Thursday, August 31, 2017

"When are people gonna realize their studies are dead on arrival?"


"my message is that this noisy, N = 41, between-person study never had a chance. The researchers presumably thought they were doing solid science, but actually they’re trying to use a bathroom scale to weigh a feather—and the feather is resting loosely in the pouch of a kangaroo that is vigorously jumping up and down.
To put it another way, those researchers might well have thought that at best they were doing solid science and at worst they were buying a lottery ticket, in that, even if their study was speculative and noisy, it was still giving them a shot at a discovery.
But, no, they weren’t even buying a lottery ticket. When you do this sort of noisy uncontrolled study and you “win” (that is, find a statistically significant comparison), you actually are very likely to be losing(high type M error, high type S error rate).
That’s what’s so sad about all this. Not that the original researchers failed—all of us fail all the time—but that they never really had a chance.
On the plus side, our understanding of statistics has increased so much in the past several years—no joke—that now we realize this problem, while in the past even a leading psychologist such as Kahneman and a leading journalist such as Gladwell were unaware of the problem."



In biology, this happens when you use a small number of mice (as can happen when you're maybe setting up some kind of secondary confirmation experiment where you take the mice you already experimented on and that had a certain result and you do a further experiment and a few will die or someone will drop a sample or a computer glitch will ruin a data file and you only have usable days for like 5 mice). You can end up with a really strong effect size that, in later experiments, turns out to be much more minor. Or, because mouse lines are supposed to be genetically identical and raised in the sane environments from lab to lab but it turns out that they can randomly have very different microbiomes and epigenetics that can skew results.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

"The UX Secret That Will Ruin Apps For You"


"Facebook actually slows down its interface to make users feel safe, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed in an email. "While our systems perform these checks at a much faster speed than people can actually see, it's important that they understand what we do behind the scenes to protect their Facebook account," the spokesperson wrote. "UX can be a powerful education tool and walking people through this process at a slower speed allows us to provide a better explanation and an opportunity for people to review and understand each step along the way."... 

Wells Fargo admitted to slowing down its app's retinal scanners, because customers didn't realize they worked otherwise, while various services on the web including travel sites, mortgage engines, and security checks are all making a conscious effort to slow down their omnipotent minds because our puny human brains expect things to take longer... 

Our expectations have supreme power to shape our experience of the world, including how we interact with our gadgets. "If we break customers’ expectations, the interface stops working," says Kowitz. "That can happen if the Internet is moving too slowly. And in some cases, it can actually happen if the interface is moving too fast."


Tuesday, August 29, 2017

"Nettie Stevens discovered XY sex chromosomes. She didn't get credit because she had two X’s."

"Stevens was born in Vermont in 1861 and got her start in science at the relatively late age of 35, when she had saved up enough to enroll in a small startup university in California. It was Stanford, and she thrived there, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree by 1900.
After Stanford, Stevens pursued a PhD — a level of education very rare for women of her time — at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania. It was there that she turned her attention to solving the problem of sex determinism...
Stevens wanted to know how (and if) sex was passed on through genetic inheritance. She was making observations with a microscope of the chromosomes in Tenebrio molitor — the mealworm beetle — when she discovered something that had eluded humanity for millennia.
Stevens observed that the female mealworm’s cells had 20 large chromosomes. The male had 20 chromosomes as well, but the 20th was notably smaller than the other 19...
“It is generally stated that E. B. Wilson obtained the same results as Stevens, at the same time,” Brush writes. But “Wilson probably did not arrive at his conclusion on sex determination until after he had seen Stevens' results. ... Because of Wilson's more substantial contributions in other areas, he tends to be given most of the credit for this discovery.”


Monday, August 28, 2017

"My White Boss Talked About Race in America and This is What Happened"


"So yesterday, when my boss — a White woman in tech — empathized with me, a Black woman, that was A.VERY.BIG.DEAL. In fact, it was the first time a White colleague (and I’ve had many) has ever said anything to me about the killing of a Black person in America by a White police officer — and there’s unfortunately been several opportunities for them to speak up.

The fact that a White colleague in a work setting made it a point to make a point about racial injustice in America and acknowledge the Black community’s pain, hurt, and anger over it…the fact that she didn’t just act like today was “business as usual” — that meant more to me than any free lunches, office perks, or holiday bonuses ever could...

Tech is smart — like really freakin’ smart. Tech wouldn’t be taking over the world if it wasn’t so damn smart. So I don’t buy the “I don’t know what to do” spiel. You have a growth mindset when it comes to everything else. Why do your critical thinking skills suddenly vanish when it comes to figuring out how you can contribute to this whole racial equality thing? Whether it be investing in a more diverse workforce, lobbying for judicial system reform, refusing to do business with cities and individuals that perpetrate racism…there are countless things you can take action on."


Sunday, August 27, 2017

"What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement After 1965? Don’t Ask Your Textbook"

"It’s no accident my students learn a narrative that stops in 1965. Most history textbooks end their chapter on the Civil Rights Movement with a short one- or two-page section on “Black Power” that covers Malcolm X and a few post-1965 events...

