Mad Science Monday, 9/7/2009

I'm under the weather today, so I'm going to keep this week short. This week's article also isn't "mad science," per se, but simply "science" that makes me mad. It also happens to be about drug studies, so I thought it was fitting to give it a look while I'm sick.

What makes me mad isn't so much the study, but that it gets worse every time it's passed through another filter on the web. Today's "Placebos Are Getting More Effective" headline on Slashdot drove me over the edge.

Placebos are not getting more effective. Several factors are combining to make the placebo effect larger compared to the "real" drug in the same studies, but it isn't that something magical is happening with placebos.

First, the studies are getting better. For example, imagine if you were studying a drug in the 1930s (in a world where 1930s researchers knew to do placebo-controlled studies), and this drug was supposed to decrease the incidence of lung cancer. You would create two groups, a placebo control group and an experimental group, making sure to balance for factors you expected to affect the results--age, gender, etc. By chance you might end up with more smokers in your control group than in your experimental group (because why bother controlling for that, if you don't think it has anything to do with cancer?). After your study, you'd likely find that your experimental group had a lower incidence of lung cancer, and thus that your placebo had very little affect compared to your drug. Of course, if you did that same study today, you'd be able to balance your groups for all kinds of known factors, including genetic risks for lung cancer, not just for the smoking bit. More and more, any improvement in your experimental group vs the random improvement of your placebo-controlled group would decrease, which you could choose to see as your placebo magically getting stronger. That's not what it is, though; you're just doing better science. See this great article over at Mind Hacks for more on this side of the effect.

Second, we're getting better at making placebos. We know strange things about human psychology, such as the wondrous bits in the graphic about half-way down the page on Wired's version of this news. We can make the placebo green in an anti-anxiety study, for example, because green pills work better for anxiety medicine (or we can at least make the placebo and the real drug the same color). That doesn't mean something magical is happening, either; it means we know how to harness psychology to boost the effectiveness of the pills, even if the medicine doesn't actually do anything beyond what the placebo does.

Third, the medicines being tested are, very often, just marginal improvements (or potential improvements) on existing drugs. We don't see as much of an effect because there isn't much of an effect to see.

So, if you see the headline I'm expecting this to morph into, something about placebos proving that medicine is unnecessary or some other similar nonsense, be sure to take it with a grain of salt. The pharmaceutical industry is still making improvements to our health, it's just doing so with better scientific practices.

Mad Science Monday, 8/10/2009

Sorry that I missed last week's post. To make it up to you, I've found a paper just dripping with mad science (and bad puns!). Enjoy!

Mad Observations: Many organisms (ranging from apples to mammals) use chemicals called pheromones to communicate. As you'll see if you follow that link to Wikipedia, these signals are used to communicate many different things, from "follow me" to "look out!" The "look out!" class, better known as alarm signals, had been well-established in mammals. And humans are mammals...

Mad Reference: Mujica-Parodi LR, Strey HH, Frederick B, Savoy R, Cox D, et al. (2009) "Chemosensory Cues to Conspecific Emotional Stress Activate Amygdala in

Humans." PLoS ONE 4(7): e6415. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006415 (full text available online)

Mad Hypothesis: Humans, like other animals, have alarm pheremones. Those pheremones invoke an alarm response in humans (for example, the known responses associated with fear). In other words, humans produce something that makes other humans scared when they smell it (or at least makes other humans behave in ways that scared humans behave).

Mad Experiment: The researchers collected sweat from two groups: first-time tandem skydivers (the experimental group), and people exercising (the control group). They then had people smell this sweat to see if they could tell the difference (ie, they asked people which sample smelled worse), to rule out a noticeable difference in smells (the subjects couldn't tell the difference). They then had subjects breathe in this sweat (one sample or the other) while undergoing an fMRI (the test where they look at what part of your brain lights up in response to different stimuli). They also had the subjects identify whether faces looked frightened or not (we'll get into why they did that below).

They All Laughed, But: Actually, it turns out nobody was laughing. The most interesting thing I learned by reading this paper is that there had already been six studies published about a human alarm substance transmitted via sweat. In two, subjects were able to identify whether the sweat came from someone watching a scary movie or a "benign" film. Another study found that subjects were better able to complete a word-association task when they smelled scary-movie sweat (again vs "benign film" sweat). The remaining three found that stress sweat caused subjects to interpret expressions as more fearful, to be less likely to judge a face as positive, and to be more likely to be startled by "auditory stimuli" (that last one, which I like to think of as the "boo!" study, makes me laugh somewhat maniacally). If you're interested, all of those references are in the paper (linked above); I don't want to repeat them all here.

