Google Reader Send To Remember the Milk Lists

This isn't perfect yet, and that makes me angry. But it's getting there, and I'm hoping someone can help me finalize it in the comments.

What this trick will do: Allow you to send articles to specific Remember the Milk lists (I set up a Mad Science Monday list, and another one to add things to my Personal to-do on RTM, and one for food-related articles, and another for work-related articles) from Google Reader.

What you'll need:

• A bookmarklet from Twitlet (follow their instructions).
• An account on Remember the Milk. Set up any lists you want to use there. Your life will be easiest if you make these lists all one word (for example, I used "msm" for my Mad Science Monday list).
• A Twitter account.
• The Remember the Milk rtm Twitter trick.
• A list of things on Google Reader that you want to sort into to-do lists.
• At least a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Do you have all of that set up? Ok, open up your Twitlet bookmarklet (right click and Edit it, most likely, depending on your browser), and copy that mass of confusion in the URL field. All you really want out of that is the part after ?a= and before &t=, which will be a jumbled mass of letters and numbers (that's your personal code for Twitlet).

Now go to Reader, and click Settings, and then Send To. Down at the bottom, click Create a custom link. Name it something to remember it by (for example, I used MSM and To-Do for mine). For the URL field, you want this:

http://www.twitlet.com/updates/?a=YOURCODE&t=d%20rtm%20${title}%20${short-url}%20%23LISTNAME

Obviously, swap in your code for YOURCODE and the name of your list for LISTNAME. If you have spaces in the name of your list, replace them with %20's.

For the Icon URL, enter this: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/favicon.ico (that'll put a RTM icon on it).

Now save it. Make more as necessary. Enjoy.

Oh, you'll have to tell your browser to allow popups from Reader (you need to do that for any Send To), and (here's the annoying part) the window that pops up is pointless; you can close it again after it loads. It just needs to load for this to work. I guess I might be able to kill it with a user script, but that's a bit overboard. Does anyone have any suggestions?

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, 8/31/2009

I live in Austin, TX. Not only do we have confirmed record-setting zombie hordes, but we also have a populace ready to warn one another of outbreaks of zombiism. So of course I'm interested in knowing whether we (or anyone else) will be able to survive an actual bout with zombies. Thankfully, a group of certified mad scientists have figured this out for us.

Mad Reference: Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad, and Robert J. Smith?. (2009) "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress. (full text available free online [PDF])

Mad Background: First off, that isn't a typo in the name of the lead researcher. His last name is "Smith?" with a question mark. In addition, from his homepage at the University of Ottawa (emphasis added), "People kept asking if I'll be getting US citizenship next and I kept laughing at that. Somewhat hysterically, it must be said." Your last name is "Smith?", and you talk about your hysterical laughter on your homepage? You are an inspiration for all would-be mad scientists, Dr. Smith?!

As far as the science, the background you need is that mathematical models are used in fields like epidemiology to help predict the spread of diseases under various conditions, and thus to plan out the best way to combat those diseases. For example, mathematical models can help predict what will happen if only a limited number of vaccine doses are available for a disease, or what will happen if people infected with a disease are quarantined. But can they predict the outcome of a hypothetical disease that follows a pattern very different from known real-world diseases?

Mad Observations: Especially in modern movies and video games, zombiism spreads like a disease. If it spreads like a disease, it should be possible to model it the same way we model diseases.

Mad Hypothesis: If a zombie outbreak occurs, mankind can survive. At least, that's what they're pretending to test. What they're really testing is whether mathematical models can be put together for a "disease" as strange as zombiism, in particular the strain of zombiism in which the dead can become "infected" with the disease and come back to terrorize the living.

Mad Experiment: The researchers built five mathematical models for zombie outbreaks: a basic model, a model with an incubation period, a model in which the unaffected attempt to quarantine the infected, a model in which a treatment for zombiism is available, and a model in which humanity fights back. They then used each model to predict the equilibrium; in other words, to predict whether humanity would survive. Each model had some assumptions in common:

• The particular form of zombiism being modeled is the "slow zombie" style. "Fast zombies," like the things in 28 Days Later, were not studied. I'd be interested to see what would change in such a model, but, alas, that will require further research.
• As I mentioned in the Mad Hypothesis section, the strain of zombiism being modeled also infects the dead (including dead zombies), allowing the dead to join the population of zombies. The whole point was to model something far from known diseases to see how the models held up, so it made sense to include the truly undead in the model.