Textbooks reinforce the Voting Rights Act-as-the-end-of-the-movement narrative when they draw a line between the Civil Rights Movement and the call for Black Power. One example is Teachers Curriculum Institute’s widely used History Alive! The United States. One page after extolling the virtues of the Voting Rights Act, the authors write in their “Black Power” section:

By the time King died, many African Americans had lost faith in his vision of a society in which the color of a person’s skin didn’t matter. Angry young African Americans looked instead to new leaders who talked about black pride and black power.

Missing from this passage is the angry young King, who reminded us after 1965 that his dream had “turned into a nightmare,” who attacked segregation in the North, who opposed the Vietnam War, who advocated for a massive redistribution of wealth, who called for Black pride, and who worked closely with Black Power proponents...

The broader curricular crime is that History Alive! teaches students to accept the turn to Black Power as the end of the successful Civil Rights Movement, and therefore not worth spending class time exploring...



One of many disservices done to non-white kids in US history classrooms. There are so many ways that the curriculum assumes a white audience, which not only prevents those of us who are not white from developing strong identities as Americans, but reinforces the marginalization of Americans-of-Color in the minds of white students. We exist as victims and activists an tightly prescribed historical "incidents", if we exist at all.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

"By the way you're now White. How to make Asians invisible."


"Recently I was looking at an education report, pretty standard stuff – charts on graduation rates, kindergarten readiness, etc. Where it got interesting was the chart labeled “opportunity gap.” I paused and started reading more carefully, but couldn’t make sense of the chart or the table. My colleague and I puzzled over it until we read the footnote and it became real. In the chart Asians were grouped with Whites in order to present their opportunity gap data. We went from “no way, they didn’t do that…” to “oh, shit they did…”...

Data is an important way to demonstrate the disparities that continue to exist for Asians. Data can either be used for good or as my colleague Dr. Jondou Chen describes as ‘weaponizing’ data against communities of color. Grouping Asians with Whites plays into the myth of the ‘model minority.’ While many Asians are doing well, many others still struggle or have to work twice as hard to find the same gains as our White counterparts...

Grouping Asian with White people shifts the burden of closing gaps to Asians rather than identifying factors that continue to marginalize Asian communities."



Related: White people don't want "merit-based" with Asians; the essay by the Indian med student; the essay about how the Hulk shoudl be Asian

Friday, August 25, 2017

"The Victorian Muslims of Britain"


"Like Headley, many of the early British converts to the religion were young aristocrats or the children of the mercantile elite. Some were explorers, intellectuals and high-ranking officials of empire who had worked and lived in Muslim lands under British colonial rule.

The stories of these converts, says Professor Humayun Ansari of Royal Holloway, University of London, reflect the turbulent times in which they lived, as well as the profound questions that were being raised about religion and the nature and origins of humanity.

“There was the carnage and chaos of the First World War, the suffragette movement, the questioning of imperialism and the right of the British and other Western empires to rule over vast numbers of people,” says Ansari. “In many ways, [those who converted] were living in a very troubled world. In Britain’s wars in Sudan and Afghanistan, and later Europe, they saw terrible slaughter, with armies and governments on all sides claiming God was with them.

“They had experienced what they saw as the peace, the spirituality and simplicity of Islamic societies, and it appealed greatly to them,” Ansari adds...

Here are the stories of some of Britain’s Victorian Muslims:"



I am always fascinated by these narratives of moments in history when something that is currently highly political was allowed to be personal. Another thing that these narratives do is remind us that historical cultures were not monolithic, that the world wasn't sepia-toned, that maybe I could have existed then too as substantially the same person. That maybe we are not limited by our contexts.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

"What your fat friend needs from you."


"I laughed because I didn’t want anyone to notice me. I wanted to disappear into the backdrop, be absorbed into the joke so I wouldn’t be spotlit as its subject. In moments like these, I could feel every inch of my skin, every hot pore, every hair on end. I could feel my body reawaken, exhausted and alert to this same old threat. The only defense I had, the only defense I could muster, was to laugh...

fat bodies cannot simply be broken. Fat bodies must be eliminated. A healthy world, a happy and functional world, is almost always envisioned as one without bodies like mine. The message about my body is clear: we’d all be better off if you weren’t here...

When I tell you about comments from strangers and colleagues, family and dates, you ask me what you can do, how you can help. The simplest answer is that you can intervene. Say something, anything, to stop the dismissal and rejection of fat people, whether or not you love them yet. Rise to the occasion of who you aspire to be in those brief and exceptional moments...

The greatest gift you can give me, dear friend, is to let yourself go. Let yourself believe that your body is sufficient, just as it is today. Stop beating it into submission, publicly listing its shortcomings and your own failings. Treat your body as tenderly as you would mine."



Related: The pain? of not knowing if it is about you; there was another one about obesity...

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

"Welcome To Mongolia's New Postal System: An Atlas Of Random Words"


"What we've done is we've cut the world into 3-meter squares, so that's 57 trillion 3-meter squares," Chris Sheldrick, co-founder of What3Words, tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "And there's enough words in the dictionary — so, I'm talking words like table, chair, spoon — that you can actually assign three words to every 3-meter square in the world and you don't run out of combinations."..

