More Placebo effect

The Placebo effect is fairly interesting to me. I've probably blogged about it some before - but as most know it's a name given to the effect produced simply by giving people a "fake" treatment. It could be sugar pills. It could be a suggestion - like if you're told boys are expected to do better in math - they might. It could be the idea that you heard there's something in the water - and more people get sick - or even ideas of mass hysteria in cases. We seem to have a propensity to be able to "worry ourselves sick" as much as we can "expect ourselves to health." If given a placebo (fake treatment) - if the patient is told both of benefits and negative side effects - the patient will likely experience _both_ increased benefits and negative side effects of the fake treatment. Anyhow, the idea that our mental expectations influence outcomes and reality is quite interesting. And there's some data that the placebo effect is increasing over time. To the point that apparently it's becoming a problem for pharmaceutical companies when trying to show drug efficacy. Well, here's an interesting article discussion about a methodology pharmaceutical companies may start using to try to minimize the placebo effect. It sounds fishy to me, but is premised on the idea that some people may be more prone to placebos than others, and that perhaps placebo responders can be weeded out of clinical trials.

Massively Incomplete Markets

This blog post is thought provoking in an economics-sort-of-way. Why we do what we do when it's not our job. "We live in a world of Massively Incomplete Markets."

Sounds like me - wide awake at night

I've always tended to be what is called a night owl - functioning best at night rather than in the mornings. When I should be going to bed I find myself most alert and engaged. Even when dog tired during the day I'd often find myself that same night forcing myself to go to bed just because I had to get up soon. Sometimes I'd find myself staying up to 2-3 even 4 in the morning even though I knew I had to get up in 3 or 4 hours. It wasn't insomnia - I could sleep easily - just not when I wanted to. But at night I was simply wide awake, not sleepy, and wanting to do things. If I tried to go to bed earlier I'd often just roll around until later in the morning.

Left to my own devices without a set schedule I find I'm very capable of getting completely off kilter with the normal day/night schedule. From a young age I often felt like my clock was set to 25 or 26 hour days - it's always been easy to stay up late - and generally a struggle to get going in the morning. I kind of felt like something was wrong with me because of Ben Franklin's quote about "early to bed, early to rise..."

Anyhow, I noticed this effect drastically the other day when I was draggy much of the day after about 3-4 hours of sleep. I found myself wanting to take a nap even about 12 hours after I woke up. But then I hit a certain point and it's like everything in me lights up at full go and I'm easily good for another 6-8 hours - very clear headed and motivated - and I have to force myself to go to bed just because I know I need to remembering how draggy I was during the day.

So I did a web search to investigate what may be going on. This interesting article popped up: Tired in the Morning and Awake at Night?

It says there's a thing called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome that is characteristic of this - and it's essentially due to biological clocks being out of whack. The fancy term is Circadian rhythm sleep disorder. Now I don't think what I have is very severe, because I can still force myself to wake up whenever I need to - but again - left to my own devices I do think my body may run on abnormally long days - and I've always had groggy mornings for as long as I can remember. Apparently there's a thing called light therapy that I could try if I wanted to test things - it'd involve sitting in front of very bright lights right after waking up each day to shock my clock back into time. (I think this idea has been shown to work for overcoming jet lag also). Maybe put a flood light staring me in the face while I ride my exercise bike?

Pump and Dump

More on Wall Street gaming the system. Rotten to the core. This story suggests that investment bank practice might involve underpricing IPOs initially - and then given allocation to the IPO to preferred specific firms, who immediately flip the stock for profits when price moves upward to match market demand. Instead of the IPO company getting the cash, it's skimmed instead by these preferred clients. In return investment banks require the preferred clients to find some way to return the favor, completing the virtuous cycle. I guess the bottom line here - is firms going to Wall Street to help them raise cash for an IPO shouldn't expect the investment bank to be in their corner, even when they're paying fees to the investment bank to do the job.

Bees like caffeine too

Just like people like caffeine in our drinks, bees seem to like caffeine in their nectar too and go back to flowers whose nectar has more caffeine. I didn't know this, but caffeine occurs naturally in plants as a poison to predators that eat them, but caffeine in smaller doses that is present in nectar seems to attract pollinators. So my question is: Are we built so that caffeine is good for us, or are we just addicted - or is a little bit of both?

