purepedantry | November 4, 2008I always get in arguments with mathematically-inclined people about whether to vote or not. The mathematically-inclined point out very reasonably that the chances of your vote being decisive are perishingly slim.
(These mathematics are explained clearly in this PBS video by economist Gordon Tullock explaining why he does not vote. Hat-tip: Marginal Revolution)
But there is always a part of me that believes there has to be more to the story. My intuition is that if there really was no practical purpose, people wouldn't do it. The behavioral scientist in me argues that if a behavior has no…
purepedantry | November 3, 2008Professors are not effective at indoctrinating their students with their own politics -- or so says a study in the journal PS as reported in the NYTimes:
A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.
"There is no evidence that an instructor's views instigate political change among students," Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, a husband-and-wife…
purepedantry | October 31, 2008This Sunday you are slightly less likely to have a heart attack.
Swedish researchers, publishing in the NEJM, looked at a registry of heart attacks from 1987 to 2006. They found that the incidence of heart attacks slightly increases for the three days following the Spring daylight savings time where we lose an hour. The incidence of heart attacks slightly decreased on the day after Fall daylight savings time:
We used data from the Swedish registry of acute myocardial infarction, which provides high-quality information on all acute myocardial infarctions in the country since 1987. The…
purepedantry | October 24, 2008A survey of American internists and rheumatologists has revealed that over 50% of them regularly prescribe placebos. Tilburt et al. surveyed internists and rheumatologists to see whether they were prescribing placebos, and if so how and what kind they were using. The study, published in BMJ, found the following:
679 physicians (57%) responded to the survey. About half of the surveyed internists and rheumatologists reported prescribing placebo treatments on a regular basis (46-58%, depending on how the question was phrased). Most physicians (399, 62%) believed the practice to be ethically…
purepedantry | October 23, 2008Whenever you are having a debate -- particularly a policy debate -- it is always important to check your premises. That is why I found this article in the Journal of the American Medical Association refreshing.
Emergency Department utilization is clearly on the rise in the US, and this rise in use is leading to longer wait times and diminished quality of care. One assumption that the cause of this problem are the uninsured, i.e. the uninsured are using the ED as an alternative to primary care and causing overcrowding.
However, Newton et al., in what will likely be a provocative article,…
purepedantry | October 21, 2008I am a little late to this party, but I do want to talk about this paper in Nature Neuroscience.
Moritz et al. implanted an electrode into a monkey's motor cortex. The electrode was designed to only record from a single neuron at a time. Then the output of that cell -- after a little amplification and transformation in a computer -- was connected to a muscle in the monkey's wrist. Finally, the nerves that innervated that muscle were temporarily anesthetized. The monkey was trained to play a little game that involved moving the wrist muscle to get a reward.
The researchers wanted to know…
purepedantry | October 21, 2008I have been a bit lax on the blogging, but here is what I have been reading on the economy.
Tyler Cowen attributes the financial bubble to three main causes:
The current financial crisis comes from a conjunction of three major trends, common to many countries and to a wide variety of financial institutions.
The first trend was a positive one: an enormous growth in wealth that needed to be moved into investments. Before he became chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke wrote of a "global savings glut," particularly from Asia. Furthermore, over the last 20 years, many countries have…
purepedantry | October 16, 2008Lawrence Lessig, co-founder of Creative Commons, writes in the WSJ in defense of piracy -- or more aptly the culture of remixing of which blogging is certainly a part:
The return of this "remix" culture could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history -- save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century -- where many create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to read a…
purepedantry | October 16, 2008Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Fiery Cushman have designed a moral sense test. The test poses scenarios and asks you to evaluate the relative morality or immorality of different actions. The purpose of the test for the researchers is to compare the responses between philosophers and non-philosophers to various ethical questions. (I imagine that the results will be not unlike when they check economist's ability to perform investment finance.)
I encourage you to go over to their site and help them collect some data.
Anyway, I was over on their site this morning, and one of…
purepedantry | October 15, 2008The scientific process is composed of generating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses through experiment. Yet we don't know a whole lot about how about hypothesis generation happens on the level of the brain.
Recognizing that I am dealing with a loaded term -- scientists have strong opinions on the meaning of the term hypothesis -- I would like to talk about a study that looked hypothesis generation in the brain. Kwon et al. used fMRI to look at the brain activation associated with hypothesis generation (as opposed to being just told a hypothesis), with and without training.