Even in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, there aren't really street names that people use in everyday life," Sheldrick says. "You can't put [an address] into an app, and people tend to use directions — or they say, you know, 'by the blue, tall building,' or 'the lampost on the left.' "
When the new system is put into place though, things will be a bit different.
"The first thing that somebody would do would be to discover their three words," he explains, by downloading the app. Once equipped with their own address phrase, Mongolians will be able to provide a precise and unambiguous location for any number of uses — like navigation, banking and online shopping."

http://www.npr.org/2016/06/19/482514949/welcome-to-mongolias-new-postal-system-an-atlas-of-random-words#Where?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160619

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

"Evidence for Absolute Moral Opposition to Genetically Modified Food in the United States"


"the scientific consensus is that genetically modified crops are no more dangerous than conventionally bred alternatives. For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) writes that “the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: Consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques” (AAAS, 2012). Likewise, independent scientific reviews of the environmental risks of GM agriculture have not yet uncovered meaningful risks to the natural environment above and beyond those of conventional (i.e., non-GM) agriculture (Nicolia, Manzo, Veronesi, & Rosellini, 2014; Sanvido, Romeis, & Bigler, 2007)...

A recent survey of U.S. adults and scientists found that only 37% of the public thought genetically modified food was safe to eat, whereas 88% of AAAS members thought it was (Pew Research Center, 2015). This 51-point gap between scientists and the public was the largest of any issue tested, including anthropogenic climate change and human evolution. This divergence between scientific and public opinion is striking and has stimulated a great deal of research on public acceptance of GM...

We argue that this combination of minimal knowledge and strong conviction is sensible if, for many people, attitudes about GM are the result of absolute moral values rather than consequence-based calculations. Psychologists have called these kinds of moral values “sacred” or “protected” values (Baron & Spranca, 1997; Tetlock, 2003)...

Disgustbased proscription seems to occur largely for behaviors that violate values pertaining to sex, food, and the body or those that evoke notions of unnaturalness, impurity, or contamination (Haidt et al., 1993; Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2008). Consequently, disgust-based proscription may be especially likely for GM. Consistent with this possibility, genetically modified food is often described by opponents as unnatural (e.g., “Frankenfood”), as contaminating people by ingestion, and as contaminating the natural environment by contact (see McWilliams, 2015)"


Monday, August 21, 2017

"The theater of faculty diversification"


"The Yale Report reviewed numerous plans for diversification, focusing on hiring and promotion data. The Committee found Yale’s many such endeavors locked a “groundhog day” scenario, a “perpetual loop: Form a committee in reaction to a crisis, pledge to diversify the faculty, and then fail to follow through with action and resources needed to sustain progress”... 

McMurtrie says: “more than half of faculty members in underrepresented groups said they often or always felt excluded from informal networks, had to work harder to be seen as legitimate scholars, and had more service responsibilities”... 

One senior White colleague, who had offered a sympathetic ear for years, ended up on my promotion committee; under pressure from her department head (as I discovered later), she teamed up with her colleagues against me, claiming informal complaints for which there was no evidence. When I demanded evidence, she said, “Well, we know you,” the “we” being a clear flag of WE – a small number of tenured, long-standing local, White Christianfaculty who will always stick together.
Fortunately the Faculty Council, reviewing evidence, struck down the promotion committee’s claims, though this did nothing to improve the program climate."

Related: The Other Side of Diversity 


FB: "This is why this post is titled “The theater of faculty diversification.” Theater is busy work. It looks good. It is a lot of talk, a lot of lip-service. Hire a woman of color whose research focuses on underrepresented communities, and then put her through the wringer. Not only do you get points for hiring her, but you get rid of her long-term. And bonus points for putting a black mark on her long-term career by marking her as a “bad fit,” a turnover risk."

Sunday, August 20, 2017

"Unstickiness and Emotions in the Classroom"


"historically, the U.S. classroom privileges rationality over emotion and, as we bring students into our courses, we implicitly and sometimes explicitly ask them to learn how to “gain distance” in order to learn. But this move –one I’d taken for granted for years– means that students who feel particularly affected by a topic like the physical and epistemic violence against people of color in the U.S. must do much more work to manage their emotions while other students skate easily into “rationality.” Or as Dian Million puts it, speaking of indigenous feminist scholarship, “academia repetitively produces gatekeepers to our entry into important social discourses because we feel our histories as well as think them” (her emphasis). Million makes the vital case that, to decolonize our knowledge production, we cannot divorce understanding from feeling."


Yes yes yes yes yes. I have become very good at gliding past my feelings. Sometimes I have serious, emotional conversations with friends and they get upset because I don't seem affected (if the conversation is about their emotions) or super clinical and **unserious, dismissive, unweighty...** (if it is about my emotions). 


I would love to see a study about POC who grew up and went to school with most white people, and our ability to communicate emotion in the moment.

Saturday, August 19, 2017

"Why do any of us have orgasms, really?"


