Posts Tagged health
Cyclists wearing more visible clothes just make it easier for motorists to target them
Tuesday’s Health & Wellness section of Wall Street Journal passed along distressing news for folks like me who like to take a spin on their bicycle. New research by scholars at University of Bath and Brunel University* suggests that wearing noticeable clothes not only did nothing for getting motorists to back off, but when cyclists wore a “POLITE notice, Pass Slowly” vest, they were more likely to be harassed.
Perhaps wearing camouflage like this fellow shown here this fellow shown here might be the way to go.
*Detailed here by IrishCycle.com
Feeling Fall finally–thoughts turn to Florida…but, given their gators, do we dare go?
Talk about the office this week blew with the strong northern winds to consideration of making a move to the South. When I suggested Florida, a colleague expressed concerns about alligators, such as this one that put an end to a jogger. This led me to doing some research on the relative risks of Nature down there in God’s Waiting Room.
Check out these stats that surprised me with evidence that ‘gators are worse than sharks.
Elsewhere I learned that there’s been 52 lighting deaths in Florida over the last 10 years.
Here’s a recap of these grisly stats for Florida:
- Gators—3 deaths per decade
- Sharks—1.4 killed every 10 years
- Lightning—52 fried per decade
It turns out that the latter are mainly men out fishing (>80 % of the deaths)—probably trying to catch sharks or gators.
Maybe I will just stay here in Minnesota and take my chances on either freezing to death or being eaten by wolves.
Brain disturbers make folks smarter or dumber (believe it or not)
Based on the underpowered experimental designs by neuroscientists reported in my previous blog, I am skeptical of these new findings, but they are very intriguing, nonetheless:
- Shocks to the Brain Improve Mathematical Abilities. (You ‘mathaletes’ should do some calculating before wiring up because the sample size for these findings is miniscule!)
- Brain, Interrupted-How distractions make us dumber. (The news here is mixed:Multitasking may be a myth but perhaps some people, with practice, can handle it.)
I hope this blog did not derail your train of thought. If so, go lick a battery to reverse the brain drain.
Only 14 percent of biomedical results are wrong, after all–Is this comforting?
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on February 2, 2013
The Scientist reports here that new mathematical studies refute previous findings that most current published medical research findings are false due to small study sizes and bias. I suppose–considering the original assertion of “most” announced discoveries being wrong–we can literally live with a false positive rate of ‘only’ 14% for findings that relate ultimately to our well being. But the best advice is:
It is still important to report estimates and confidence intervals in addition to or instead of p-values when possible so that both statistical and scientific significance can be judged by readers.
– Leah R. Jager, Jeffrey T. Leek (“Empirical estimates suggest most published medical research is true”)
Hedonic adaptation-getting back to your happy place
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, Wellness on January 4, 2013
While motoring down to a beach in southwest Florida 🙂 yesterday, I listened to this NPR interview of Sonja Lyubomirsky on her book “The Myths of Happiness”. Evidently people have a natural ‘set point’—like a thermostat for mood—that helps them withstand terrible events and be happy again. It’s called hedonic adaption.* Sadly most folks suffer the flip side of this mood regulator: They finally get what they want, such as a coveted Christmas gift, but it does not make them any happier.
There is a nifty way around this—rather than gratifying your greed, do something for someone else. It needn’t be much: Every little bit adds up to leading a happier life.
Such behavior is twice blest—good for the giver as well as the beneficiary.
“The pleasures associated with our own acts of consumption tend to be short-lived. The pleasures derived from doing something for others linger.”
– Excerpted from this 1/14/12 post on “Consumption Makes Us Sad? Science Says We Can Be Happy With Less” by Barry Schwartz of The Daily Beast.
*I dictated “hedonic adaptation blog” into my (supposedly) smart phone and it transcribed “add on a caterpillar engine block”—presumably thinking I meant to increase the horsepower in my road grader. Ha ha!
A debatable question: Should healthy people take cholesterol drugs?
