Roundup of epic visualizations

A map of the world revealed by networks of Facebook friendships.

Play with the New York Times' tool for visualizing census data.

Spatial distributions of tourists and locals in various cities.

How did your schools compare with others within district, state, country?

Asteroid discoveries from the last 30 years.

Sunday soundbites

Weekly fun dataset for hobby-statisticians.

More statistical goodness on diabetes rates and state lines.

Neurophilosophy has an interview with Suzanne Corkin about HM.

Visualize yourself eating to lose weight? A good review of a recent study at NPR.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a short piece reviewing a paper showing that we find bearded salesmen more trustworthy. (I dunno... facial hair freaks me out....)

Barking up the Wrong Tree reviews a study showing that narcissism scores are on the rise.

Maybe it's because parents are giving their children more unique names.

The Economist has a good interview with Oliver Sacks. (Though shame on the Economist for mixing up "affect" and "effect").

The Neurocritic has a great article on how blogging and peer review interact (or not).

Cool interview with author of recent paper on visual hallucinations.

A good analysis of the "slut gene".

Book review: Addiction: A Disorder of Choice by Gene Heyman

I was apprehensive about reading this book. I was worried that it was going to be a hyper-conservative and moralizing tome. What I found instead was a provocative and well-researched book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in addiction, public policy or psychiatry.

As is clear from the book’s title, Heyman asserts that the dominant paradigm of drug addiction (that it is a “chronic and relapsing brain disease”) is not correct, and that by viewing addiction as the result of a series of willful actions, we have a better understanding of the course of drug addiction and its treatment.

Why is this view controversial? It strikes at the heart of the paradoxical way that we view drugs and drug addiction in the modern US. Heyman explains: “The reasoning behind this view is that if addiction is a disease, then science will soon find an effective treatment for it, as had been the case for many other diseases, but if that addiction is a matter of choice, then the appropriate response is punishment… The core assumption of this viewpoint is that there are but two possible responses to addiction: treatment or punishment”. As a good liberal, I was uncomfortable starting the book because I was worried that Heyman would be blaming the victims of addiction, and potentially creating policy that would take away treatment options, leaving them worse off.

Heyman remains unfortunately agnostic on what ought to be done about drug abuse, but focuses instead on the science and history of drug abuse and drug policy. Here are his central arguments for addiction being a choice:

The same drugs have different effects on people that depend on cultural context

Across time, culture and place, the reactions to the same drug are markedly different. If drug abuse were a biological reflex, this would not be the case. Of course, some of the “cultural contexts” listed by Heyman (smoking versus injecting heroin, for example) can dramatically influence the metabolism of the drug, which is a biological context that can influence receptor binding, etc.

The more interesting piece of this argument was that studying only those in treatment for drug addiction biases many studies of drug addicts. These people have higher co-morbidity with other mental illnesses and are more likely to relapse. For most people, a drug habit runs a natural course, beginning in a person’s late teens to early twenties and ending by age 30. Heyman profiles the majority population of invisible “successful addicts” who start and end drug-taking behavior as free choices.

The right motivations get just about anyone to quit

When people are given enough motivation, nearly all can quit taking drugs. 85% of drug addicted doctors and airline pilots faced with the possibility of passing all future random drug tests or losing their jobs will quit taking drugs. “Change your incentives, change your behavior, change your brain”.

The genetic basis for addiction is not compelling.

Heyman uses religiosity and twin studies to prove this point. Religion is a learned and voluntary behavior, and twins tend to have similar degrees of religiosity. However, the religiosity data only show a 0.3-0.4 correlation between even identical twins, so I agree with Heyman that the argument is a little weak.

The book misses a great opportunity to go into the neuroscience of addiction, as strengthening neural circuits associated with habit, and down-regulating neurotransmitter systems affected by the drugs could be very potent reasons why drug taking is so difficult to stop.

Near the end of the book is an argument of choice behavior, largely based on the very cool research of Drazen Prelec and colleagues. While it takes Heyman a while to set up the background, it is worth following as it has a lot of explanatory power for habitual behavior of all kinds, not just drug addictions. In brief, as the negative consequences of taking drugs accumulate slowly while the positive feeling of taking drugs is immediate (albeit diminishing over time), it takes a long-term perspective to see that drug-taking is a losing prospect in the long-term. The same goes with any bad habit: while just one cupcake will not cause you to gain 20 pounds, the habit of eating cupcakes over time will accumulate those 20 pounds. It takes a strong future orientation to see that the immediate deliciousness of the cupcake is not worth the long-term metabolic cost of the cupcake. Heyman refines his argument here by pointing out that while it is silly to say that someone would choose to be an addict, one becomes an addict from the accumulation of choices. “The point is that one day of heroin does not mean addiction, just as eating desert once does not make one fat. Of course as the days accumulate, the characteristics of addiction emerge, and as the deserts accumulate, fat cells get bigger”

One disappointment is the frequent straw-man argument along the lines of “It is not likely that anyone ever referred to recovery from obsessive compulsive disorder or schizophrenia as ‘going cold turkey’”.  These arguments seem to appeal to the emotions behind addiction rather than the science. Also, cognitive behavioral therapy, which involves the willful changing of one’s beliefs and behaviors, is an effective strategy for combatting other mental illnesses such as OCD, only showing how nuanced the idea of will in mental illness really is.