"The issue is usually presented like so: Male orgasms are “straightforward” and serve an obvious purpose. But female orgasms—what’s the deal with those? If they aren’t reliably sparked by a penis pumping away in the baby chute, why do they happen at all?...

Lloyd catches scientists only considering the female orgasm as an event tied to intercourse and wrongly asserting its (unestablished) relationship to fertility—including but not limited to the idea that a woman’s orgasm “induces a sucking motion of the uterus.”...

if we loop back to the original framing—orgasm obviously makes sense in men, but not in women—the root of the larger problem is painfully apparent. What assumption underlies “obviously”? Is it a conflation of ejaculation and orgasm, which are separate biological experiences? (Truly, they are, which is why they can and do occur independently, as tantric sex practitioners are often so eager to tell.)...

In conversations that treat a strong orgasm-propelled sex drive as “obviously” beneficial to the species when present in men, women are usually depicted as proportionately disincentivized to have intercourse. It won’t get them off and it might get them pregnant—which is a total bummer, resource-wise—so what’s in it for them? The same people who regard (male) orgasm as the most powerful reward known to humankind inevitably embrace that tired evopsych fantasy of reticent, selective women and indiscriminately horny men. At some point, one has to imagine, these desperate dudes would just satisfy themselves with their hands....

The fact is that orgasm, which probably occurs in most other mammals but is far from a certainty, is not a requirement for reproduction... The real question, then, is not “Why do women orgasm?” but “Why do any of us orgasm?”"


Excellent questions, fun read.


FB: " To treat a body—and inevitably, a male body—as a perfect machine in which there are no superfluous functions is to invent a “just-so” story that cannot carry scientific weight."

Friday, August 18, 2017

"ON READING ISSUES OF WIRED FROM 1993 TO 1995"


"Founded in 1993 by Jane Metcalfe, Louis Rossetto, and Kevin Kelly, Wired emerged when San Francisco’s tech scene was still shadowy and creative, populated by phreakers and neo-hippies, artists and anarchists, ravers and cypherpunks. The founders were hugely influenced by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth network, a group of technologists, entrepreneurs, and writers. Unlike today’s tech workers and entrepreneurs, the readers of early Wired were direct heirs of the sixties’ countercultural ethos (not coincidentally, the same spirit that informed the rise of personal computing in the seventies). On the Venn diagram between monied techno-utopianism and hippie idealism, Wired’starget reader sat squarely in the center.

As people were beginning to figure out how to integrate technology into their lives, Wired raised new possibilities for the cybernetic future. In early Wired, technology wasn’t just entertaining; it was a tool, meant to liberate and enlighten. Products were positioned as socially transformative (“We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got Email”). I was strangely moved by an article about Santa Monica’s Public Electronic Network, an online town hall used by the city’s homeless and wealthy alike. And then there were the regular contributions by members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—a civil-rights nonprofit that is effectively cyberculture’s answer to the A.C.L.U.—advocating for digital freedoms including online privacy, encryption, and free speech...

In early Wired, a piece about a five-hundred-thousand-dollar luxury “Superboat” would be followed by a full-page editorial urging readers to contact their legislators to condemn wiretapping (in this case, 1994’s Digital Telephony Bill). Stories of tech-enabled social change and New Economy capitalism weren’t in competition; they coexisted and played off one another. In 2016, some of my colleagues and I have E.F.F. stickers on our company-supplied MacBooks—“I do not consent to the search of this device,” we broadcast to our co-workers—but dissent is no longer an integral part of the industry’s ethos.

Today’s future-booster events, like the annual Consumer Electronics Show, tend to prize stories of novelty and innovation—and yet, reading early Wired, it becomes clear that many of the inventions that claim to be new today are simply extensions of what came before."


This all sounds like the optimism of my silicon valley childhood, the future that we were raised to inherit.

I sort of forgot about this, but there was a definite part of "cyber" that was also about questioning the current world order, being very cynic-savvy about the political structures that technology fit into. 

I think the difference was the idea of the tech company, before the scene was dominated by massive work-play complexes that have kinda commodified the rebellious youthyness.

And a transition from physical engineering with specialized software (remember how often people said "widgets"?) to software engineering of the same specific set of physical devices. Tech companies and startups are a lot less independent of each other.


#RealTimeBrainDrips

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

"ADHD Tipping Points: Why people with ADHD suddenly seem to fall apart, and what you can do about it"



"In her coaching practice, Laurie met many people diagnosed as adults as late as middle age. Often, they had functioned well in school, at work, and in their relationships, until their lives suddenly seemed to fall apart--at which point they were finally diagnosed. Laurie developed the concept of a "tipping point" (similar to what I call "hitting the wall") to describe this phenomenon. She then looked for patterns in her clients' lives to explain why these bright, successful adults were able to function so well for so long, and then suddenly could no longer do so.

Tipping points occur because undiagnosed people have always had an ADHD brain with ADHD strengths and weaknesses. However, these traits may have never disabled them before because they found ways to compensate, and their physical and social environments allowed them to do so...

