Holiday Spirits
In lieu of writing an actual blog post this week, here are some pictures of our easter keg hunt. (Apologies for the quality, it’s a camera phone.)
Under the Sea
I love making cakes, especially for friends’ birthdays. Yesterday was my housemate Mitchell’s birthday, and he requested a carrot cake but did not specify a shape. Given his recently acquired but ardent love for sea slugs, I decided to make him a sea slug cake:
Turns out sea slugs (and related sea creatures) are frequently quite gorgeous, and a few of them have some pretty neat skills. For instance, there’s a couple species of slug that can eat sunlight. And there’s a sea slug which feeds on Portuguese man-o-wars. Not only is it immune to their nematocysts (stingers), it collects them in sacs, concentrating the poison until it’s even more dangerous to the touch than its prey.
My favorite creature I’ve discovered in the course of making this cake is not actually a sea slug – it’s a “sea squirt”, a fairly simple organism that starts off life with a rudimentary brain (really a ganglion), uses it to find a home, and then says, “Well, I guess I don’t need this any more” and digests it.
Upward and Onward
It’s Women’s History Month, which I’m going to use as an excuse to ramble about a very cool historical lady I learned about only recently: Victoria Woodhull.
Victoria once said she was “a child without a childhood”. Born Victoria California Claflin, the seventh of ten children, she had only a few years in school before dropping out to support the family by begging and helping to raise her younger sisters. Her father, an abuser and a drunk, bought an old mill and burned it down for the insurance money, an act which got the family kicked out of town. In their new home, Victoria and her beloved younger sister Tennessee (Tennie) began working as clairvoyants. When she fell ill, 28 year old doctor Canning Woodhull treated her. Even sick, she must have been charming – he fell in love, and within a year they were married. Victoria was 15.
Married life was not easy for Victoria. Her first child, named Byron after the poet, was born developmentally disabled. Her husband, unsuccessful as a doctor, spent much of what he earned on alcohol, so Victoria began to take odd jobs to support the family, working first as a dressmaker, and then as an actress. When her husband delivered their second child, left both mother and newborn bleeding, and didn’t return for three days, Victoria decided she was done with him. She spent the next several years traveling with her birth family. She posed alongside Tennie first as mediums, then as healers who could cure cancer. At one point the family was charged with nine counts of fraud, but they left town before they could be apprehended.
Eventually Victoria and her sister Tennie decided they wanted a fresh start. They moved, along with Victoria’s children and new husband Colonel James Blood, to New York City, where they billed themselves as simple clairvoyants. One of their clients was multimillionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, who fell in love with Tennie and who encouraged the sisters to go into business together. Their business received a boost on Black Friday. As others frantically sold socks, Victoria stood on the steps of the stock exchange – women weren’t allowed in – and sent couriers inside to buy. The risk paid off, and Victoria earned a tidy sum, which she and Tennie used to open up a brokerage business. They were the first American women to ever do so, and the novelty of it catapulted them to fame. The experienced Vanderbilt helped manage the firm, and Colonel Blood was his wife’s personal secretary. She and Tennie used profits from the brokerage to start up a weekly newspaper.
Victoria’s life up until this point had certainly been unconventonial, however the archives of the newspaper make clear how radical she truly was. The paper exposed financial fraud, published the first English-language version of the Communist Manifesto, and made impassioned arguments on social issues which challenged the morals of the period.
(more…)
Too Hard For Science
Too Hard for Science? is a series on a Scientific American blog asking researchers what experiments they would do if money, ethics, or the laws of the universe weren’t an issue. I think the idea for the series is brilliant, although somewhat disappointingly executed – the articles are all way too short, and some of the interviewees fail to actually propose impossible experiments, and just describe hard problems. That said, there are some real gems:
Is there an invention a prospective [black hole] diver can use to resist spaghettification? Gott and his colleague Deborah Freedman Woods calculated that a giant ring might do. If this “life preserver” encircles your waist as you fall, its gravity counteracts the black hole’s, pulling your sides apart while pulling your head and feet together…[S]uch a buoy would have a mass of more than 12,800 trillion tonnes, about two-millionths the mass of Earth, roughly equal to an asteroid 100 miles wide. “That’s somewhat beyond the current NASA budget,” Gott says.
…“Hero of Alexandria invented a steam engine before 100 AD, and people back then looked at this and said, ‘Good job, that’s fun, isn’t that nice,’ and nobody looked at it and said ‘Wait, this can change the world.’ We waited about 1,700 years for the Industrial Revolution,” Gott notes. “You can never tell — concepts for inventions that might seem like toys now might have unrealized promise.”
