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Another Blow to Sea Cucumbers and a New Challenger to the Ring

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science ha an awesome post highlighting recent research on the unique vision of mantis shrimps. At the end of his post he (rightfully) dismisses the sea cucumber: "Personally, I think mantis shrimps kick the crap out of sea cucumbers, but they're on a par with squid, which incidentally also use polarised light for secret communication." This makes me slightly conflicted as someone who is describing a new species shrimp. Really, I love all the invertebrates, but like any well-meaning parent with a gazillion children, I certainly have a few that are favorites…

The fine art of looking like an idiot

It's amazing how often doing good science walks hand in hand with looking like a bloody fool. It's entirely possible that doing something that looks absolutely insane is a necessary step in the development of a decent scientist (if so, there are many good scientists who never escape this stage). There are lots of good examples of this. A series of experiments published last year in the journal Nature demonstrated that some species of Amazonian ant are capable of gliding back to the tree if they fall off the trunk. Like many things in science, this was first discovered as the result of an…

Why Mama Bear's Porridge Is Too Cold

Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad frets about committing physics heresy via a reading of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to his young offspring. The story may convey a useful moral message, but it's way off base on the physics. After all, the Papa Bear, being the biggest, presumably has the largest bowl of porridge. Here, the story fits what we know about thermodynamics, as the largest bowl should take the longest time to cool, and thus should be the hottest at any time before the porridge bowls reach thermal equilibrium with their environment. The description provided of the other two bowls…

Somebody's lying

Last week I wrote about how Rutgers university engaged in some secret dealings to retain head football coach Greg Schiano and some poor decisions that put the financial stability of the institution at risk by dumping over 100 million dollars into the football program. Investigations have been promised and everyone is very upset (either at the press for running the stories or at Rutgers for their chicanery), but something strange has happened. In interviews held over the past few days Bob Mulcahy, athletics director at Rutgers, has denied that Schiano was ever given a hush-hush "escape clause…

More than science bloggers?

As I once commented to Jennifer Ouellette, we science bloggers can be a funny bunch. We whine and complain about the way science is misrepresented in mass media, but many of us want to produce popular science pieces ourselves. Is is because we think that we can do better? (I know that's part of my own motivation, at least.) More specifically, I wonder how many of us have published/are working on books of our own? I've been tracking the progress on my own project, but plenty of other science bloggers are either working on their own books, have already published books, or both. Carl, Jennifer,…

Pinchy personalities

Like every kid who went on family outings to the NJ shore, I ended up coming home with any number of hermit crabs over the years. I'd make sure the sponge was wet, that they had food, that they were really in their shells and not just hiding elsewhere (probably terrorizing them in the process), but they generally didn't last long. My grief as to my departed pets is now made all the worse by a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that suggests that hermit crabs have personalities. Oh Pinchy, how I miss you... The experiment on responses of the hermit crab species Pagurus…

Did Cuvier not think about things he did not think about?

Tonight I finished Rudwick's Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes, and I certainly feel that I have a better understand of Cuvier's work than I did previously (although the subject of his embranchments and debates with Geoffrey only received a fleeting mention). What is truly curious, though, is that Cuvier was not a biblical literalist and yet did not seem to favor a mechanism by which the various unique fossil taxa he described could have come into existence. He noted that an "age of reptiles" likely preceded an "age of mammals" (divided by a catastrophic revolution…

Photo of the Day #117: Naosaurus Edaphosaurus

Over the course of evolutionary history there have been a number of animals that have sported elongated neural spines, the structures sometimes aiding in the support of a hump (as in bison) and other times as the framework for a great sail (as in Spinosaurus). Of the group of "sail-backed" and "bison-backed" animals, the pelycosaur Edaphosaurus (the spines of which are pictured above) are unique, and the presence of transverse bars arranged on either side has long vexed paleontologists. Charles R. Knight's sculpture of "Naosaurus" with a revised Edaphosaurus head. Courtesy of Dan Varner…

Black Dress: chance or conspiracy?

