iankirk.net

Career counseling via voxel-based morphometry? With the U.S. unemployment rate at 9.5% as of June 2010, job seekers might be willing to try anything to gain an edge. As part of the Trends in Phrenology craze sweeping the field, the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation appears to be capitalizing on the new cultural neurophilia:
The Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation is a nonprofit scientific research and educational organization with two primary commitments: to study human abilities and to provide people with a knowledge of their aptitudes that will help them in making decisions about school and work. Since 1922, hundreds of thousands of people have used our aptitude testing service to learn more about themselves and to derive more satisfaction from their lives. Sounds noble, right? Although they are a nonprofit, JOCRF charges $675 ($750 in New York)1 for a proprietary assessment battery. And a very preliminary morphometric analysis by Haier et al. (2010) features prominently on their homepage. The genesis of this structural MRI study is helpfully described on their website.
Relationships Between Aptitudes and Brain Areas

...In late 2006 at a professional research conference, David Ransom, exploring how our founder’s vision could be pursued by funding an outside researcher through the Johnson O’Connor Research Support Corporation, discussed with Dr. Richard Haier, a leading researcher on brain imaging and intelligence, the possibility of relating the volumes of defined brain areas measured with structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) to performance on Johnson O’Connor aptitude tests. In the spring of 2007 Dr. Haier agreed to work on such a study, and in conjunction with Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York, to conduct sMRI scans of 40 Foundation examinees, under the supervision of Dr. Cheuk Tang.

In the summer of 2007 a sample of Foundation clients aged 18 to 35 was recruited to participate in the study by having scans completed at Mt. Sinai. These examinees were selected in two ways. First, a solicitation letter was sent to former clients tested in New York in the previous year and a half. Second, new examinees were recruited in person when they came in for testing.

In January 2008 the goal of 40 examinees with completed sMRI scans and Johnson O’Connor test scores was met. Dr. Tang sent the brain-scan data for the examinees to Dr. Haier, and Chris Condon sent along the corresponding aptitude test data. Working with the sMRI scans, Dr. Haier used recently-developed technology called “voxel-based morphometry” to identify various brain areas and measure the volume of gray and white matter in each area.In addition to the structural MRI, each participant received the following cognitive tests:
The eight tests in the JOCRF battery were: Inductive Speed (IS), Analytical Reasoning (AR), Number Series (NS), Number Facility (NF), Wiggly Block (WB), Paper Folding (PF), Verbal-associative Memory (VM), and Number Memory (NM). Each is described in Additional file 1: supplemental table S1 [.DOC]. These tests have been used in research on various aspects of cognition and intelligence [e.g., Schroeder & Salthouse, 2004]. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed using the entire psychometric database from 2002-2003, consisting of 6,889 people who had visited JOCRF for vocational guidance and aptitude tests. Combining this group with the 40 MRI subjects, the analysis revealed loadings for g (general intelligence) and four other factors: Speed of Reasoning (IS, AR), Numerical (NS, NF), Spatial (WB, PF), and Memory (VM, NM). Using standard voxel-based morphometry methods (Ashburner & Friston, 2000), the authors correlated gray matter volumes with each of these independent factors.

However, with n=40 the study was underpowered to produce much in the way of significant results, which accounts for why it was published in BMC Research Notes. I have no problem with that, once we're clear on the scope of the journal:
The aim of BMC Research Notes is to reduce the loss suffered by the research community when results remain unpublished because they do not form a sufficiently complete story to justify the publication of a full research article. A key objective of the journal is to ensure that associated data sets are published in standard, reusable formats whenever possible. Data sets published in the journal will be made searchable and easy to harvest for reuse.Press releases and news stores were not very clear on this point, however:
Brain Scans Could Guide Career Choices

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor

Brain scans may guide a person toward the optimal career, new research suggests.

The results show people's cognitive strengths and weaknesses are linked to differences in the volume of gray matter in certain parts of the brain.And this!
MRI challenges Myers-Briggs

By Rebekah Moan

Good news radiologists! There’s a new place to set up that MRI machine: the guidance counselor’s office. Researchers are starting to use MRI to document an individual’s ability to perform on vocational guidance tests. I see.

There should be some sort of prominent disclaimer when the popular press reports on such preliminary findings, but we find nothing of the sort. Instead we'll have pushy overbearing parents clamoring for that MRI to give their kid the advantage needed to get into Harvard.

