Germans are the Fattest Europeans

Unless its citizens are fooling the Body Mass Index (BMI) with a lot of muscle tone (BMI is useless at measuring whether those of an athletic persuasion are carrying extra poundage outside the gym),  Germany weighs in as Europe’s fattest nation, and is on a par with the United States.

In 2007, the International Association for the Study of Obesity found that that 75.4 percent of  German men and 58.9 percent of  women were overweight. According to a new study by Germany’s Federal Research Institute for Food and Nutrition, the situation is a result of being clueless about food and calories, increasing laziness and, as Reuters notes,  drinking too much beer after eating sausages.

How to Tell a Good Scientist from a Bad Scientist

In a series of interviews with New York Times science writer Gary Taubes on scientificblogging, psychology professor Seth Roberts turns to the question of how do you go about making the judgment as to whether a scientist is trustworthy, especially when the topic is controversial. Taubes responds:

I’m a stickler about the use of words like “evidence” and “proof”. So if someone tells you there’s no evidence for some controversial belief, you can be fairly confident that they’re a bad scientist. There’s always evidence, or there wouldn’t be a controversy. If somebody says that “we proved that this was true” or “we set out to prove that this was true” that’s another bad sign. The point here, as [Karl] Popper noted, among others, is that you can never prove anything is true; you can only refute it. So researchers who talk about proving a hypothesis is true rather than testing it make me worried.

SETH: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. They overstate; they twist things around to make it come out the way they want. They are way too sure of what they…

TAUBES: Yes, and the really good scientists are the ones, almost by definition, who are most skeptical of evidence that seems to support their beliefs. They’re most aware of how they could have been fooled, how they could have screwed up, or how they might have missed artifacts in their experiment that could have explained what they observed. They’re very careful about what they say. If you ask them to do play devil’s advocate, and tell you how they could have screwed up, then at the very least, they’ll say “Well, if I knew how I could have done it, I would have checked it before I made the claim”. So when I’m talking about discerning the difference between a good scientist and a bad scientist, I’m talking about how they speak about their research, the evidence itself, it’s presence or absence.

Worth bearing in mind when you hear something which appears to overturn consensus expressed in strident terms: Where all the other possible explanations for the phenomenon considered? How did the researchers test their theory and data against the best possible countervailing research? Why do their conclusions offer better explanatory power?

Should Fractions Be Scrapped?

Rebecca Goldin Ph.D

According to USA Today, “Fractions should be scrapped” – and the whole world seems to be cheering the potential demise of perhaps the most frustrating and demanding topic in elementary school arithmetic. As the paper reported:

A few years ago, Dennis DeTurck, an award-winning professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, stood at an outdoor podium on campus and proclaimed, “Down with fractions!”

“Fractions have had their day, being useful for by-hand calculation,” DeTurck said as part of a 60-second lecture series. “But in this digital age, they’re as obsolete as Roman numerals are.”

But before the shouts of joy rise to the power of deafening, take a closer look: No one is actually proposing that the idea of fractions be scrapped; Dr. DeTurck was expressing the opinion that decimal expressions are more relevant and important in the age of computers than ratios such as 3/4.

The point is that every fraction (a ratio of two integers) can be expressed as a decimal expression (allowing for infinitely repeating sequences), and vice versa. So fractions and decimals are two different ways of talking about the same nubmers: rational numbers. Irrational numbers, such as the square root of two or the infamous pi, cannot be expressed as a ratio nor as a decimal, though they can be approximated by them (e.g. pi is close to 3.14).

While DeTurck engages mathematicians and math educators over whether the techniques involving ratios are more or less important than the techniques using decimals, no one is questioning the importance of generalizing from integers to fractions, a fundamental concept which is typically a major component of fourth grade mathematics.

(Editor’s note, Rebecca Goldin is an award-winning mathematician at George Mason University)

Generation Google Suck at Using the Web

Worried that the Internet may be less of an educational tool than the techno-evangelists promised? Well, the news is even worse than you imagined: forget about fretting over the decline of handwriting, mental arithmetic skills, memorizing poetry, using a printed dictionary or other reference books composed and edited by experts, reading a newspaper, or reading passages of text longer than 500 words, todays kids – Generation Google – are pretty useless at using Google. That’s according to a new study from University College London, commissioned by the British Library to

identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time. This is to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way. In this report, we define the `Google generation’ as those born after 1993 and explore the world of a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web.

