Controlled studies where one group is given Vitamin E and the other a placebo have found no significant harm or benefit at reasonable dose levels:
Three other meta-analyses that combined the results of randomized controlled trials designed to evaluate the efficacy of vitamin E supplementation for the prevention or treatment of cardiovascular disease found no evidence that vitamin E supplementation up to 800 IU/day significantly increased or decreased cardiovascular disease mortality or all-cause mortality (73-75). Additionally, a more recent meta-analysis of 57 randomized controlled trials found that vitamin E supplementation, up to doses of 5,500 IU/day, had no effect on all-cause mortality (76). Furthermore, a meta-analysis of 68 randomized trials found that supplemental vitamin E, singly or in combination with other antioxidant supplements, did not significantly alter risk of all-cause mortality (77). At present, there is no convincing evidence that vitamin E supplementation up to 800 IU/day increases the risk of death from cardiovascular disease or other causes.
[The study] reported that adults who took supplements of 400 IU/day or more were 6% more likely to die from any cause than those who did not take vitamin E supplements (72). However, further breakdown of the risk by vitamin E dose and adjustment for other vitamin and mineral supplements revealed that the increased risk of death was statistically significant only at a dose of 2,000 IU/day, which is higher than the UL for adults.
After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, [Steve Jobs] tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, “Your commercials suck.”
“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.”
“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.”
Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.
When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
The Big Bang Theory - watched it all in the past 3 weeks. Sheldon grew on me.
The Office - still good.
The Boss - excellent acting. Sexy and interesting in the way The Wire was for its first 1.5 seasons.
so perhaps they’ll make you stronger - a new vitamin supplementation study demonstrates a “sick-user effect” - those who never took vitamins but suddenly started may have done so because they became seriously ill. This reverses my view based on past studies that multivitamins probably don’t help (though I’d continued taking mine, since the evidence was mixed).
Though LA has long been touted as an antioxidant, it has also been shown to improve glucose and ascorbate handling, increase eNOS activity, activate Phase II detoxification via the transcription factor Nrf2, and lower expression of MMP-9 and VCAM-1 through repression of NF-kappa B. LA and its reduced form, dihydrolipoic acid, may use their chemical properties as a redox couple to alter protein conformations by forming mixed disulfides. Beneficial effects are achieved with low micromolar levels of LA, suggesting that some of its therapeutic potential extends beyond the strict definition of an antioxidant. Current trials are investigating whether these beneficial properties of LA make it an appropriate treatment not just for diabetes, but also for the prevention of vascular disease, hypertension, and inflammation.
LA has been shown to have a variety of properties which can interfere with the pathogenesis or progression of AD. For example, LA increases acetylcholine (ACh) production by activation of choline acetyltransferase and increases glucose uptake, thus supplying more acetyl-CoA for the production of ACh. LA chelates redox-active transition metals, thus inhibiting the formation of hydroxyl radicals and also scavenges reactive oxygen species (ROS), thereby increasing the levels of reduced glutathione. In addition, LA down-regulates the expression of redox-sensitive pro-inflammatory proteins including TNF and inducible nitric oxide synthase. Furthermore, LA can scavenge lipid peroxidation products such as hydroxynonenal and acrolein.
Evidence for a clinical benefit for LA in dementia is yet limited. There are only two published studies, in which 600 mg LA was given daily to 43 patients with AD (receiving a standard treatment with choline-esterase inhibitors) in an open-label study over an observation period of up to 48 months. Whereas the improvement in patients with moderate dementia was not significant, the disease progressed extremely slowly (change in ADAScog: 1.2 points=year, MMSE: -0.6 points=year) in patients with mild dementia (ADAScog
Animals treated with alpha-lipoic acid, for example, suffered less brain damage and had a four times greater survival rate after a stroke than animals who did not receive this supplement.
In my personal experience, high dosages of ALA and acetylcarnitine can cause insomnia and ALA may cause heart rhythm disturbances.
Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 makes it a crime to: 1) knowingly and willfully; 2) make any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation; 3) in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of the United States. Your lie does not even have to be made directly to an employee of the national government as long as it is “within the jurisdiction” of the ever expanding federal bureaucracy. Though the falsehood must be “material” this requirement is met if the statement has the “natural tendency to influence or [is] capable of influencing, the decision of the decisionmaking body to which it is addressed.” United States v. Gaudin , 515 U.S. 506, 510 (1995). (In other words, it is not necessary to show that your particular lie ever really influenced anyone.) Although you must know that your statement is false at the time you make it in order to be guilty of this crime, you do not have to know that lying to the government is a crime or even that the matter you are lying about is “within the jurisdiction” of a government agency. United States v. Yermian , 468 U.S. 63, 69 (1984). For example, if you lie to your employer on your time and attendance records and, unbeknownst to you, he submits your records, along with those of other employees, to the federal government pursuant to some regulatory duty, you could be criminally liable.