Let's return to the actual methods and results reported in the article (which is open access for all you science writers out there):
Given the limited statistical power of 40 subjects, we detail results at p<.001, uncorrected, in all the tables...; figures are shown consistently for all analyses at p<.01 uncorrected, to allow straightforward comparisons. Findings corrected using the False Discovery Rate (FDR) p<.05 are noted; no findings survived correction using Family Wise Error (FWE).Table 1 gives the full list of brain areas that showed non-significant positive correlations between gray matter volume and the factors of g, Speed of Reasoning, Numerical, and Spatial. The Memory factor did show significant negative correlations with some regions, as shown below [note that a higher memory score was associated with smaller gray matter volumes]:


Table 1 (modified from Haier et al., 2010). Brain areas with significant negative gray matter correlations (p<.001 uncorrected) with the Memory factor. * BA is Brodmann Area, Talairach x, y, z co-ordinates; positive x values are in right hemisphere; Z is z-score; cluster size is number of voxels (blank entry denotes part of previous cluster); FDR is False Discovery Rate (blank entry denotes not significant p<.05).

How did the authors interpret these negative correlation?
The inverse direction of the gray matter correlations for the Memory factor was evident in both component tests, although we are unaware of any previous reports of inverse correlations between gray matter and other similar tests. ... Since there are previous reports of sex differences in the patterns of gray matter correlates to intelligence test scores, we recomputed these analyses for males and females separately. Only the males showed the inverse pattern. Why this should be the case is not clear. ... Since the sample sizes, however, were quite small for VBM stability (21 males, 19 females), we cannot interpret this finding with confidence. In general, VBM requires larger samples than 40 for stability, so this report is offered as an exploratory account of factor versus test correlates with gray matter in a sample uniquely characterized with a comprehensive test battery.In brief: the authors are unable to interpret this finding! So don't rush out just yet for that MRI offered by the local entrepreneurial neuroradiologist who set up shop in the guidance counselor’s office.


Footnote

1 Their website says this is their first fee increase since Jan 1, 2003. "For years now, we have been offering—and will continue to offer—the testing below our cost."

References

Ashburner J, Friston KJ. (2000). Voxel-based morphometry--the methods. Neuroimage 11:805-21.

Haier, R., Schroeder, D., Tang, C., Head, K., & Colom, R. (2010). Gray matter correlates of cognitive ability tests used for vocational guidance. BMC Research Notes, 3 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1756-0500-3-206

Schroeder DH, Salthouse TA. (2004). Age-related effects on cognition between 20 and 50 years of age. Personality and Individual Differences 36:393-404.

Odor Judge. From Ten Odd Jobs. Which One Do YOU Want?

Noah's Ark Zoo in Wraxall, North Somerset has won a Learning Outside the Classroom Quality badge for its schools programme.

This is surprising for two reasons.

Firstly, an investigation by the Captive Animals Protection Society (CAPS) and the BBC Programme Inside Out found that the zoo was breeding tigers for a controversial circus owner and that staff were under strict orders not to tell anyone.

read more

Tessera

You’ll often see loony zealots refer you to a study showing how effective their preferred treatment is — there usually is some small study supporting the use of almost any treatment.

You’ll also often hear people reply that the study was only small, so shouldn’t be trusted. But why shouldn’t you trust small studies? Sure, they won’t provide quite as much statistical power as larger ones, but surely they can still be useful.

And that’s true. They can be useful, and they do provide important information. But a meta-epidemiological study in the British Medical Journal recently showed a really interesting fact about small studies.

The researchers highlight what is known as the “small study effect”: a very particular bias that small studies introduce into systematic reviews.

It turns out that small studies are systematically biassed towards the effectiveness of the intervention they are testing.

Systematic reviews pool the results of all the relevant studies on a particular issue and usually provide the very best evidence. Before major decisions are made about some particular treatment, we usually wait for a big systematic review of the literature to be published.

But if there have been lots of small studies done, then when researchers conduct a systematic review, it turns out they might end up being slanted.

These particular researchers looked at studies that tested various treatments for osteoarthritis and they plotted all the studies for each treatment on a graph with the larger trials near the top and the smallest ones near the bottom.

If the study showed the treatment was very effective, they plotted it further to the left and if it showed it was ineffective (or had a negative effect) they plotted it further the the right.

They call them funnel plots because if small trials are not biassed, the graphs will resemble funnels. The large studies will group together at the top and the small studies will scatter evenly on either side.

The results are visually striking. Far from resembling funnels, they resemble toppling towers — with small studies heavily drawing the plots to the left, towards the treatment being more effective.

The funnel plots for the 13 meta-analyses studied.

You can see just by looking at these plots that if systematic reviews are conducted, pooling all these data, the final analysis will generally be skewed towards supporting the treatment.

