Glucose and Aggression ?

The major discovery is that there is a journal called Aggressive Behavior.

Science Daily has reported on a recent work that "Sweetened blood cools hot tempers." The claim is that people who drink lemonade sweetened with sugar show less aggression towards strangers within a short time window after the drink. The experiment is exquisite :

In the study, 62 college students fasted for three hours to reduce glucose instability. They were told they were going to participate in a taste-test study, and then have their reaction times evaluated in a computerized test against an opponent.

Half of the participants were given lemonade sweetened with sugar, while the others were given lemonade with a sugar substitute.

After waiting eight minutes to allow the glucose to be absorbed in their bloodstream, the participants took part in the reaction test.

The reaction test has been used and verified in other studies as a way to measure aggression. Participants were told they and an unseen partner would press a button as fast as possible in 25 trials, and whoever was slower would receive a blast of white noise through their headphones.

At the beginning of each trial, participants set the level of noise their partner would receive if they were slower. The noise was rated on a scale of 1 to 10 -- from 60 decibels to 105 decibels (about the same volume as a smoke alarm).

In actuality, each participant won 12 of the 25 trials (randomly determined).

Aggression was measured by the noise intensity participants chose on the first trial -- before they were provoked by their partner.

Results showed that participants who drank the lemonade sweetened with sugar behaved less aggressively than those who drank lemonade with a sugar substitute. Those who drank the sugar-sweetened beverage chose a noise level averaging 4.8 out of 10, while those with the sugar substitute averaged 6.06.

I can not dispute that a low blood sugar contributes to irritiability (and by extension, aggression.) Just last night, I waited too long between lunch and dinner and was becoming irritated with my surroundings until I was able to eat. But, I have just had a glass of extra-sweetened lemonade and I am still annoyed by the presentation of the study results. The comparison of the means of two populations is meaningless without an error bar on the mean. The numbers of members of each population is only 31, so the error on the mean may be significant relative to the difference of 1.26. Error bars please ! I don't want to pay to see the PDF of this article, so I am not sure if the fault lies with the authors or Science Daily. Did the authors measure their blood sugar? The article's abstract states :

Self-control consumes a lot of glucose in the brain, suggesting that low glucose and poor glucose metabolism are linked to aggression and violence.

Knowing this, it is imperative to know how well each participant metabolizes glucose. Probably more important would be to know the number of men and women in each population. The abstract goes on :

Study 1 found that participants who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than did participants who consumed a placebo beverage. Study 2 found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by low glucose levels and poor glucose metabolism) and aggressiveness through low self-control. Study 3 found that states with high diabetes rates also had high violent crime rates. Study 4 found that countries with high rates of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency (a metabolic disorder related to low glucose levels) also had higher killings rates, both war related and non-war related. All four studies suggest that a spoonful of sugar helps aggressive and violent behaviors go down.

Regarding Study 3 : I wonder what the relative levels of poverty are in these states.

Regress = Progress

In the generally annoying vein of journalists writing about science comes this. All of the items Mr. Horgan, apparent journalism school graduate, cites as regress are signs of progress. I think this points to a huge gulf between science and journalism. In journalism, realizing your proposed narrative is wrong means that you're back to where you started; in science, realizing your proposed narrative is wrong means you've made a giant leap forward in understanding.

Just think: how often do we see articles about, say, city government where the author has as its main point that  there is no narrative?

The key point is that frequently in science knowing more means we realize we know less.

I actually see one of Horgan's observations:

What I found fascinating was the issue's overall tone of caution rather than the traditional boosterish enthusiasm.

as progress in itself. "Boosterish enthusiasm" is, in my view, bad for scientific progress.

On to the examples ...

The end of infectious disease

We used to think this was a) possible, and b) if possible, economically feasible. We've come to realize that evolution can be more powerful than our technology.

Space colonization

This will probably still happen soon on the scale of the lifetime of the solar system with our currently main sequence star, so don't fret, Trekkies. But if you can tell me what the point of the ISS is beyond a giant subsidy to Boeing to maintain some of our space infrastructure, I will give you a thousand dollars. I have never seen a peer-reviewed paper come out of the ISS; nearly all of the science is done by unmanned probes. 

But the real problem I have is that colonization is not science. It being nearly Thanksgiving, a seasonal example: the Mayflower was not a scientific voyage. 

Supersonic transport

The science behind supersonic flight happened before 1947. The fact that it is not economical to send hundreds of people at a time to business meetings and/or tropical islands faster than the speed of sound, but is economical to send one person and thousands of pounds of bombs is not a scientific fact.

Commercial fusion power

This turned out to be much harder than we thought; I myself was discouraged by my advisors from pursuing this field back in the 1990s. However missing a 20 year guess at commercial viability 30 years ago does not mean the field is going backward. It is still moving very, very slowly forward. Additionally, arguments against fusion's commercial viability are themselves due to progress in the field. We understand the problem better, and therefore understand that it is not likely to be economical anytime soon.

The origin of life

Keep up with the research buddy. Most of the problems with Urey-Miller type experiments are due to the fact that we have no idea what the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere was at the time. This is another case where we know more now and realize we know less.

