Well, not exactly. I hate science press releases that hype a study beyond its importance. I hate it even more when the investigators who published the study make statements not justified by the study and use the study as a jumping off point to speculate wildly. True, it’s not always the fault of the investigators, particularly if they don’t have much experience dealing with the press, but all too often scientists fall prey to the tendency to gab glibly and give the reporter what he or she wants: Pithy, juicy quotes that relate the results to what the reporter wants them related to. It’s irritating as hell, not so much because it’s pure self-promotion. (After all, self-promotion is not in and of itself a bad thing) but rather because it’s almost inevitably an excuse for the investigators to say what they want without peer pesky peer reviewers telling them that they should keep their remarks focused on what the evidence will support. Often these press releases lead to credulous news stories that make conclusions that aren’t justified from the actual study. Sometimes an investigators’ comments are taken out of context. Sometimes the investigator says something dumb. Sometimes it’s all three.
There’s a certain Reuters story entitled Cancer cells slurp up fructose, U.S. study finds making the rounds, and it’s being represented as yet more evidence about the evils of high fructose corn syrup. That it might be viewed as a few years in the future, after followup studies have been done, but for right now all it is is an intriguing study being used to serve an agenda that it doesn’t serve well:
I mentioned this research earlier but this post by Orac does a much better job going through the science. we are a long way from knowing much at all about fructose metabolism in a human and its effects on pancreatic cancer.
The work is interesting but deals with isolated cells and mainly shows that the cells can use fructose, when we might expect them to only be able to use glucose.
The problem, if there is one, I would expect comes from consuming too much of any sugar rather than what type. Reducing the intake will be healthier than changing which sugar you eat.
Yesterday, I wrote a rather lengthy post about germ theory denialism. As I put it, yes, there really are people who don’t accept the germ theory of disease. As part of my Orac-ian length discussion (well over 4,000 words), I had a bit of fun with a video done by a hapless (is there any other kind?) naturopath named “Dr. Shawn.” Our new buddy Dr. Shawn laid down a heapin’ helpin’ of napalm-grade burning stupid in the form of only the finest germ theory denialism coupled with some truly brain dead analogies, not to mention a whole lot of hating on swamps. Last night, exhausted by an even longer than usual post, I felt like slumming a bit more with Dr. Shawn; so I decided to check out a bit of the rest of his website, which is the website of the Whole Body Healing Center of Lewisville. After all, Dr. Shawn is a naturopath, and naturopathy is nothing but a one stop shop for all things woo. Consistent with the nature (if you’ll excuse the term) of naturopathy, Dr. Shawn’s website is, as we say in the skeptic biz, a “target-rich environment” indeed.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Dr. Shawn offers the infamous detox foot bath. As I’ve described before, detox foot baths are pure nonsense; the water changes color regardless of whether you put your feet in it or not because of electrolysis, not because the bath is doing anything to suck toxins out of your body through the soles of your feet. I have a basic rule of thumb when it comes to “alt-med” practices in which I divide them into two groups: a group that offer the detox foot bath and a group that don’t. If there’s a single accurate indicator of pure quackery, in my not-so-humble opinion, it’s when a practice actually charges money for detox foot baths. When I broaden my criteria, another such criterion is selling and promoting homeopathy.
Denying evolution or relativity may be upsetting to those of us who want to understand the world around us but will most likely not have much of an effect on their daily lives. BUt denying the germ theory of disease? hat directly affects them. Just as anti-vaccine views do.
I guess some people are more comfortable with a world based on simple just-so stories that do not have any basis in reality than to live in a complex world based on on verifiable facts.
The world is a complex place and sometimes useful simplifications are useful – physics is a lot easier if you ignore friction. But some simplifications are not only not useful, they are maladaptive. Misunderstanding how disease spreads will result in severe injury not only to he individual but to others who are infected.
A new analysis suggests that making papers open access would pump $1 billion into the U.S. economy over the next few decades.
That’s about five times the amount it costs to archive the papers, according to ScienceInsider.
The economic analysis, about the effects of a pending National Institutes of Health policy that would make all papers from federally funded research free after a delay, comes from John Houghton at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues. He has also suggested open access could save nearly half a billion euros per year in the UK, as well. You can read more about the newest model here.
Publishers, of course, have decried the proposal. Do you think such a potentially dramatic cost savings is enough to convince skeptics?