Here is part of a picture some of my friends posted from a recent high school reunion. It may be hard to tell, but this is part of a picture of 7 females all wearing black. I just wanted to show you that they were indeed wearing black without giving away anymore details. If you are one of these people and you want your whole picture included, I will be happy to make that change and include your face. Anyway, my first comment was: "Wow, everyone is wearing black. Was this a planned event or was black part of the dress code?" The response was that it was just pure chance that all the women…

Basics: Centripetal Acceleration

pre-reqs: vectors, kinematics I haven't done a "basics" topic in quite some time. It's odd, I have used centripetal acceleration quite often, but I never derived the expression that I use. To get to the point, the magnitude of the acceleration of an object moving in a circle is: Also, the direction of this acceleration vector is always towards the center of the circle the object is moving in. This is really not too difficult to derive (but it does use at least one "trick"). Let me start with an object moving in a circle at a constant speed. I am going to show to instances of the object…

What he said

Before the weekend, I had a half-composed post about Hillary Clinton's asinine invocations of RFK's assassination, but I wasn't done when weekend fun-n-games began, and now it's dated and irrelevant. I only mention it because I would've linked to Atrios's excellent and correct advice to the Clintonites: Stop Sticking Finger in Brain. The post had the same title as today's and quoted the observation that "the various historical comparisons the Clinton campaign is making are in the 'isn't it great that people are so stupid that they'll swallow this horseshit' category. It did not take her…

The Benefits of Brain Damage (Take Two)

Yesterday, Chris had an interesting post describing an experimental situation in which selective brain damage leads to improved performance. It's an cool paradigm, since it helps to illuminate the innate constraints of the (intact) brain. Look, for example, at this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, Antonio Damasio and George Loewenstein. The scientists invented a simple investing game. In each round, experimental subjects had to decide between two options: invest $1 or invest nothing. If the participant decided not to invest, he or she would keep the dollar, and the task would advance to the…

Dreaming, Smelling and Memory

After Freud lost his scientific credibility, psychology became very dismissive of dreams. The leading scientific theory held that dreams consisted of mental detritus, the scraps and fragments of memories that your brain didn't want to remember. While Freud mined our nighttime thoughts for hidden meanings - they were symbol laden narratives of wish-fulfillment - this modern theory held that our dreams were entirely meaningless, a montage of hallucinations. They were the result of our hippocampus taking out the trash. But dreams have been slowly making a comeback. There's now a large body of…

The Neuroscience of Music

There was a nice article in The Times on Sunday about the research of Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill (and former record producer) who studies the neural substrate of music: Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain's sense of reward. The cerebellum, an area normally…

Scott Adams on Free Will

Here is Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) weighing in on neuroscience and free will (a topic that has been heatedly discussed on this blog recently): It seems to me that free will can be easily tested. The next time someone is getting brain surgery, just take a few minutes to perform the test. Sometimes the patient remains awake during brain surgery so he can report what functions are changing as the surgeon is poking around. So for example, when the surgeon electrically stimulates the language center of the brain, the patient might temporarily lose his ability to speak. The test for free…

Soda

There's been lots of chatter about Pepsi lately, so I thought I'd run with the theme. I don't have much to add to the media commentary - I'm just sad to see some of my favorite bloggers leave this space - but I've got plenty to say about soft drinks. And little of it will please Pepsi. The first thing is that a soda tax is a great idea. Here's a compelling chart from a recent report published by US Department of Agriculutre's Economic Research Service (via Yglesias): Some of these calories, of course, will be shifted to other categories of food - we'll drink less Pepsi, but we'll consume…

Gut Memories

Over at the always wonderful blog Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a recent experiment that investigated the impressive prescience of our unconscious recognition memory: 12 healthy participants were presented with kaleidoscopic images under two different conditions. In one set of trials, they paid full attention to the images, and were then asked to decide whether or not they had seen each of them before. In the other condition, they were made to perform a working memory task whilst the initial first set of images were presented to them - they heard a spoken number and were…