Rand Paul filibuster

I normally try to stay away from political-type posts, but I was riding my exercise bike today I came across Rand Paul's filibuster over the CIA director nomination on C-Span. While I'm normally not a fan of actions like this that add to gridlock - I appreciate what Paul was doing, and hope the focus he puts on privacy and rights gains some traction. His particular focus was on the usage of drones, but the bigger argument he stressed was about privacy, rights to privacy, and the scope of personal freedom and governmental security concerns.

I'd thought about this for a while - especially as it regards to terrorism and post 9-11 realities. I was particularly concerned about things like wire-taping, holding suspects indefinitely without charges, enhanced interrogation techniques / torture, and just the general framework of how you adapt to real and dangerous asymmetrical threats while still maintaining a free and open society.

I believe it was Newt Gingrich who I saw speaking about this quite a while back - and he proposed a dual law enforcement system with a "wall" between it and the normal law enforcement system. I could be misattributing to Gingrich, but I liked the model proposed where certain asymmetric threats like terrorism are prosecuted under a different set of laws - outside of the normal judicial system. Additionally, if increased surveilence is needed - it should be very clearly and restrictively defined as to how any data collected can be used so that this type of surveilance does not turn into "fishing" expeditions for other agendas. For example: with drones it would probably be easy for law enforcement to track any of us 24 hours a day for our entire lives, and use NSA data to sneak into all of our phone conversations, and probably eventually at some point have so many microphones set up that even just basic conversations we have everyday are captured somewhere. Facial recognition technology is being employed in places already to identify people, and as technology gets better anonymity in public is going to be greatly reduced.

When I've talked to friends about this, worrying about computerized monitoring of phone calls (is it so crazy to be concerned given the ability of computers to mass translate speech now?), they say "well, if you're not doing anything wrong what are you worried about?". The thing is that the people in power running those systems don't always use them the way they're supposed to. For example, Martin Luther King had has reportedly had a 17,000 page FBI file and had running wiretaps on him from 1958 until his death. Any chance info uncovered was used improperly to intimidate and put leverage on him? Or, Richard Nixon and staff utilized wiretaps to find information on political enemies and this ultimately led to his resignation. So the question to me isn't whether we should be concerned about privacy - I think it's pretty clear we should assume that those in power have a tough time respecting privacy when it's inconvenient to do so. As a result it makes sense to me to say that if this power to invade privacy is going to exist, very clear rules about how this power is used need to be designed.

If this requires a constitutional amendment, the so be it (it'd probably be a good national debate to have) but we've seen cases such as the Rico statute where the law is modified to see a pattern of behavior as constitution a criminal enterprise - and this in particular was used to target mafia crime families. It addressed how do you prosecute an enterprise that exists, but those running the enterprise only give orders - but never carry out the crime themselves? This sounds alot like the the asymmetrical aspects of terrorism where you have certain leaders who incite or command dangerous activity, but don't carry out the activity themselves. To me it would seem cleaner if we would have a constitutional amendment clarifying how we deal with these types of situations where it seems some basic rights like Rand Paul mentions are potentially being infringed - especially the right to privacy. I don't think there's any way to stop what technology is going to be able to do in the future, but we can carve out how that technology can and cannot be used and how it relates to civil rights.

edit: Gail Collins had a good op-ed in the NYTimes about this filibuster also.

Superbugs and Antibiotic resistance

Scientific American has been running a series of articles on antibiotic resistance recently. Here's a good Here's a good blog post building on that conversation.. quote: "Until there are restrictions on antibiotic use—saving them as a national security treasure—and requirements to use them judiciously, we will never control antibiotic resistance."

Harmonic Series Guitar

I was reading some stuff about the derivation of musical scales - the math behind why things sound the way they do - and came upon the harmonic series.

The harmonic series mathematically is the series (a sum) like this:   1+1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4+1/5 +.... +1/n up to infinity.  In nature there are natural resonances in vibrating objects (like a guitar string, or organ pipe) that are these ratios of the string or pipe's length, so there's thinking these resonances may be related to why musical scales sound good to us.

From the "A Mind For Madness" Blog, this blogger (that ties the harmonic series to musical overtones and discusses the idea that perhaps the musical scales used have their "musical-ness" due to their relationship to this natural resonant properties that's expressed in the harmonic series. I first read about this idea on his blog, so I'll give credit there, although it's entirely possible this idea may be out there elsewhere.

