Funmurphys: the Blog

Don't Let It All Hang Out, Please

I'm constantly amazed by how people act on the internet (not just blogs) -- which sadly isn't that much different than people act in public these days -- thrusting every part of themselves into the public square, no opinion held back no matter how uninformed, no emotion too raw, no passing thought too stray or pointless to be repressed, no thought about anyone else for that matter, always providing a virtual floor to ceiling window into their soul. I feel like Sally Rand in a Jenna Jamieson world.

Circuit City Cost Cutting

I have never been a big fan of Circuit City and we usually go to Best Buy in the Murphy Family. I did buy a camcorder there a few years ago for which the salesperson knocked 200 dollars off the price just so I'd buy the 200 dollar extended warrenty. I later decided I was $200 down on the deal and haven't been back. So I don't see the latest news as out of character: Circuit City to Fire 3,400, Rehire Cheaper Workers .

``Firing 3,400 of arguably the most successful sales people in the company could prove terrible for morale,'' Colin McGranahan, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein & Co., wrote in a note today. ``The question remains as to whether Circuit City can rebuild in time for the all-important holiday season.''

I'm thinking that firing 3,400 of arguably the most successful sales people could prove terrible for more than just morale, I'm thinking perhaps, just perhaps, it could prove terrible for sales as well. Although if the salesman who moved money from the store's pocket to his own is one of the highly compensated ones, maybe not.

Since I'm not one of the people being fired, I can be detached and think that this will provide a nice economics case study in cost cutting. Arguably (i.e. I'm leaving wiggle room for later) it will be used as a case study in business school - but I will leave it up to an excercise for the reader to decide if it will be held up as an effective, an ineffective, or a disasterous way to cut costs.

Pathfinder

Brian Noggle must be made of stronger stuff than I, because he titled a post "I Can't Wait For Joe Williams' Review". What's next, "I can't wait to be smacked repeatedly by a large mackerel", or "I can't wait to have a bucket of bricks dumped on my head" or "I would really like to have my toenails pulled out one by one".

I have to say, I saw the same trailer while I waited to see "300" the other day, and at first I was intrigued - nothing gets my intrigue up like seeing helms with lots of horns, wings, and assorted dodads and swords of destiny - but when it was clear that the movie was going to be a post-modern morality play dressed up in ornate plate armor I lost most of my interest. Yes, ornate plate armor is just that irresistable.

Alcohol Powered Fuel Cells

What can run longer than the energizer bunny? Fuel cells powered by vodka and enzymes, if you can keep the enzymes around long enough. A St. Louis company is working that very problem, and hopes to one day make fuel cells that run for a month before you fill them back up:

Akermin, however, has developed a polymer membrane that is used to contain the enzymes and prevent them from breaking down.

The result is a lab-scale fuel cell that has continuously generated power for more than two years and is still running, said Nick Akers, Akermin's president and co-founder.

It requires the alcohol supply to be continuously renewed.

The company has demonstrated other breakthroughs, he said:

•The enzymes are able to completely break down the alcohol, increasing efficiency and providing a longer run time from a given volume of fuel than other types of fuel cells. A pen-cap full of alcohol lasts about 30 days, said co-founder Shelley Minteer, a chemistry professor at St. Louis University, in a radio interview last year.

•It has engineered a commercial prototype that stacks several tiny fuel cells into a device like a battery pack that is rugged and about the size of a cell phone.

So far, the prototype is just approaching the amount of power generation sufficient to fuel a cell phone. Creating a device that could run a laptop computer is years away, Akers said.

The eventual goal is creating a small, powerful array of fuel cells that last a long time and can be instantly "recharged" by replacing a small, portable and non-toxic alcohol cartridge. Corn-based ethanol is a likely source of fuel because there is a ready supply, but the cells have been shown to run on vodka, gin and even flat beer.

No word on how long before devices that can power flying cars will be on the market.

So maybe the push into ethanol as a renewable energy source will pay off after all.

