One of the problems brains must overcome to behave effectively is to discretely encode all the different responses that they can produce. Considering movement alone, you can move in a lot of different ways. Selecting which one is appropriate is troublesome in itself, but encoding all of them is a challenge. It is like trying to organize the Library of Congress so that you can instantly find exactly what you want. Your brain must come up with some way to encode each of these responses separately because if it didn't than you might engage in one response when you really meant another. How…

I have been meaning to update about this, but Presh at Mind Your Decisions blog discusses another example of Game Theory in the movie the Dark Knight. He talks about the first scene where the robbers are let us say vigorously arguing about the division of the spoils from a bank heist: The robbers don't like that the Joker gets an equal share for doing unequal work. Their complaint raises the issue of fair division, which is central to game theory. In fact, fair division is the first problem that game theory addressed historically. The problem appears in the Babylonian Talmud about how…

There is a great review of anti-aging science in Nature by an Jan Vijg and Judith Campisi. Life extension has been in the news with compounds like resveratrol -- a compound found in red wine -- shown to increase the life span of nematodes, yeast and most recently mice (though the mice in that study were on an unhealthy high calorie diet). Explaining how these compounds work is a more difficult challenge. We think that these compounds work by influencing pathways that regulate overall metabolism. We also think that these same pathways are altered by caloric-restriction -- a technique that…

I talked last week about the pros and cons of lowering the drinking age back to 18. One of the cons that I had assumed was that lowering the drinking age would increase the number of traffic fatalities in the 18-20 cohort. A study from NBER disputes this argument. Miron and Tetelbaum looked at the data from different states that voluntarily raised their drinking ages to 21 before federal law tied highways funds to that age in 1984 -- forcing to states to raise the age. They wanted to understand the time course of changes in traffic fatalities both before and after the implementation of…

This is funny. Andrew Sullivan has a discussion going on whether the use of semicolons is (ahem) gay. It references an article in the Boston Globe documenting a variety of semicolon-haters. But here is the best comment from Bryan Appleyard: Lately, with considerable effort, I have begin to use them with some frequency; they seem to come almost naturally at last. Yet I still fear Kurt Vonnegut's description of them as 'transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing' as well as the charge that real men neither eat quiche nor use semi-colons. In the end, however, the semi-colon…

The fit-fat fight -- whether someone can be obese but still healthy -- has reignited (if it ever really stopped) with an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine that was reported in the NYTimes. Wildman et al. used data from the NHANES study and looked at the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and whether the individuals had a variety of other indicators of cardiovascular risk -- mostly blood tests that indicate poor cardiometabolic physiology like high cholesterol or high blood pressure. What they found was that large numbers of obese individuals (BMI > 30) had few…

I have talked a little before about alternative strategies to lowering college alcohol abuse -- alternative meaning as opposed to outright bans like the 21 drinking age. Now a set of college presidents are circulating something called the Amethyst Initiative whose goal is to lower the drinking age back from 21 to 18. (For those of you who don't remember the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 under the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 by tying raising the age to receipt of highway funding from the federal government. This act was championed by then Transportation Secretary…

The University of Georgia has started doing health screens to check their football players for possible arrhythmias or heart abnormalities: Makiri Pugh is not your typical college freshman. At age 18, he knows more than most young adults about the structure and health of his heart, and it's not because he's sick. Pugh, of Charlotte, North Carolina, was recruited to play football for the University of Georgia Bulldogs, ranked No. 1 in pre-season polls. Like other elite athletes at the school in Athens, Georgia, he was required to undergo a battery of medical tests before he took the field.…

There is a fascinating review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this month about the cognitive science of magic tricks -- authored by both scientists and practicing magicians (sadly behind a subscription wall). The article attempts to list and describe in neuroscientific terms the techniques that magicians use to trick their audiences. The authors break down these into "visual illusions (after-images), optical illusions ('smoke and mirrors'), cognitive illusions (inattentional blindness), special effects (explosions, fake gunshots, et cetera), and secret devices and mechanical artifacts (…

I was distressed to hear that Bernie Mac died last Saturday of pneumonia at the age of 50. I always thought he was pretty funny, and I was a big fan of the Ocean's Eleven movies where he played a prominent part. I also raised an eyebrow when I heard that he was only 50 because 50-year-olds do not typically die of pneumonia unless they are in some way immunosuppressed -- either from medications or from some condition like HIV. Even though it wasn't the immediate cause of his death, Mac fought a poorly understood disease called sarcoidosis which may explain why he would be particularly…

One of my students in LSE's summer school microeconomics class sent me this video. At least I know something's sinking in when I talk about things happening on the margin...