So why are small studies biassed in this way? The study authors suggest that there might be several factors at play. For one thing, there might be a selection bias: Small studies that show less effect might be less likely to be published. They also suggest a number of other explanations including a problem with participants being excluded from the analysis after being randomised into one of the arms.

They urge that authors of systematic reviews include the above funnel plots in all systematic reviews, and if a “small study effect” is observed, the reviewers should include a separate analysis that excludes all the small studies.

Update: The researchers defined “small” studies in this paper as ones with less than an average of 100 participants in each arm. Thanks, Simon, for pointing this out in the comments.

So next time someone points you to a small study showing how effective acupuncture is, how reflexology relieves depression or how fish oil cures everything, you can rest easy knowing that you’re under no obligation to accept the study’s conclusions. It’s much better to wait for a larger study, a meta-analysis, or even better, a meta-analysis that controls for the small study effect.

Nüesch E, Trelle S, Reichenbach S, Rutjes AW, Tschannen B, Altman DG, Egger M, & Jüni P (2010). Small study effects in meta-analyses of osteoarthritis trials: meta-epidemiological study. BMJ, 341 PMID: 20639294

You’ll often see loony zealots refer you to a study showing how effective their preferred treatment is — there usually is some small study supporting the use of almost any treatment.

You’ll also often hear people reply that the study was only small, so shouldn’t be trusted. But why shouldn’t you trust small studies? Sure, they won’t provide quite as much statistical power as larger ones, but surely they can still be useful.

And that’s true. They can be useful, and they do provide important information. But a meta-epidemiological study in the British Medical Journal recently showed a really interesting fact about small studies.

The researchers highlight what is known as the “small study effect”: a very particular bias that small studies introduce into systematic reviews.

It turns out that small studies are systematically biassed towards the effectiveness of the intervention they are testing.

Systematic reviews pool the results of all the relevant studies on a particular issue and usually provide the very best evidence. Before major decisions are made about some particular treatment, we usually wait for a big systematic review of the literature to be published.

But if there have been lots of small studies done, then when researchers conduct a systematic review, it turns out they might end up being slanted.

These particular researchers looked at studies that tested various treatments for osteoarthritis and they plotted all the studies for each treatment on a graph with the larger trials near the top and the smallest ones near the bottom.

If the study showed the treatment was very effective, they plotted it further to the left and if it showed it was ineffective (or had a negative effect) they plotted it further the the right.

They call them funnel plots because if small trials are not biassed, the graphs will resemble funnels. The large studies will group together at the top and the small studies will scatter evenly on either side.

The results are visually striking. Far from resembling funnels, they resemble toppling towers — with small studies heavily drawing the plots to the left, towards the treatment being more effective.

The funnel plots for the 13 meta-analyses studied.

You can see just by looking at these plots that if systematic reviews are conducted, pooling all these data, the final analysis will generally be skewed towards supporting the treatment.

So why are small studies biassed in this way? The study authors suggest that there might be several factors at play. For one thing, there might be a selection bias: Small studies that show less effect might be less likely to be published. They also suggest a number of other explanations including a problem with participants being excluded from the analysis after being randomised into one of the arms.

They urge that authors of systematic reviews include the above funnel plots in all systematic reviews, and if a “small study effect” is observed, the reviewers should include a separate analysis that excludes all the small studies.

Update: The researchers defined “small” studies in this paper as ones with less than an average of 100 participants in each arm. Thanks, Simon, for pointing this out in the comments.

So next time someone points you to a small study showing how effective acupuncture is, how reflexology relieves depression or how fish oil cures everything, you can rest easy knowing that you’re under no obligation to accept the study’s conclusions. It’s much better to wait for a larger study, a meta-analysis, or even better, a meta-analysis that controls for the small study effect.

Nüesch E, Trelle S, Reichenbach S, Rutjes AW, Tschannen B, Altman DG, Egger M, & Jüni P (2010). Small study effects in meta-analyses of osteoarthritis trials: meta-epidemiological study. BMJ, 341 PMID: 20639294

In the magazine’s 40th anniversary issue, one of the 40 things you need to know about the future is both revolutionary and unreal: “A medical laboratory will fit on a postage stamp.”

The idea behind Google—boiling down vast stores of knowledge into an elegant little package—is also the idea behind the thing [George] Whitesides is now holding in his hand, a so-called lab on a chip no bigger than a postage stamp, which is designed to diagnose a variety of ailments with nearly the precision of a modern clinical laboratory.

It’s intended for health workers in remote parts of developing nations. They will place a drop of a patient’s blood or urine on the stamp; if the ailment is one of the 16 or so that the stamp can recognize, it will change color according to the affliction. Then the health worker, or even the patient, can take a picture of the stamp with a cellphone. The picture can be sent to a doctor or a lab; someday a computer program might allow the cellphone itself to make a tentative diagnosis.

