purepedantry | July 24, 2008People have been asking me about Riccardo Ricco, the Italian cyclist who was thrown out of the Tour de France for testing positive for the hormone erythropoietin (Epo), so I want to do a little Q&A about Epo detection and abuse.
What is Epo?
Epo is a hormone released mostly by the kidney that regulates red blood cell (RBC) number. Cells in the kidney respond to hypoxia by releasing Epo into the blood stream. Epo then goes to stem cells in your bone marrow that produce RBCs and increases their production. The appeal to use Epo from the point of view of a cyclist is that in raising…
purepedantry | July 22, 2008We were discussing game theory and the Dark Knight. Mike at The Quantitative Peace has an excellent post that discusses all the possible iterations:
I think this calls for a new villian in the third movie of the trilogy: The Game Theorist. Much like the riddler, but deadlier and requiring Batman to use mathematics to fight crime.
Encephalon is up at Sharp Brains. My personal favorite: therapy applications of Dungeons and Dragons.
Mercifully, a gas tax holiday is dead in the water -- in this case due to fears of lost jobs due to the diversion of money from the Highway fund.
An 81 year-old…
purepedantry | July 22, 2008Have you ever said any of the following?
1) That Jake fellah (or other ScienceBlogger) has insightful things to say. By Heaven, I would like to meet him and discuss said insights.
2) That Jake fellah (or other ScienceBlogger) is one sexy mama. I am aroused by the possibility of discussing science with him in person.
3) That Jake fellah (or other ScienceBlogger) is a big fat jerk. I sure would like to meet him so I can punch him in the snoot.
If the answer is "yes" to any of those statements, you are in luck. SEED magazine will be hosting a ScienceBlogger meetup in New York on August 9th…
purepedantry | July 21, 2008I suspect that many of you got a chance to see The Dark Knight movie this weekend.
Just as an aside, I will say that I thought that the movie was sweet. Definitely the best Batman movie, maybe one of the best superhero movies ever made. Heath Ledger is terrifyingly good throughout. Aaron Eckhart and Christian Bale give excellent performances as well, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is a hell of lot better than Katie Holmes.
Anyway, there is a scene in the movie that got me thinking about game theory, and that is what I want to talk about. Beware, if you haven't seen the film, this discussion…
purepedantry | July 16, 2008Temporal discounting is our tendency to want things now rather than later. In order to encourage us to save money, banks have to offer us a reward in the form of an interest rate. In order to delay gratification, we have to be convinced that the reward in the future is going to be sufficiently large to compensate us for going without right now.
When economists talk about temporal discounting, they talk about it in terms of what is called the discount rate. The discount rate is the percentage of money that you would have to be offered after a time period to convince you to save.…
purepedantry | July 14, 2008Happy Sizzle Day!
Today numerous bloggers from ScienceBlogs and elsewhere will be reviewing a new movie Sizzle directed by Randy Olson of Flock of Dodos fame. Sizzle is a documentary/mockumentary/comedy partly about the science of global warming, but more in my opinion about the nature of the global warming debate.
I was fortunate enough to receive a pre-release copy of the film for review, and I can summarize in one sentence what I thought about it: Randy Olson gets it.
By gets it, I mean that he understands that there are two levels to the global warming debate. The first level is a…
purepedantry | July 9, 2008One of the difficult things about economics is that you can't really see an economy develop from scratch. There is no visible State of Nature. All you see is the continuous process.
In that light, here is a very interesting article. R.A. Radford was an economist taken prisoner by the Germans and put in a POW camp. He witnessed the formation of a POW camp economy and wrote about his experiences in an article published in 1945. The economy included as a prominent feature the use of cigarettes as money. From the article:
The permanent camps in Germany saw the highest level of commercial…
purepedantry | July 9, 2008Kenneth Chang, guest-blogging at TeirneyLab, laments the use of the word "organic" in both the contexts of organic chemistry and as a term for natural foods:
Organic derives from Greek, organikos. The original meaning was, logically, something related to an organ of the body. The meaning later generalized to "characteristic of, pertaining to, or derived from living organisms."
Nowadays, the most prevalent meaning of organic is in the supermarket -- natural, without artificial ingredients, grown without chemical fertilizers -- a fuzzy notion codified by 27,000 or so words of federal…
purepedantry | July 8, 2008At least someone is benefiting from the economic stimulus package:
An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.
So I guess all porn-mongers should be Keynesians.…
purepedantry | July 7, 2008I often rant about bad coverage of the psychology of sex differences, so it is always satisfying to see an article that really has their facts straight.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate, have an excellent article reviewing Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain and Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox. They take both authors to task for selective use of the literature, using evidence that is dated, and for ignoring the complexity of the subject.