- A simple instruction to “think about alternatives” can promote resistance to overconfidence and confirmation bias. In one study, subjects asked to generate their own hypotheses are more responsive to their accuracy than subjects asked to choose from among pre-picked hypotheses.16 Another study required subjects to list reasons for and against each of the possible answers to each question on a quiz prior to choosing an answer and assessing the probability of its being correct. This process resulted in more accurate confidence judgments relative to a control group.17
- Training in microeconomics can help subjects avoid the sunk cost fallacy.18
- Because people avoid the base rate fallacy more often when they encounter problems phrased in terms of frequencies instead of probabilities,19 teaching people to translate probabilistic reasoning tasks into frequency formats improves their performance.20
- [“promote bias awareness”]
- Research on the planning fallacy suggests that taking an ‘outside view’ when predicting the time and resources required to complete a task will lead to better predictions. A specific instance of this strategy is ‘reference class forecasting’,25 in which planners project time and resource costs for a project by basing their projections on the outcomes of a distribution of comparable projects.
- Unpacking the components involved in a large task or project helps people to see more clearly how much time and how many resources will be required to complete it, thereby partially meliorating the planning fallacy.26
- One reason we fall prey to the planning fallacy is that we do not remain as focused on the task at hand throughout its execution as when we are planning its execution. The planning fallacy can be partially meliorated, then, not only by improving the planning but by improving the execution. For example, in one study27 students were taught to imagine themselves performing each of the steps needed to complete a project. Participants rehearsed these simulations each day. 41% of these students completed their tasks on time, compared to 14% in a control group.
Usually the first details that come to mind are the right details. Once you have those, stop layering on. Which actually is good advice to liars, too. The first details that come to mind, as you lie to the police, are the best details. Stop there. Stop elaborating. Otherwise they’re not going to buy it.via
23andme and other personal genome services make predictions based on research identifying correlations between particular genes and disease or other traits. However, most published studies in the area can’t (yet) be reproduced:
23andme does a decent job of classifying the strength of evidence, but they probably don’t account for the poor replication rate, which may be due to data-mining effects (not fixing hypotheses in advance, or doing proper multi-hypothesis significance testing). Failure to do this is little better than fraud, of course. If you lie about the story that lead to your having published a model fit to some data, then that’s nearly as bad as completely inventing the data. see alsoIt asks (a) if initial findings have been repeatable and (b) how much we should trust the repetition attempts. To answer the first question, they found that only a third (10 of 37) of initial findings were repeated when tested a second time. If things were working well, all of the initial findings would have been repeatable. The low replication rate doesn’t mean that two-thirds of the initial findings were false. Perhaps the replication attempts were poorly done and allof the initial findings would have held up if they were better done (e.g., larger samples). Or perhaps the replication attempts were biased toward positive results and none of the initial findings would have held up if they were better done.
The review paper also found that positive replication attempts had much smaller samples (median sample size about 150) than negative replication attempts (median sample size about 380). This suggests that the negative replication attempts are more trustworthy than the positive ones. The true replication rate is probably lower than one-third.
from Richard Feynman’s 1974 commencement address on Cargo Cult Science:
There have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on–with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using–not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.via
viaPeople who trained vigorously for 45 minutes at a level of effort that increased body temperature, raised heart rate, and induced sweating burned an average of 190 extra calories in the 14 hours following the training session.They also burned about 590 total calories in the exercise session itself. This contrasts with low intensity exercise, which does not increase caloric expenditure in the hours following exercise sessions.As this article points out, if you need mental refreshment, a coffee break will probably backfire, but a growing body of research shows that making contact with live plants and animals, even if vicarious (photos of forests) is more effective than other diversions. A little time enjoying the sights and sounds of nature also has proven successful at relieving depression and anxiety and boosting cognitive performance.
“We received input from 23 scientists (heads of laboratories) and collected data from 67 projects, most of them (47) from the field of oncology. This analysis revealed that only in ~20–25% of the projects were the relevant published data completely in line with our in-house findings. In almost two-thirds of the projects, there were inconsistencies between published data and in-house data that either considerably prolonged the duration of the target validation process or, in most cases, resulted in termination of the projects…”via. Of course, just from occasional relative incompetence on the part of pharma lab scientists I’d expect only a ~70% reproduction rate. And given the rate of attempted vs. accepted publications, and the bias toward publishing positive results, reduce that by another 70% (and this can be eliminated by waiting for multiple confirming studies), and you have about a 50% expected reproduction rate. This leads me to believe that (very rough estimate) half of published medical research is fraudulent. So, the U.S. government is probably funding faux “research”, wasting perhaps 50%. But the overall good done may be worth it (since it’s nearly impossible to identify the honest vs. oversold research CVs and proposals). Perhaps if failed reproductions were made public, there could be eventual repercussions - funders could use that track record to reward the researchers with the greatest amount of influential, validated output (as opposed to merely published).