They All Laughed, But: We are all screwed. Unless we get infrastructure in place to quarantine zombies and zombies-to-be, or are able to quickly develop a cure when an outbreak occurs, or are able to successfully coordinate zombie-eradication attacks, zombies eventually wipe us all out. The eradication model was the only one in which we eventually won, and it seems likely to me that this would require military involvement. If you've ever seen a zombie movie, you know that involving the military is a terrible, terrible idea, so our best hope is also the one that, the "literature" shows us, is empirically shown to lead to a society in which the living envy the dead.

The treatment model was also unique in that, at equilibrium, a large zombie population survived in addition to a small human population. Note that this human population would remain at a certain size, but would not always contain the same individuals; you might become a zombie for a while, then get treated, then die, then rise as a zombie, then get treated again and rejoin the human population. This wouldn't necessarily be a fun existence, although it would definitely be interesting. This model is the only one in which pet zombies, like in Fido and Shaun of the Dead, are even slightly possible. And it looks far more likely that zombies would have pet humans (for a few minutes, before eating their brains and/or infecting them).

The quarantine model seems like our best bet, but, alas, assuming we don't have a massive infrastructure already in place for such quarantine, even then zombies eventually kill us all off.

Mad Engineering Applications: As it turns out, Dr. Smith?'s page indicates that a mad engineer has already expressed interest in this research, in that someone wrote to Dr. Smith? asking for help engineering a zombiism virus. Presumably that evil genius plans to control the treatment of his strain of zombiism, thus ensuring that he is (at least occasionally) a member of the small surviving human population. In case that nutjob is able to design such a virus, I guess the rest of us need to be ready to work with the military to make sure his plan isn't successful.

Of course, the other point of all of this was that the models seemed to work. The real application is to, essentially, not be afraid to try to model things that don't follow traditional disease models. The paper mentions the examples of allegiance to political parties or diseases with dormant infection, but there are definitely other things that can be modeled much like diseases.

It's hard to pick a favorite part of all of this, but, if you get a chance, I strongly recommend at least reading the last two pages of the PDF (the references). I couldn't stop laughing (maniacally, of course), seeing things like "Capcom, Shinji Mikami (creator), 1996-2007 Resident Evil" listed alongside "van den Driessche, P., Watmough, J. (2002) Reproduction numbers and sub-threshold endemic equilibria for compartmental models of disease transmission. Math. Biosci. 180, 29-48."

If you'd like to continue to study zombie survival tips, I recommend my friend Jon's weekly Zombie Friday! You can probably guess on which day you should check his site for said column, unless, of course, you're already safe from zombies.

Mad Science Monday, 8/24/2009

Today I'm taking part in a blog hop to wish a happy birthday to UnderstandBlue. I met UnderstandBlue through my sister, Stampin Libby. We took part in the first ever "This Is What a Tweetup Is, Libby" tweetup at Phil's Icehouse (warning: that site makes annoying noises).

So, given that I met UnderstandBlue through Twitter, and I'm taking part in a blog hop, it seemed like a good day to look into the science behind how crap spreads around the internets.

Mad Reference: David Liben-Nowell and Jon Kleinberg. (2008) "Tracing information flow on a global scale using Internet chain-letter data." PNAS 105(12): 4633-4638. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0708471105 (full text available free online)

Mad Background: In 1976, Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene as a way to describe the cultural equivalent of a gene. A meme is a a replicator, like a gene; it carries an idea, but must be copied to be transmitted. While genes copy through DNA replication, memes copy by being repeated. They still seem to evolve by natural selection, though; as they're copied, sometimes they change a little, and the ones that "work" better (from the meme's perspective, at least) spread.

Mad observations: The word "meme" is, itself, a meme, and has gotten a lot of use lately, specifically in the form of Internet memes. It seems entirely random, though, which things take off on the internet, and which fizzle. But science has a knack for finding patterns and explanations in the seemingly random. Maybe models developed for the spread of diseases will work.

Mad hypothesis: Perhaps internet memes spread "with a rapid, epidemic-style fan-out." If internet chain letters spread like disease epidemics, most people should spread it to several people, most of whom spread it to several people, etc.