Life before the web meant learning how to learn. Life after the web appears to involve not learning much about anything. The digital divide, rather than suggesting that people without access to laptops are on an information dirt track, seems a more apt way of denoting the opposite: that a life lived on the information superhighway is a fast track to stupefaction. The report outlines key areas of concern:

• the information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology: in fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems

• internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority

• young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies

• as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective

• faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them

Looking at recent research in the U.S., the study’s authors say there are two “powerful messages” that need to be grasped:

When the top and bottom quartiles of students – as defined by their information literacy skills – are compared, it emerges that the top quartile report a much higher incidence of exposure to basic library skills from their parents, in the school library, classroom or public library in their earlier years. It seems that a new divide is opening up in the US, with the better-equipped students taking the prizes of better grades. At the lower end of the information skills spectrum, the research finds that intervention at university age is too late: these students have already developed an ingrained coping behaviour: they have learned to `get by’ with Google.

The problem here is that they simply do not recognize that they have a problem: there is a big gap between their actual performance in information literacy tests and their self-estimates of information skill and library anxiety. The findings of these studies raise questions about the ability of schools and colleges to develop the search capabilities of the Google Generation to a level appropriate to the demands of higher education and research.

So there you have it, information isn’t going to set you free unless you know how to find it, and the best chance of having those “information skills’ is to have highly-educated parents who can impart what they learned before the advent of the Internet. The implications for branded and non-branded authoritative knowledge, whether a newspaper, or an archive, or an entire professional field are mind boggling. But one might venture that we’re staring at class warfare between those in possession of real knowledge versus those in possession of virtual garbage.

Non Addictive Morphine a Virtual Ligand Away?

STATS Maia Szalavitz has a fascinating post on Scientific American’s 60 Second Science about scientists bridging the gap between our endogenous “heroin” – endorphins, which are non addictive, and the exogenous drug, morphine, which is. Before journalists get carried away, Szalavitz urges caution.

Thin People Like Running; Overweight People Like Relaxing

It may sound like a study from the Duh department at Obvious U., but the consequences of giving obese and thin rats exercise wheels to play with speaks to an essential, and possibly intractable, problem with exercise as a means towards losing weight.

ABC’s Disgrace: Artistic Freedom Doesn’t Excuse Vaccination Scaremongering

When the right-wing tabloid press in Britain began to report – against all reliable medical evidence – that a form of mercury in the MMR vaccine was linked with autism, vaccination rates went down and the incidence of measles increased.

In 2006, Britain witnessed its first death from measles in 14 years. Before vaccination hundreds of children died from the virus, which causes encephalitis (swelling of the brain) in one out of every thousand cases and permanent brain damage in one out of every 4,000 cases.

Subacute sclerosing pan-encephalomyelitis, a fatal infection of the brain occurs in one in every 100,000 cases. Other complications include a severe cough and breathing difficulties, ear infections, viral and bacterial lung infections, and eye infections. In infants under 12 months, and among children who are malnourished or who are deficient in vitamin A, these complications can be much more dangerous – especially in the developing world.

But vaccination has, according to the World Health Organization, reduced the global number of deaths from measles from an estimated 873,000 in 1999 to 345,000 in 2005.

Even though there has been even more research disproving the connection between vaccination and autism, and no medical authority in the world believes there is a connection; and even though thimerosol was removed from vaccines six years ago, and the incidence of autism has not decreased, the conviction that there is a conspiracy going on haunts popular debate over vaccination.

Enter ABC with Eli Stone, a new legal drama airing on Jan 31, whose protagonist, a lawyer, has visions telling him to abandon his big pharma clients, and save the little guy. As the New York Times reports, Stone, quite figuratively on behalf of little guys and gals everywhere, takes on the evils of vaccination.

Yes, forget for one moment that vaccines have saved millions of kids around the world from death and the ravages of infectious disease, because that’s no longer part of the liberal playbook according to the show’s writers. Instead, Stone targets a preservative in flu vaccines, “mercuritol” a thinly-disguised proxy for thimerosol. Here’s how the Times article by Edward Wyatt describes what follows:

“Is there proof that mercuritol causes autism?,” Eli Stone says to the jury in summing up his lawsuit against the vaccine maker. “Yes,” he says. “Is that proof direct or incontrovertible proof? No. But ask yourself if you’ve ever believed in anything or anyone without absolute proof.”