I’m sure that the analysis will meet with some scrutiny but that is how we usually get closer to the truth. Someone takes some data to create information and produces some knowledge. Someone else takes that, adds some more data and, hopefully, creates more knowledge and a better understanding.
Cranking the cycle several times is how wisdom is achieved. So, perhaps soon we can find out if Open Access is actually a wise approach for many situations.
In a very roundabout fashion, I found myself credited as an author in a letter published by Nature yesterday. Alongside the named authors – Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popović – was me. Well, the paper didn’t quite refer to me by name, but under the more general heading of Foldit players.
Like many others, I have been playing an online game called Foldit for the past few months. The basic goal of the game is to produce accurate protein structure models. Confirmed, but incorrectly folded protein structures are presented to players to work on, and through a friendly and colourful interface, players are able to manipulate the protein and produce an accurate protein structure model.
In their letter to Nature, Cooper et al. suggested that,
top ranked Foldit players excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in which substantial backbone rearrangements are necessary to achieve the burial of hydrophobic residues.
Foldit is a fun game and has demonstrated that human skills can be much ore helpful soling some hard computational problems than brute force computing. It uses really intriguing gaming principles and harnesses the ability of humans to work in social groups to reach some pretty amazing answers.
It is produced by researchers at the University of Washington. Now it is a paper in Nature. I particularly like the last line in the abstract:
The integration of human visual problem-solving and strategy development capabilities with traditional computational algorithms through interactive multiplayer games is a powerful new approach to solving computationally-limited scientific problems.
Plus I love that the Foldit players got last authorship, which is usually reserved for the head of the lab where the work was done. And the Supplementary INformation has some of the most unusual bits of data, including a Table with the relevant players and detailed testimonials from the players explaining how they did the experiments, … uhh,
I saw a couple of teasers on the web, heard a few seconds of a report on the radio, and over the past day or so, this is what I gleaned: Fructose is a particularly high-energy fuel for the growth of cancer cells.
When I dug into the coverage, what I found was quite different.
Afraid of fructose? You may have good reason to be, as an alarming new study shows that the popular sweetener can fuel the growth of cancer.
We’ve heard plenty in recent years about high-fructose corn syrup being a special threat for the development of obesity. This, however, struck me as far more dangerous.
Here, however, is what I did not find in Freeman’s story: Glucose apparently also fuels cancer cells. That intelligence comes from a UCLA press release announcing the findings. UCLA researchers apparently found that fructose can fuel cancer cells–just as glucose can. Fructose is not a super fuel for cancer; it’s merely another one.
And not for all cancers; the study dealt exclusively with pancreatic cancer. Freeman’s expansive “fructose can fuel cancer” is way off base.
The demonization of high-fructose corn syrup by the food writer Michael Pollan and many others over most of the past decade has failed to note something I found mentioned in several of the stories yesterday and today: Table sugar, which I thought was sucrose, is roughly half glucose and half fructose–exactly the same proportions found in high-fructose corn syrup. That comes from NYU food scientist Marion Nestle, as quoted in a Salon post by Francis Lam.
Part of the worry with fructose is that it is metabolized mainly in the liver, while glucose can be metabolized by almost any cell. This is a real difference between fructose and glucose, with high fructose ingestion having all sorts of possible effects on the liver, and its health, that glucose will not.
Glucose and fructose are not metabolized the same and may have quite different effects on all sorts of metabolic diseases. We have a lot of research looking at glucose. The work on fructose is indicating that it also has effects on metabolic diseases such as insulin resistance and diabetes, even though it has the liver as its primary site of metabolism.
I seem to be in a bit of an ecosystem mood lately. Having looked at the effect of trees on the soil microbiome last week, today I’m looking at how the communities of soil bacteria are effected by a much greater disaster, forest fires.
Bacteria are admittedly not the first thing most people think of in this situation
Turning a large area of huge leafy richness into smoking remains covering an ash filled wasteland has many far-reaching effects on animals and plants alike, but the effect on bacteria in the soil is less immediately obvious. Recent research (in a rather underresearched field) shows that as well as the lack of vegetation, and corresponding signals from plants and fungi, the sheer presence of ash in the soil can drastically change bacterial populations.
Always interesting to see how much more complex an ecosystem is than we initially think. Here, bacteria help make a fire ravaged area much more fertile by helping make the nitrogen more accessible. The science is fascinating and has some real ramifications I would think for our forest management strategies.
“DON’T BE EVIL,” proclaimed the Monday morning banner headline announcing the delivery of a petition signed by 300,000 people urging the search engine giant to back away from its alliance with Verizon.