The fossil record is spotty

Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel: The spatial designation of discrete areas for different activities reflects formalized conceptualization of a living space. The results of spatial analyses of a Middle Pleistocene Acheulian archaeological horizon (about 750,000 years ago) at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel, indicate that hominins differentiated their activities (stone knapping, tool use, floral and faunal processing and consumption) across space. These were organized in two main areas, including multiple activities around a hearth. The diversity of human…

Religiosity vs. GDP PPP Per Capita

At my other weblog I looked at some of the data on the international data on religion. There are two positions in regards to religious trends which always crop up. * That in the medium-to-long term religion, in particular supernatural religion, will disappear. * That in the short-to-medium term we are in the midst of a "religious revival." The first position has been held more or less by some intellectuals since the Enlightenment. The second position is something that I'm familiar with contemporaneously. The reality is that the world is not going through a revival in religiosity if by…

The short sellers of philanthropy?

For the past few months I've been following The Givewell Blog. Here's a recent post, Why are we always criticizing charities?: Recently, we've criticized (in one way or another) many well-known, presumably well-intentioned charities (Smile Train, Acumen Fund, UNICEF, Kiva), which might lead to some to ask: should GiveWell focus on the bad (which may discourage donors from giving) as opposed to the good (which would encourage them to give more)? Why so much negativity and not more optimism? The fact is, we are very optimistic about what a donor can accomplish with their charity. Donor's can…

Basics: Conservation vs. Preservation

Within discussions of environmental issues, there are two broad approaches one can take. On one hand there are those who argue that the goal should be the creation and preservation of wilderness free of human influence. This view can be broadly construed as "preservation." The other major strain favor using human management to ensure that the natural systems maintain the state they enjoyed prior to human involvement. That approach is generally referred to as "conservation." The differences are instructive. The historic tallgrass prairie was maintained by fire across the broad center of…

Bullets of material so rich I might just use it as a soil amendment.

Lots of items kicking around in the blogosphere that deserve more attention than I have time to give them right now. (I'm off to start taking soccer classes in about an hour -- hold a good thought for my knees, please!) But I wanted to share. At Log base 2, Nick Barrowman considers the epistemic (and perhaps ethical) consequences of missing values in statistics. He writes: Missing values are a bit of a dirty secret in science. Because they are rarely mentioned in science education, it's not surprising that they are often overlooked in practice. This is terribly damaging--regardless of…

Friday Sprog Blogging: thar be seamonsters!

The Free-Ride offspring have developed a serious penchant for nature programs. The latest one they viewed was Nature: Encountering Sea Monsters, and as you might expect, they have some thoughts (and artwork) to share. So, we follow in Tim Lambert's footsteps by combining Friday cephalopods with sprog-blogging. Younger offspring: I like the diver. Dr. Free-Ride: Do you like how the squid and octopus came close to the diver and gave him a chance to see them better? Younger offspring: Yeah. I also like when the octopus fights the diver with its tentacles. Dr. Free-Ride: Do you mean the one…

Phantom Limbs and Moby Dick

Phantom limbs are one of the strangest phenomenon you'll ever hear about. As far as I can tell, phantom limbs were first described by Herman Melville, who gave Ahab, the gnarly sea captain of Moby Dick, a "sensory ghost". Ahab is missing a leg (Moby Dick ate it), and in Chapter 108, he summons a carpenter to fashion him a new ivory peg-leg. Ahab tells the carpenter that he still feels his amputated leg "invisibly and uninterpenetratingly." His phantom limb is like a "poser". "Look," Ahab says, "put thy live leg here in the place where mine was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to…

ID and Dawkins

As PZ Myers has already pointed out, Francis Collins has been busy spreading the gospel. Myers has already dismantled Collins squishy theism better than I ever could, so I thought I would focus on one particular Collins' claim in particular. It's a theme that consistently gets rehashed in his interviews: Q: Why do you say those arguments have been started by scientists? Because some of these scientists -- like Dawkins -- have said the theory of evolution leads to atheism? A: That's been a very scary statement coming back towards the religious community, where people have felt they can't…

