Seth’s blog

I blogged earlier about comparing flaxseed oil and nothing: here are the balance and arithmetic results. I also used a paper-and-pencil memory-scanning task that I described earlier. Here are the flaxseed vs. nothing results from that task:

The difference was even clearer — t = 8 — than with the other measures (balance, t = 7; arithmetic, t = 6). It took about three days of no flaxseed oil before its effect completely wore off, but only one day of resumption to reach full strength again — the pattern seen several times earlier.

The test took 5 minutes/day, twice as long as the arithmetic problems but only half as long as the balance test. The equipment demands are mild: printer, pencil and paper (in addition to computer).

I’ll discuss the implications in a later post.

In an airport a few weeks ago, chatting with a stranger, I told her about my self-experimentation. When I stand a lot, I sleep better, I said. She said that sunlight had the same effect on her: When she sunbathes, she sleeps better. Better how? I asked. More deeply, she said.

I had found that morning sunlight (an hour, say) helps me sleep. Her idea was different: No one sunbathes in the morning. She was saying that the amount of sunlight matters independent of the time of day.

This was fascinating because I remembered two days, prior to studying the effects of standing and morning light, after which I had slept very well (i.e., woken up feeling very well-rested):

1. A day when I went to many artists’ studios to look at their work (an event called Open Studios).

2. A camping trip.

Both days I was on my feet a lot. But both days I was also outside a lot, I realized.

Yesterday I gave her idea a test: I spent more time than usual outside — about three hours more, I’d guess. I spend a lot of time sitting in cafes writing; yesterday I sat outside instead of inside.

This morning I woke up feeling unusually well-rested. This bears more investigation.

From this week’s BMJ:

The saga began in the late 1980s when Dr Chalmers was preparing a systematic review of epidural anaesthesia. He noticed that much of the text and data in a 1974 paper co-authored by Professor Kurjak were identical to those in a paper from a different group of authors published three years previously.

He reported his observations to the editor concerned and to Professor Kurjak’s university [Zagreb University]. Both requested that the matter be handled discreetly.

In 2006 Dr Chalmers discovered that Professor Kurjak continued plagiarising. A report in 2002 showed that he had taken material from a Norwegian doctoral thesis and published it under his own name as a chapter in a book on fetal neurology.

Likewise, Dr. Ranjit Chandra continued his misdeeds long after someone complained to his employer, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Memorial University and its President, Axel Meisen, deserve some sort of award for now claiming Memorial did nothing wrong when it allowed Chandra to continue.

More here. An editorial by me about how well universities handle this sort of thing.

Flaxseed oil increased how fast I did simple arithmetic problems (e.g., 7+5, 9-4, 3*7). To better measure the effects of fats on my brain, I wanted to find out which problems were most sensitive to flaxseed oil. Then I could hope to create a more sensitive test.

Before looking at the data, I assumed that problems that required more processing — more time — would be more sensitive. But this was not what I found.

First, I compared problems with different functions — plus, minus, and times. (E.g., 5+4 is a plus problem.) Sensitivities:

function….F…..n
plus……..15…..1400
minus…….9…..1400
times……16…..1400

The F values are for the flaxseed/nothing comparison. Greater F = more sensitive. The n values are the number of trials. These results more or less agreed with my preconceptions: times problems were slower than the others.

Then I compared problems based on their correct answers. I divided the problems into groups with roughly equal number of trials. Sensitivities:

answer…F……n
0-3 …..12….1000
4-6……15….700
7-9……..6….900
10-19…..2….900
>19……13….500

This was the surprise: Problems with answers 10-19 contributed almost nothing to the overall sensitivity, while problems with answers on both sides contributed much more. Was typing “1″ the problem? No, problems with the single-digit answer “1″ were no worse than problems with similar one-digit answers.

I redid the analysis omitting problems with answers 10-19 and found more sensitivity to the effects of flaxseed oil — a slightly larger F (or t) value, even though the number of trials was 20% less. Here is a graph based on the more sensitive analysis:

No important differences from the earlier, less sensitive analysis:

Based on these results I will get rid of the subtraction problems and the problems with answers from 10-19. I haven’t decided whether I will keep the total number of problems the same; I might increase the number (which is now 100 — 100 arithmetic problems per session).

Jane Jacobs has said:

You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. . . . People [who] give prescriptions, who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.

Emphasis added. This applies more widely than I might have thought. Here is an example:

Two gourmet chocolate companies. Two pay-per-click ad campaigns. Two very different results.

Charles Chocolates — a small artisanal chocolate manufacturer in Emeryville — spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads over a three-month period last year and sold fewer than five boxes of chocolates. Meanwhile, Lake Champlain Chocolates — a rival chocolatier based in Vermont — sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolates each year from pay-per-click ads.

What accounts for that difference?

With 100 employees, Lake Champlain is far larger than 25-person Charles Chocolates. And with an annual pay-per-click budget of $100,000, it also spends far more on ads than Charles Chocolates did. But that doesn’t really explain the difference. When Lake Champlain started experimenting with pay per click in 2002, its budget for all forms of marketing was just $5,000.

What Lake Champlain did have was an inquisitive employee who threw himself into learning everything about how pay per click works — mastering arcane details and strategies about keyword bidding . . . Middings was fascinated by a medium that seemed the reverse of conventional marketing. . . . Middings taught himself the tricks of the trade. He developed a list of 70,000 — seventy thousand — keywords to bid on.

Jane Jacobs on the food industry and scientific method.