Our profile of nanotechnology pioneer George Whitesides just hints at some of the possibilities for the future in this area of research. For more, watch Whitesides’ lecture below, filmed at TEDxBoston last year. (As a bonus, I’ve also included his TEDTalk about simplicity. It’s fascinating. Enjoy!)

Media Centre Installation by Sam Songailo.

found at But does It Float

»Scarp«, 2008 by Jarod Charzewski.

Designed by Carlin Marin | Country: Spain

“At Azada Organic we wanted to place emphasis on the product and its Spanish origin and not on the logo itself. As such, we have decided against having the logo on the front panel as we believe it is more important to inform about the product. In order to do this, all labels are hand-written informing on how we make the oils and where we source the ingredients from. The tone of voice follows a ‘Spanglish’ style that portrays our origin and the Illustrations, also drawn by hand, convey the ‘natural and healthy’ ethos of our brand.

Furthermore, all labels are made from natural materials (95% of sugar cane fibers and 5% of hemp and linen) and all our stationary is printed using only vegetable based inks.”

Most research on religion is done in the US, a country which is something of an outlier among modernised nations because of the importance of religion in daily life. So, for example, the non-religious in the US tend to be 'disagreeable' (meaning that they are nonconformist and prefer to go their own way). But is this something general about the non-religious, or does it simply tell us something about what it takes to be openly non-religious in the USA?

So a recent analysis of the values of the religious and the non-religious in the UK is particularly interesting. The UK is moderately godless - few people go to Church, and a substantial minority (30-40%) don't believe in God.

The researchers sent surveys to 2,000 people in two towns in the south east of England (Woking and Guildford, to be precise) and got 260 back. So it's not exactly a random sample! They asked people about their values, using a standard scale (the Schwartz Value Scale) which splits values into nine broad categories.

You can see their main findings in the figure. Basically, the peaks relate to values that are endorsed more strongly by the religious. The troughs relate to values that are endorsed more strongly by the non-religious.

These are the values held dear by the non-religious in the UK:

• Universalism: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature.
• Achievement:  Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards.
• Hedonism: Pleasure and sensual gratification for oneself.
• Stimulation: Excitement, novelty and challenge in life.
• Self-direction: Independent thought and action - choosing, creating, exploring.

By contrast, these values are held dear by the religious:

• Benevolence: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact.
• Conformity-tradition: Restraint of actions likely to upset or harm others or violate social norms. Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide.

And there are two values for which the relationship changes according to how religion is defined - higher for 'religiousness' and 'attendance' than for 'spirituality' or 'identification'. These are:

• Security: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, or relationships, and of self.
• Power: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.

All in all, I don't think there are any major surprises. The religious are relatively more focused on their immediate friends, as well as respect for tradition and conformity. The non-religious, in contrast, tend to be those with the widest horizons and the most independent, confident spirits!

Pepper, M., Jackson, T., & Uzzell, D. (2010). A Study of Multidimensional Religion Constructs and Values in the United Kingdom Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49 (1), 127-146 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01496.x

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons. trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees)

Researchers conducting a neighborhood-scaled exploratory study that tested the association between the food environment, the built environment and women's body mass index have found that women with homes closer to a supermarket, relative to a convenience store, had lower BMIs, and that the greater the number of restaurants within a five minute walk of a woman's home, the higher her BMI.(author unknown)1015968943200628691618013817710178897376040975844108715923160070368558193767387414354830544431563378

DEAD BRANDS from Scott Lerman on Vimeo.

Looking through Vimeo I happened to stumble upon this piece by Scott Lerman. It’s interesting the point that he makes - there are so many dead brands out there sitting around doing nothing.

Pan-Am was an iconic brand in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and yet chapter 11 killed the company, but not arguably not the brand. Maybe brand revival / speculation is the new means of value creation for investors?

(author unknown)15442696306210781538

The works of Sigmund Freud were enormously influential in 20th century psychiatry, but they've now been reduced to little more than a fringe belief system. Armed with the latest version of my PubMed history script, and inspired by this classic gnxp post on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic fads I decided to see how this happened.

As you can see, the number of published scientific papers related to Freud-y search terms like psychoanalytic has flat-lined for the past 50 years. That represents a serious collapse of influence, given the enormous expansion in the amount of research being published over this time.

Since 1960 the number of papers on schizophrenia has risen by a factor of 10 and anxiety by a factor of 80 (sic). The peak of Freud's fame was 1968, when almost as many papers referenced psychoanalytic (721) as did schizophrenia (989), and it was more than half as popular as antidepressants (1372). Today it's just 10% of either. Proportionally speaking, psychoanalysis has gone out with a whimper, though not a bang.

