Adding green space to nursing homes might be a good idea
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Mother Jones
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There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a really good joke. Someone has made a clever new connection between two mundane things that we’ve all encountered—and suddenly we have a lovely “aha” moment. We find it funny.
That sense of revelation accompanying a good joke or comic is very similar to what many scientists experience when they finally figure out a great explanation for some kind of previously unknown phenomenon. But don’t take it from us. Take it from the scientifically-trained author and illustrator Zach Weinersmith (née Weiner), creator of the popular web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), known for its science-themed humor.
“I suspect what’s actually going on with people who are thought of as very creative is they’re good at two skills, one of which is generating connections rapidly, and two, editing out the garbage quickly,” explains Weinersmith on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.
Zach Weinersmith in 2011. Christina Xu/Wikimedia Commons
In Weinersmith’s case, some of funniest jokes are actually about just plain bad scientific thinking—and they teach a lesson about what science is, and what it isn’t. The comic artist is now one of the main forces behind an event series, entitled the “Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses,” that specializes in “celebrations of well-argued and thoroughly-researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory.” The winner takes home a sculpture of Charles Darwin, “shrugging skeptically.” The first festival took place at MIT in late 2013.
The idea for the festival originated in a popular cartoon that Weinersmith drew, depicting a scientist presenting the argument that babies are shaped like footballs so that they can be punted over mountains and thereby share hereditary material with more genetically-distinct populations living in nearby villages. (see below; click to enlarge/go to original). On a whim, he polled his Facebook fans to see if anyone might be interested in attending an event in which he turned this comic into a pseudo-serious academic talk.
“To my amazement, a thousand people came to this really dorky show,” says Weinersmith.
The cartoon that started it all. Zach Weinersmith/Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
And so BAHFest was born; the first winner gave a talk attempting to explain baby crying (“infant distress vocalization”) as advantageous because it gave supremely frustrated adults a “natural adrenaline boost” that, in turn, made them more effective in battle with rival tribes. Especially when they brought the infants into battle with them. (You might be noticing a theme here.)
Why did Weinersmith and the other organizers choose to highlight fake science talks about topics related to adaptation and human evolution in particular? “Biology is something everybody gets on some level,” says Weinersmith, who confesses he has a much harder time imagining a fake chemistry talk that would actually be funny. But he stresses that he is not “actively trying to make fun of” evolutionary psychology, or the idea that we can explain how humans behave and think today based on the evolutionary quandaries and stresses present during the species’ development. It’s just that the just-so stories characteristic of this field are quite seductive when couched in evolutionary terms.
As for Weinersmith’s own wacko-funny idea that babies are meant to be aerodynamic: He notes, babies are “largely hairless,” an attribute that would reduce friction, or drag, when flying through the air. Plus, when you blow air on babies’ faces, meanwhile, he notes they close their mouths, preventing air from entering their bodies and creating an eddy current. (Weinersmith’s science background is in physics.) “It doesn’t make sense that the baby should have this reflex unless it is designed to fly through the air, via a catapult,” says Weinersmith.
Nazca “Astronaut,” Peru. Raymond Ostertag/Wikimedia Commons
Furthermore, babies enjoy being lifted and spun in the air. And there’s even some historical evidence, Weinersmith says:
If you consider the Nazca lines, these are enormous macrostructures of these simplistic iconic drawings. So why would you ever make a drawing that people on the ground can’t even see, which is also at the same time iconic and cute-looking. There’s only one reasonable explanation which is that it’s designed for a baby to be flying over it and remain calm in flight.
Below is the full video of Weinersmith giving his “Infantapulting Hypothesis” talk at the first BAHFest. You’ll notice one slight alteration in the “theory” from cartoon to lecture: The babies are not being punted any more, but rather, catapulted. “In the original version, the baby was being drop kicked,” says Weinersmith. “And I thought for an audience of semi-normal people, that might be a little upsetting. Or at least, it would be hard to make slides.”
So how do we distinguish fact from fiction when it comes to science? When Weinersmith asked one of the previous BAHFest participants about a certain graph, one that showed a direct correlation between obesity and the length of a country’s roads, he got the following answer: “Nothing that I left in is not true.” And herein lies a major pitfall in science: cherry picking or data mining. Because we humans are highly susceptible to the confirmation bias—that is, we tend to look for evidence that supports what we already think is going on, rather than data that might call our own hypotheses into question—we need to be very careful not to focus on only a small subset of information available to us.
Otherwise, what we think is a good idea might actually be, well, just a joke.
Another serious lesson from the supremely unserious BAHFest is that there is a huge amount of interpretation of data involved in science. “I feel like there’s this unfortunate notion among most people that what a scientist does is get data, and then the data tells them what the conclusion is and that’s how science gets done,” says Weinersmith. “And of course the actual process is quite a bit messier, which probably makes it more fun. But I think the public often get misled by the idea that getting science is kind of like digging up gold nuggets or something.”