OK, I do think it's really cool that they are doing this work right here in my hometown.

300

I saw 300 last night and I have to say it wasn't as bloody as I thought it would be after reading the reviews. 300 is a mythic epic, well worth seeing in the theater if you like that sort of thing, and like action movies filled with buff men, flying blood (they really really like their blood spatters) and flying heads (of the chopped off variety). But the biggest reason to see it in the theater is to see it it on a big screen. Sometimes I hear movies described as visually stunning, but believe me, this movie is visually stunning. The director, Zach Snider, doesn't forget for one frame that he is visually telling a story. The movie represents a Spartan survivor of the battle telling the tale to his country men on the eve of another battle against the Persians, so the movie has a certain Homeric cast to it. And there are times the creepiness factor got a bit too much for me and I actually turned away from the screen.

After watching it, I have to wonder if I saw the same movie as some of the critics -- were they expecting a documentary? Maybe it's just me, but I got the impression they were sort of hoping that Greek civilization, and thus Western civilization, got strangled in it's cradle this time. Because if it had, we wouldn't have been faced with the horror of people proclaiming about freedom while owning slaves. We would just would have been faced with people owning slaves and never once even mentioning freedom.

What motivated 300 hundred Spartans and 700 Thespians to fight to the death against the Persians in 480 BC? It sure wasn't a desire to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, end poverty, envision world peace, save the Whales, end Global Warming, or some other modern worthy enterprise. The world was much simpler then - or at least the struggle for survival was much clearer (and harder), and the extreme Lycurgian laws that Sparta lived under were all about how civilization could survive. Sometimes we forget the idea that love of country, a conviction that our culture is superior, and a devotion to duty and others are important values and not just quaint ideas without power to be forgotten or mocked.

Universal Healthcare for Soldiers

I'm shocked, shocked to discover that politicians brazenly lie. Or that it would be Claire McCaskill this time.

Have you ever noticed how when it's a Democrat in the White House, the credit for good news goes to his administration and blame for bad news goes to "the government", but when a Republican is in the White House, just the opposite occurs?

Why Do Research?

How's this for a provocative title: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False:

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

The article is relatively short and readable, and makes me wonder why I haven't heard about it before -- I guess because it isn't in scientists or journalists interest for the public to know this. Here's something to ponder as you read the lastest research finding:

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. This seemingly paradoxical corollary follows because, as stated above, the PPV of isolated findings decreases when many teams of investigators are involved in the same field. This may explain why we occasionally see major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention. With many teams working on the same field and with massive experimental data being produced, timing is of the essence in beating competition. Thus, each team may prioritize on pursuing and disseminating its most impressive “positive” results. “Negative” results may become attractive for dissemination only if some other team has found a “positive” association on the same question. In that case, it may be attractive to refute a claim made in some prestigious journal. The term Proteus phenomenon has been coined to describe this phenomenon of rapidly alternating extreme research claims and extremely opposite refutations [29]. Empirical evidence suggests that this sequence of extreme opposites is very common in molecular genetics.

Make sure you read the part "Claimed Research Findings May Often Be Simply Accurate Measures of the Prevailing Bias" - and wonder how much out there is a null field and ponder this the next time someone tells you about "the scientific consensus" in a particular field.

There is science, and then there is science - like the time my mother claimed a study showed the worst weather was on Saturdays and the best was on Tuesdays. Does such a study have any meaning - the weekly cycle is a human invention that has no basis in meterology, but statistically you can pick out a "best" and "worst" based some definition of weather quality (rain, snow, departure from mean temperature, or whatever).

But even within real science, there is research and then there is research. Number one would be studies that are just too small to pick out the effect they are looking for. When examining probabilistic effects, sample size matters. How much does smoking increase heart disease? It's not a simple smoke and get heart disease, or not smoke and don't. It's normally 50% of non-smokers get heart disease, and 75% of smokers do (in made up numbers). Teasing that kind of information out of an assemblage of non-identical people requires lots of people. I'd be willing to bet most health studies simply lack enough participants out of the gate to be reliable. Yet they still happen, the results are still reported breathlessly, and some other equally unreliable study will be equally breathlessly reported when it contradicts the first - or worse, the study that comports with accepted ideas will be given far more play than the one that doesn't.