Posted by mark in Uncategorized, Wellness on January 23, 2012
At my annual physical before my heart attack in December of 2004 I was advised that, although the cholesterol came in a bit high, it would not be necessary to go on medicine to reduce this. Would I have been spared if I had? This sort of speculation really does nothing for me but it underscores a big question that is debated in today’s Wall Street Journal: Should Healthy People Take Cholesterol Drugs to Prevent Heart Disease.
You be the judge whether the answer is yes or no—it is far too problematic for me to say. However, here are two points I want to make on the WSJ debate:
“we need clinical trials that actually follow healthy people treated with statins for the long term to see if treatment really results in lower mortality.”
I remain very skeptical of “experiments” comprised in a metamorphic manner by happenstance, as opposed to being truly controlled from start to finish and done double-blind (if possible).
Pace yourself with willpower to accomplish 2012 resolutions
Today’s Science Friday radio show made it known that willpower is a very limited resource. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can build up your willpower by proper exercises, just like you do for toning up muscles. This is the premise of Florida State University psychology professor Roy F. Baumeister, whom Science Friday host Ira Flatow interviewed. Baumeister and co-author John Tierney reveal all in their book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, chosen as one of the Best Books of 2011 by Amazon’s editors.
Here are a few pointers I picked up from Science Friday that will prevent depletion of your willpower reservoir:
- Do not start in on all of your New Year’s resolutions all at once – pace yourself: Work on one resolution at a time.
- Pick off the easiest resolutions first, such as making your bed every morning or taking your dog for a walk daily.
- Exercise and build up your willpower with trivial things such as sitting up straighter and using your non-dominant hand to mouse around the computer.
For an inspiring demonstration of supreme willpower see this video of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EjJsPylEOY
Unfortunately, according to Professor Baumeister, testing your willpower on something as compelling as a sugary snack can be very perilous, because once you fail it goes downhill from there. That’s why my goal is to first eat all the Christmas cookies before giving up sweets.
Happy New Year — best wishes for achieving all your resolutions…
Formula for Happiness
Spiritual teacher Jaya Row, a microbiologist by training, provides a simple formula for happiness in this article on Timeless Truths which I saw in The Times of India while vacationing in Aurangabad last month. Here it is: Happiness Quotient (HQ) equals the number of desires fulfilled divided by the number of desires entertained. She advises that we focus more on the denominator than the numerator of this HQ ratio. I interpret this as trying to be happy with less, rather than being greedy for more.
While in Aurangabad I came by the tomb of the Mughal emperor Aurangazeb. His father, Shah Jahan, built the Taj Mahal – the most beautiful building in the world, in my opinion.* Aurangazeb was an ascetic who followed a particularly austere from of Sufism. At the ripe old age of 88 the emperor was buried according to his wishes in a simple tomb purchased with money he earned himself by stitching caps. Sometimes the apple does fall far from tree. One wonders who led the happier life – Aurangazeb or his father. Now I think that the Taj Mahal really symbolizes the desires that never can be fulfilled in anyone’s life, that is, a monument to unhappiness.
Ending on a happier note, I offer up this photo of monkeys scampering along the road to Chand Minar, the Tower of the Moon, built by the Mughal conquerors of what came to be known as Aurangabad.
*Another story: While working for General Mills in the mid-1980s as a purchaser of Indian agricultural products, my agent bribed the guard at this monumental set of tombs in Agra to enable a private tour for my wife and I under a full moon and candlelight. Priceless!
Trouble with math & stats? Blame it on dyscalculia.
Posted by mark in Basic stats & math, Uncategorized on October 16, 2011
According to this article in Journal of Child Neurology “dyscalculia is a specific learning disability affecting the normal acquisition of arithmetic skills, which may stem from a brain-based disorder. Are people born with this inability to do math in particular, but otherwise mentally capable – for example in reading and writing? Up until now it’s been difficult to measure. For example, my wife, who has taught preschool for several decades, observes that some of her children progress much more slowly than other. However, she sees no differential in math versus reading – these attributes seem to be completely correlated. The true picture may finally emerge now that Michèle M. M. Mazzocco et al published this paper on how Preschoolers’ Precision of the Approximate Number System Predicts Later School Mathematics Performance.