 Vocalist showing the harmonic overtone capabilities in his voice - kindof freaky right?

Now obviously, from the above video you can tell that the resonances don't tie directly the current dominant equal tempered musical scale that we have, but there are many resonances that happen right on the musical scale where we have musical notes.  The 7 note in this video (click link) really stands out as being foreign to our current musical scale, but most of other note positions are familiar.

Hear the harmonic scale in action. Here's guitarist Dante Rosati who's composed a piece of music using the harmonic scale.  It's definitely different, but something foreign it's still quite cohesive and even a bit hypnotic if you ask me.  Pretty cool stuff.

Smart Machines

Check this out.  A mini-helicopter that can balance a pole - and toss it to another copter which catches it - at least it worked once.  Pretty amazing.

1913 meteor event over North America and Atlantic

The recent meteor event in Russia has stirred up interest in other meteor events in the newswires, and I came across this account from a 1913 event over northern North America, with most of the sightings from around the Great Lakes area exteding to the coast and into several reports by ships in the the Atlantic.

This event was odd in that the meteors apparently were traveling nearly tangent to the earth's atmosphere, sortof skimming along at very high altitude and not crashing down like the more recent Russian event.  This cluster of meteors apparently skimmed across the sky in a long trail lasting several minutes.

The linked article has a picture painted by artist/amateur astronomer Gustav Hans from his vantage point in Toronto as it passed over the night sky.

Dream Imagery

I occasionally take time to think about my dreams when I wake up, and recently I've noticed a change in character from the often disorganized/chaotic/confused mess that most dreams are.  There's occasionally a nice story arc I'm noticing in some.

As I thought about the most recent night's dream this morning I almost passed over/discarded some details until I thought about it some more.  The more I thought about it I just smiled as I was impressed with what was going on in my head.

Now, discarding a really bad haircut that I was conned into getting - the main image theme that kept coming back to me was that of being in a large sports arena.  For some reason I'd taken a long trip to get to this arena and watch the event.  But about half of the seats were empty, and the fans weren't all that excited about the game.  Just kindof sitting there passively watching.  All over the arena on the floor in front of the empty seats were blank pieces of paper - kind of like they were put there to advertise "this seat is available" when you go to pick out available season ticket seating in some places.  Anyhow, I was sitting there and wasn't interested in the game going on at all.  I couldn't even see it - obstructions in my view - maybe people standing/ or construction underway (not sure) - but either way I didn't care.  So I got up and weaved my way through all the other people scattered about rows around me and made my way to the aisle to leave.  Instead of walking upwards to exit though, I walked down toward the court (I think it was a basketball court) because the exit I needed was on the other side of the arena. The game wasn't over yet, but when I got to the aisle I found the aisle crowded with lots of other folks leaving too.  As I tried to go down the steps I had to step to the side because it seemed like work was underway down in front of the court.  I almost missed the significance of this part - or didn't pay attention to it at first, but it was cheerleaders who were folding up the chairs and pulling up the steps as I was walking down.

As I wound my way around the court and then outside all of a sudden everything was deserted.  The parking lots were empty.  No vehicles anywhere.  Setting was a small town not unlike some I grew up in.  Everybody had already left and I was wondering how I was going to get back home because I didn't have a vehicle.  So I started walking down the small street worried how I was going to make my trip back home.  I got to an old junk lot on the side of the road - with gravel on the ground - and was wondering where my ride was.  And then I just started hearing an engine running.  I looked around - nobody was anywhere - but I kept hearing the running of this old clunky engine.  Gradually I found it.  It was coming from an old timey car - like a Model T I guess - and it was stashed in with other junk.  It was a tiny car - like the size of a bumper car.

When I saw the little car with it's engine still running I remembered it from a portion of a dream I'd had very early in the night.  I remembered encountering this old little car running in the junk pile prior to going to the arena.  The little car was in terrible shape, wheels all bent, rusted, in a mud puddle, debris inside - but I remember the engine on it was running even then, and thinking or saying "Well, if all else fails I guess I can drive home in this."   Well, this image had returned to me at the end of the dream right before I woke up.  I started pulling out junk from around the little car to free it, dumping out accumulated water from the junk, worried about mosquitos, pulling debris off of it.  And underneath the debris were two big red gas cans.  And they sloshed when I moved them - they had gas in them.  So I put them in the trunk of the little junky car.  At this point I woke up with the feeling that I knew that little car could get me back home.