The rise of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), however, is even more dramatic. From being almost unheard until the late 80's, it overtook psychoanalytic in 1993, and it's now more popular than antipsychotics and close on the heels of antidepressants.

What's going to happen in the future? If there is to be a struggle for influence it looks set to be fought between CBT and biological psychiatry, if only because they're pretty much the only games left in town. Yet one of the reasons behind CBT's widespread appeal is that it hasn't thus far overtly challenged biology, has adopted the methods of medicine (clinical trials etc.), and has presented itself as being useful as well as medication rather than instead of it.

One of the few exceptions was Richard Bentall's book Madness Explained (2003) in which he criticized psychiatry and presented a cognitive-behavioural alternative to orthodox biological theories of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Bentall remains on the radical wing of the CBT community but in the coming decades this kind of thing may become more common. Only time will tell...

Here is a review that, if you are interested in how the brain controls muscles, and you are prepared to put in some hard yards, you should read. Simon Gandevia works down the corridor from me, so do Janet Taylor and Jane Butler. Nicholas Peterson doesn’t but I once had a cup of tea from [...]Lorimer0645400246252706552104041255298488366462

Feds get all our bank info

Europe has signed a deal to hand over all bank transaction data to the US in order to help the ongoing war on terrorism.…

Free On-Demand Webcast - Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

(author unknown)02976086705399159255

Russell Kirsch says he’s sorry.

More than 50 years ago, Kirsch took a picture of his infant son and scanned it into a computer. It was the first digital image: a grainy, black-and-white baby picture that literally changed the way we view the world. With it, the smoothness of images captured on film was shattered to bits.

The square pixel became the norm, thanks in part to Kirsch, and the world got a little bit rougher around the edges.

As a scientist at the National Bureau of Standards in the 1950s, Kirsch worked with the only programmable computer in the United States. “The only thing that constrained us was what we imagined,” he says. “So there were a lot of things we thought of doing. One of which was, what would happen if computers could see the world the way we see it?”

Kirsch and his colleagues couldn’t possibly know the answer to that question. Their work laid the foundations for satellite imagery, CT scans, virtual reality and Facebook.

Kirsch made that first digital image using an apparatus that transformed his picture into the binary language of computers, a regular grid of zeros and ones. A mere 176 by 176 pixels, that first image was built from roughly one one-thousandth the information in pictures captured with today’s digital cameras. Back then, the computer’s memory capacity limited the image’s size. But today, bits have become so cheap that a person can walk around with thousands of digital baby photos stored on a pocket-sized device that also makes phone calls, browses the Internet and even takes photos.

Yet science is still grappling with the limits set by the square pixel.

“Squares was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch says. “Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.”

Now retired and living in Portland, Oregon, Kirsch recently set out to make amends. Inspired by the mosaic builders of antiquity who constructed scenes of stunning detail with bits of tile, Kirsch has written a program that turns the chunky, clunky squares of a digital image into a smoother picture made of variably shaped pixels.

He applied the program to a more recent picture of his son, now 53 years old, which appears with Kirsch’s analysis in the May/June issue of the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Finally,” he says, “at my advanced age of 81, I decided that instead of just complaining about what I did, I ought to do something about it.”

Kirsch’s method assesses a square-pixel picture with masks that are 6 by 6 pixels each and looks for the best way to divide this larger pixel cleanly into two areas of the greatest contrast. The program tries two different masks over each area — in one, a seam divides the mask into two rough triangles, and in the other a seam creates two rough rectangles. Each mask is then rotated until the program finds the configuration that splits the 6-by-6 area into sections that contrast the most. Then, similar pixels on either side of the seam are fused.

Kirsch has also used the program to clean up an MRI scan of his head. The program may find a home in the medical community, he says, where it’s standard to feed images such as X-rays into a computer.

Kirsch’s approach addresses a conundrum that the field of computational photography continues to grapple with, says David Brady, head of Duke University’s imaging and spectroscopy program in Durham, N.C.

Images built from pixels can show an incredible amount of detail, Brady says. “It’s fun to talk to kids about this because they don’t know what I’m talking about anymore, but the snow on analog television — a block-based imager can reconstruct that pattern exactly.”

But images taken from real life never look like that, Brady says. Typically, they have several large uniform sections — forehead, red shirt, blue tie. This means there’s a high probability that one pixel in an image will look the same as the pixel next to it. There’s no need to send all those look-alike pixels as single pieces of information; the information that’s really important is where things are different.

