Category: Science

More and more of you read us through an RSS feed, so I will direct your attention to a new item on our blogroll, the British Psychological Society Research Digest.  Every two weeks they post a series of articles on new psychology results, typically with relevance to social science.  Scroll through the site, or here is a recent piece on depression and sensitivity to the emotions of others.

Timothy Wilson writes:

In one study, mildly depressed college students were asked to spend eight minutes thinking about themselves or to spend the same amount of time thinking about mundane topics like "clouds forming in the sky."

People in the first group focused on the negative things in their lives and sunk into a worse mood. People in the other group actually felt better afterward, possibly because their negative self-focus was "turned off" by the distraction task…

What can we do to improve ourselves and feel happier? Numerous social psychological studies have confirmed Aristotle’s observation that "We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage." If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves.

Social psychologist Daniel Batson and colleagues at the University of Kansas found that participants who were given an opportunity to do a favor for another person ended up viewing themselves as kind, considerate people – unless, that is, they were asked to reflect on why they had done the favor. People in that group tended in the end to not view themselves as being especially kind.

Here is the full story, and no I don´t have New Year´s resolutions.

No, this is not Klaus Barbie:

Barbie, that plastic icon of girlhood fantasy play, is routinely tortured by children, research has found.

The methods of mutilation are varied and creative, ranging from
scalping to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving,
according to academics from the University of Bath.

The
findings were revealed as part of an in-depth look by psychologists and
management academics into the role of brands among 7 to 11-year-old
schoolchildren.

The researchers had not intended to focus on Barbie, but they
were taken aback by the rejection, hatred and violence she provoked
when they asked the children about their feelings for the doll.

Violence and torture against Barbie were repeatedly reported
across age, school and gender. No other toy or brand name provoked such
a negative response…

She and her colleagues Christine Griffin and
Patricia Gaya Wicks concluded that, while adults may find a child’s
delight in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls to be
disturbing, from the child’s point of view they were simply being
imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity, in the same way as
one might crush cans for recycling.

Here is the story.

For some reason (psychoanalyze me if you wish), I find this one especially awful:

For her 17th wedding anniversay Jeanette Yarborough wanted to do something special for her husband.  In addition to planning a hotel getaway for the weekend, Ms. Yarborough paid a surgeon $5,000 to reattach her hymen, making her appear to be a virgin again.

"It’s the ultimate gift for the man who has everything," says Ms. Yarborough…

This is reported to be one of the plastic surgery industry’s fastest-growing segments, and yes that is in the United States.

The article is from the 15 December Wall Street Journal, p.A1.

Next thing you know, there will even be a market in Ron Artest.

…there is no clear evidence that schools are contributing to the growth in obesity.  The obesity-related complaints about school lunches, vending machines, and physical education are based largely on the assumption that these factors are causing our kids to get fat.  Yet, I find little evidence to support this claim.  For example, in looking at survey data on the health behavior of middle and high school students, the factor I found that best predicted whether or not a kid was obese was tooth brushing [emphasis added].  More important than how much junk food they ate, soda they drank, or physical education they received was whether or not they brushed their teeth.  Among fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, only 16 percent of kids who brushed their teeth more than once a day were overweight compared to 24 percent who brushed less than once a day.  Of course, other factors were important as well — teenagers who play more computer games, eat more fast-food, and drink less whole milk were also more likely to be obese — but these factors were tiny in comparison with tooth brushing.  Meanwhile school policies, such as whether the kid was in physical education or ate school lunches, had no predictive power for whether or not a child was obese.

Now obviously the act of brushing one’s teeth plays little direct role in a child’s weight, but it is a good indicator of something else — in what type of household the child lives.  Children who brush their teeth more often are more likely to come from homes where health and hygiene are a priority…In other words, outside of genetics, the biggest factor predicting a child’s weight is what type of parenting they receive [emphasis added].

That is from J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic.  Here is my previous post on the book; the comments are open.

Here is a defense of using those rat tests to judge what will cause cancer in humans:

The "junk science" they are referring to is the long-standing and
well-confirmed practice of identifying chemicals likely to cause cancer
in humans by testing them in animals. The animals (rodents) are a
standard model for biological processes of relevance to humans (which
is why drug companies and medical researchers have been using them for
a century). They are well understood and are the only sentinels for
detecting carcinogenicity of any use to public health. Since chemically
induced cancer has a latency period of decades (typically 20 years or
more), waiting for it to appear in human populations would meant that
once detected, even if exposure would cease instantly (which can never
happen), it would take another 20 or more years to eliminate the
cancers from exposure (all the cancers induced in the 20 years exposure
prior to detection). But even then, the chances of detecting any but
the most powerful carcinogens in human populations (via epidemiology)
is small. Epidemiology is a very insensitive tool. I say this with some
authority, as I am a cancer epidemiologist specializing in chemical
exposures and have authored numerous peer reviewed studies in that area
over many years.