However, this new study did find two new things:

1. The previous studies had used scary movies or preparation for difficult exams to provoke the stress in the experimental groups. By using first-time skydivers, this one provides us a different variety of stress, broadening the range of where we can expect to find this signal.
2. The previous studies had looked at whether subjects could identify sweat from stressed people, or what subjects' psychological responses were to the fear sweat. This study showed a physical response to the fear sweat, specifically activation of the amygdala (the part of the brain associated with emotion), just as expected.

This new study also threw in an "is this face scared?" test, but that was just to confirm that those results agreed with the previous results (they did).

Mad Engineering Applications: This area of research positively screams to be implemented by mad engineers. You might not be able to make a fear gun, per se, but it just might be possible to make a fear bomb. And, combined with other research (including a piece in an upcoming Mad Science Monday), a good mad engineer could even use this to make his or her henchmen more effective (I mean, sure, your henchmen should already be afraid of you, but with this you could make sure they're working scared even when you aren't around). There simply have to be at least a few DARPA projects associated with this.

Do you have any other ideas for how to apply this? Let me know in the comments.

Mad Science Monday, 7/20/2009

Are you a mad engineer looking to take over the world (or even a small section of it)? Do you also have a powerful, supervillainous ability to extend a simple example into a general principle? If so, this research is for you.

Mad Observations: In widely varying areas, animals follow leaders. This behavior ranges from ants seeking food, through birds and butterflies migrating long distances, to human politics. In all of these cases, the followers have a strong tendency (and motivation) to keep following the established leaders; if they didn't, particularly in the non-human examples, things would quickly be very bad for them.

Mad Reference: Note: This is a not-yet-published letter, not a peer-reviewed paper. It's basically raw presentation of research, which is what arxiv.org is for. "Effective leadership in competition." Hai-Tao Zhang, Ning Wang, Michael Z. Q. Chen, Tao Zhou, and Changsong Zhou. Full text available from arxiv.org.

Mad Hypothesis: As the authors state it, "is it possible for the minority later-coming leaders to defeat the dominating majority ones and how?" In other words, the hypothesis they're attempting to disprove is "It is impossible for minority later-coming leaders to defeat the majority leaders." If they manage to disprove that, they'll also have the how covered.

Mad Experiment: The researchers used a "generic model of collective behavior, the Vicsek model." As far as I can find, this is a widely used model for motion. Specifically, in this model individual motions are aligned to the average of their neighbors. In other words, if you want to think of this research in a more global context than just motion, you have to make the assumption that the individuals you're targeting will tend to follow along with whatever the people near them are doing. However, "near them" could mean "politically near them," for example, so it's not necessarily a bad assumption. Remember that translation of "near them" when pondering the rest of the findings, though.

In this model, the researchers introduced "leaders," which were simply individuals that did not simply align themselves to their neighbors. The followers obeyed the "follow your neighbor" rule, but the leaders were set to either move right (the established leaders) or left (the newcomer leaders).

After establishing the model with the right-leaders + followers, the researchers introduced late-coming left-leaders in various patterns and with various distributions. They measured how well these patterns of left-leaders were able to overcome the movement direction established by right-leaders.

They All Laughed, But: The researchers found that the late-comers were able to change the direction of the group, but that their ability to do so could be predicted based on two factors: the spatial distribution of the leaders (how far apart groups of leaders were) and the clumping of the leaders (how close together the members of a group of leaders were). Higher values for either of those factors increased the chance that the left-leaders could overtake control of the group. And, of course, it helped if the right-leaders had lower values for those factors.

Mad Engineering Applications: What these researchers found is that two factors help in taking over control of a group: wide distribution of the individuals working to change the group, but tight clumping of change-introducing individuals. In other words, it's good to spread out your leaders, but give them allies to work with locally.

It's easy to accidentally keep too much of the geographic part of this model, though. For example, if you translate the findings to politics, you should translate all of the model to politics. If you want to spread an idea throughout a group, you need people idealogically clumped to help each other influence others who are close to them idealogically, but it helps to also have such groups spread out to different places on the idealogical scale.

I'd be interesting to see other ways mad engineers could find to adapt this model to other scenarios. If you think of any, let me know in the comments.

Shared Google Reader Items, 3/27/2009

It's been a busy couple weeks since my last shared items from Google Reader update. Sorry I took so long!