“I always joke that it’s like Los Angeles weather,” Brady says. “If you were a weatherman in Los Angeles you would almost always be right if you say tomorrow is going to be the same weather as today. So one thing you can do is say, I’m going to assume the next pixel is like this one. Don’t talk to me, don’t tell me anything about the image, until you get something different. A good weatherman in Los Angeles tells you when a big storm is coming. In an image, that’s an edge. You want to assume smoothness but have a measurement system that’s capable of accurately finding where the edges are.”

Where Kirsch uses masks to accomplish that task, researchers today typically use equations far more complex than his to strike the balance between shedding unnecessary information and keeping detail. Pixels are still the starting point of digital pictures today, but math — wavelet theory in particular — is what converts the pixels into the picture. Wavelet theory takes a small number of measurements and turns them into the best representation of what’s been measured. This best estimation of a picture allows a megapixel image to be stored as mere kilobytes of data.

Images: 1) This baby picture, scanned in 1957, was the first digital image. At 176 by 176 pixels, its size was limited by the memory capacity of the computer./NIST. 2) Before transforming the square-pixel image, a close-up of one ear appears as a blocky stack. The variably shaped pixel treatment turns it back into an ear./NIST.

The drinks company says its adverts received around 86 million views in 24 hours.

New Statesman

1-bit symphony is a project by conceptual musician tristan perich that is played on a single microchip
embedded inside a cd jewel case. the project features a piece of music that is played in five movements
by the micro chips. rather than a recorded piece of music, 1-bit symphony is literally performed for the
listening once they plug in their headphones. the design uses an electronic circuit that is programmed
by the artist and assembled by hand inside a clear case with a headphone jack built-in for listening.
1-bit symphony will be available for sale later this summer by cantaloupe records.

http://bangonacan.org











via dvice

(author unknown)0554787686882848347807764542672078550974176557836125176549611252051331106373731003522121594676810574079805954191066258971112278063928056990913867110531151619227074741636925815637991837972097484850124213432326820769360800056145950289248732390820106761770135219907852816579200967989047766019375583644020932217540569504128903341977110333771624051805827685616058360285500710929097768314977423913883187051037097514234810146160923011086375424715007917999171265625049104095769184495537411564099386775531503802804840620774179951109785179495965129620530939035605445242603336083275881444229097002422621881818991744279149568287109705752796416174773673168018141703651978440464519244673958525910199421240599758468124133503657215316150311777997264310264000156545195346368128055769453518854953190213969187223692303405072842680914321302036970738432907920711640916868410137109001865510538466196674

It's not just for headaches anymore! The active ingredient in TYLENOL® (acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol) has been shown to ease the pain of social rejection. Wouldn't it be great if you could pop an over-the-counter medication to lessen the hurt of being excluded from that grad student party? Of being ostracized by all your old friends? Even disowned by your family and becoming homeless? The journal article, which was promoted by press release six months ago, has finally appeared online (Dewall et al., 2010). An excerpt from the December 2009 press release is below.
A Pill for Psychological Pain?

. . .

“The idea—that a drug designed to alleviate physical pain should reduce the pain of social rejection—seemed simple and straightforward based on what we know about neural overlap between social and physical pain systems. To my surprise, I couldn’t find anyone who had ever tested this idea,” [psychologist C. Nathan] DeWall said.Perhaps because there's no clear mechanistic basis for such an idea? The authors themselves never proposed one either. One might expect that a psychopharmacological experiment with a drug that can cause serious liver damage would be conducted with a specific hypothesis in mind and some basic knowledge about how the drug is thought to work, but we didn't see that here. Granted, that would not be typical fare for Psych Sci. So instead the rationale given by Dewall et al. (2010) is partially linguistic, partially based on a neuroimaging study (Eisenberger et al., 2003):
Studies suggest that the similar linguistic descriptions of social and physical pain extend beyond metaphor, and demonstrate overlap in the neurobiological systems underlying physical pain and social pain (DeWall & Baumeister, 2006; Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Way, Taylor, & Eisenberger, 2009). In the present experiments, we examined one functional consequence of the hypothesis that social and physical pain rely on shared neurobiological systems—whether acetaminophen, a common physical pain reliever, also reduces social pain. The "shared neurobiological systems" are thought to be located in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain structure that contains discrete regions responsive to physical pain (Kwan et al., 2000). Interestingly, externally applied vs. self-administered thermal pain activate anatomically distinct areas of the ACC (Mohr et al., 2005). Furthermore, it is not at all clear whether the same regions of ACC represent social pain and the affective components of physical pain. In a study designed to dissociate expectancy violations from social rejection, the dorsal ACC was activated when expectations were violated, while ventral ACC (quite distant from the physical pain regions) was activated by social rejection (Somerville et al., 2006).