The Areas of My Expertise

(Apologies to John Hodgman for swiping his nifty title.) There has been some discussion in these parts about just who ought to be allowed to talk about scientific issues of various sorts, and just what kind of authority we ought to grant such talk. It's well and good to say that a journalism major who never quite finished his degree is less of an authority on matters cosmological than a NASA scientist, but what should we say about engineers or medical doctors with "concerns" about evolutionary theory? What about the property manager who has done a lot of reading? How important is all that…

The iPhone Mind

Here's the philosopher David Chalmers, arguing that it's time we expand our definition of the "mind": "The key idea is that when bits of the environment are hooked up to your cognitive system in the right way, they are, in effect, part of the mind, part of the cognitive system. So, say I'm rearranging Scrabble tiles on a rack. This is very close to being analogous to the situation when I'm doing an anagram in my head. In one case the representations are out in the world, in the other case they're in here. We say doing an anagram on a rack ought be regarded as a cognitive process, a process of…

DFW

David Foster Wallace on the increasing specialization of knowledge, or what I call the acronym boom: Things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There's no way we'd expect a world-class, cutting-edge mathematician now also to be doing world-class, cutting-edge philosophy, theology, etc. Not so for the Greeks--if only because math, philosophy, and theology weren't coherently distinguishable for them. Same for the Neoplatonists and Scholastics, and etc. etc. (This is a…

Why the Facts Don't Matter in Politics

I think this experiment helps explains a rather disturbing amount of our political discourse. What it neatly demonstrates is that the main reason so many campaigns traffic in dishonest allegations and pseudofacts is that, when it comes to voters, the facts don't really matter. Most of us are just partisan hacks: Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not…

Market Panic

A few months ago, when it looked as if the financial maelstrom had mostly passed - after the Bear Stearns bailout, things calmed down - I decided to write an article about Read Montague and the weird habits of dopamine neurons. While these brain cells are often used to explain the computation of rewards, until I visited Montague's lab I had no idea that dopamine neurons could also help explain the perpetual cycle of boom and bust on Wall Street. The experiment went like this: Each subject was given $100 and some basic information about the "current" state of the stock market. After choosing…

Who carried out 9/11? Views Differ....

My earlier post which showed that large numbers of people around the world are skeptical about the "official" story regarding the perpetrators of 9/11 really needs an American baseline as a comparison. I have posted data from a Zogby poll as well as a Pew survey of American Muslims. Note that I selected only some of the fields; if the N's were too low or I found the category uninteresting I left it out (what's uninteresting? Don't care if you participate in Little League). Question: "There are three main schools of thought regarding the 9/11 attacks. The first theory is the official…

Don't know much about politics

NationalJournal.com - Six of Ten Political Insiders Believe Public Is Ill-Informed: When it comes to policy, the political class doesn't have a lot of faith in the public's IQ. In the latest National Journal Political Insiders Poll, a solid majority of political operatives â 59 percent â said the public didn't "know enough about the issues facing Washington to form wise opinions about what should be done." There was a sharp partisan difference between the two parties: By more than a 2-to-1 margin, Democratic Insiders believed the public didn't "know enough," while a slight majority of…

Scientility?

I was given a proposal for a new word by a fellow named Francois Choquette. It's a tough game trying to get a new coinage accepted, and I doubt that it'll take off…but it's actually a useful word to replace that abomination, "spirituality". So I'll toss Choquette's description out there for the readership to judge. Scientility Describes the sensation that a scientist or amateur of science experiences when he/she observes an amazing phenomenon, for which his/her qualifications or knowledge makes them experience it a greater degree of appreciaton and joy than people without that knowledge.…

Disrupting the game as such

James Grimmelmann writes an important essay on The Power of the Selectee. He put it under Creative Commons, so here's the whole thing: If you wish to fly in the United States, you will be scanned by a machine that produces a picture of your naked body. You may ask not to be scanned, but if you do, you will be groped by a TSA screener. This choice has been criticized as no choice at all, since both alternatives are degrading invasions of your privacy. But I disagree. There is a choice, and in that choice there is meaning. Start again. If you wish to fly in the United States, you will be…

