A Correction

In my previous post, on the paper A Facial Attractiveness Account of Gender Asymmetries in Interracial Marriage by Michael B. Lewis, I wrongly stated that it was unclear from the paper whether the research assistant who selected the Facebook images was blind to the hypothesis of the study.

In fact, the paper did state that they were "a naive research assistant", something I missed. Apologies for this avoidable mistake. I've corrected the post.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that sometimes comments will get caught in the Blogger spam filter, especially if they're long or contain links, but it can happen to any comment. If your comment doesn't appear immediately, don't worry, I will manually approve such comments as soon as possible.
 
Lewis, M. (2012). A Facial Attractiveness Account of Gender Asymmetries in Interracial Marriage PLoS ONE, 7 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0031703

Neuroskeptic In The Papers

Two more academic papers have appeared that refer to this blog:

The Openness of Illusions is a philosophy piece about the epistemological implications of optical illusions. It cites my post about a paper dealing with the spooky Hollow Face Illusion. Long-time readers will remember this, but most of you probably won't, so here it is again; it truly is weird:

In my view, an even better demonstration of the same effect is the incredible magic dragon:

You can make your own dragon by printing it out from this helpful page. It takes like 5 minutes to make and it'll provide hours of philosophical fun.

Meanwhile, Stereotypes and stereotyping: What's the brain got to do with it? takes a neuro-skeptical look at the psychology and neuroscience of prejudice. It flatters me with a mention:

It should go without saying that activity in the brain does not indicate in any way whether a mental act is hard-wired (Beck, 2010). It is equally absurd to argue that the amygdala is on anyone’s team or feels occasionally upset. Alas, non-experts should not be expected to spot such fundamental flaws in reasoning without help.

Thus scientists using neuroscientific methods to study phenomena of social relevance are not only expected to be particularly critical towards over-interpreting their own findings, but also to monitor the ways in which their and other researchers’ data are reported in the media. Courageous attempts to counter overblown neuroscience-based claims in non-scientific outlets have so far resulted in numerous critical blogs (e.g., http://www.talkingbrains.org; http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com) as well as in the publication of counterstatements in popular magazines (e.g., Aron et al., 2007).

Beware Dead Fish Statistics

An editorial in the Journal of Physiology offers some important notes on statistics.

But even more importantly, it refers to a certain blog in the process:

The Student’s t-test merely quantifies the ‘Lack of support’ for no effect. It is left to the user of the test to decide how convincing this lack might be. A further difficulty is evident in the repeated samples we show in Figure 2: one of those samples was quite improbable because the P-value was 0.03, which suggests a substantial lack of support, but that’s chance for you! A parody of this effect of multiple sampling, taken to extremes, can be found at http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2009/09/fmri-gets-slap-in-face-with-dead-fish.html

This makes it the second academic paper to refer to this blog as far. Although I feel rather bad about this one, since the citation ought to have been to the original dead salmon brain scanning study by Craig Bennett. I just wrote about it.

Actually, though, this editorial was published in five separate journals: The Journal of Physiology, Experimental Physiology, the British Journal of Pharmacology, Advances in Physiology Education, Microcirculation, and Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology. Phew.

In fact, you could say that this makes not two but six citations for Neuroskeptic now. Yes. Let's go with that.

Anyway, after discussing the history of the ubiquitous Student's t-test - which was invented in a brewery - it reminds us that the p value you get from such a t-test doesn't tell you how likely it is that your results are "real".

Rather, it tells you how often you'd get the result you did, if there was no effect and it was just random chance. That's a big difference. A p value of 0.01 doesn't mean your results are 99% likely to be real. It means that there's a 1% chance that you'd get them, by chance. But if you did say 100 experiments, or more likely, 100 statistical tests on the same data, then you'd expect to get at least one result with a p value of 0.01 purely by chance.

In that case it would be silly to think that the finding was only 1% likely to be a fluke. Of course it could be true. But we'd have no particular reason to think so until we get some more data.

This is what the dead salmon study was all about. This multiple comparisons issue is very old, but very important. Arguably the biggest problem in science today is that we're doing too many comparisons and only reporting the significant ones.

Drummond GB, & Tom BD (2011). Statistics, probability, significance, likelihood: words mean what we define them to mean. British journal of pharmacology, 164 (6), 1573-6 PMID: 22022804

Social Media

Many of you may have noticed that I no longer have a blog roll with all of your blogs on my sidebar. It is something that I miss - it is so easy to keep up when you update your blog with a new post, and I have fallen behind by not having this convenience. However, this was an intentional move to protect my readers. When writers Trish and Rob MacGregor were hacked several months back, a few of their blogging friends were also hacked. It was nasty - they hacked their email accounts, ruined a computer, literally made their lives miserable.