The story arc and ending of this dream was odd in that it resolved interestingly and positively.  I had a similar dream a few weeks ago that similar - with a positive resolution that was surprisingly logical.  Usually dreams for me would degrade into getting lost, nonsensical disconnected events, that type of thing - so it surprises me when they make a good deal of sense and conclude nicely.

My Interpretation:
So as I thought about this, at first I just recounted the events in my mind without really getting the gist of what was going on.  But gradually the big picture began to take shape that made me smile at the analogy that I think my mind was building.

You see I quit my job last year - and I think the dream imagery ties into thinking about quitting work.  To me, the arena and the game represented my company.  It's a place I wanted to go to - something I wanted to be a part of.  And the fans represented the workers.  It makes sense to me that we couldn't really see the game, because the work we do is often far disconnected from what happens in the overall game.  And it makes sense in that context that the fans just weren't that into it.  In my experience a lot of employees work hard and do their best, but really don't know whether what they're doing makes a difference to whether their team wins or loses - kindof like a fan's cheering.  Obviously, me losing interest in the game and walking to the exit represents my decision to leave the company....

But here's the interesting thing that almost missed - remember that the cheerleaders were putting away the chairs and dismantling the steps while the game was still going on.  I almost missed this part as part of the ambiance of the dream - but as I thought about it I realized this relates directly to an undercurrent I felt about our company at the end - that the cheerleaders were encouraging us in our work to achieve outwardly stated corporate goals - but in reality I did feel that some of it was exactly that: cheerleading.  I felt like the strategy we were pursuing wasn't working and despite our best efforts we weren't making headway.  And it would not be a stretch to say that I felt like they knew it wasn't going to work as designed, but that they had to continue to try to execute the plan given to them from higher up anyway.   Again, this is all my perception, but the image of the cheerleaders packing up the chairs and the steps while the game was still going on tapped into subtly into this impression I already had.   When even the cheerleaders a packing it up, it's time to go.

The deserted setting in after leaving the arena makes sense in this context of me now being out on my own now, and then wondering how I get home makes sense in this context.  Another thing that surprised me was this old little junky car on the side of the road.  Its' little engine was still "putting" along like it was before all the rest of the dream happened.  And despite the crooked wheel, small size, and rusty exterior - I thought this little car and a couple cans of gas could get me where I needed to go.

I had to smile at this.  And at the same time be pretty amazed at what sometimes goes on inside my head at night.

Things that go boom

NYT article had an article this morning pointing out renewed interest in dangers posed by meteors and the need to do some better sky surveys following the recent undetected meteor that exploded over Russia a couple days ago.

It probably also reminded us all of the Tanguska event in 1908 that occurred over a remote area of Siberia.  Apparently the Tanguska meteor (or maybe comet?) was only about an estimated 100 meters across (a little more than a full football field), and according to wikipedia "The Tunguska explosion knocked down an estimated 80 million trees over an area covering 2,150 square kilometres (830 sq mi) (i.e. circular area of 52km in diameter)."
 
Apparently NASA was recently awarded with 2 decommissioned high powered Defense department  telescopes - supposedly with capabilities greater than Hubble.  But while the telescopes are space ready, they'd need to be upgraded for space and then would need to be launched.  Could they perhaps /should they be put to use doing dangerous meteor hunting?

Bubbles and talent diversion

I was reading a book called _Analyze This_ recently that was detailing many examples of how computer algorithms are increasingly used in the world.  It describes a lot of exciting things (like algorithms that write songs), and a lot of not so exciting things (like algorithms that create financial catastrophes).  The talent tends to go where the money is, and the book describes how the financial bubble siphoned off so much of the best talent - usually math, science, engineering students with advanced degrees - to Wall Street.  When Wall Street crashed that talent moved to Silicon Valley where much is being directed at Social Media and web interactions currently.

The chain of events led to this quote by Jeff Hammerbacher that summed up well his experience on both Wall Street and at Facebook as this:  "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads...  That sucks."

He's now founded a startup called Cloudera dedicated to organizing large sets of unstructured data that would have a wide range of applications.

Abandoned Images

I saw a link to this page on the Marginal Revolution website.  I tend to like images that show nature taking back from civilization, but these are exceptional photos of deserted places.

Reminds me of photos like this I took in in either Alabama or Florida.