Teabaggers do Texas

For whatever reason, last year's hearings in the Texas Board of Education attacking the basics of science education got less attention than this year's nonsense over social studies and history. The Washington Monthly did a great article on the process last month, and now the New York Times Magazine section has a long article about it. Just as Don McLeroy urged his colleagues on the board to "stand up to experts" in the science hearings, he proposed a range of amendments to the social studies standards, what the Times calls "a single-handed display of archconservative political strong-arming…

A church is a gaping hole cut into a community's resources

Chicago has been oppressing the people! They've installed some mechanical deviltry called parking meters on the street, forcing people who want to drive their multiton iron chariots (an offense unto god right there) into the city and then park them somewhere to pay for the privilege. Everyone is annoyed by parking meters, but guess who is whining the loudest? The churches, of course. "I think it's interfering with my religious activity," said the Rev. Webb Evans, 96, who keeps an office at Israel Methodist Community Church. "We should have the freedom to go to church without having to pay a…

Analogies to apes leading us on the wrong track

Reading the papers on Ardipithecus ramidus which just came out in Science one of the take-home points that jumps out at me is that extant apes may be very misleading analogs to extinct hominins. Here is Owen Lovejoy: In retrospect, clues to this vast divide between the evolutionary trajectories of African apes and hominids have always been present. Apes are largely inept at walking upright. They exhibit reproductive behavior and anatomy profoundly unlike those of humans. African ape males have retained (or evolved, see below) a massive SCC and exhibit little or no direct investment in their…

The Large Hadron Collider will confirm the Bible

Good news: the Large Hadron Collider is operational, and has fired two particles together with a force of 7 trillion electron volts…and it's only the beginning, since they're going to ramp up the power gradually. It's too bad Michio Kaku had to muck it up with a lot of nonsense. "This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 - what happened in the beginning," physicist Michio Kaku told The Associated Press. "This is a Genesis machine. It'll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe." Please, no. Genesis has zero correspondence to reality.…

People should stick with "their own kind"

Since the post on anti-miscegenation laws got a lot of attention, I was curious about analogs in the World Values Survey. There are two such questions of interest: Important for succesful marriage: Same ethnic background(D042) and Important for succesful marriage: Religious beliefs(D031) These data are skewed toward European nations. Below the fold are data are % who assert that same ethnic background is NOT very important, or that same religious beliefs are NOT very important. I will admit that the international pattern is surprising to me. Same Religion Not Very Important…

Moron is as moron does; the dumb money

Daniel Gross of Slate has a piece up, Dumb Money: The villains of the financial catastrophe aren't criminals. They're morons. I just love the use of the term "morons." As Gross notes though there was plenty of g to go around, but that didn't prevent moronic behavior. But, I do think it is worth considering whether the behavior was really that stupid. After all it isn't as if wizards of high finance are going to go through the same sort of crash toward subsistence or penury of middle class borrowers who recklessly increased consumption during the bubble years. Remember that the individuals…

The mists of the adaptive fog

Richard Lawler pointed me to a new paper by Sean Rice, A stochastic version of the Price equation reveals the interplay of deterministic and stochastic processes in evolution. The Price Equation is the generalization of selective evolutionary dynamics by the amateur evolutionary biologist George Price which so impressed W. D. Hamilton. But as Rice notes it only captures a slice of the various parameters which influence evolutionary processes. Like some other papers I've pointed too Rice presents some relatively counter-intuitive results, or at least results which confound our general…

Berlinski responds: A Digested Debate

I thought that for a followup to yesterday's repost of my takedown of Berlinksi, that today I'd show you a digested version of the debate that ensued when Berlinksi showed up to defend himself. You can see the original post and the subsequent discussion here. It's interesting, because it demonstrates the kinds of debating tactics that people like Berlinski use to avoid actually confronting the genuine issue of their dishonesty. The key thing to me about this is that Berlinski is a reasonably competent mathematician - but watch how he sidesteps to avoid discussing any of the actual…