Certainly many great minds, particularly authors, abhor math and stats, even though they many not suffer from dyscalculia (only numerophobia). The renowned essayist Hillaire Belloc said*
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
I wonder how he liked balancing his checkbook.
Meanwhile, public figures such as television newscasters and politicians, who appear to be intelligent otherwise (debatable!) say the silliest things when it comes to math and stats. For example a U.S. governor, speaking on his state’s pension fund said that “when they were set up, life expectancy was only 58, so hardly anyone lived long enough to get any money.”** One finds this figure of 58, the life expectancy of men in 1930 when Social Security began, cited often by pundits discussing the problems of retirement funds. Of course this was the life expectancy at birth, in times when infant mortality remained a much higher levels than today. According to this fact sheet by the Social Security Administration (SSA), 6.7 million Americans were aged 65 or older in 1930. This number exhibits an alarming increase. The SSA also provides interesting statistics on Average Remaining Life Expectancy for Those Surviving to Age 65, which show surprisingly slow gains over the decades. I leave it to those of you who are not numerophobic (nor a sufferer of dyscalculia) to reconcile these seemingly contradictory statistical tables.
*From “On Statistics”, The Silence of the Sea, Glendalough Press, 2008 (originally published 1941).
**From “Real world Economics / Errors in economics coverage spread misunderstandings” by Edward Lotterman.
Simple and cheap safety precautions against the small risk of drowning in an automobile
I always thought that if I was in a car that went into water, I’d be cool enough to roll down the windows, or wait until it submerges before opening the door (otherwise the pressure differential makes it impossible). Based on actual experimentation, the hosts of the television show Mythbusters felt the same way, that is, until viewers pointed out that many cars turn turtle as they sink. So in a show I watched last month they [Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage] tried this. It was a disaster! The Mythbuster driver [Adam] survived only by breathing from an emergency air source, and the safety diver had to cut his way out of a seat belt that wouldn’t release! See this recap to learn what went wrong. What they don’t show is how at first the car just floated, so it seemed like no big deal; but then when it sank, the automobile went down incredibly fast. En route to the bottom of the lake the car spun around so much that the occupants would’ve drowned for sure. Scary!
After this epiphany, I ordered several of these inexpensive (<$5) safety hammers (see one pictured) for cars owned by me and my offspring.
Check out this post by First Aid Monster for another video showing how fast you can go underwater when a car runs into a canal, river, pond, lake or ocean. They suggest buying a safety hammer and provide a link to one similar to what I bought.
When I advised family and co-workers to be prepared for being trapped in a car that goes underwater, it was met by a few with great skepticism.
One individual wondered how many people die this way, figuring it being so unlikely as to not be worth any worries. From internet research, the best I can figure is that about 10% of all drowning occur in submerged cars. Then using statistics from this graphic by the National Safety Council putting the odds of death by drowning at 1 in 1000, I figure that dying this way in a car occurs at about a 1 in 10,000 rate – somewhat less likely than dying in a plane crash. I’ve flown hundreds of times and never yet come across anyone refusing to buckle up as required when taking off and landing. Why not?
Another person expressed strong doubts as to whether the hammers could break an automobile window. I cannot yet say from first-hand experimentation, but this video provides convincing evidence, I feel.
Anyways, I’m putting the little <$5 safety hammers in all my cars. Why not? It could come in handy some day, if not for me to escape a submerged car, then maybe for some other event that requires breaking glass – someone trapped in a car crash on land, for example.
Bear in mind that I am a Minnesotan — a state that boasts of having 10,000 lakes and where a bridge fell down into the Mississippi not that long ago. Furthermore, I live in a town (Stillwater) with a rotten old lift bridge that may be the next to fail according to this recent report by The History Channel.