Science:

• Obama ended the ban on stem-cell research funding. Things that are stupid about the idiots who are against stem-cell funding:
  
  1. The things being used for research are blobs of cells. They're less human than a patch of dry skin that flakes off.
  2. The blobs of cells are incinerated when they aren't used in research. How is incinerating these blobs of cells less bad than using them to learn?
  3. The assholes love to point out that embryonic stem cells haven't shown as much promise as other types of stem cells... ya know, the types of stem cells that have received government funding for research. If embryonic stem cells are so great, why can't researchers learn things from them when the research isn't being done, huh??? Answer that!
• A chimp at a Swedish zoo hoarded rocks to later throw at people. In other words, the chimp planned for future events. That is very cool.
• These photos of undersea eruptions near Tonga are awesome, moreso after the confirmation that this event wasn't associated with a tsunami or anything.

Politics:

• Obama ordered his administration to consult with AG Holder before using the content of Bush signing statements (ie, to ignore them unless Holder says otherwise). Mostly awesome news, although he signaled that he might use them himself.
• Diebold admitted that its voting software had a flaw: it failed to record deletion of ballots. Um, that's a pretty big flaw.

Education:

• Students who listen to podcasts of lectures outperform students who attend lectures.
• Woohoo! The Texas board of education didn't ammend the science standards to include "strengths and weaknesses" garbage about evolution (an attempt to set natural selection apart as a weak theory, rather than one of the strongest). Hurray, science education survives in Texas!
• Er, survived in Texas. Six hours later, an ammendment to require teachers to tell their students that there are different estimates for the age of the Universe passed 11-3. Ok, technically there are different estimates, but they result in an age of 13.7 +/- 0.12 billion years. The young-Earth creationists on the board think that +/- 0.12 billion is close enough to the +/- 13.7 billion (to three sig figs) that they believe, and want to make sure students have room to think that their nonsense is backed by science.
• In better news, YouTube and a site called Academic Earth have each put together directories of the various educational videos available online. YouTube's offering contains over 200 full courses. Very interesting.

Technology:

• Sometimes I think Scott Adams is watching me.
• Research for my mecha is almost complete: UT-Dallas scientists have created nanotube-based artificial muscles, and European researchers are making microchips that physically mimic brains (I assume this will be useful for the complex control systems that my mecha will require).

Astronomy:

• I want to believe Space Bat survived his trip, and will return one day to save us from Mothra or something.
• The entire Cosmos series is now on Hulu. This needs to get hugely popular, inspiring someone to make a series somewhere near as awesome.

The Interwebs:

• You can filter google image searches by color by adding "&imgcolor=COLORNAME" (such as "&imgcolor=green") to the end of an image search. Neat!
• User scripts work in the beta (or dev) version of Chrome. I now have subfolder-labels in my gmail inbox. Woot!

Business:

• Peter Bregman at the Harvard Business blog says small businesses will win in this economy. I hope he's right.
• On a related note, a BusinessWeek column from 2000 wondering how Google will possibly ever make money (particularly since it's focused purely on search, not on the lucrative portal market like competitors [never heard of them] and [oh yeah, remember altavista?].

Psychology:

• Zenhabits had some good tips for beating procrastination. #7 is best: "Put something you dread more at the top of your to-do list — you’ll put off doing that by doing the other things on your list." I've been using it (combined with Gmail Tasks), and it works like a charm. Well, better than a charm, since charms don't work.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below (or on Reader if you use it, with the cool new comment feature).

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/26/2009

It's been almost a week since I last did this! Doh! Here they finally are, my shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Art:

• I love Photoshop, but I'm not as good at it as I should be after using it for... holy jeebus, about 15 years now! I want to get better, so I need to start using VunkySearch's tutorial finder thingy.

Technology:

• Researchers found a way to make solar power cheaper. Any time now solar should make sense (sadly, it usually doesn't right now; it hurts the environment enough to make solar cells that their benefit probably doesn't offset it). How long after that do you think it'll take for it to actually be used?
• I'm so in love with this key finder idea that I want to elope with it and bear its children.

Psychology:

• A couple weeks ago, I mentioned an interesting-sounding survey over at Cognitive Daily. Soon after that (but not soon enough to make it into my last update), they posted results. Turns out we're more random than at least one of their readers thought.

The Internets:

• The stimulus bill requires that each government agency report money it gives out via RSS. Neat.
• I'm using Gmail's new multiple inboxes feature, and I think I like it.
• Speaking of Gmail, attaching multiple files in Gmail is now easier. Can gDrive be far away?
• This xkcd comic notes something I noticed with my Kindle the first time I laid eyes on it; that's why I re-read the Hitchhiker's series on it, and set up this store. Took him long enough!
  