When Weinersmith isn’t creating comics and curating events to roast bad science, he’s tending to his 3-month old baby girl. Infantpulting is out, of course, but he says he was thinking about a safe way that he could, er, involve his daughter in a real wind tunnel demonstration to elaborate on the theory.
“I suppose I could 3D print a model of exactly my kid for the experiment,” he says.
To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Zach Weinersmith, you can stream below:
This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short discussion with Cynthia Graber, author of the new PBS/NOVANext article “The Next Green Revolution May Rely on Microbes,” and a discussion of the science of why human biting is so dangerous, and of how our hormones influence political choices.
To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds viaiTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.
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Baby Catapulting and Other Batshit Hypotheses That Teach You How Science Works
Mother Jones
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Dominic Casciani of the BBC has a good piece up today about the hypothesis linking lead exposure in small children to violent crime rates later in life. Here’s my favorite part:
So why isn’t this theory universally accepted?
Well, it remains a theory because nobody could ever deliberately poison thousands of children to see whether they became criminals later in life. Lead theorists says that doesn’t matter because the big problem is mainstream criminologists and policymakers who can’t think outside the box.
But Roger Matthews, professor of criminology at the University of Kent, rejects that. He says biological criminologists completely miss the point. “I don’t see the link,” he says. “If this causes some sort of effect, why should those effects be criminal?
“The things that push people into crime are very different kinds of phenomena, not in the nature of their brain tissue. The problem about the theory is that a lot of these researchers are not remotely interested or cued into the kinds of things in the mainstream.
“There has been a long history of people trying to link biology to crime — that some people have their eyes too close together, or an extra chromosome, or whatever. This stuff gets disproved and disproved. But it keeps popping up. It’s like a bad penny.”
If Matthews didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him. He plays the role of closed-minded scientist to perfection here. He obviously hasn’t read any of the literature about lead and crime; doesn’t care about the evidence; and is interested only in sociological explanations of crime because he’s ideologically committed to a particular sociological school of criminology. Beyond that, he apparently figures that because phrenology got debunked a century ago, there’s no real point in reading up on anything more recent in the field of neuroscience. All this despite the fact that mainstream criminology is famously unable to reasonably account for either the epic crime wave of the 60s through the 80s or the equally epic decline since then.
In any case, if anyone really wants to know why the lead theory isn’t universally accepted, the answer is easy: it’s not universally accepted because it’s new and unproven. Nor does it pretend to be a monocausal explanation for all crime. However, there’s pretty good reason to think that neurology might indeed mediate violent behavior, and there’s pretty good reason to think that massive postwar exposure to lead may have been a very particular neurological agent mediating a large rise in violent crime starting in the mid-60s. The evidence isn’t bulletproof, but it’s pretty strong. It deserves more than cavalier dismissal.
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Mother Jones
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Yesterday’s data dump of how much Medicare pays doctors has generated predictable outrage about the vast amounts some of the top doctors bill. Obviously there are a lot of reasons for high billing rates, but Paul Waldman points to an interesting one: the way Medicare reimburses doctors for pharmaceuticals is partly to blame. The #1 Medicare biller on the list, for example, was a Florida ophthalmologist who prescribes Lucentis for macular degeneration instead of the cheaper Avastin. Since Medicare pays doctors a percentage of the cost of the drugs they use, he got $120 for each dose he administered instead of one or two dollars. That adds up fast. (More on Avastin vs. Lucentis here.)
In the LA Times today, a Newport Beach oncologist who’s also near the top of the Medicare billing list offers this defense:
For his part, Nguyen, 39, said his Medicare payout is misleading because all five physicians at his oncology practice bill under his name, and much of that money overall is reimbursement for expensive chemotherapy drugs on which he says doctors make little or no money. Other high-volume doctors voiced similar complaints about the data.
Anyway, Waldman wonders why we do this:
If nothing else, this story should point us to one policy change we could make pretty easily: get rid of that six percent fee and just give doctors a flat fee for writing prescriptions. Make it $5, or $10, or any number that makes sense. There’s no reason in the world that the fee should be tied to the price of the drug; all that does is give doctors an incentive to prescribe the most expensive medication they can. That wouldn’t solve all of Medicare’s problems, but it would be a start. Of course, the pharmaceutical lobby would pull out all the stops trying to keep that six percent fee in place. But that’s no reason not to try.
The backstory here is that Medicare used to set the reimbursement rate for “physician-administered drugs” based on an average wholesale price set by manufacturers. This price was routinely gamed, so Congress switched to reimbursing doctors based on an average sales price formula that’s supposed to reflect the actual price physicians pay for the drugs. Then they tacked on an extra 6 percent in order to compensate for storage, handling and other administrative costs.
I don’t know if 6 percent is the right number, but the theory here is reasonable. If you have to carry an inventory of expensive drugs, you have to finance that inventory, and the financing cost depends on the value of the inventory. More expensive drugs cost more to finance.
However, this does motivate doctors to prescribe more expensive drugs, a practice that pharmaceutical companies are happy to encourage. I don’t know how broadly this is an actual problem, but it certainly is in the case of Avastin vs. Lucentis, where the cost differential is upwards of 100x for two drugs that are equally effective. And the problem here is that Medicare is flatly forbidden from approving certain drugs but not others. As long as Lucentis works, Medicare has to pay for it. That’s great news for Genentech, but not so great for the taxpayers footing the bill.