 A person may have an ADHD neurotype (for example, dysregulated dopamine systems in their brains, delayed prefrontal cortex development, and reduced prefrontal cortex activity during executive function), but they may only have the disability ADHD when they can no longer compensate for these traits or their environment makes these traits a sufficient liability to cause disability and distress. Thus, a person could theoretically go back and forth over their lives between having ADHD and not having ADHD!"


"What the Amish Can Teach the Rest of Us About Modern Medicine"


"The biggest and most complicated cultural intersection is the modern healthcare system. Plain people often advocate for more freedom in deciding when to go to a hospital, how to get there, and what interventions will be used. In short, they want greater autonomy.

“Patient autonomy” is a relatively new concept in Western medicine, and its significance depends on your perspective. On the one hand, patients report feeling lost in the system—stripped down to a gown and underwear and pressured to follow doctors’ orders. On the other hand, doctors can face demands for unwarranted treatments. With their unique cultural traditions, Plain communities might point the way towards a better concept of autonomy, one that balances patient choice with patient responsibility. One that we might all learn from...

For Plain communities, autonomy in healthcare—and in life more broadly—is deeply tied to personal responsibility. This is perhaps best exemplified by their choice not to have insurance. Rather, when someone gets sick, the church collects alms to help the patient cover expenses. Marvin Wengerd estimates that, collectively, the 30,000 Amish in Holmes County spend $20–30 million a year on healthcare.

“Personal responsibility is still huge among us,” he says, adding that Plain people “think there’s a lot of harm in divorcing the cost from the patient”. He describes communities in which individuals are beholden to their brothers and sisters in the church to make wise healthcare decisions that don’t cost the community more money than necessary. As a result, Plain communities are highly interested in health education and disease prevention...

In his experience, autonomy to the general American public means, “I get whatever interventions I want or need, and I get however much I want or need, regardless of the cost.” Plain communities on the other hand “are very independent, which is part of their autonomy”. They want to know how diseases develop and what they can do themselves to prevent a disease or its progression...

For Americans with health insurance, it may come as a surprise that hospital costs are negotiable. Indeed, pricing is so murky that most of us don’t know the actual cost of our care. Prompt-pay discounts are rarely advertised, but according to Plain people, they’re quite common."


FB: "Coming from an ethic of thriftiness, many Plain people distrust the motives of hospital administrators and even doctors themselves. They believe a profit motive can influence courses of treatment. They are also keenly attuned to unnecessary expenditures within the system. (One Plain woman I spoke with questioned the need for fancy carpets at a nearby clinic.)


“In the Amish world, healthcare is seen as a ministry,” says Wengerd, “which is exactly what healthcare in the [non-Plain] world used to be.” Remember apprenticeships and house calls? The doctor used to be viewed like a minister who sacrificed his life for the patient, but there has been a shift. “The patient now sacrifices his livelihood for the doctor’s wellbeing.”"

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

"What we’re missing when we buy into the ‘millennial’ myth"

"Meanwhile, poverty reporting is usually divorced from the generational conversation. Many of the exploited nail salon workers in Sarah Maslin Nir’s viral expose are technically “millennials.” So is Dasani’s mother, prominently featured in Andrea Elliott’s 2013 blockbuster portrait of a homeless New York family. Stories about young black men in prison and homeless youth don’t have “millennial” in the headline, nevermind the text. The underlying message is that working class people live in a trendless vacuum. They don’t fit into navel-gazing generational narratives.

This appalling cognitive dissonance isn’t new. Media obsessions over Gen X and Baby Boomers were just as focused on the richer half of the generation. “I knew the phrase to make a living could have absolutely no meaning to these children of the affluent society,” sneered Life magazine writer in 1968, erasing the nearly 10 percent of young people who were living in desperate poverty at the time. TIME magazine bemoaned the entitlement of “twentysomethings” in 1990: “They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder.” As if every twentysomething had a choice between a thrilling adventure and a hedge fund job."

http://fusion.net/story/266481/the-big-millennial-lie/

I find myself continuing to really appreciate the millennial term, but it's definitely a specific one. I am constantly in a cycle of forgetting and reminding myself that I'm really talking about college-educated urbanites, not everyone.


It's very erasing, and I need to think again about the value I see in using the term and how to maintain that without continuing to contribute to the erasure.

Monday, August 14, 2017

"I Grew Up Too Poor To Smile"


"For college, I moved to a town that doesn’t fluoridate its water. The measure had come up time and time again in local elections, but the hippy liberal students with full dental plans would vote it down and then move away when they graduated, leaving the poor, long-term residents to suffer the consequences. As a result, the county I went to school in saw twice the amount of untreated tooth decay in preschoolers as the rest of the state. My teeth, however, were managing to hang in there—that is, until I became pregnant... 

And we are in pain, actual physical pain—every day. Sometimes it’s the sharp pain when chewing, sometimes it’s the dull ache that reminds you that things are likely getting worse, sometimes it’s the throbbing pain that makes you feel like you are going to lose your mind.