How about reasonable proof? Or much better proof than the evidence mounted by the vaccines = autism brigade? Nah. Stone wins the day (isn’t there an anti-cliche vaccine that we could give Hollywood writers and producers?).

The co-creator and an executive producer of the show, Greg Berlanti, tells the Times that “As a show, we want to keep the conversation going after people turn off the television.”

Perhaps he and the presiding powers at ABC should have first asked themselves whether they were striking a very real blow against the little guy (or gal). What if the show is successful enough to lead some parents to forego vaccination, and what if some of those kids are very, very unlucky, and die?

It was precisely for this reason that the American Association of Pediatrics demanded the premiere episode of Eli Stone to be cancelled:

A television show that perpetuates the myth that vaccines cause autism is the height of reckless irresponsibility on the part of ABC and its parent company, The Walt Disney Co.,” said Renee R. Jenkins, MD, FAAP, president of the AAP. “If parents watch this program and choose to deny their children immunizations, ABC will share in the responsibility for the suffering and deaths that occur as a result. The consequences of a decline in immunization rates could be devastating to the health of our nation’s children.”

By the legal standards of the show’s “to hell with absolute proof” attitude, someone, by rights, ought to be able sue ABC for reckless endangerment. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. And the only possible recourse is to shame them into adult responsibility, viz, ‘what next? Eli Stone takes on AIDS – “it’s the drugs that cause AIDS, not HIV!”‘

Fortunately, in the real world, courts apply a much more stringent standard of truth on scientific testimony, as they did recently in Baltimore, excluding, as consequence the plaintiff’’s entire line-up of expert witnesses in a vaccine autism suit.

 

Why Critics of New York Times “Law and Order – Vets in America” Series Are Also Statistically Challenged

Trevor Butterworth

A lot of people have gotten carried away by the suggestive statistics in the New York Times story on veterans and homicide rates, to the point of adding suggestive statistics of their own (see here, here and here).

First of all, comparing the homicide rate of veterans with the homicide rate of the general population aged 18-34 and then noting that the latter is higher than the former (ergo, combat is not predictive of increased PTSD, violence or whatever) is a poor way of conceptualizing an answer to the question of whether exposure to combat is predictive of increased rates of violence in veterans. Here’s why:

Soldiers who experience combat are a unique sample of the population: they are, in the main, highly trained and highly disciplined. And in combat they are exposed to highly unusual stresses.

They are not directly comparable to dentists who commit homicide or don’t commit homicide, or to violent or pacific nuns, or – more to the point – drug dealers, gang members and any other social group where lack of empathy, social circumstances and/or other factors drive high rates of homicide and violence. The general homicide rate in the population tells us very little about who is committing homicides or why. The best it does is show rate by age and race – and no, surprise, young men tend to be at the top of the heap.

One would expect, given the training and discipline of army life (and the fact that the services do a good job of discharging those with “problems”) that soldiers, generally, would have lower homicide rates than the general population, which they do. But simply pointing this out forecloses the key question – does combat, or a certain amount of combat, or even a certain kind of combat lead to the kinds of stress that foreshadow violence?

What Can We Learn From Heath Ledger’s Death?

Trevor Butterworth

STATS’ Maia Szalavitz offers some insight into the problems of mixing “downs,” which is don’t: “don’t take “depressant” drugs — drugs that make you calm or sleepy, not depressed!!! — in combination with each other.” More over on the Huffington Post…

New Research Shows OxyContin Epidemic to be a Myth

Trevor Butterworth

The media and the Drug Enforcement Agency created a myth of widespread accidental addiction to OxyContin a new study of almost 28,000 drug addicts attending treatment centers across the United States shows. The research, published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of American Psychiatry also demonstrates that:

most of the OxyContin use reported in the sample of individuals seeking addiction treatment did not originate from physician prescriptions, but rather from illicit sources, such as family, friends, or other illegitimate sources. Clearly, the pharmaceutical opioid problems of the individuals in this sample were part of a larger pattern of alcohol and other drug use—the problems were not “accidental,” secondary to prescribed use for pain or other medical problems. These results also suggest that those who suffer from OxyContin abuse or dependence share many characteristics with those who are dependent on other classes of drugs.

Oh, and just like the bogus meth epidemic, those who abuse OxyContin are overwhelmingly white. For more, read the STATS news highlight…