“Google has always presented itself as a different kind of corporate entity,” warned Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org. “The fact that they are involved in a deal that would kill Internet freedom directly contradicts this image. We hope that Google will reconsider before they are seen as just another giant corporation out to make a buck regardless of the consequence.”
I guess this all depends on how much one thinks wireless internet will be important. To me, the complexity of all of this indicates that consumers will get screwed at some point,
Google may be trying to not do evil but it is a corporation whose first goal is maximizing shareholder value. If it has to screw us all to do that, then it will.
I would feel much better if there was really someone representing customers involved here, rather than two internet giants.
The proposed “Cordoba House” overlooking the World Trade Center site—where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks—is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites. For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to the Chrysler Cordoba, a car made famous by a foreign kind of Mexican man who touted its un-American “soft Corinthian leather.” […I]n fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of soft Corinthian leather. It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.
Well, at first I thought Newt had to be kidding, but then I did some historical research, and guess what? He’s completely right! Check out the Islamomexicanian accent and music that was used to sell “this small Chrysler” to an unsuspecting American market:
You can fool some of the people some of the time, Islamists. But you can’t fool our Newt—not now, not tomorrow, not even in the middle ages.
No to Cordoba House. No to secret Islamist insults. And no, a thousand times no, to soft Corinthian leather.
The proposed “Cordoba House” overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks – is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites. For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex. [...I]n fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest. It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.
Would Newt misrepresent history? Would he take things out of context, discussing facts in a way to actually lower their information content? Deliberately insulting? The ironic thing is he is basing his argument on historic ignorance and misrepresentation in the way that all demagogues do. I actually believe his last line more fittingly belongs to his comments than his opponents.
Would Newt try to mislead you and mischaracterize another in order to score political points in a purely divisive fashion?
Is the Pope Catholic? Or, in fact, did the Catholic Pope learn things in Cordoba that changed Europe? Turns out that some of the Catholics and Jews who inhabited the city of Cordoba had a much greater positive impact on history than Newt ever will.
Of course the above quote about the car misrepresents what Newt said. But the link does a pretty good job demonstrating how Newt’s original quote misrepresents history in a particularly partisan and divisive way. Reality is much more interesting, more complex and actually makes a better argument against Newt, which I am sure he knows, as he is a well-educated man.
The Cordoba most people, aside for a fire-breathing Newt, would bring up represents a city of tolerance between Jews, Catholics and Muslims that resulted in the creation of arguably the greatest city in Europe at the time – for the arts, for science, for medicine, for architecture, for learning, for engineering, for mathematics, for astronomy and probably anything else we would find useful.
Yes, Cordoba had a large mosque at the time. A mosque that the Muslims shared with the Catholics for 50 years until they paid the Catholics for the area and allowed the Catholics to build another church.
But it also housed the largest library in the world. Muslims and Christians worked together to translate works from Rome and Greece, and the Arab world. Some of these works from the ancient world only made it to the West because of the work in Cordoba.
Newt leaves out 99% of the relevant, interesting history in order to make a short term political point of demagoguery. It is what he is good at.
His simplification of the history of the great city that was Cordoba under Islam allows him to create an ahistoric image and plant it on people who he wants us to fear. It permits him him to propagate a stereotype that may bring fear to his listeners but presents such a misleading image that he might as well be talking about a car.
For one thing, he leaves out the part about how the Christian conquerors symbolized their victory over Muslim Cordoba by transforming the mosque back into a church. You know, that was what conquering armies did. Nothing in history suggests that they shared the Church with any Muslims or paid them for the buildings. The returning Catholics were not that tolerant.
Let’s see what the Catholic Encyclopedia does have to say about Cordoba around the time its mosque was being expanded into the third largest in the world:
In 962 Abd-er Rahman III was succeeded by his son Al-Hakim. Owing to the peace which the Christians of Cordova then enjoyed, some knowledge of their condition has been preserved, among other things the name of their bishop, Joannes, also the fact that, at that period, the citizens of Cordova,Arabs, Christians, and Jews, enjoyed so high a degree of literary culture that the city was known as the New Athens. From all quarters came students eager to drink at its founts of knowledge. Among the men afterwards famous who studied at Cordova were the scholarlymonkGerbert, destined to sit on the Chair of Peter as Sylvester II (999-1003), theJewish rabbis Moses and Maimonides, and the famous Spanish-Arabian commentator on Aristotle, Averroes (Bourret, De Scholâ Cordubæ christianâ sub Omiaditarum imperio, Paris, 1853).[my emphasis]
The New Athens. Not the New Damascus. Or the New Alexandria. Not some other city under Muslim rule. But the New Athens. Is that somehow a bad thing for a city to be known as?
