Anecdotal evidence works

From Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2010

Your parents recommend taking a Caribbean cruise and tell you about a discount deal. You’ve never taken a cruise and aren’t so sure you’d enjoy it, so you dig up some information on the Web and even watch a couple of videos. You recollect the times you’ve been on ships, and your past visits to Caribbean islands—rum drinks, aqua waters. But will you really enjoy an eight-day cruise? Turns out there is a better way to answer this question: ask anyone who has just gotten off a cruise boat—a total stranger is fine. That way, you’ll be 30 to 60 percent more likely to accurately predict your own experience than by basing your decision on painstaking research and inner speculations.

Ricardo was wrong

From Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2010

A truism about the benefits of international trade holds that countries that specialize in producing goods that they are best at manufacturing will enjoy the greatest prosperity. But a recent study of economic complexity provides a different take on the wealth of nations. Using “network science,” a method of analysis that examines webs of connections in complex systems, Ricardo Hausmann, professor of the practice of economic development and director of Harvard’s Center for International Development, and CID research fellow César Hidalgo, a physicist by training, have shown that the richest countries are those with the most complex economies—and actually produce the greatest diversity of goods. “Firms and individuals specialize, countries diversify,” emphasizes Hausmann.

The reason Ricardo's truism is wrong is that he assumed a static world in which there were a given number of products and a given demand for each product. But the world isn't static. The successful countries are those that can adapt as times change and as new products become important. The most successful countries are those that invent the new important products.

The beast is starving. Now what?

By Paul Krugman

So the beast [i.e., government, in the Republicans' eyes] is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.

Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse — in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn’t have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with some actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Mr. Obama established by executive order.

Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.

In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna go back now and say, Let’s abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.”

What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits. But in December, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because “middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., G.O.P.) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes.” (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the G.O.P. is the party of the affluent?)

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.

Physical contact matters

From NYTimes.com

Momentary touches … — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.

“It is the first language we learn,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009), and remains, he said, “our richest means of emotional expression” throughout life.

The evidence that such messages can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. Research by Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute in Miami has found that a massage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depression and strengthen a relationship.

In a series of experiments led by Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana, volunteers tried to communicate a list of emotions by touching a blindfolded stranger. The participants were able to communicate eight distinct emotions, from gratitude to disgust to love, some with about 70 percent accuracy.

“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined.”

We all knew that at some level. It's probably more difficult today, though, with so much emphasis on possible harassment.

Pain and suffering

This op-ed piece discusses how animals (presumably including humans) experience pain. It says that there are two components to pain: sensation and suffering. It is possible to turn off the suffering without turning off the sensation. (This is important so that an animal can feel a stimulus that it should avoid, such as a hot surface, even if the stimulus does not cause what we traditionally think of as pain.)

It then argues that since we can engineer animals so that they do not suffer when subjected to the conditions common factory farms, we should do it—not change the farms but change the animals so that they don't feel bad.

Seems like a very strange argument. Whether or not factory farms are ethical ways to treat animals, the argument seems to be saying that torture is ok as long as the victim doesn't suffer.

Along the way the claim is made that morphine works because it competes with the part of the brain that feels bad about pain, i.e., the part of the brain that suffers. When the suffering receptors are blocked by morphine, they are unable to respond to pain—hence no suffering.

The whole thing is an interesting description of how the brain works. I was unaware of it. Nor did I know we were so certain about this mechanism. It's strange to learn about it in such a strange op-ed piece, though.

From NYTimes.com:

The brain, it turns out, has two separate pathways for perceiving pain: a sensory pathway that registers its location, quality (sharp, dull or burning, for example) and intensity, and a so-called affective pathway that senses the pain’s unpleasantness. This second pathway appears to be associated with activation of the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, because people who have suffered damage to this part of the brain still feel pain but no longer find it unpleasant. (The same is true of people who are given morphine, because there are more receptors for opiates in the affective pain pathway than in the sensory pain pathway.)

Neuroscientists have found that by damaging a laboratory rat’s anterior cingulate cortex, or by injecting the rat with morphine, they can likewise block its affective perception of pain. The rat reacts to a heated cage floor by withdrawing its paws, but it doesn’t bother avoiding the places in its cage where it has learned the floor is likely to be heated up.

Recently, scientists have learned to genetically engineer animals so that they lack certain proteins that are important to the operation of the anterior cingulate cortex. Prof. Min Zhuo and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, for example, have bred mice lacking enzymes that operate in affective pain pathways. When these mice encounter a painful stimulus, they withdraw their paws normally, but they do not become hypersensitive to a subsequent painful stimulus, as ordinary mice do.

Biological curiosities - CSWiki

I just posted the following on the Biological curiosities page of the CS wiki. It comments on a story that talks about how viruses (phages) help anthrax bacteria survive.

I would love to see a diagram that shows the various entities and processes involved. There are at least 4 levels: phage, bacterium, earthworm, and mammal. What is the role of each and when is that role played out? I gather from the article that it's not even as simple as that since different phages change how anthrax acts under various conditions.

This is a beautiful example of a complex system that we are beginning to understand. It would be very useful as an illustration of how complex systems function.

Phineas Gage

From The Scientist

On September 13, 1848, a 25-year-old railroad worker named Phineas Gage triggered an explosion that propelled a 3 foot 7 inch iron rod straight through his skull, destroying a good portion of his brain. Luckily, the iron missed the critical blood vessels and parts of the brain necessary for survival, but the injury spurred dramatic behavioral changes and made Gage’s accident one of the most important contributions to modern neurology.

“This was the first case when doctors made a definite connection between an injury to the brain and a change in personality,” says Malcolm Macmillan, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Melbourne in Australia and an expert on Gage. Linking the damage in Gage’s prefrontal cortex to his sudden erratic behavior was one of the first clues that the prefrontal cortex was responsible for personality expression and decision making.

Because Gage made public appearances and worked after the injury, Macmillan hypothesized that his personality change must have been “a temporary one” and “that he made a good psychosocial recovery.” Macmillan found further support for this theory when, in 2008, photographers Jack and Beverly Wilgus from Massachusetts revealed an image of Gage holding the pole that had shot through his brain. The picture, which they had possessed for 30 years but only recently identified as Gage, displays a handsome, proud, and confident-looking man.

“The image suggests that Phineas had adapted to his disfigurement and was not ashamed to display it,” writes Macmillan in an email. Gage’s mental improvement suggests that it’s possible for the brain to recover some of its function after an injury, he adds, although the details of Gage’s recovery remain a mystery.

This is indeed a very famous incident. From what I've read about Gage, his mental changes did not diminish, but he was able to function reasonably well.

Global footprints

From Newsletter Humanity Now Demanding 1.4 Earths - Footprint Network News.

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