When I finally got insurance and a decent-paying job after college, the first thing I did was make an appointment with a dentist. I blinked back tears as I opened my broken mouth to him and tried not to imagine what he was thinking. The dentist handed me an estimate of how much it would cost to fix my teeth—$17,000 out of pocket. My tears splashed on the page as I read it. “You’ve waited too long for any less expensive options to work,” he scolded me gently. I left feeling, once again, ashamed."



Dentistry, one of the things we forget about access to. I met a guy in a summer research has program who had entered college a pre-med, but switched to pre-dental after he went on a medical service trip and kept hearing people request help with their teeth, report constant pain, come in dealing with malnourishment because they couldn't chew. He recently graduated from Harvard Dental School, and his story has really stuck with me. 

Sunday, August 13, 2017

"The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago"

"Because Italian surnames are highly regional and distinctive, they could compare the income of families with a certain surname today, to those with the same surname in 1427. They found that the occupations, income and wealth of those distant ancestors with the same surname can help predict the occupation, income and wealth of their descendants today...
The economists say their evidence suggests persistence is somewhat highest for the wealthiest, which they interpret as evidence for “the existence of a glass floor that protects descendants of the upper class from falling down the economic ladder.”
But they note their research is not focused on the super elite at the top 1% of income. Their finding is for the overall population. The entire top 33% of the income distribution in 1427  is likely to be wealthier today."


Saturday, August 12, 2017

"Psychologists Throw Open The “File Drawer”"


"a group of Belgian psychology researchers have decided to make a stand. In a bold move against publication bias, they’ve thrown open their own file drawer. In the new paper, Anthony Lane and colleagues from the Université catholique de Louvain say that they’ve realized that over the years, “our publication portfolio has become less and less representative of our actual findings”. Therefore, they “decided to get these [unpublished] studies out of our drawer and encourage other laboratories to do the same.”
Lane et al.’s research focus is oxytocin, the much-discussed “love hormone”. Their lab has published a number of papers reporting that an intranasal spray of oxytocin alters human behaviour. But they now reveal that they also tried to publish numerous negative findings, yet these null results remain in the file drawer because they weren’t accepted for publication."


Friday, August 11, 2017

"A lesson on infrastructure from the Anderson Bridge fiasco"


"This glacial pace of implementation does not reflect the intrinsic technical difficulty of the task. For comparison, the Anderson Bridge itself was originally completed in just 11 months in 1912. General George Patton constructed nearly 40 times as much bridging in six months as American soldiers crossed the Rhine to win World War II. And even modern-day examples abound; for instance, in 2011, 14 bridges in Medford were fixed in just 10 weekends. In contrast, the lapses exposed by the Anderson Bridge project hold key lessons for America’s broader inability to solve its infrastructure problems... 

Delay, then, is at one level the result of bureaucratic ineptitude and the promiscuous distribution of the power to hold things up. At another level, it is the failure of leadership to insist on reasonable accountability to meet reasonable deadlines. Perhaps, at a deeper level, it is the failure of citizenry to hold government accountable for reasonable performance — a failure that may in part reflect a lowering of expectations as trust in government declines. These themes, unfortunately, are not unique to the Anderson Bridge; they help illuminate why, despite our vast needs, the country has struggled to generate the necessary momentum to respond to pressing infrastructure demands."


Thursday, August 10, 2017

"Sensory neurons detect fullness and nutrients in the GI tract in surprising ways"

"To trigger that feeling of fullness, does just one wire need to be activated, or are there several that need to be activated? How is this sensory system organized to distinguish proteins from carbohydrates or lipids, and then how does it send messages to secrete enzymes that will digest each of them?
Peering into the gut-brain connection in mice, Harvard Medical School researchers led by Stephen Liberles discovered two distinct types of  that survey the status of the gastrointestinal tract: one senses stretch in the stomach and one responds to the presence of  in the ... 

The neurons that sense stretch in the stomach produce receptors for glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1), a hormone released from the intestine in response to the arrival of nutrients. GLP-1 analogs are powerful anti-diabetic drugs. While it might seem likely that neurons containing the GLP-1 receptor would respond to nutrients, the team's experiments instead showed they were sensitive to mechanical stretch of the stomach and the intestine... 

Nutrients are detected by GPR65 neurons, which express receptors for the hormone serotonin."


Interesting. 

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

"When Private Reasoning is Public Property"


"It’s a different thing entirely when paperwork states, in black and white, that women are required to disclose their private thoughts for entry into their permanent medical record, while men are not. It’s a different thing entirely when the reason given for this is that I am presumed to have a uterus, if I identify as female. This, apparently, means I’m in a permanently pre-pregnant state. Even on birth control. Even though I don’t menstruate.

And, naturally, if women are permanently pre-pregnant, we are permanently in a state where at any given moment our right to privacy may be suspended in favor of the best interests of a fetus. Whether or not it’s a wanted fetus, from the time a fertilized egg exists within an adult female body, it will be viewed by many people as more important than its host...

I will be returning my patient consent form with those lines filled in with the words, “I am neither pregnant nor nursing. I will not disclose any non-medical information that isn’t also required from men for this procedure.”"