And, to most people’s surprise, one of the Popes studied in Cordoba. In fact, Pope Sylvester II could be viewed as one of the few scientists who ever became a pope. He created new tools for calculating, wrote about the sciences and taught others, including one of the Holy Roman Emperors.
His studies in Cordoba revealed to him many of the things that had been lost in Europe. He learned about the Arabic number system when educated men in Europe were only being taught the Roman system.
This helped him reintroduce the abacus to Europe, which had been lost after the fall of Rome. Something he simply had heard about from a Spanish Arab had a huge effect on European business for the next several centuries. His fascination with Arab science produced a description of an astrolabe – unknown in Europe since before the Dark Ages. He was primarily responsible for the reintroduction of the armillary sphere to Europe – an incredibly important tool for examining the heavens. He even innovated, adding sighting tubes on the armillary sphere to allow the Pole Star to be easily sighted.
As a Pope, he was ahead of his time, particularly fighting against the Church’s use of simony, 500 years before Martin Luther mentioned them in his 95 Theses. He sounds like a really great man, almost a Renaissance man, 300 years before the Renaissance.
Of course, Newt would simply say he was French and thus worth ignoring. Grossly simplifying an astounding man and his life would be par for the course.
This is just one man who was educated at Cordoba. What he learned there had a tremendous impact on those of us in the Western World. And he was not the only one who was influenced positively by Cordoba or its legacy.
It was not just Catholics who worked with the Muslims in Cordoba to create a great city.
As mentioned by the Catholic Encyclopedia, there were many Hebrew rabbis that lived in Cordoba whose impact is still felt today. This was a Golden Age for Jews. They were ministers to the rulers and Cordoba became a center for Talmudic study. They were treated much better in Cordoba than elsewhere in Europe. In fact, not too long after Ferdinand and Isabella took the Iberian Peninsula back for Catholics, all Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Catholicism or were banned from living in the country. The resulting Spanish Inquisition is today the very emblem of religious repression and intolerance in Europe.
So, if I were in the mood, I would make the point that the intolerant way Catholics treated those of other religions when Catholics ruled the Iberian Penisula seems similar to the intolerance displayed by Catholics, such as Newt, towards others. But I won’t because the world and Newt are much more complex than that; something I wish an educated man like Newt would at least recognize.
There is a reason we really know about Cordoba, rather than some other city under Muslim rule. That is because it has historically been known as a city where members of all three Abrahamic religions worked together and were, for a time, the citizens of one of the greatest cities of the last 1000 years or so. It is known because of this and it is because of this that the name Cordoba House was chosen.
We should all live in a city where Jews, Christians and Muslims live in peace and create some of the most important work in human history. Perhaps New York will be known 500 years from now as such as city.
But that is not Newt’s purpose – he wants to divide for partisan gain. Midterm elections are coming up, followed by a Presidential one. It certainly appears that a well-educated man as himself wishes to simplify and misrepresent the rich history of one of Europe’s great cities for political gain. This allows him to simplify and misrepresent the purpose of a group whose vilification he hopes will help keep him at the front of the pack.
Simplify something complex. Misrepresent the facts. Scare people. The tools of the demagogue. Perhaps we should just call Newt Senator Bob Rumson. Or perhaps Shelly Runyon.
One great thing about demagogues – there is always a ton of material for people willing to debunk their words. Aa long as debunking is allowed to continue.
*Finally, the interesting conjunction of the car, Newt and Cordoba led me to the picture. Ricardo Montalban was the actor who talked about the Corinthian leather and is pictured with the car. It turns out that there is a city in Spain called Montalban de Cordoba. Yep, it is in the province of Cordoba, about 42 kilometers from that city. Ricardo’s parents were of Castilian ancestry and the Crown of Castile happens to include Cordoba.
Of course, there are lots of Montalbans in Spain but it is interesting that a small town not far from Cordoba has the same name as the actor selling a Cordoba. I wonder if anyone has ever done the genealogy of Ricardo.
Life is much more interesting than Newt would like us to think.
So, even the smooth voice describing the Cordoba car has a link to the city of Cordoba, reminding us of just what an amazing city it once was.
by AdamSelwood