Mad experiment: The researchers used an online petition that spread mainly in 2002-2003. Each recipient of this petition was asked to add their name to the end of the petition, and then forward it on to their friends. They collected 637 copies of the petition from mailing-list archives, each representing a distinct chain of participants, totaling 18,119 distinct signatories. They repeated this procedure for another petition that circulated in 1995. They used the multiple copies of each petition to construct a tree diagram, tracing the routes that the letter traveled. This was complicated by "noise," such as rearrangements of the list of names, deletions, insertions, mutations (changing a name on the list to a political figure, for example), and even hybridization when a user apparently received two copies of the petition and merged them together (interestingly, these are all things that happen with genes). Both petitions resulted in similar structures. They then followed all of this up by computationally modeling different patterns of forwarding (including modelling different patterns of the information being posted in a form that they could evaluate, ie taking into account the fact that they couldn't see everything), and seeing which pattern matched the observed trees (if any).

They all laughed, but: The hypothesis that these internet memes would spread in a similar manner to disease epidemics was (at least for these two examples) disproven just from the initial tree constructions. The trees were much longer than they would be for disease epidemics (the average distance between a given individual and the "root" of the tree was much longer than for diseases), and more than 90% of the nodes had exactly one child (ie, most people only spread the meme to one person).

The modeling experiments showed that two parameters had to be added to the disease model in order to get results that matched the petitions. First, not all recipients respond in the same amount of time. Some respond right away, and some take months to respond. This would be similar to a disease with a very widely varying incubation period (the memes don't match real diseases because real diseases don't have such widely varying incubations). Second, some recipients would send the meme back to either the person they got it from or the people the original person sent it to. This also doesn't happen in quite the same way for real diseases, and thus doesn't match known disease spreading patterns.

Of course, this was just a model. It would take more research to determine if the model was correct.

Mad follow-up: Researchers in Spain did the additional research. They started a meme through the IBM company newsletter, and were able to more exactly track its spread, and they found that the spread matched the model's prediction. Moreover, given a small set of initial data on the spread, they were able to predict how far and fast the information would spread (by calculating the parameters used by the model).

Mad engineering applications: Combined with the Spanish research, this is getting close to a way to construct messages to spread far and wide (such as, for example, your Manifesto on Why Everyone Should Bow to Your Will). It definitely isn't there yet; they can predict how far it'll spread given initial information about its spread, but they can't predict it before it's released into the wild. But, given that ability, more experiments are now possible; they don't have to wait until the meme has spread to see how effective it is, they only have to know initial information, so now they can construct slight variants of memes and see what makes different ones spread. Perhaps soon we will know what to include in your Manifesto to get it out there.

BTW, if you want to see the rest of the UnderstandBlue Birthday Blog Hop, start here.

Awkward Praise [Updated 8/22]

If you asked me at any time in the last 25 years (including within the last week) what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer would be uncertain. If, in any of that time, you asked me what my friend Jeffrey Dinsmore would be when he grew up, the answer would be easy and obvious: a writer.

I met Jeffrey in the back of Mr. Doolittle's band class in fifth grade. We were both drummers (aka the part of the band the conductor mostly ignores), so we got to know one another by yapping about various things while everyone else learned scales and such. No matter the topic, Jeffrey was always hilarious.

Over the years, I read many of Jeffrey's short stories, and they were always great. To this day, whenever I have writer's block, all I have to do is imagine how Jeffrey would say what I'm trying to say, and I can pseudoplagiarize my way out of the block.

So, of course, when he started a new independent publishing house (Awkward Press), and told me he'd have a story in their first anthology (appropriately entitled Awkward One), I knew I would have to buy it.

I just finished devouring his short story from the collection, "Little Deaths." This is where I need your help. I loved it, but I'm not certain if that's because it's as quirkyfunny as I think it is, or if it's just because I know Jeffrey. So, if at all possible, I need you guys to buy copies of Awkward One, and let me know what you think. Am I right?

Jeffrey has also always had a talent for recommending things I will love. He introduced me to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He owned the Rocky Horror Picture Show on VHS before it was officially available in the US, and is to Blane for me being able to surprise friends with my knowledge of the appropriate lines for viewings. He got me hooked on They Might Be Giants. And, of course, apropos to the site of our first meeting, he introduced me to the album Doolittle by the Pixies, cementing a love of alternative music before we knew what to call the stuff.

My point in all of that is that Jeffrey wrote one story for Awkward One, but he also recommends the other authors, so they must also be awesome. I'm just saying.

PS: Have I mentioned that you should buy a copy of Awkward One?

Update: The rest of the stories are also great. Well, I didn't much care for one of them, but the others make up for it. And I'm too nice to say which one that was. Well, ok, maybe not "nice," per se, 'cuz now they'll all assume it was them. Muahahahaha!