Tuesday, August 8, 2017

"The ‘gay cure’ experiments that were written out of scientific history"

"

"B-19 features in two 1972 papers: ‘Septal stimulation for the initiation of heterosexual behavior in a homosexual male’, by Heath and his colleague Charles E Moan, and ‘Pleasure and brain activity in man’, by Heath alone, which set out – apparently for the first time – what happens to human brainwaves during orgasm. The papers are extraordinary: at once academic and pornographic, clinically detached and queasily prurient. And they prompt all sorts of questions. Who was this Dr Heath? How on earth did he come to carry out this experiment – and get permission for it? And did it really, you know, work?"...

Imagine a line that goes through one ear and out the other. Now take another line that runs dead centre from the top of your skull and down through your tongue. Where the two meet is what Heath labelled the septal area, although scientists today would probably call it the nucleus accumbens. For Heath, it was the seat of pleasure and emotions that he thought would allow him to unlock the human brain...

There was just one problem. Heath could – and did – carry out all the tests he wanted on animals, but he couldn’t test his theories on humans: not so much for ethical reasons as because his colleagues at Columbia weren’t interested in the subcortex. Then, on a trip to Atlantic City, he found himself lying on the beach next to a man from New Orleans. He was the dean of Tulane University’s medical school, and he was looking to set up a psychiatry department. He’d heard good things about a guy called Bob Heath. I’m Bob Heath, said Bob Heath. And so they started to talk...

electrodes had, they announced, uncovered “an abnormality in the septal region” – unusual brainwave patterns, seen during seizures, that were exclusive to schizophrenia. And their use of electrical pulses to stimulate the same area had had promising results with the initial 22 patients, 19 of whom were schizophrenic...

Yet you do not have to read through many of the 600 pages of Studies in Schizophrenia to feel slightly different emotions. The type of electric pulse, Heath and co admitted, was “arbitrarily chosen” because it seemed to work on animals: “We are still by no means certain that it is the most effective way of influencing the circuit.” Among the first ten patients, “Two patients had convulsions… wound infection occurred in two cases.” Among the second ten, there were two deaths, both related to brain abscesses that developed following the operation. Some patients developed infections, others had convulsions. Patient 21 “tugged vigorously at his bandage and displaced the electrodes”. Patient 12 had two electrodes put in the wrong place...

of the initial 22 patients, four who had had abnormal brainwave patterns showed improvement a few months later, but at least the same number who had had normal patterns developed “evidence of gross abnormality”. Also, although Heath did not acknowledge it, any improvement may have come about simply because the chosen patients were getting more attention from their doctors...

Heath’s was a time in which damaging or experimental procedures were commonplace: there were almost none of the controls or restrictions that we have today. But even so, his radicalism stood out.

Other doctors would implant a few electrodes for a few days; Heath implanted dozens, and left them in for years. Others experimented with animals; Heath experimented with people and animals both, feeding the findings from one set of tests into the next. Others tested the pleasure reflex under carefully controlled laboratory conditions; Heath handed patients the control boxes and set them loose to juice themselves as they saw fit...

Among these were his efforts to treat gay men by turning “repugnant feelings… toward the opposite sex” into pleasurable ones – and similar work on “frigid women”. He experimented with dripping drugs deep into the brain down tiny pipes called cannulae, targeting the same regions as his electrodes. He tested a ‘brainwashing’ drug called bulbocapnine for the CIA, on both animals and (although he denied it for decades) on a human prisoner, as a small part of the vast and largely illegal ‘MK-ULTRA’ program to explore the limits and limitations of the American body...

controversy damaged Heath’s national reputation – already imperiled by a feud with Seymour Kety, who as the first director of the National Institute of Mental Health ensured that Heath was always denied federal funding for his work, and had to go cap in hand to private donors...

Valenstein pointed out gently but firmly that because of Heath’s lack of controls, his habit of reading what he wanted into the data, and other experimental errors, much of his work was simply invalid. “My criticism of Heath,” he says today, “was really that he didn’t seem to know how to test his own conclusions for verification. He was always interested in results that were spectacular – like finding some protein in the brain that would evoke schizophrenia. He’d published papers of that sort but never really looked for alternative explanations, never tested the reliability of his findings, was very willing to rapidly publicize his findings, so that he was quite unreliable.”

http://mosaicscience.com/story/gay-cure-experiments


This man sounds like the Donald Trump of neurology.

Monday, August 7, 2017

"Here’s What Really Happened To The Cars From ‘Pimp My Ride’"

"In Justin Dearinger’s Reddit AMA, he claimed that “they actually take out a lot of the stuff that they showed on TV,” 
such as in his case, a “pop-up” champagne contraption and a “drive-in theater.” Further explaining to HuffPost, Dearinger said that they removed the champagne part because the show didn’t want to condone drinking and driving. The theater was removed for not being street safe.

According to Larry Hochberg, however, the removals were done with a specific purpose in mind. “Sometimes we did things for safety reasons that the kids on show interpreted as us ‘taking away’ some items,” he said...