The sense of meaning in dreams:
By investigating why dreams feel profound, one might learn how events get imbued with this sense of meaning — perhaps the same one felt during revelations. Stickgold notes that during REM sleep, when dreaming typically occurs, the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin is shut off in the brain. The only other time that happens is because of LSD, “when people seem to have these totally uninteresting experiences they describe as profoundly meaningful called ‘acid insights.’”… The solution? Experiments with drugs that suppress or boost serotonin levels could explore any connections between the neurotransmitter and the feeling of meaning. “You could give people such compounds or a placebo and get them to rate how deep or meaningful specific movie clips seems to them,” Stickgold suggests.
(Also: Raising animals to human intelligence and Printing people and Testing if 10,000 hours makes you an expert.)
Of course, reading this series made me think about what experiments I would run if I had no practical or ethical limits. I came up with this:
For over a decade now I’ve been obsessed with genocide. What fascinates me more than anything else is the moral complexity of the phenomenon, the number of people capable of goodness and kindness who somehow turn instead to fear, anger, and violence. A serial killer or a mass murder is just as “evil” as a person taking part in a genocide, likely more so. But I guess I’m not interested in evil so much as our collective failure to be good. It’s not the psychopaths that disturb me but the bystanders, the folks who say it isn’t that bad as the community slides into hell and never again! as it struggles to find its way out. You know, the people who could very well be me.
So my questions are, What makes a society attempt genocide? and What environmental and personality variables distinguish people who foment genocide, people who go along for the ride, and people who try to stop it?
Probably the “ideal” way to answer these questions would involve a really convincing virtual reality where you could simulate a society turning genocidal around an individual subject, tweaking aspects of the their experience and comparing the actions of different subjects who experience the same thing. Even better would be if we developed the technology to suppress people’s memories, so that you could run different simulations on the same individual. With such resources, it would be trivial to measure/fiddle with physiological reactivity to experiences as they happened, to see how a surge of adrenaline or testosterone, an anxiety attack, or a mild sedative influences moral decision-making.
Of course, the technological limitations here are secondary to the moral ones. Even if we could do all of this, we shouldn’t. We’d be no better than that which we seek to stop – which, when you’re trying to stop genocide, really says something.
(Although if we did have memory suppressants in our virtual world, I would volunteer to be a subject.)
Anyway, that’s the dream that can never be. What impossible experiment would you do, if you could?
Degrees of freedom aren’t free
There’s another article out this month on all the false positives being published in psychology [pdf].
It deals with what the authors call “researcher degrees of freedom” – a series of somewhat arbitrary decisions about experimental design and data analysis that researchers have to make over the course of their study. Because researchers are a) out of a job if they don’t find enough significant results and b) human, this ambiguity can frequently, unconsciously, perniciously be used to hone in on the most significant results, causing an abundance of false positives in the field as a whole.
The coolest part of the article is a set of simulations they ran where they looked at the effect of four common decisions, or degrees of freedom, on results. The decisions were:
A) If you have two dependent variables, which one should you conduct your analysis on – or should you use an average of the two?
B) If you’ve tested a moderate number of subjects and found no results, should you try to improve your power by adding more subjects?
C) How do you deal with covariants? For example, should you see if there is a main effect of gender on your study, or an interaction between gender and condition?
D) If you have multiple conditions, which should be compared and which should be combined?
The researchers simulated results 15,000 times by drawing randomly from a normal distribution. By definition, this means that they should get “significant” (p < .05) results 5% of the time, "highly significant" (p < .01) results 1% of the time, and "marginal" (p < .1) results 10% of the time. However, when they simulated the above decisions - for example, with B, by testing after 20 observations and only adding 10 more subjects if they failed to reach significance - they had many more false positives. When you combine all four degrees of freedom, the simulation was more likely than not to find a “significant” result!
Also cute: the researchers did a study on whether listening to the Beatles makes you age backwards. This paragraph below shows the difference between how they could, according to current reporting standards, describe the study (in bold) and how they recommend all studies be reported:
The authors use six reporting guidelines (and four corresponding reviewer recommendations) to tackle this problem. Although it’s not my preferred method I’m just grateful to see people with standing in the field continue to talk about these issues. I agree with pretty much everything in this paper, especially their conclusion, which I think packs a nice punch.
Our goal as scientists is not to publish as many articles as
we can, but to discover and disseminate truth. Many of us—
and this includes the three authors of this article—often lose
sight of this goal, yielding to the pressure to do whatever is
justifiable to compile a set of studies that we can publish.
This is not driven by a willingness to deceive but by the
self-serving interpretation of ambiguity, which enables us to
convince ourselves that whichever decisions produced the
most publishable outcome must have also been the most
appropriate. This article advocates a set of disclosure require-
ments that imposes minimal costs on authors, readers, and
reviewers. These solutions will not rid researchers of publica-
tion pressures, but they will limit what authors are able to jus-
tify as acceptable to others and to themselves. We should
embrace these disclosure requirements as if the credibility of
our profession depended on them. Because it does.