Politics:

• Legalization of marijuana is more popular than key conservative leaders.
• 538.com examines the same question I had: Was volcano monitoring really the worst thing Kenneth Jindal could find in the stimulus bill? Really? The Governor of Louisiana can't see the economic benefit in paying people to make sure people aren't killed by volcanos? Really??
• News organizations can now show photos of returning war dead, after an 18-year ban. The reason reversing this was important was so Americans could get a clear picture of what these wars are costing. I think we're already starting to get that, but better late than never on the reversal.
• The economy tanking may have a good result: states are scrapping barbarism because it's too expense. Woot.
• Obama has picked former Washington Governor Gary Locke for Commerce. Let's hope third time's a charm...
• Because I like to be fair, here's FactCheck.org's run-down on Obama's speech. I think most of those "exaggerations and factual misstatements" are what I'd call "rhetorically true," meaning that the truth fits at least one interpretation of what he said, whether that's the interpretation most people would jump to first or not... but anyway, it's good to check this sorta thing.
• The Senate has passed the DC Voting Rights Bill 61-37. The idea sounds great, but, dammit, it's illegal. You can't just change the Constitution because it sounds like a good idea. You need to ammend it. It's not that complicated: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed." That's quoted from the 14th Amendment, because we already realized once that the original was broken. Fixing it again wouldn't be a big thing, but you can't change the Constitution through a bill, no matter how good of an idea you think the bill is.

Science:

• Researchers are getting close to a universal flu vaccine. Neat. Someone was talking about something similar at a party recently (because that's the sort of party I attend), but they had the process all wrong.
• Learn all about nanotechnology and why it's cool through the Nano Song. Strong work.

Entertainment:

• The Oscars didn't show Don LaFontaine in their dead people montage. That's terribly lame.
• Jim Kakalios, author of the awesome The Physics of Superheroes (great read, I highly recommend it), was a consultant on The Watchmen movie, and made a video about it. Neat.
• U2's Bono and the Edge are writing music and lyrics for a Spider-Man musical, set to premier in 2010. Awesome.

Atheism:

• Teehee. (BTW, for those who think I filed the comic under the wrong heading, "atheist" and "agnostic" pretty much mean the same thing, I just prefer the taken-as-more-shocking term. If you aren't sure that you believe in something, particularly something that damns you to eternal torment for not swearing fealty to it, you don't believe in it.)
• The UN has passed a resolution trying to ban making fun of religion. The response to that is obvious: Fuck you, religion! In case that's not specific enough, I'm talking about you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. Are you such a bunch of pussies that you need special protection? Aw, what's wrong, religion? Is free speech telling you you're unnecessary? Suck it up and take it like a man.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 2/15/2009

Here are today's shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

The Internets:

• With a simple edit to a text file, you can make Firefox ignore security settings and remember passwords. Be careful using this one. The bookmarklet version is also neato.
• We can now edit Google Spreadsheets on our phones. I can barely imagine all of the possibilities! (Note: Like many geeks, I have an unnatural love for spreadsheets.)
• "Web 2.0" has passed from a buzzword into being an actual thing. It's becoming uncool to invest in Web 2.0, and I'm hoping investors will realize the reason the hype has gone down is that now it's the right way to make a website.

Technology:

• IBM has patented a bullet-dodging bionic suit. Seriously. We definitely have the technology now.
• Samsung has released a solar-powered mobile phone. This means we can edit our spreadsheets all day without fear of power loss!
• Abraham Lincoln was a technology nut, and even had a patent. Cool.
• Liquid wood is coming back as a possible plastic replacement. It's good to see there's something in the works as a plastic replacement. If we switched to 100% alternative energy today, we'd still need a crapton of oil to make plastic. We need to find a plastic replacement, or our reliance on fossil fuels can't go away.

Politics:

• Andrew Sullivan is still not happy with the party to which he supposedly belongs. I think he hoped they'd become his ideal of the party after Bush left office, and is now even angrier.
• Roland Burris now says Blago's brother asked him to donate to buy the Senate seat, but Burris also claims he didn't do so. BTW, NYTimes.com seems to be requiring a login more often than it used to. Sorry about that. I'll probably switch to a different general news feed.

Psychology:

• I don't know what Cognitive Daily is planning with this survey, but it looks interesting.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.