Figure 2 (Somerville et al., 2006). Differential ACC response to expectancy violation and social feedback. (a) A three-dimensional rendering of the medial surface of the brain illustrates a functional dissociation between dorsal (dACC) and ventral (vACC) anterior cingulate. A whole-brain voxel-by-voxel ANOVA was used to identify voxels that showed a significant main effect (P less than 0.001, uncorrected) of expectancy violation (blue) and a main effect of feedback type (yellow).

At any rate, participants in the Eisenberger et al. (2003) study took part in a computerized ball-tossing game while being scanned. Initially, two fictitious players included the scanned subject in the game, but then started to exclude him/her. This was the “social exclusion” condition, which was compared to the inclusion condition. But it happens to be the case that this paper was singled out as one of the worst of the "voodoo correlation" violators by Vul and his colleagues [PDF], since it reported a statistically unlikely value based on a non-independent analysis:
Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams (2003), writing in Science, described a game they created to expose individuals to social rejection in the laboratory. The authors measured the brain activity in 13 individuals at the same time as the actual rejection took place, and later obtained a self-report measure of how much distress the subject had experienced. Distress was correlated at r=.88 with activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).A correlation of r=.88 between dACC activity and self-reported distress is implausibly high... But I'll stop here, and point to Lieberman, Berkman, and Wager's (2009) reply to Vul et al.

That brings us to the present study by Dewall et al. (2010). In Experiment 1, 30 participants (24 women, 6 men) took one 500 mg acetaminophen pill immediately after waking up and another 500 mg an hour before going to sleep (1,000 mg per day for 3 weeks). The other 32 participants (24 women, 8 men) took the same dosing of placebo for 3 weeks. Each evening, subjects filled out the the Hurt Feelings Scale (the "today" version) to report how much social pain they had experienced that day. Despite the fact that the half life of acetaminophen is 4 hours, it took about 10 days for the drug group to report significantly lower hurt feelings than the placebo group. The difference on day 21 was greatest (p < .005). However, the difference in change-over-time slopes between the two groups was only marginally significant (p ≤ .10). The explanation of the time course for these effects was unclear: Acetaminophen has a relatively short half-life, lasting approximately 4 hr, which means that it is unlikely that acetaminophen had a cumulative effect in our experiments. Our finding that acetaminophen reduced hurt feelings over time could be due to a combination of not feeling hurt and having a greater ability to reappraise the rejection experience.In Experiment 2, the dose was upped to 2,000 mg acetaminophen per day for 3 weeks. Instructions were given to refrain from drinking entirely, since alcohol can potentiate liver damage when taken with acetaminophen. In 2009, an FDA panel made a recommendation to lower the maximum daily dose from 4,000 mg (to an unspecified value). The panel also endorsed limiting the maximum single dose of the drug to 650 mg, down from the current 1,000 mg dose (which was given in Exp. 2). At the end of the three week period, the cyberball exclusion fMRI study was run. The acetaminophen group showed less activity in dACC in response to social exclusion, but they did not report lower hurt feelings.

Hmm. As an aside, here's another puzzling observation. If it's been claimed that "social exclusion hurts" (Macdonald & Leary, 2005), then why does the experience of social exclusion result in higher tolerance for physical pain and higher pain thresholds (DeWall & Baumeister, 2006)?

Next, I have a series of questions for the authors:

• Did you consider the negative consequences of acetaminophen?
• Did your IRB have anything to say about this (there was NO info in the paper on institutional approval or the signed consent procedure with participants)?
• How did you decide on your dosing regimen?
• Why 3 weeks, when the half-life is only 4 hrs?
• Instructions say "do not use for more than 10 days without doctor's permission." Was an MD involved in the study?
  
• What do you know about the mechanism of action? For more info, see Acetaminophen from Frank J. Dowd.
• And most critically, why did you choose acetaminophen, rather than aspirin, ibuprofen, or naproxen?
• Related to this, why did the first version of the manuscript have "Tylenol" in the title? 1

I was also alarmed by the wild extrapolation from exclusion in a laboratory video game to purported increases in aggressive violence:
Furthermore, many studies have shown that being rejected can trigger aggressive and antisocial behavior, which could lead to further complications in social life (DeWall, Twenge, Gitter, & Baumeister, 2009; Warburton, Williams, & Cairns, 2006). If acetaminophen reduces the distress of rejection, the behavioral consequences of rejection, such as antisocial behavior, may be reduced as well. Indeed, our fMRI results showed that acetaminophen diminished reactivity in the dACC and amygdala, brain regions that have been linked to aggression (Denson, Pedersen, Ronquillo, & Nandy, 2009; Eisenberger, Way, Taylor, Welch, & Lieberman, 2007). It would therefore be worthwhile to explore whether acetaminophen reduces the aggressive consequences of social rejection.I'm sure the 24 women in the placebo condition felt like committing mass murder after being excluded from a game of cyberball. Better put them on TYLENOL®.