Sunday soundbites

Does kicking back and watching TV make you happier? Absolutely not. In fact, scheduling your free time might make you happier.

A very pretty statistical visualization.

Interesting Google talk on industry scientists hired by corporations to sow seeds of doubt in the public's mind about science.

Speaking of evil corporate interests, The New York Times has an article about the increasing boldness of ghostwriting in the pharmaceutical industry.

And more Big Pharma shenanigans here.

Nature has a short-but-sweet quip on the value of basic research.

I think that this guy should read that last one.

Freakonomics blog has a piece on how the same study can lead to opposite-sounding headlines in different papers.

This would surely be nominated for an IgNoble if not for the null result: do dogs get contagious yawns from people? Unclear.

More IgNoble fodder: this might actually be the most inspiring paper I've ever read!

Science reviews two feminist critiques of neuroscience.

PLoS has this article about D4 variants associated with sexual promiscuity. I can't wait to see what kind of headlines we see about this one.

What is the real value of effective writing?

This shocking article, written by a man who makes a living writing college papers for other people, has had a lot of mileage around the web lately.

I had two immediate reactions to the essay: “I would love to invite this guy to a dinner party, he sounds really interesting” and “this is just another example of the profoundly broken economics of the American higher educational system”

“In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.”  Stated the pseudonymous Mr. Dante.

Alex Reid wrote about some economic observations from the article. “… it's a little sad that people who are clearly accomplished writers (to be able to produce quickly good academic material across the disciplines) are willing to work for such little pay.”  This is in stark opposition to my own reaction, which was along the lines of “wow, I could increase my post-doc salary by a substantial margin by doing this!”  And recall that despite my whining, my salary is quite reasonable when compared to my adjunct peers in the humanities.  I whole-heartedly agree with Mr. Reid’s assertion that we should really start questioning our paradigms about college education.

To review: our students can’t afford not to get a college degree, and end up paying smart individuals who might otherwise be teaching them if it wasn’t more worth their while economically to pass them through the system. These students are in college because it’s just “what you do” to get a job that doesn’t involve flipping burgers.  What kind of education do people need to have for a typical job? How do we best scale this to the largest number of people?

Of course, this ghostwriting problem is far from limited to the college population. This week’s Nature had this article about “editorial services” that help with everything from experimental logic to type setting that help researchers get work published.  Such a service operates in a massive ethical gray area of authorship ethics – if a service organizes your ideas and suggests a critical control experiment, is that not a unique intellectual contribution?

Although both cases are very different, it is evident that the inability to clearly communicate one’s ideas is a primary barrier to academic and life success, and although we do not compensate teachers for this skill, its value is shown on the black market.

Sunday soundbites

The Neuroskeptic has the 9 circles of academic hell.

Speaking of academic hell, it looks like the 2011-2012 science funding prospects are very slim, especially with the latest tea-party-style Republicans.

Also, the Neuroskeptic has an excellent post on the rise of fMRI research with 7-Tesla magnets. Now, we  have more power to detect artifacts!

NPR wonders why people can't walk straight. Apparently, the problem isn't limited to post-alcohol consumption walking.

"Your brain has more connections than every computer on Earth combined" claims Gizmodo.

Over at Science is a review of a paper claiming that these connections are the latest reason that human brains are "special".

Does early exposure to pornography turn people into porn addicts? Barking up the Wrong Tree reviews a new study saying "No".

Jonah Lehrer has a timely piece on overeating in the Wall Street Journal.

For the statistically obsessed, this will keep you busy for hours.

Sunday soundbites

In defense of perfectionism.

Over at Nature, Melanie Stefan argues that scientists should keep a CV of failures. You know, to keep perspective. The perspective of wanting to drink heavily at 10am?

On the other hand, Frank Furedi argues that civic-minded activities should be recognized as accomplishments on one's CV.

Freakonomics blog has a review of a new novel on romance and data mining. Sounds like my kind of book!

A great description of a very depressing study on the media's representation of female scientists.

Also in the category of gender inequality, the recommendation letters women receive might do more harm than good.

Excellent article on the "privatization of neuroscience" and the shift away from basic research.

OK. Now to solve your depression from the previous links.

OK. Enough feeling good. Big Pharma really is as evil as you think they are.