I closed my blog - totally eliminated it, and started a new one which I kept personal until it was clear I was not a target. But I began to worry about my readers. If for some reason I attracted a bad element - I didn't want my readers to also be pulled into the mess. Lucky for me, that has not happened. But for many, social media is becoming intrusive and worrisome.

This article about a mother who found her children were being used in an unauthorized manner makes the case for being very careful about what information you give to social media sites, and especially if you link them. In this case a mother found her children being used on one site, without them ever signing on to that site, just from them being a friend on her Facebook, and leaving a message on her Wall.

This is scary. The idea that information can be swiped and used throughout the internet is of major concern.

So be aware that when you sign on to your blog, twitter, Facebook, etc., that everything you write is public domain - even your children.

Who Should Catch Fraud?

Whose job is it to detect scientific fraud?

You've probably heard of Diederik Stapel, a Dutch psychologist who's just admitted to scientific fraud on a grand scale, with dozens and maybe over 100 papers published based on made-up data. This comes just months after Harvard's Marc Hauser resigned over unspecified data-meddling activities.

What disturbs me is not just that this fraud happened, but the way it was detected. Both Stapel and Hauser were busted by their own junior lab members. Browsing Retraction Watch and reading over other fraud cases reveals that fraud is almost always detected either by 1) By readers of published papers who notice oddities in the data, or 2) by internal whistleblowers, almost always junior lab members

But these are both ad hoc methods. They rely heavily on individual vigilance and courage in speaking out (especially in the latter case). It seems to me that there's no working mechanism for catching fraud. If there were, such acts of individual heroism wouldn't be needed.

So whose job is it to catch fraud? At the moment, it's all the work of private investigators. Where are the police?

First off, is it the job of journals? That seems plausible. Journals publish scientific papers and by doing so they are saying, implicitly, that the papers are good quality. The way this works is meant to be through peer review.
But peer review is failing to catch many cases of fraud. I guess we don't know how many fraudlent papers are caught at the peer review stage and never published. But one would hope that such cases would come to light anyway because reviewers who suspect fraud ought to alert the relevant authorities. I can't think of any recent cases in which fraud investigations were started by peer reviewers, or at least not that we know about.

Maybe it's up to the institution that employs the fraudster? It's the institution that carries out investigations, "convicts" the fraudster and enacts the punishment. Clearly it's in their interests to do this because they don't want to be seen as soft on misconduct. But rarely do they go out and proactively try and catch or prevent fraud. It's not in their interests to do that.

Undetected fraud does no harm to anyone's reputation. On the contrary fraudsters are often the "stars" of their faculty until they get caught. Hauser and Stapel were. Plus, a department that got a reputation for hard-hitting anti-fraud measures might struggle to recruit people, even perfectly innocent ones who just found it annoying.

So what we see is departments who perform (fairly) good investigations into fraud, but only when someone else tells them to.

Maybe it's the funding bodies? They're paying for the research, so they clearly have an interest in making sure their money is well spent. At present, though, they lack the mechanisms to investigate it.

So those are the three possibilites as I see them - journals, institutions and grant awarders. While all of these organizations have policies for investigating and punishing fraud when it comes to light, they rarely (if ever) actually catch it, leaving this hazardous and stressful job to individuals.

Is there a better way?

On Antipsychiatry

So leading US psychiatrist Stephen Stahl is annoyed at Daniel Carlat (of the The Carlat Psychiatry Blog and many other publications.)

After first surveying the current outlook for the development of new psychiatric drugs - not good, with many companies pulling out - Stahl laments:

Undoubtedly this is to the great delight of the anti-psychiatry community, lights up the antipsychiatry blogs (e.g., Carlat, http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/), who attract the Pharmascolds, scientologists and antimedication crowd who believe either there is no such thing as mental illness, that medication should not be used, or both.



Did you know that psychiatric illnesses are pure inventions of Pharma and their experts to treat patients that do not exist with drugs that are dangerous and do not work with the purpose only of profiting themselves? Stop the profits! Make mental illness go away by legislation and committee!

Stahl ends with the warning: Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it - "it" being an end to drug development in psychiatry.



Well, I would say the same to him.



