What I'm Reading Now

Mostly I'm reading No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality which is both fabulous and annoying. The fabulous part is that Rich Harris* has a wonderful mind and she demonstrates the use of it so well. Her review of the literature on personality development is clever, and engaging, and her book is set up like the mysteries she apparently enjoys. There are frequent references to both specifics, like The Daughter of Time and to the general, such as the use of red herrings.


But, understandably, the fierce reaction to her previous book, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (which I also really enjoyed and thought was well reasoned) has made her defensive as hell. When she's describing the limits her health places on her activities, I really like the personal stuff, but it's hard to read so much about the attacks generated by her previous book.




Additionally, I'm reading The Shadow Thieves aloud to the Possum, and we're both loving it. And I'm reading all kinds of stuff to the PandaBat, including, last night, My Wobbly Tooth Must Not Ever Never Fall Out , in honor of her first tooth falling out. And I'm reading a manuscript aloud to them both that has lots of birds in it, by the old friend who wrote the wonderful book The Verb To Bird, which, by an uncanny coincidence also has a lot of birds in it. Finally I'm carrying Clarice Bean Spells Trouble, back and forth to work each day, although I am mostly not reading it but would like to, because the Possum really enjoyed it, and the PandaBat is very fond of the Clarice Bean pictures books, and we're all just generally crazy about Lauren Child.




* It seems to me that when a woman uses her maiden name and her husband's last name both, that one should not refer to her exclusively by his name, but one should use both, even if they aren't joined with a hyphen. The same way one would use both last names of an author in the Spanish tradition. So, "Garcia Marquez", and "Rich Harris", and "Baratz-Logsted". But I'm open to discussion, and even to finding out that I've leapt** to hasty assumptions and Rich is not her maiden name, but her middle name.

** Getting meta on my meta, I just love irregular verbs, and I hate to lose them. So I persist with my "leapt" and "slept" and what have you. Even to the point of rewriting kids books as I read them aloud. Yes, I am the sort of person who also modifies the text to make it scan better or what have you. No doubt my loathing of Goodnight Moon is in part based on the faulty rhythm of the thing.

Update 6/25/08: edited to add the wordle version, via Gaiman and Scalzi

Solar System Visualizer

Cool and sciency!

Thanks, Live Granades

A Short Course in Epidemiology

Once again, Sandy Szwarc undertakes to explain the science of epidemiology, and why so much of what is reported as news really turns out to be noise. Junkfood Science: Math phobia — Is that evidence for real?:

"Most worries among the public would already be assuaged if more people simply understood that relative risks less than 3 (200%) have long been recognized as untenable. Just imagine how many popular fears and health agendas would disintegrate in an instant if the public realized that relative risks less than 10 — that’s 10-fold or 900% as high — with p-values >0.01 are often not real, tenable and are generally explained by confounding factors."

Happy Birthday, Junkfood Science!

Beware the Evil Grapefruit

The article said something like this: "Avoid Deadly Grapefruit". No, that was just how it came across to some readers. Somehow between the actual article in British Journal of Cancer and the press release, and then the newspaper article, though, that's what it became. Reading the actual paper in the journal is difficult for most people not just because Sturgeon's Law is true of research papers, but also because access to medical journals is limited for people who don't work near a medical research library. I read the paper, and it's pretty much Bullsh*t, although not as bad as the newspaper version made it sound.

Epidemiological studies can be helpful at revealing further avenues of inquiry, but they are not proof of anything. The other epidemiological study that invariably comes out saying the opposite will also get big headlines, but the clinical study that disproves both of them will be ignored.

"In epidemiologic research, relative risks [RR] of less than 2 are considered small and usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias or effects of confounding factors not evident"

National Cancer Institute, "Abortion and Possible Risk for Breast Cancer: Analysis and Inconsistencies," October 26, 1994

In this study, the only patients with a RR greater than 2 were the ones currently taking estrogen/progestin therapy. The highest RR for the greatest consumption of grapefruit? 1.30. Any lower and the headline would have been saying that "Grapefruit Saves Lives".

So, the really interesting stuff from this particular study (in my opinion) didn't make news:

This finding of a reduced effect of grapefruit in women with a higher BMI is similar to the lower effect of ET on breast cancer risk in women with a higher BMI

That is, these meaningless increases in risk are even less meaningful for fatter women. That's a relief, isn't it?

Consistent with other studies on postmenopausal oestrogen use, we found an increase in breast cancer risk, particularly among current EPT users.

And post-menopausal hormone use really is risky, just like everyone else was saying.

Spreading a Little Happiness

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Happiness wins science book prize:

"A scientific exploration of the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award. "

Two years ago in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004, I read a piece by Jon Gertner on Affective Forecasting. It's not often that I can pinpoint a paradigm shift in my own thinking, but since reading that article, reading more on the topic, and blogging on it, I can be fairly exact. I'm delighted that Gilbert won the prize, and I'm very eager to read the book.

If There is a "New Atheism"...

does that mean that there can be Fundamentalist Atheists, insisting on returning to the old ways of disbelief?

I love Pro-Science because I agree on every major issue, natch, blut also because he really takes the time to elucidate the issues. Kristjan does awesome fisking on ID in particular, science in general, and he brings a clear-eyed disinterest to American politics.

Plus he gave me the link to the coyote in the Loop.

Affective Forecasting

My interest in Affective Forecasting began less than two weeks ago, when reading The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004 . The book only has two nonfiction pieces, and one of them was The Futile Pursuit of Happiness by Jon Gertner. This one little bit caught my eye:

We often yearn for a roomy, isolated home (a thing we easily adapt to), when, in fact, it will probably compromise our happiness by distancing us from neighbors. (Social interaction and friendships have been shown to give lasting pleasure.) The big isolated home is what Loewenstein, 48, himself bought. ''I fell into a trap I never should have fallen into,'' he told me.

I'm a sucker for anything about urban planning or architecture.

Now I'm trying to find the following sources that should give me some more info on social relationships as a critical determinant of happiness: Argyle, 1999; Biswah-Diener & Diener, 2001; Diener, Gohm, Suh, & Oishi, 2000; Diener, Suh, Lucas, Smith, 1999; Larson, 1990; Myers, 1999; Sheldon, Elliot, Kim, & Kasser, 2001.

Some sources on the idea that people know social aspects are more important than material comforts: Putnam, 200; Schor, 1991.

You got to love Harvard. This paper ends with a section called Policy Implications. Here, the author points to slum clearance projects of the past, and the decision to replace crumbling tenements with modern high-rises. There are innumerable anecdotes about folks who are poor but happy, living in tiny and/or decaying houses, but all the fun they have with their neighbors. To some extent we all know that crappy houses are okay in a close-knit neighborhood, but when it's time to choose someplace to live this knowledge is ignored. Some of it is beyond us: there are only so many houses for sale when we're looking, and many of those will be new suburban (or even exurban) models with big, private yards, and big private houses, and no social interaction at all. And it may not be possible to buy somewhere we'd like to, due to mortgage lenders' redlining neighborhoods. Some of the problem is widespread, such as the common belief that you need a yard to raise kids. We tend to overlook the corollary that a giant yard isn't as much fun if you have to ply in it all by yourself.