The main rhetorical lever ACSH employs is the
use of high doses in the animal studies, doses that are much higher
than usually faced by humans. But as ACSH knows well (but didn’t
divulge) there is a technical requirement for using these doses. If one
were to use doses in animals predicted to cause cancer at a rate we
would consider a public health hazard, we would need tens of thousands
of animals to test a single dose, mode of exposure and rodent species
or strain. This makes using those doses infeasible. Thus a Maximum
Tolerated Dose is used, one that causes no other pathology except
possibly cancer and doesn’t result in more than a 10% weight loss. The
assumption here is that something that causes cancer at high doses in
these animals will also do so at low doses. This is biologically
reasonable. It is a (surprising) fact, that most chemicals, given in no
matter how high a dose, won’t cause the very unusual and specific
biological effect of turning an animal cell cancerous. Cancer cells are
not "damaged" cells in the individual sense but "super cells," capable
of out competing normal cells. It is only in the context of the whole
organism that there is a problem. It is not surprising, then, that very
few chemicals would have be ability to turn a normal cell into a
biological super cell of this type. Estimates are that is far less than
10%, perhaps only 1% of all chemicals that have this ability. Thus
western industrial civilization doesn’t have to come to a screeching
halt if we eliminate industrial chemical carcinogens from our
environment.

We know of no false negatives with this process.
Every chemical we know that causes cancer in humans also does so in
rodents (with the possible exception of inorganic trivalent arsenic,
which is equivocal).

Here is the full post.  I’m not close to having the expertise to evaluate these claims, but two points.  First, the author is highly qualified; as a blogger he is anonymous but I can vouch for his credentials.  Second, it should be the self-appointed task of bloggers to pass along arguments which either struck them or which might shake up their readers.

Clint Hallam, the man he selected for the world’s first hand
transplant, refused to keep up with the lifelong drug regimen required
to suppress immune responses, along with regular exercises to train the
new hand. After three years he had the hand removed.

And then:

Brain-dead patients in France are presumed to be organ donors unless
they have made explicit provisions to the contrary, and approval by
next of kin is not normally required.

Here is the full story.

Some relatives of people with autism also display behaviours and brain differences associated with the condition, even though they themselves do not have it. This could make it easier to spot families at risk of having an autistic child. It could also help in the quest to identify the genetic and environmental triggers for the condition, though it seems these triggers might vary from country to country.

Eric Peterson of the University of Colorado in Denver had compared an MRI study of the brains of 40 parents with autistic children to that of 40 age-matched controls. And he told the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington DC that the parents who had an autistic child shared several differences in brain structure with their offspring.

Here is the article.

Just as our technology for finding and understanding UFOs improved dramatically, the manifestations of UFOs dwindled away. Despite forty-plus years of alleged alien abductions, not one scrap of physical evidence supports the claim that mysterious visitors are conducting unholy experiments on hapless victims. The technology for sophisticated photograph analysis can be found in every PC in America, and yet, oddly, recent UFO pictures are rare. Cell phones and instant messaging could summon throngs of people to witness a paranormal event, and yet such paranormal events don’t seem to happen very often these days. For an allegedly real phenomenon, UFOs sure do a good job of acting like the imaginary friend of the true believers. How strange, that they should disappear just as we develop the ability to see them clearly. Or perhaps it isn’t so strange.

Here is more.  I doubt if people have fewer delusions, so presumably they have moved into stories which cannot so easily be refuted.  This would include delusions about the future (e.g., extreme forms of transhumanism?), delusions about politics, and delusions about religion.  The demand for verification need not outrace the ever-powerful self-deception; "stamp the weasel" is never an easy game to win.  And sometimes too much stamping is counterproductive.  For all of the associated craziness, UFO delusions have been of a relatively harmless ilk.  They made people skeptical about government, drew viewers to science fiction movies, and the policy implications of belief in aliens (appoint another ambassador?) were consistent with fiscal responsibility.

Randomness seems to confound us. For example, we have a tendency to infer non-randomness from apparent patterns in random events (witness the incorrigible optimists who spot trends in the spins of a roulette wheel or the ups and downs of the FT Share Index); at the same time, the history of statistics suggests that, when random samples are required, we often mistake the merely haphazard – or whatever happens to be near at hand – for the truly random. As I will show, the Doomsday Argument’s fundamental mistake is to rely on the intuitive but misguided notion that we can in general take ourselves to be typical humans, and thus, in effect, random samples of the species.

Here is the paper.  If you are familiar with the core argument, scroll down to p.9 "We are necessarily alive…" for the beginning of the bottom line.  I have never been persuaded by the Doomsday Argument, if only because it does not specify the appropriate reference class of self-observing agents.  I now see further reason to be skeptical.  Comments are open, and thanks again to the what-would-I-do-without-it www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

Truth be told, physicists are terrified of quantum mechanics. Really.  The rules of quantum calculation seem so strange that anyone afraid of losing his or her mind should be scared.  (Those who love to lose their minds, on the other hand, adore it.) 

Struggling to make the quantum rules square with a reality "out there," many physicist’s position is "shut up and calculate."  Others have abandoned standard logic, probability, or decision theory for "quantum" versions of these things, or have decided that consciousness must play a fundamental role. (There is even a quantum game theory.)

In eleven days I give my first talk at a physics department, on my conservative research program that tries to have it all: the quantum rules, a reality out there with no special role for consciousness, and keeping standard logic, probability, and decision theory.  I’m not quite there yet, and I may be too close to my work to be objective, but I feel I’m very close. 

Of course we can’t make all the quantum strangeness go away.  For example, reality seems to be intrinsically non-local, and it seems to be far larger than we ever imagined.  But the universe we are all familiar with now is far larger than our ancestors ever imagined, and even Newton gave up on locality. 

Fear not the quantum night – it really will all make sense someday.