Seth’s blog

Last night I saw Praying with Lior, a documentary about the bar mitzvah of a boy with Down’s Syndrome. Easily the best movie I’ve seen this year, better than There Will Be Blood, Mary Poppins (leaving aside the great song Feed the Birds), Blade Runner, and several documentaries, for example. I asked a friend why she liked the TV show ER. “It makes you feel happy and sad,” she said. Praying for Lior made me sad again and again, which is part of why I liked it so much. I also liked seeing someone with a handicap struggle and succeed; Praying with Lior has a lot in common with My Left Foot, one of my favorite movies.

The person responsible for the film is Ilana Tractman, who met Lior at a religious retreat. Her day job is making television documentaries. She got the money to make the film — from a large number of foundations and people — while she was making it. As far as I can tell, she had almost total freedom, in contrast to her TV documentaries. I use the term superhobby to describe activities that combine the skills and resources of a professional with the freedom of a hobbyist. All of the blogs I read regularly are superhobbies. My self-experimentation was (and is) a superhobby. Writing open-source software is a superhobby. Most books are superhobbies. When a superhobby produces art, we call the product a labor of love. As we get richer and richer — thus can afford more freedom — and skills and knowledge improve, these labors of love become better, more possible, and more common.

The Praying with Lior website revealed to me that the film had/has a “mission”: “to change the way people with disabilities are perceived and received by faith communities.” Perhaps that is another reason why such a good film was made: This purpose helped it get funding and other help (a lot of people worked on it). And maybe it was part of why Ms. Tractman began and continued a difficult and uncertain project.

This coming Monday (March 31), at noon, I’m giving a talk at the University of Pennsylvania titled “The Value of Self-Experimentation, with Examples from the Study of Omega-3 and Brain Function.” The talk will be in the Large Conference Room of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, Suite 400A, 3401 Walnut Street.

Speaking of blegs, Howard Wainer, a renowned statistician at the National Board of Medical Examiners, is looking for sets of blood sugar measurements in Excel format. The ideal set would be measurements six or more times per day for several months. He is writing a paper about better ways to analyze such measurements, which are commonly made by diabetics and persons at risk for diabetes. He has collected such measurements himself; he wants to see how well the methods he developed using data from himself work with data from someone else. You can reach him at hwainer at nmbe dot org.

I told Howard: You will be the first statistician (a) to use your professional skills to improve your own life and (b) publish the results. (Which is what I did with my self-experimentation.) Lots of statisticians must have done something similar, said Howard. For example? I asked. He mentioned John Tukey making traffic measurements to help his wife push a change in traffic rules. However, Tukey didn’t publish the results and the relevance to Tukey’s own life was tiny. If anyone reading this knows of an example, please let me know. Statistics is hundreds of years old; there are thousands of professional statisticians. It seems strange that it has taken this long for such a thing to happen but that seems to be the case.

I am visiting Philadelphia. Yesterday I learned that if you want to do human subjects research at Drexel University you must:

1. Include indemnification language in the consent form. The subject must promise to not sue Drexel no matter what happens. This is a bluff: You cannot sign away your ability to sue. Of course this requirement leaves subjects more vulnerable, not less, the usual purpose of consent forms. Shades of twisted skepticism.

2. Never contact subjects via email.

3. Never advertise your research on the web.

4. Never contact subjects who have been in a previous experiment.

The Drexel IRB (Institutional Review Board) will never approve any study that involves giving any drug to a non-patient. This means the very important studies by David Healy that involved giving Prozac to ordinary (non-depressed) people — some of whom became suicidal — wouldn’t be possible.

I suppose it’s no surprise that Drexel IRB members, such as literature professors, criticize research designs. In an NPR piece, a former IRB member boasted about the accomplishments of her membership, which included correcting faulty designs. At UC Berkeley a few years ago, I submitted to the animal research IRB a proposal to test with rats a key observation behind the Shangri-La Diet: Drinking sugar water caused me to lose weight. The proposal was turned down: It couldn’t possibly be true that sugar water can cause weight loss, said the IRB. Testing this idea was a waste of time.

IRB Watch. Earlier post about IRBs.

Does too little potassium cause cramps? Quite possibly:

Dr. Stephen Liggett, a professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Maryland, . . . got terrible cramps in his calf during yoga. The culprit, he decided, was the drugs he takes for asthma, which can diminish the body’s supply of potassium. He knew that potassium is sold over the counter. But because high levels of potassium can be dangerous, store-bought potassium supplements are not very strong. . . . Before he does yoga, he measures the potassium levels in his blood before and after taking what he describes as a hefty dose of over-the-counter supplement. Then he calculates how much additional potassium he thinks he needs, securing it from concentrated potassium tablets from his research lab — how much he declined to say.'’I didn’t want to drink two gallons of Gatorade,'’ Dr. Liggett explained. He hasn’t had cramps since he began ‘’preloading,'’ as he calls it, with potassium. But, he said, ‘’I haven’t done a controlled trial.'’

Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.

Addendum. Someone commented that the potassium/cramps connection is widely known. And he or she is right. No wonder Dr. Liggett didn’t do a “controlled trial”.