Truth in data

Where did this image come from? I first noted it on Science Daily. Ignore for the moment the bombast accompanied by most any Science Daily post. Well, wait don't ignore that :

• Science Daily : "Brilliant X-ray Explosion."
  

• MAXI : "faint X-ray transient."

Hmmm. Which is it then?
Perhaps the Science Daily author was completely blown away by the accompanying image. After all, in 5 days, this object in the center of the field-of-view became significantly brighter. A close look at the two images shows that all objects in this field-of-view are brighter on Oct. 17. Why were these data sets not normalized to each other? From just these images, I think it is obvious that the relative brightness of the central object is greater on Oct. 17th. I can only guess that the two different normalizations were included to produce a more dramatic image. Unfortunately, this drama comes at the price of honesty.
There is much effort to bring science results to non-scientists. This effort is a cross between public outreach (i.e. "please keep letting the NSF, NIH spend your tax dollars") and public education (i.e. "this here galaxy is 12 billion years old. [12billion much greater than 5000]".) Some of these efforts are official, and others are part of a greater media.
The short time-scales of today's mass media are unsuited to science reporting. Science Daily is "Updated several times a day with breaking news...". I doubt it. Science is slow and painstaking work. To give the public the impression that there is such a thing as "breaking news" in science is potentially damaging to research. To generate "breaking news", a researcher may be tempted or coerced to scale the false color in an x-ray image at the behest of an editor or PI. I wish Science Daily included a minimum of technical detail in their articles and captions. A lay reader may learn a little more than what someone said. And, the editors may have to think a little more critically about the content they are including.

On separating religion and science

I've long tried to put my finger on exactly why I dislike philosophy. One reason is a certain amount of rectally disseminated speech on the subjects of how science works or the meanings of particular theories (especially quantum mechanics). I was reading this piece by atheist/philosopher Tim Crane and realized philosophers tend to do this exact same thing in fields outside the natural sciences (here, political science and history).

I am wondering if this falls under a higher heuristic that motivates philosophers I will call the preeminence of human thought. Included under this heuristic are claims that humans engage in rational thought divorced from evolutionary pressures (biological or cultural) and a lack of knowledge of -- or desire to perform -- empirical studies.

Crane states:

Religions do make factual and historical claims, and if these claims are false, then the religions fail.

There is no evidence for this. In fact, from political science, there is evidence against it. People have this weird tendency to discount empirical data from their political opinions. I know this from a great deal of firsthand experience talking to my dad. We feel like we're thinking about our political opinions, but facts never seem to trump political party affiliation. And there is no reason why this behavior should not extend to religious beliefs.

Crane's actual intent behind that statement was to differentiate religious claims from scientific claims: the former do not fail (in the eyes of believers) under rational scrutiny because they contain mysteries. However, switch the argument from religious to political claims, and this sounds ridiculous. Political positions do not contain mysteries in the religious sense of the word, yet political positions unsupported by evidence also do not fail (again, in the eyes of believers) under rational scrutiny.

This is where we come to history. Crane narrowly focuses on the Christian concept of mystery, and how it is a fundamental aspect of religion that allows it to "avoid" the rigors of rationalism almost as a side effect. Actually, mysterium fidei arose as a counter to the reintroduction of logic and the decline of Christian mysticism (to which mystery originally referred, not in our modern sense of unexplainable) around the time of the Christian conquest of Arab Spain. Arab translations of ancient Greek texts on logic and science began to be reintroduced to "dark ages" Europe. Peter Abelard was one of the key figures that introduced logic to the Roman Catholic church in the 12th century -- coinciding with things like the explanation that the priest may have transformed wine into the blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist but it still tastes like wine (which only happened because that was around the time they started getting the masses involved in the Eucharist). The mystery of the Trinity actually originates in the split of the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches. The (almost) modern mass standardizes much of the mystery in the church in the late 16th century, right at the birth of modern science (the council of Trent was primarily concerned with Protestantism, but was generally concerned with questioning church dogma). The modern mysteries in Christianity follow from these and later scientific developments -- the seven days/6000 years didn't become a problem until geology got its start in the late 18th century.

Mysterium fidei is a protective response to rationalism by Christianity, not a fundamental aspect of religion. In fact, the concept of religion itself, as opposed to a collection of undifferentiated beliefs, may just be a modern Christian concept.

I personally tend to subscribe to that last view in some sense. There is just human thought, composed of heuristics and methods of de-conflicting those heuristics. The heuristics are things like the method of steepest descent, the Earth is 6000 years old, or What is Buddha? Three pounds of flax. De-conflicting methods range from ignoring particular data to giving up a heuristic to keeping both in unanalyzed conflict. These heuristics then signal particular group loyalties or abilities. Science and religion are not exactly separable concepts, but part of a continuum of belief systems. Science tends to put more emphasis on signalling curiosity, open-mindedness, and a particular form of group loyalty (e.g. citing papers) as well as its almost total dedication to de-conflicting all heuristics dealing with concepts that can be tested empirically. Scientists particularly feel like they are thinking when they do this. Fundamentalist Christians in the US signal group loyalty by "not believing in evolution". I don't mean that they are not believing it on purpose (implying a certain kind of rationalism), or they are somehow dumb (implying a certain kind of "irrationalism"). I mean that they feel like they are thinking as much as scientists do, but are signalling different abilities and group loyalties. Human thought is not preeminent, but subordinate to mating and resource strategies. Inasmuch as we are convincing do we succeed, so there is some tendency for an accurate representation of reality to eke out an existence.