Stahl paints opponents of modern pharmaceutical industry behaviour as "antipsychiatrists". They're not. Well, he only names one of them, Daniel Carlat, and he's certainly not. Carlat edits the Carlat Psychiatry Report. Let's take a look at the latest issue:



Benzodiazepines: A Guide to Safe Prescribing - discusses benzodiazepines, including a helpful table of their doses and half-lives. Useful to someone planning to prescribe these drugs, that is, which not many anti-psychiatrists would. Says that "They work quickly and effectively for anxiety and agitation...In most cases benzodiazepines have a benign side-effect profile..." Hardly likely to please the antimedication crowd.



Update on Medications for PTSD - including a review of trials of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and more exotic drugs. Says that psychotherapy is the key to treating PTSD, but that medication can be helpful: "Getting some comfort from meds can often enable a patient to more easily face" the hard task of therapy. Not enormously pro-medication, but very far from being anti.

Combined Antidepressants No More Effective Than Monotherapy - discusses a recent study finding that starting depressed patients on a combo of two antidepressants offers no benefits over just one drug. So, the piece concludes, "We recommend never using antidepressants, and banning them all forever"... no wait, that's what it would have said if Stahl were right. It actually said "we recommend...starting with a single antidepressant". Not none.



Overall Carlat is, as far as I can see, really pretty moderate. Yes, he's been critical of certain drugs, of Pharma-influenced psychiatrists and the culture of giving doctors freebies to promote products. Nonetheless, he believes that mental illness exists, and he thinks that medication can be useful in treating it.



Maybe Stahl's right and Carlat leads a secret double life as a Scientologist. Maybe he is the reincarnation of R. D. Laing, or Thomas Szasz in a rubber mask. If not, though, branding him an antipsychiatrist shows that Stahl is unclear on what "psychiatry" is.



Psychiatry means the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Carlat, and indeed many other like-minded critics, are trying to improve that process by encouraging correct diagnosis and appropriate treatment.



When Carlat criticizes, say, the psychiatry textbook that turned out to have been written with "help" from a drug company, he's doing, I assume, because, as a psychiatrist who cares about psychiatry, he doesn't like seeing his field corrupted by propaganda.



This is why Stahl should heed his own warning: Be careful what you ask for.



Because Stahl seems to be asking for all the opponents of the excesses of the modern pharmaceutical industry to be opponents of psychiatry itself. At the moment, they're not. There are many, psychiatrists and others, who are trying to improve psychiatry, by protecting it from what they see as negative influences.



Maybe they're wrong about which influences are negative, maybe Pharma has had a more positive impact than they think, but even if they're wrong, they're not anti-psychiatry, they're pro-psychiatry.



However, if Stahl succeeds in painting all of these people as outside the psychiatric mainstream, he might find that psychiatry, stripped of such voices of sanity, turns into something so crazy that true antipsychiatry becomes the only reasonable option.

The Scary Drum

I have been thinking about taking a course that requires a drum, so when I found this one at the Farmer's Market the other day I jumped on it. It was made by a Native American from New Mexico who sets up a booth here at Lake Tahoe during the summer. This booth has beautiful, authentic items, made by the lady and her husband. Anyway, as soon as I got it home I tried it out. This activity absolutely freaked Lucy out ! She not only ran up the stairs, but would not even enter the room that held the drum --- all day! Occasionally she would peek around the corner, but refused to be in the same room as the offending instrument.

Have I mentioned that my dog is neurotic?

On another note, I've decided to take a break from blogging. I'm hoping it will inspire me to finish up a writing project. I will be dropping by and visiting you, however. And I will occassionally post when I feel a topic is interesting or important.

I'm in a funny mood these days. I'm not quite sure what is happening, but it appears other bloggers are feeling the same way as I've noticed several of you are thinking about a blogging break. Is it the Dog Days of Summer or something more? I guess only time will tell. Take care dear blogging friends.

A Re-Write

I think have been spending too much time alone and on my computer.

Why do I think this, you ask?

Well, I'm starting to communicate better in writing than I am orally.

I noticed this a few weeks ago while we were with friends for the weekend. I found myself stumbling over words, unable to put sentences together in a witty or even interesting manner. I found it difficult to explain what I wanted to say without sounding like a seven-year old doing a book report in front of class. What I really wanted to do was whip out my computer and type it out...

That's when I started to wonder ... am I losing my ability to communicate in person?

I do spend an enormous amount of time reading, researching, surfing, blogging, emailing, texting my daughters who only communicate by text - all of which depends on writing. Easy enough - you can always re-write what you want to say until it comes across as it was intended. (Although I am not always successful in this endeavor.)

In other words, much of my communication allows for a re-write. 

Have a great weekend, everyone!