The bottom line from the science should really be this: Some differences between the minds of men and women exist. But in most areas,…
purepedantry | July 7, 2008Human beings use stereotyped facial expressions to identify the feelings of others. We can tell what another person is feeling in part because of how their face looks. However, this says very little about why the particular changes in facial musculature are associated with particular feelings. Why do the eyebrows go up when we are afraid instead of down?
To address this issue, Susskind et al., publishing in Nature Neuroscience, looked at the visual and physiological effects of fearful expressions as opposed to expressions of disgust and neutral expressions. They found that when someone…
purepedantry | July 7, 2008Found in an abstract:
The medial PFC, as well as the ventral tegmental area, also seem to participate in the generation of pelvic thrusting.
purepedantry | July 2, 2008Publishing in Science, Gormley et al. compared the benefits of Oklahoma's TPS pre-K program to Head Start. Conclusion: preschool matters in cognitive development.
Early childhood education programs in the United States face enormous challenges. The overwhelming majority of Head Start program participants are poor, and many Head Start children face additional risk factors, such as a single-parent home or a home where English is not the primary language spoken. Pre-K programs targeted to poor or otherwise at-risk children face similar challenges. Even universally available programs, such as…
purepedantry | July 1, 2008New York Magazine has an interesting article about fertility in Europe. Most European countries have a huge fertility problem. Since they have gone through the demographic transition, their populations are actually declining. Many do not have the relatively liberal immigration policies of the US -- which would help because immigrants have more children. (I didn't think that I would ever call the US policies liberal.) They are getting in a financial crunch because many have relatively generous social service programs, and you have a dwindling number of workers paying for an increasing…
purepedantry | June 30, 2008A lot of people have read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. In the book, he gives an example of a group of people forced to estimate the weight of a cow. (This was actually an experiment that geneticist Franics Galton attempted.) When you do this, you find that the accuracy of the average response from the group is much greater than the accuracy of each individual estimate.
This is the so-called wisdom of crowds. The assumption with experiments like this is that each individual will make the best guess they can and this guess will be stable over time -- minus any new information…
purepedantry | June 27, 2008There is a must-read paper in Nature about the limits of functional MRI as an experimental tool by one of its pioneers, Nikos Logothetis. (Also discussed by Jonah and Vaughan.)
This paper is pretty technical, but Logothetis hits the important points of what it is we think we are actually measuring using the fMRI. Also, he notes that the difficulty in interpreting fMRI data lies in the fact that you have to make assumptions about network architecture that may or may not be true. Other experiments are required to confirm the validity of these assumptions.
Here is his good summary of the…
purepedantry | June 25, 2008There was a very sad article in the NYTimes about the regular practice in some long-term care facilities of treating demented patients with anti-psychotic medications like Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa:
The use of antipsychotic drugs to tamp down the agitation, combative behavior and outbursts of dementia patients has soared, especially in the elderly. Sales of newer antipsychotics like Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa totaled $13.1 billion in 2007, up from $4 billion in 2000, according to IMS Health, a health care information company.
Part of this increase can be traced to prescriptions in…
purepedantry | June 24, 2008Presh has a great post on game theory and voting power using nominations to the Israeli Supreme Court as an example. Take homes:
Here is what you can take away when creating your own voting structures:
1. Vote size does not equate to voting power
2. Smaller voters can still hold great power
3. Voters can increase power through voting blocs
4. Raising a majority might not diminish the power of a voter or bloc
Astronomers have nailed down the exact date of the events described in the Odyssey by Homer -- the non-mythical ones anyway -- by looking closely at astronomical references in the text:…
kcontreary | June 24, 2008This is a bit old, but in case you haven't seen it...
A few weeks ago, Jake wrote a post about the importance of teaching during grad school. I couldn't agree more--some of my best experiences in grad school to date have been in front of a classroom of keen undergrads, their young minds yearning to be filled with the minutiae of microeconomic theory (or so I have convinced myself). I find it absolutely true that having to teach a concept cements it in my mind, and it is my fervent hope that a few of my students will at least consider becoming economists.
There is also, of course, the…
purepedantry | June 23, 2008PsyBlog is soliciting your favorite psychobabble. Head over there to give your favorite instance of the complete misinterpretation of psychology in pop culture.
My favorite is number one on their list of examples: "Their brains lit up in the scanner." Brain activity is not phosphorescent. There is euphemism, and there is a point where the euphemism entirely confuses the issue.
Hat-tip: Mind Hacks