Common sense has a part in science:

Finally, instead of chasing statistical significance, we should improve our understanding of the range of R values—the pre-study odds—where research efforts operate [10]. Before running an experiment, investigators should consider what they believe the chances are that they are testing a true rather than a non-true relationship. Speculated high R values may sometimes then be ascertained. As described above, whenever ethically acceptable, large studies with minimal bias should be performed on research findings that are considered relatively established, to see how often they are indeed confirmed. I suspect several established “classics” will fail the test.

Sadly, common sense isn't common enough.

I suppose this is one of the things turn of the century physicist types disliked about quantum mechanics - probabilistic vs. deterministic results. The great thing about all the classic phyiscs experiments is that they are deterministic -- the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant that can be measured; either there is an ether or there isn't (as Michelson and Morley proved), the charge on an electron is constant and can be measured exactly (for which Robert Milikan won the nobel.) But I digress.

There have been a couple of recent responses to Dr. Ioannidis. First is
Most Published Research Findings Are False—But a Little Replication Goes a Long Way:

In a recent article in PLoS Medicine, John Ioannidis quantified the theoretical basis for lack of replication by deriving the positive predictive value (PPV) of the truth of a research finding on the basis of a combination of factors. He showed elegantly that most claimed research findings are false [6]. One of his findings was that the more scientific teams involved in studying the subject, the less likely the research findings from individual studies are to be true. The rapid early succession of contradictory conclusions is called the “Proteus phenomenon” [7]. For several independent studies of equal power, Ioannidis showed that the probability of a research finding being true when one or more studies find statistically significant results declines with increasing number of studies.

As part of the scientific enterprise, we know that replication—the performance of another study statistically confirming the same hypothesis—is the cornerstone of science and replication of findings is very important before any causal inference can be drawn. While the importance of replication is also acknowledged by Ioannidis, he does not show how PPVs of research findings increase when more studies have statistically significant results. In this essay, we demonstrate the value of replication by extending Ioannidis' analyses to calculation of the PPV when multiple studies show statistically significant results.

Sorry Virginia, don't trust a result until it's been replicated more than once. When will you know, since you'll never read about even a second study replicating the first in general publications? Now you're starting to see the problems I hope.

The other response is When Should Potentially False Research Findings Be Considered Acceptable?:

As society pours more resources into medical research, it will increasingly realize that the research “payback” always represents a mixture of false and true findings. This tradeoff is similar to the tradeoff seen with other societal investments—for example, economic development can lead to environmental harms while measures to increase national security can erode civil liberties. In most of the enterprises that define modern society, we are willing to accept these tradeoffs. In other words, there is a threshold (or likelihood) at which a particular policy becomes socially acceptable.

In the case of medical research, we can similarly try to define a threshold by asking: “When should potentially false research findings become acceptable to society?” In other words, at what probability are research findings determined to be sufficiently true and when should we be willing to accept the results of this research?

Here's the basic conundrum: If you don't do any research, you won't discover anything. If you do do research, you will discover all kinds of stuff that isn't so -- and you won't be able to tell the accurate from the spurious without even more research. And you will do things that while intended to help will in fact cause harm. Of course, the same thing will happen without doing any research.

