I spotted several undocumented and unpaid workers in my front yard today. I stooped next to them, took photos of them and told them "thank you." You can clearly see a "yellow pollen basket" on the bee in the top photo.
According to the Associated Press, numerous alternative medical cures have now been tested by the U.S. government, at great cost, and almost none of them show any promise at all in controlled studies sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.
Over at Scientific American Mind Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues have published a terrific article documenting the statistical illiteracy that sometimes runs rampant in health care fields. The article, "Knowing Your Chances," appears in the April/May/June 2009 edition. The authors point out numerous medical care fallacies caused by statistical illiteracy , including Rudy Giuliani's 2007claim that because 82% of Americans survived prostate cancer, compared to only 44% in England, that he was lucky to be living in the United States and not in England. This sort of claim is based on Giuliani's failure to understand statistics. Yes, in the United States, men will be more quickly diagnosed as having prostate cancer (because many more of them are given PSA tests), and then many more of them will be treated. Despite the stark differences in survival rates (the percentage of patients who survive the cancer for a least five years, "mortality rates in the two countries are close to the same: about 26 prostate cancer deaths per 100,000 American men versus 27 per 100,000 in Britain. That fact suggests the PSA test
has needlessly flagged prostate cancer in many American men, resulting in a lot of unnecessary surgery and radiation treatment, which often leads to impotence or incontinence. Because of overdiagnosis and lead-time bias, changes in five-year survival rates have no reliable relation to changes in mortality when patterns of diagnoses differ. And yet many official agencies continue to talk about five-year survival rates.
Gigerenzer and his colleagues give a highly disturbing as example regarding mammogram results. Assume that a woman just received a positive test result (suggesting breast cancer) and asks her doctor "What are the chances that I have breast cancer?" In a dramatic study researchers asked 160 gynecologists taking a continuing education course to give their best estimate based upon the following facts:A.) the probability that a woman has breast cancer (prevalence) is 1% B.) if a woman has breast cancer the probability that she tests positive (sensitivity) is 90% C) if a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nonetheless tests positive (false-positive rate) is 9% The best answer can be quickly derived from the above three statements. Only about one out of 10 women who test positive actually has breast cancer. The other 9/10 have been falsely diagnosed. Only 21% of physicians picked the right answer. 60% of the gynecologists believed that there was either an 81% or 90% chance that a woman with a positive test result actually had cancer, suggesting that they routinely cause horrific and needless fear in their patients. What I found amazing is that you can quickly and easily determine that 10% is a correct answer based upon the above three statements--simply assume that there are 100 patients, that one of them (1%) actually has breast cancer and that nine of them (9%) test false positive. This is grade school mathematics: only about 10% of the women testing positive actually have breast cancer. As the article describes, false diagnosis and bad interpretations often combine (e.g., in the case of HIV tests) to result in suicides, needless treatment and immense disruption in the lives of the patients. The authors also discuss the (tiny) increased risk of blood clots caused by taking third-generation oral contraceptives. Because the news media and consumers so often exhibit innumeracy, this news about the risk was communicated in a way that caused great anxiety. People learned that the third-generation pill increased the risk of blood clots by "100%." The media should have pack is aged the risk in a more meaningful way: whereas one out of 7000 women who took the second-generation pill had a blood clot, this increased to two in 7000 women who took the new bill. The "absolute risk increase" should have been more clearly communicated. Check out the full article for additional reasons to be concerned about statistical illiteracy.
Want to watch/read an entertaining and inspiring three-part discussion covering the frontier of astronomy? All you need to do is follow this link to the article and videos at Discover Magazine. The participants include Saul Perlmutter, Debra Fischer, Mike Brown and Andrea Ghez, in a panel moderated by Discover's Phil Plait. It's lively, accessible and mind-blowing. Here are a few of my favorite quotes: [Debra Fischer]
We started out with a solar system where many planetesimals were forming, and that evolved into a system where all the stable niches are filled. To me that’s one of the most exciting discoveries in this field.
[Mike Brown][I]t’s the small objects that really matter. The small ones are little particles that sit in the outer solar system, and they’re gravitationally swept around by planets. The analogy I like is that these objects in the outer solar system are the blood splattered on the wall after some horrendous murder. I love this analogy—it’s disturbing, but I love it. As Debra just suggested, there might have been additional planets that used to be here in our solar system [but were ejected due to gravitational instability]. The bodies have all been removed.
[Andrea Ghez]The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just “Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?” But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions. What happened with my research is that the stars we studied to prove that there was a black hole turned out to be very young. Young stars have absolutely no right to be next to a black hole because a black hole should shear them apart. We have no idea how these stars formed. So that’s one of the major questions we’re trying to address today: “How do baby stars form next to this completely inhospitable object?”
Liz Coleman, the President of Bennington College, has some terrific ideas about reforming liberal arts education. She presented them at TED in February 2009. Many people will never appreciate Coleman's ideas, however, because she presented them in a long paper filled with redundant and sesquipedalian (!*) terms. To top it off, she chose to read her speech in monotone rather than speaking from her heart. Coleman's decision to read her speech rather than presenting it with spontaneous enthusiasm undercuts the very message of her paper. She violated a basic rule of speech-making: Don't bore your audience with good content deficiently presented. Why can't the highly educated C0leman see this conspicuous problem with her own delivery? Why can't she understand that many people (even the smart sorts of people who attend TED lectures, have lots of trouble paying attention to liberal arts college presidents who read pedantic speeches? For starters, she needs to keep in mind that the Internet audience is not a captive audience motivated by the pursuit of grades. Yes, ordinary Americans need to become more disciplined at being attentive audiences. They need to learn to persevere when difficult ideas are presented, even when those ideas aren't sugar-coated. On the other hand, academics (Coleman is one example of many) really need to get out of their ivory towers and learn to talk to real people without sounding condescending. One suggestion: Coleman should study Barack Obama, who often knows his material well enough to talk off-the-cuff. He has also learned to present pre-written presentations in a fresh, spontaneous-sounding way. I'm not suggesting that everyone can deliver ideas like Obama, but all us can take the time study the various techniques he often uses. Before getting to work studying her new technique, Coleman should carefully watch her TED presentation and ask herself whether her delivery would even keep her own interest. She should ask what so many academics should ask: was her speech designed primarily to move her audience or was it (perhaps subconsciously) designed to show off her own vocabulary and intellectual superiority, amply laced with uppity intonation? If there is even an unintentional hint of these, she's lost her audience. --
*sesquipedalian 1. given to using long words. 2. (of a word) containing many syllables.