And that includes this.

Hoisted from the archives: Enough with the mystery of the wave-particle duality.

Ok, so I was reading this, and wondering things to myself like -- is religion like the belly-button of our consciousness, i.e. a conduit from our ancient limbic system to our higher planning and social interaction noodly bits our brain, and the remainder of the pathway by which we bootstrapped to sentience -- but then came to this:

Just as physicists cannot fully understand the electron as either a particle or a wave, but only as both at once, says [Andrew] Newberg, so we need both science and a more subjective, spiritual understanding in order to grasp the full nature of reality.

Wave-particle duality? Yes we do have to describe electrons as both in particular experiments, but we can fully understand the electron (to 10 or so decimal places) as a single thing: an irreducible (Dirac spinor) representation of the Lorentz symmetry group. Sort of like how a cube is a (scalar) representation of the group of 90 degree rotations about the x, y, and z axes, and a sphere is a representation of the group of all rotations, an electron is a particular representation of the various 'rotations' of the Lorentz group (which gives us the weird stuff in Einstein's special relativity).

So what Newberg is saying is that there is some kind of unified quantum field theory of brain function out there waiting to be discovered. This is what dualities have meant in the past. The duality between electricity and magnetism gave us Maxwell's electromagnetism. It's not mysterious anymore ... 150 years later. The wave-particle duality lead to Quantum Electrodynamics only 20 or so years later. T-duality may be one of the links that eventually lead to the string theory description of everything.

You are welcome to continue to be weirded out by the quantum mechanics of 80 years ago if you'd like, but the uncertainty principle is nothing more mysterious than why you need measure something resonating for a longer time to more precisely determine its tone (or that something that resonates for a short time does not have a precise tone). Or if you wiggle a jumprope between two people, that you can figure out the wavelength if you make a standing wave, and figure out where the pulse is if you make a pulse, but not vice versa and never both.


There are things that are actually mysterious in quantum mechanics (like entanglement), but let's bring on the new weird dualities in Physics! The AdS/CFT correspondence! The holographic principle! We may all just be projections on a screen ... and I can't show you why with a jumprope.

I Am Not an Economist. But.

Greg Mankiw considers Casey Mulligan's summer employment effect to be a challenge for Keynesian economists to explain. Now, I am not an economist; however, I think this represents a lapse in numeracy, not economic theory

Let's discuss orders of magnitude. Mulligan describes a summer employment effect -- employment among the 16-19 year old cohort rises relative to the 20-24 year old cohort from May to June -- representing an increase in the supply of labor accompanying an increase in the demand for that labor that purportedly contradicts the Keynesian view that aggregate demand in a recession is controlling unemployment. Here is the graph:

How big is this bump? Going back to the data, we get 4.1 million 16-19 year olds employed vs 12 million 20-24 year olds in May of 2010, for a ratio of 0.34. For June 2010, these numbers at 4.9, 12.6 and 0.39 respectively. So about ~ 800,000 kids become newly employed. At $10/hour for 500 hours (for the summer, both of which are probable overestimates), that represents $4 billion dollars of economic activity.

The US economy is about $15 trillion dollars. That $4 billion dollars represents about 0.03% (no, really, 0.0003) of the US economy, and about 0.5% (no, really, 0.005) of the ARRA stimulus.

There is no theory in economics that predicts anything to 1%. Maybe they can get you the number of pennies you'd get for change of a dollar. Maybe.

This is a bit like a physicist saying that the Lamb shift represents a serious challenge to theoretical physics even before the development of quantum mechanics.

I think this another aspect of a problem with economics that Matthew Yglesias describes as "doing work that superficially resembles physics and therefore counts as science-like". I wish they would pay more attention to how physicists work, not just how our interminable papers look. Yes, there appears to be an effect, but it is at most a 1% effect. Supply and demand appears to work at the order of magnitude level. Now show me Real Business Cycle theory or new Keynesian economics or whatever getting stuff right to 10%, then we can talk about this.

And though I am not an economist, I have a feeling that this represents 16-19 year olds getting jobs at the mall, Denny's and the movie theater so that they can have money to go to the mall, Denny's and the movie theater. It seems like it could occur largely independent of aggregate demand in the economy.

arXiv blog (no amateurs)

While I don't have much to say about the paper itself, it is again time to appreciate people who comment on the arXiv blog. The post in question:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25420/

The comment in question:

Wrong domain for graph

If you wanted to prove that there's a 27 Million year peak, wouldn't it make sense to present the frequency domain data instead of the time domain data?  If there were a peak every 27 Million years, then it would be clear from a frequency domain graph.

And the evidence bsdimp did not read the paper itself?