Circadian Rhythm of Aggression in Crayfish

Long-time readers of this blog remember that, some years ago, I did a nifty little study on the Influence of Light Cycle on Dominance Status and Aggression in Crayfish. The department has moved to a new building, the crayfish lab is gone, I am out of science, so chances of following up on that study are very low. And what we did was too small even for a Least Publishable Unit, so, in order to have the scientific community aware of our results, I posted them (with agreement from my co-authors) on my blog. So, although I myself am unlikely to continue studying the relationship between the…

In tight fiscal times, National Public Health Week highlights the return on public health investments

by Kim Krisberg In a little less than a month, public health workers and their community partners in Macomb County, Mich., will set up at the local Babies"R"Us store to offer parents a free child car seat check. The Macomb County Health Department has been organizing such car seat checks for years now, knowing that proper child vehicle restraints can truly mean the difference between mild and severe injuries, or between survival and death. The car seat check is taking place April 4 in observance of the fourth day of this year's National Public Health Week (NPHW) celebration, which officially…

Le Poidevin on the Cosmological Argument

Edward Feser has posted a reply of sorts to my two essays from last week (Part One, Part Two.) Turns out he's pretty touchy about people who are dismissive of the cosmological argument. The post is quite long and only a small portion of it is directed specifically at me. Since most of that portion is just a temper tantrum about the lack of respect shown to the philosophy of religion, I feel no desire to respond in detail. But there is one place where the magnitude of Feser's rudeness is so out of proportion to the strength of his argument that I do think some response is called for. In…

Why DSM-V Doesn't Worry Me

A friend sent me a link to an article about the upcoming fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.  The article speaks of flaws in the process, and warning of dire "unintended consequences." href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/print/article/10168/1425378?printable=true"> href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/print/article/10168/1425378?printable=true">A Warning Sign on the Road to DSM-V: Beware of Its Unintended Consequences Allen Frances, MD June 26, 2009 Psychiatric Times ...I believe that the work on DSM-V has displayed the most…

Ben Swann's long-awaited report on the "CDC whistleblower" goes over like a lead balloon of antivaccine misinformation

Ben Swann, anchor of the evening news for the local Atlanta CBS affiliate and the face of his Truth In Media series of videos, thinks himself an investigative journalist and a truth teller, but much of what I see him reporting more closely resembles reporting as though done by a cross between Ted Baxter, Ron Burgundy, and Alex Jones. For one thing, Mr. Swann sure does love him some conspiracies, and he sure is susceptible to antivaccine nonsense, no matter how nonsensical. I first saw him in action nearly three months ago, when he credulously regurgitated the antivaccine talking points on…

Acupuncture bait and switch: Electrified hot flash edition

It's always disappointing to see a good journal fall for bad medicine, particularly when it's in your field. For example, the Journal of Clinical Oncology (affectionately referred to by its abbreviation JCO) is the official journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and probably the most read clinical journal by those involved in the clinical care of cancer patients. Just as most oncologists, surgeons, and radiation oncologists who specialize in the care of cancer patients belong to ASCO, most of them also at least peruse JCO on a regular basis because major results of large…

Hollie Quinn defends her testimonial for breast cancer woo

A couple of weeks ago, as Breast Cancer Awareness Week was approaching, I was highly disturbed to see everybody's favorite wretched hive of scum and quackery (The Huffington Post, in case you didn't know) promoting a dubious breast cancer testimonial for quackery. This testimonial, contained in a book entitled You Did What? Saying "No" to Conventional Cancer Treatment and promoted in a HuffPo post by an acupuncturist named One Woman's Story: Saying No to Conventional Cancer Treatment, on the surface sounded as though a woman named Hollie Quinn had eschewed all conventional therapy after being…

The Chicago Tribune's cheerleader for quackery on the infiltration of woo into academic medicine

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been becoming increasingly disturbed by what I see as the infiltration of non-evidenced-based "alternative" medicine into academic medical centers. Indeed, about a month ago, I went so far as to count the number of medical schools that offer some form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) in their curricula. (What a fantastic marketing term for what are in the vast majority of cases therapies without a plausible scientific basis or compelling clinical evidence for efficacy above that of a placebo!) The end result was the Academic Woo…