Before…
purepedantry | October 15, 2008An article at RealClearPolitics of interest to those living in the Southwest. (I am looking at you, Mom and Dad.)
Political observers agree that, like in the Northeast, Democrats have made gains because they have broadened their coalition to include those more supportive of gun and property rights and more open to domestic energy exploration. Western voters aren't just choosing the same liberals who win in urban centers like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. Instead, Democrats have presented most Westerners with a new kind of candidate, one more in tune with Western values of limited…
purepedantry | October 14, 2008Kara showed me this clip when I was in London, and it is too funny not to share. It is of British comedian James Sherwood detailing his "rules of songwriting."
My favorite: "...but ignores the more psychologically interesting detail that he cannot lie."
purepedantry | October 14, 2008Many scientifically-inclined voters were a bit shocked by McCain's comment criticizing Obama for supporting a "3 million dollar earmark for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago." The "overhead projector" in question was actually a top of the line piece of equipment for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and many did not consider this an earmark.
University of Chicago professor, Andrey Kravstov, responded in a comment on the NYTimes website (Hat-tip: Cosmic Variance):
The way Sen. McCain has phrased it suggests that Sen. Obama approved spending $3 million on an old-fashioned…
purepedantry | October 13, 2008John Tierney reports this shocking revelation: our marijuana control doesn't work and no one -- particularly the government -- wants to admit it.
Now that the first five years' results are available, the campaign can officially be called a failure, according to an analysis of federal drug-use surveys by Jon Gettman, a senior fellow at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. The prevalence of marijuana use (as measured by the portion of the population that reported using it in the previous month) declined by 6 percent, far short of the 25-percent goal, and that decline was…
purepedantry | October 13, 2008Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli have an article in PLoS suggesting that because the emphasis in scientific publishing is too much on the big positive results in the big journal, many results are going to be wrong. (Remember that Ioannidis published another paper saying that many results are going to be wrong on purely statistical grounds.) They borrow an idea from economics called the winner's curse.
Basically, the winner's curse is the idea than in some auctions with imperfect information, the winner will overpay. Applied to science, it means that when you have big…
kcontreary | October 13, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics goes to Paul Krugman "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity".
I think this will come as a surprise to many, particularly since he's winning it alone. Most economists guessed he would win it someday, but assumed he would share it with one of his redoubtable co-authors. Helpman, perhaps. Given his political bent and coming on the heels of Gore's win last year, you can count on renewed suspicion of the Nobel committee's "impartiality". Stay tuned...
purepedantry | September 25, 2008Not really a lot for me to say about the bailout package, but I stumbled on this funny sentence in the NYTimes:
After the overnight drafting efforts on both sides of Capitol Hill -- with pizza on the House side, and Thai food in the Senate -- Democratic officials said they had completed a unified draft of a bill.
1) Did the particular choices of overnight food affect the impressions of the relevant parties about the bill?
2) Do you think the House eats cheaper than the Senate? I mean, there are more of them...
purepedantry | September 24, 2008For those of you who are interested in science blogging -- either to ask questions or to start one of your own -- I will be participating in a panel discussion about science blogging next week (Wednesday, Oct. 1st at 7 pm) at the Apple Store in Soho New York. More info here if you would like to attend.
The panel is moderated by Katherine Sharpe and includes fellow SciBlings Jessica Palmer, Steinn Sigurdsson, GrrlScientist, and Brian Switek.
Please come by and join us if you are in the area.
In the vein of the significance of science blogging, SciBlings Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis, and Tara…
purepedantry | September 23, 2008Sorry about the light blogging everyone. I am super-busy at work preparing for an upcoming vacation, so I just don't have the time for it at the moment. I expect light-blogging between now and the middle of October, so check back with us then.
purepedantry | September 18, 2008Here is a clever idea for making sure you never have to search for a parking space: congestion pricing. San Francisco is trying out a system based on this principle:
The SFpark project will begin early in 2009 with a new network of pavement sensors in 6,000 of San Francisco's metered parking spaces and 11,500 of its off-street car parks and garages. These sensors will detect when a space is taken and relay that information to a central database. From there, information about vacant parking spots will pass to drivers in several ways. The most basic will be through a network of road signs that…