Seth Martino’s car seemed to be particularly low quality. “There were plenty of things wrong with it,” he told HuffPost, including television screens never working again after filming. As Martino recalled, some things that didn’t work on the car included the LED lights that were put in the seats. “They would get really hot if left on so I couldn’t drive with them on,” Martino said. “They took the gull-wing doors off because the pistons used to lift them kept them from putting seat belts in the back, which was highly dangerous.” A cotton candy machine they installed was fit into the trunk without leaving enough room for the dome top to keep the cotton candy strands “from flying all over the place.”... 

Larry Hochberg says that “it’s not accurate to say that we didn’t work on the mechanics of the cars” and that the contestants on the show had a misconception of what had happened with their vehicles. As Hochberg explained to HuffPost, “Some of the cars were so old and rusted that they would have mechanical issues no matter how much work you put into them [and] the production team and the car shops worked their butts off to get parts for these cars... 

From watching the show, you might have thought that the vehicles were in the shop for about a weekend or even a week or two and then were given back to their owners. Not the case at all. At least for the contestants spoken to by HuffPost, the cars would actually be in the garage for about six to seven months, which obviously caused some problems."


Oh the dreams and excesses of the early aughts. I feel like there is an overwrought metaphor in here somewhere. 


FB: an ~expose~

Sunday, August 6, 2017

"The Stuff That Costs More When You're Poor"

"In other words, as the study’s title points out, Frugality is Hard to Afford. We’ve discussed this phenomenon in detail, too. It’s not just toilet paper. When you’re poor, it’s not easy to buy stuff in bulk or buy high-quality items that will last. There are a lot of hidden, systematic ways poor people pay more for stuff, and there are some expenses that aren’t so subtle...  

many colleges, especially private ones, use a method called “gapping” to squeeze more money out of poorer students—or discourage them from attending altogether. Basically, those colleges offer prospective low income students tuition packages that don’t really meet their financial needs. They underfund those students and save the aid for wealthier students who can afford to pay full tuition rates...

Bank fees make it expensive just to maintain your money in an account, which is ridiculous. They’re easy enough to get around, though—if you have the money."


Saturday, August 5, 2017

"We Can Finally Stop Demonizing Butter"


"new study published in PLOS ONE is now bolstering this changing tide of opinion, showing there’s no link between butter and chronic disease. This gigantic analysis—a meta-study that included a total of 636,151 individuals across 15 countries, and involving 6.5 million person-years of follow-up—showed no association between the consumption of butter and cardiovascular disease... 

butter is healthier than sugar or starches like bread, which have been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. On the other hand, butter is worse than many margarines and cooking oils, such as those rich in healthy fats, like soybean, canola, flaxseed, and extra virgin olive oils. Importantly, margarine made from trans fats should be avoided like the plague."



Butter is very important. 

Friday, August 4, 2017

"Why TV Shows Are Darker Than They’ve Ever Been"


"HBO has made a cottage industry of dimly-lit hourlong dramas—True DetectiveBoardwalk Empire. And where HBO goes, other networks have followed, from basic cable (Better Call Saul) to streaming (Jessica Jones) to even networks: No show was as inky as Hannibal. So why, exactly, has this happened?...

Over the ensuing years, as The Sopranos succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, that very specific visual callback to a thematically similar film sometimes got conflated with the relatively new idea of “prestige television” in much the same way as the show’s antihero did. “I kept hearing, you know, make it darker, make it darker, make it darker,” said cinematographer Manuel Billeter about his work on Jonathan Nolan’s Person of Interest, which premiered in 2011. (Billeter also shot the very dark Jessica Jones.) “They wanted it to look more noir, to look more stylized. I started playing a lot of scenes in silhouette, with no light at all on the actors and just light in the backgrounds.”... 

But one problem with the wave of technological change that has made dark lighting easy and cheap for filmmakers is that it doesn’t translate to all television sets. Old televisions did a better job of rendering dark colors than modern ones. Detail that’s visible on an expensive television disappears on a cheap one, and suddenly Game of Thrones is indecipherable. The same is true when a television is viewed in a brightly-lit room or from an angle"



Related: TV hair all looks the same

Thursday, August 3, 2017

"‘A Million Questions’ From Descendants of Slaves Sold to Aid Georgetown"


"Orlando Ward, 55
Great-great-great-grandson of Bill and Mary Ann Hill... 

Let’s jump ahead and talk about reparations. How do you really value the damage that was done in a way that’s straightforward and fair? Everybody should have scholarships, yes. But not everybody wants to go to Georgetown. The more important thing to me is to memorialize the 272 and, at the same time, the people who sold them and the people who brought the slaves to Louisiana. What do their descendants have to say about it? I don’t know all the emotions they would go through; I can’t fully get into their shoes. But I think it’s important for both sides to be pointed out and memorialized, not villainized, to begin to build a model for healthy dialogue.

I have a 12-year-old son, and we live in a fairly diverse community where African-Americans are in the minority. He had a history project not too long ago where kids were asked to trace their families. Many of his European-American classmates could go all the way back to Ireland, England and Spain. I could take him to Louisiana, and that’s as far as I could go. As African-Americans, we’ve grown to accept that. But we’ve also known there’s another door there that we didn’t have a key to."