The Medscape article on the study had prominent kudos from Bruce G. Charlton, MD, who:
...applauded the investigators' research efforts.

"It is particularly difficult to get research funding to study old, cheap, unpatented, over-the-counter drugs, so I congratulate the authors on doing this," he said.

Dr. Charlton, who [was] editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses and professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham, United Kingdom, agreed that different sorts of pain are often related, so there is good reason to assume that acetaminophen or paracetamol may benefit those who suffer any type of pain of unpleasant feelings, including some types of depression.

However, he noted that the same effect would likely apply to aspirin, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and opiates, "about which there is more evidence," he said.One last question arose when I checked funding for the study:
This work was funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-65999) and the Gulf Atlantic Group, Inc.The grant number was misreported, it's MH065559, not MH-65999.

And funding from the Gulf Atlantic Group, Inc.?? Trying to trace that entity has been like navigating a maze, an endless series of shell corporations:

http://haverlandprince.com/
http://www.texpacfunding.com/
http://www.gainagroup.com/
http://pcigroupltd.com/

But maybe it's really Gulf Atlantic Funding Group Inc ? -- no, that's mortgages.

OR how about: Gulf Atlantic Group Incorporated in Tallahassee, FL (where one of the authors is located)?

Or maybe it was just another typo...

ADDENDUM

1 Original name of the article was: DeWall C. N., MacDonald, G., Webster, G. D., Masten, C., Baumeister, R. F., Powell, C., Combs, D., Schurtz, D. R., Stillman, T. F., Tice, D. M., & Eisenberger, N. I. (in press). Tylenol reduces social pain: Behavioral and neural evidence. Psychological Science.

Here are two other papers that use the brand name Tylenol:

DeWall, C. N., Stillman, T. F., MacDonald, G., Webster, G. D., Finkel, E. J., Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2010). Can Tylenol boost self-esteem? Effects of acetaminophen on perceived social threat and social self-esteem. Manuscript in preparation. (Intended outlet: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology).

DeWall, C. N. (2008). Effects of Daily Acetaminophen on Social Emotions: Can Two Tylenol Overcome Heartbreak? Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. Albuquerque, NM.

References

DeWall CN, Baumeister RF (2006). Alone but feeling no pain: Effects of social exclusion on physical pain tolerance and pain threshold, affective forecasting, and interpersonal empathy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 1–15.

Dewall CN, Macdonald G, Webster GD, Masten CL, Baumeister RF, Powell C, Combs D, Schurtz DR, Stillman TF, Tice DM, & Eisenberger NI (2010). Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain: Behavioral and Neural Evidence. Psychological Science PMID: 20548058

Eisenberger NI, Lieberman MD, Williams KD. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An FMRI study of social exclusion. Science 302:290-2.

Kwan CL, Crawley AP, Mikulis DJ, Davis KD. (2000). An fMRI study of the anterior cingulate cortex and surrounding medial wall activations evoked by noxious cutaneous heat and cold stimuli. Pain 85:359-74.

Lieberman M, Berkman E, Wager T. (2009). Correlations in Social Neuroscience Aren't Voodoo: Commentary on Vul et al. (2009) Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4 (3), 299-307

Macdonald G, Leary MR. (2005). Why does social exclusion hurt? The relationship between social and physical pain. Psychol Bull. 131:202-23.

Mohr C, Binkofski F, Erdmann C, Büchel C, Helmchen C. (2005). The anterior cingulate cortex contains distinct areas dissociating external from self-administered painful stimulation: a parametric fMRI study. Pain 114:347-57.

Somerville LH, Heatherton TF, Kelley WM. (2006). Anterior cingulate cortex responds differentially to expectancy violation and social rejection. Nat Neurosci. 9, 1007-1008.

Vul E, Harris C, Winkielman P, Pashler H (2009). Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition [PDF]. Perspectives on Psychological Science 4(3), 274-290.

Way BM, Taylor SE, Eisenberger NI (2009). Variation in the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is associated with dispositional and neural sensitivity to social rejection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 15079–15084.

A 16-year-old boy is detained for 14 years for killing an 18-year-old former friend after the pair traded insults on Facebook.(author unknown)