Originally posted here:
Behind the Scenes on Those Enormous Medicare Billing Numbers
Mother Jones
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Phil Plait
This article originally appeared at Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
After writing yesterday about the now-famous/infamous debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, I don’t want to make this blog all creationism all the time, but indulge me this one more time, if you will. On BuzzFeed, there is a clever listicle that is a collection of 22 photos showing creationists holding up questions they have for people who “believe” in evolution.
These questions are fairly typically asked when evolution is questioned by creationists. Some are philosophical, and fun to think about, while others show a profound misunderstanding of how science works, and specifically what evolution is. I have found that most creationists who attack evolution have been taught about it by other creationists, so they really don’t understand what it is or how it works, instead they have a straw-man idea of it.
Because of this, it’s worth exploring and answering the questions presented. Some could be simply answered yes or no, but I’m all about going a bit deeper. With 22 questions I won’t go too deep, but if you have these questions yourself, or have been asked them, I hope this helps.
I’ll repeat the question below, and give my answers.
1) “Bill Nye, are you influencing the minds of children in a positive way?”
I’m not Bill, but I’d say yes, he is. More than just giving them facts to memorize, he is showing them how science works. Not only that, his clear love and enthusiasm for science is infectious, and that to me is his greatest gift.
2) “Are you scared of a Divine Creator?”
No. In fact, if there is a Judeo-Christian god, that would have fascinating implications for much of what we scientists study, and would be a rich vein to mine. Perhaps a more pertinent question is, “Are you scared there might not be a Divine Creator?” There is more room for a god in science than there is for no god in religious faith.
3) “Is it completely illogical that the Earth was created mature? i.e. trees created with rings … Adam created as an adult ….”
It might be internally consistent, even logical, but a bit of a stretch. After all, we can posit that God created the Universe last Thursday, looking exactly as it is, with all evidence pointing to it being old and your memories implanted such that you think you’re older than a mere few days. Consistent, sure, but plausible? Not really.
4) “Does not the second law of thermodynamics disprove evolution?”
No. The creationist argument assumes the Earth is a closed system, such that energy cannot escape or enter. But the Sun is the main source of energy for the Earth. This allows more order to be created, and for entropy to be locally lowered in some cases.
5) “How do you explain a sunset if their sic is no God?”
Angular momentum. OK, kidding aside, if you mean the beauty of a sunset, well, we have evolved to appreciate colors, shapes, and metaphors. And in my opinion understanding the science behind events like sunsets adds to their beauty.
Incidentally, some creationists are geocentrists.
6) “If the Big Bang Theory is true and taught as science along with evolution, why do the laws of thermodynamics debunk said theories?”
See No. 4. Also, as far as the Big Bang goes, we don’t know how or why the Universe came into being (though there are some interesting ideas). But “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer in science. It leads to asking more questions, which leads to more exploration, which leads to more understanding. Just being given an answer is like using the answer key to fill in a crossword puzzle. It’s no fun.
7) “What about noetics?”
Well, that depends on what you mean. There is a branch of philosophy called noetics, which deals with understanding the mind. That is also a scientific endeavor, since we know the mind is an effect of the brain—as many say, the mind is what the brain does. Scientists are studying that now, so I don’t think you can dismiss science out of hand and replace it with religion in that instance.
There is also a more New Age-y field called noetics, which posits that the mind can have an effect on matter (though there is more to it than that). I’m not sure what that had to do with God, except the idea that God gave humans mind. But for that claim to sway me I want evidence, not just a proclamation that it is so.
8) “Where do you derive objective meaning in life?”
We have evolved over millions of years to be social animals, tribal, supportive of others and willing to reach a common goal. This could explain much of the morality and meaning we see in life, without the need for it to be revealed by a divine presence. In fact, I object to the idea that humans need a supernatural parent figure to give us morals; I don’t need religion to know that murder is wrong. Note that there were laws against murder long, long before the Bible was around. I would also mention that the Bible has very conflicting morality, saying for example that it’s OK to stone people to death for all manners of minor infractions. I have no problem with the idea that people seek moral guidance or meaning in the Bible, but I do object when they ignore the parts that are clearly immoral.
Meaning in life is what you make of it. For me that’s love, beauty, art, science, and learning. For others it may be different, but those are what call to me.
9) “If God did not create everything, how did the first single-celled organism originate? By chance?”
This is an excellent question. It was partly by chance, but it wasn’t random. Chemistry shows us that atoms and molecules are like puzzle pieces, fitting together a certain way. This means some molecules can have astonishing complexity, including the ability to replicate. It’s not like taking all the pieces of a clock, throwing them in a box, shaking it, and getting a working timepiece. The pieces themselves built up over time, attaining more complexity.
And I might turn the question around. Who created God? If you say He has always been, then why not say the same about the Universe (or more properly, the multiverse)?
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