we can have our gay friends who are parents over for brunch, coffee, and some discussion of the Sunday New York Times while listening to indie music via our iTunes.
I read this, laughed, and then immediately joined Ruth in cleaning our house so that we could have people over for brunch on Sunday. Ruth made cinnamon rolls, but not in the Kitchenaid; I used the mixer’s bowl to make batter for pancakes. People were still talking about how good the coffee was the next day, in our graduate school classes.
Of course, there were some important differences between the Holbo/Waring brunch and the Johnson/Barrett brunch. We had sausage from Whole Foods, which they probably can’t get. Most of the vegetables in the omelets were organic, purchased the day before at the local farmer’s market. We were also poorly prepared, and had to send a guest out on my bicycle to get more flour. Our was a jazz brunch, so no indie music, and we use the much more awesome mpd rather than iTunes. Rather than the Sunday Times, we talked about our plans to travel this fall.
Andrew Gelman posted a quote today describing a problem with the literature in the statistics community: all of their functions are named “p”. The post is interesting, but at first it made no sense to me. This is because I follow the blog with Google Reader, and there the post looked like this:
“Wait, the only symbol in statistics is a-hat Euro o-e? I’ve never seen one of those. Maybe this explains why stats papers are confusing to me.”
Nicholson Baker (author of everyone’s favorite erotic novel The Fermata) has a neat piece up on the NYRB (free this week) on “The Charms of Wikipedia“. As an occasional Wikipedia contributor, I found this to be much better than a lot of the editorials that have weighed in on the debate over why Wikipedia does (or doesn’t) work. He’s better able to capture the reasons why Wikipedia garnered so much excitement at first:
It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman—all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn’t been a waste of time—would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something.
This also adds new insight to Jimbo Wales’ observation (that Wikipedia is “fun and addictive”), getting at just why the often rote task of maintaining an ever-expanding knowledge source would be fun or addictive. And these in turn give us the reason why WP moved from it’s joyously undisciplined origins to the rule-governed community it’s become of late. Baker doesn’t think this is unequivocally bad, though; he makes the point nicely while discussing vandalism:
Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals—up to a point—the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context.
The piece is full of curios mined from the expanses of Wikipedia, plus Baker’s own experiences fighting the deletionist effort to cut loose articles that don’t meet the standards of neutrality and notability. In doing so, Baker gets exactly right why we’re drawn to add to the digital mass.
Tonight, I was scanning a paper in a respected medical journal. The paper was a clinical study that tested some claims of alternative medicine. Halfway in, I came on a paragraph that jumped out at me. It went like this:
The test procedures were explained [to test subjects] by 1 of the authors (E.R.), who designed the experiment herself. The first series of tests was conducted when she was 9 years old. The participants were informed that the study would be published as her fourth-grade science-fair project and gave their consent to be tested.
That’s a pretty bad-ass 4th grader, right there. I always thought that the Disgruntled Chemist’s scientific take-down of Dr. Frank’s No-Pain Spray was pretty cool. But TDC is a professional scientist, and an adult, and the results of his No Pain Challenge have never been published in a peer reviewed journal. None of which can be said about the completely awesome Emily Rosa, who at the age of 11 parlayed a 4th-grade science fair experiment into a publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Rosa’s mother was a nurse, and was frustrated by the widespread adoption of “therapeutic touch” — a form of alternative medicine which involves channeling of life energies. Curious herself, Emily designed an experiment to determine whether or not there was any merit to the claim that practitioners of therapeutic touch could detect life energies.
During each test, the practitioners rested their hands, palms up, on a flat
surface, approximately 25 to 30 cm apart. To prevent the experimenter’s hands from being seen, a tall, opaque screen with cutouts at its base was placed over the subject’s arms, and a cloth towel was attached to the screen and draped over them. [...]The experimenter flipped a coin to determine which of the subject’s hands would be the target. The experimenter then hovered her right hand, palm down, 8 to 10 cm above the target and said, “Okay.” The subject then stated which of his or her hands was nearer to the experimenter’s hand.
The subjects identified the correct hand about 44% of the time — a result statistically no different from random guessing. The moral here should be pretty simple: your techniques are in trouble if a nine year-old can design and execute an experiment to debunk them. Unfortunately, therapeutic touch still seems to be moving units on Amazon.com.
The paper is a real hoot; I just want to point out two more bits that I liked. First, details of a previous experiment:
[A University of Alabama at Birmingham] project compared the effects of TT and sham TT on the perception of pain by burn patients. The final report to the funding agency noted statistically significant differences in pain and anxiety in 3 of 7 subjective measurements, but there was no difference in the amount of pain medication requested.
“So, do you feel better?”
“Uh. Yeah. Sure. Can I have my meds now?”
Then, one of the excuses made by a failed test subject:
[The subject argued that the] experimenter should be more proactive, centering herself and/or attempting to transmit energy through her own intentionality. This contradicts the fundamental premise of TT, since the experimenter’s role is analogous to that of a patient. Only the practitioner’s intentionality and preparation (centering) are theoretically necessary. If not so, the early experiments (on relatively uninvolved subjects, such as infants and barley seeds), cited frequently by TT advocates, must also be discounted.
That’s right — our techniques are no good on skeptical little girls, but they work wonders for barley seeds.
For more good skeptical content on the interwebs, see Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance on how modern physics has ruled out the possibility of telekinesis.
I’m not sure if it was something in my dinner tonight or if Nature is just really funny this week. A few noteworthy picks:
- “We are not recommending you import alligators into California. That would not be a good idea.”
- ‘Doomsday vault‘ opens
- Meat meter measures marbled muscles: “Japanese researchers have developed a device to objectively assess the deliciousness of meat.”
- Overhyped: Gravity lamp
- Animal-rights activists invade Europe