Engineers at Penn State have developed a new method of running a refrigerator that doesn't require a compressor. Rather, it changes the level of organization in a solid to change the temperature. This change in entropy results in heat-transfer. Conventional cooling systems -- refrigerators or air conditioners -- rely on the properties of gases to cool and most systems use the change in density of gases at changing pressures to cool. The coolants commonly used are either harmful to people or the environment. Freon, one of the fluorochlorocarbons banned because of the damage it did to the…

Michael S. Teitelbaum has an editorial in Science about scientific funding that echoes a point that I have been making for a while: the issue with scientific funding is as much about volatility (bigs ups and downs) as it is total funding. For NIH, more research funding does produce increased research output, as intended. Yet, because the system as currently structured employs graduate and postdoctoral research assistants to do much of the laboratory work, increased research funding also produces (after a multiyear lag) additional Ph.D.-level applicants for NIH grants. No effective mechanisms…

A Spanish cyclist, Maria Isabel Moreno, became the first person at the Beijing Olympics to test positive for a banned substance. It's cycling, so no shocker that the banned substance was Epo. No word on whether it is the new type of Epo called CERA that Riccardo Ricco tested positive for in the Tour de France. Anyway, I wrote a big post on Epo that has all I want to say on the matter.

Yet another piece of evidence for the futility of abstinence education. Masters et al., publishing in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, show that an adolescent's attitude about sex is a much stronger indicator that they will actually have it than their attitudes about abstinence. The study followed around 300 teenagers from Seattle over a year after interviewing them about their attitudes about sex and abstinence and their intentions to have sex or abstain. They wanted to know how their initial attitudes and intentions about sex and abstinence interacted over time…

It has been a rough month here at Pure Pedantry. At one point last week, I think I trained rats for 8 straight hours. (My job in the lab is training rats.) And let me just tell you, that is not particularly interesting. Visualize getting a repetitive stress injury moving around an pissed off animal with a limited attention span but to whom your entire future is chained. Anyway, in order to entertain myself, I have been playing every episode of South Park in order in the background. (Yes, I know...very, very sad.) Sufficeth to say, this has resulted in me having South Park on the brain…

There is an interesting discussion going on at the Becker-Posner blog about obesity abatement. Richard Posner talks about the NY ordinance requiring that calorie counts of food be prominently labeled fast food restaurants: The significance of the New York City ordinance lies in its requiring that calorie numbers be printed next to the food items on menus and menu boards and in large type. The purpose is less to inform than to frighten. Psychologists have shown (what is anyway pretty obvious) that people respond more to information that is presented to them in a dramatic, memorable form than…

Sorry for the light blogging everyone. It has been a busy, busy week. Some of you may have caught Janet Hyde's latest paper looking at data from the No Child Left Behind Act and math performance in the US. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required to test children for a variety of skills on a yearly basis. The paper looked at math performance across grade-level broken down by gender for 10 states from these tests. Here is the key graph: The data includes a measure of effect size called Cohen's d (I discussed it here) and a measure called the variance ratio (VR -- which is…

Just a heads up. Next week on August 5th (Tuesday) I will be hosting the illustrious medicine carnival Grand Rounds. (Has it been a year and a half since I did this last? Jeez I have been doing this forever...) Anyway, here is how you submit. Send an email with your name, your blog, the url to the post, and a sentence description of it to jamesjyoung **at** gmail. The submission deadline is Monday August 4th at 6 pm as I will be writing the carnival that evening. Haven't decided on a theme for this yet, so just give me your best. I am looking forward to reading all of your posts!

Carlos Sastre won the Tour de France yesterday, but the whole race has been marred by incidents of sports doping. First, Riccardo Ricco was caught using a form of Epo called CERA. Now another biker named Dmitriy Fofonov tested positive for a drug called heptaminol. Heptaminol made me raise an eyebrow, primarily because I had never heard of it before. I am beginning to wonder where these bikers even find this stuff. I kid you not: it took me a while to even find information on it. Most drug databases I checked don't even have an entry for it. It is on the list of WADA prohibited…