The conclusion:

In the final analysis, the answer to the question posed in the title of this paper, “When should potentially false research findings be considered acceptable?” has much to do with our beliefs about what constitutes knowledge itself [24]. The answer depends on the question of how much we are willing to tolerate the research results being wrong. Equation 3 shows an important result: if we are not willing to accept any possibility that our decision to accept a research finding could be wrong (r = 0), that would mean that we can operate only at absolute certainty in the “truth” of a research hypothesis (i.e., PPV = 100%). This is clearly not an attainable goal [1]. Therefore, our acceptability of “truth” depends on how much we care about being wrong. In our attempts to balance these tradeoffs, the value that we place on benefits, harms, and degrees of errors that we can tolerate becomes crucial.
...
We conclude that since obtaining the absolute “truth” in research is impossible, society has to decide when less-than-perfect results may become acceptable. The approach presented here, advocating that the research hypothesis should be accepted when it is coherent with beliefs “upon which a man is prepared to act” [27], may facilitate decision making in scientific research.

So why do research? Because you will have less imperfect information on which to act.

Ann Coulter Robot Post

I'm just going to post this every time Ann Coulter comes up:

The problem with Ann Coulter is that whenever she makes some good points she discredits them with terrible hyperbole and insult. Her problem isn't uncommon in partisans who are forever overreaching, but far too often she misses provocative and land squarely in revolting.

Pygmy, Giant, Shoulders

And now for something you'll really like:

WWII Squadron Patches. H/T Tom McMahon

Badges? We don't need no stinking badges gringo.

Order of the Science Scouts of Examplary Repute and Above Average Physique. The title says it all. H/T Mark Ciocco

Sadly, not once did he mention "Kevin".

The searchable Calvin and Hobbes. Remember when the comics used to be funny and smart? H/T Joe Carter

It's only a movie.

Brian reviews Joe's review. I stopped paying attention to Joe Williams when he thought JFK was a documentary. At least, that's the way he reviewed it.

Why can't we all just get along?

Blog To America: A dialogue between America and the rest of the world. H/T David Weinberger

The Towers of Chankillo

What did people do before the internet was invented?

They built massive stone solar observatories to figure out when and where the sun was going to rise and set that day.

Now you can just go online to somewhere like Time and Date.com.

Once again we discover that people who lived a long time ago were pretty darn smart, they just didn't have the latest tools (perhaps because they were busy inventing them?).

Expanding The Carbon Offset Business

While waiting for the Libby Trial jury to come back with a verdict (my mind's made up, what's taking them so long?), Tom Maguire has been forced to write, ever so briefly, about other things, like cigarette offsets. Not being a smoker, I don't think he's on to anything there.

However, he has the kernal of a good idea, and so I'm willing to partner with anyone who wants to form a fat offset firm. Yep, we sell people weight offsets - whether you want to lose weight but stay at your current weight, or pork up while being able to claim you haven't gained a pound. So if somebody mentioned Al Gore's weight gain, he'd be able to retort that in fact he'd lost weight when you factored in his fat offsets. I'm sure we could really clean up in Hollywood.

Oh, for any prospective partners, I consider access to anorexics a clear plus.

Wall Street Insider Trading - Is That All There Is?

I don't know whether to be happy or sad after reading this article about a Wall Street insider trading ring:

Earlier this year, the SEC asked at least 10 Wall Street firms to turn over stock-trading records for the last two weeks of September, seeking to determine whether they leaked details about big stock trades to favored clients.

The government said yesterday that it broke one of the biggest insider-trading cases since the 1980s. According to the SEC, which brought a civil suit against 14 defendants, the scheme stretched over five years, included hundreds of tips and produced more than $15 million in illegal profits.

At a meeting at the Oyster Bar in New York's Grand Central Station in 2001, Mitchel Guttenberg, an executive director in UBS's equity-research department, and hedge-fund trader Erik Franklin hatched one of the schemes, the SEC claims.

Guttenberg, 41, offered to settle a $25,000 debt to Franklin, 39, by slipping him analyst ratings in advance, the agency said. To avoid getting caught, the men used disposable mobile phones to send each other coded messages, according to the SEC's complaint.

Should I feel sad because it indicates widespread and pervasive fraud in the securities market?

Should I feel happy because it's such small beer - a 25k debt, a total of $15 million for 14 people for 5 years of work - we're talking just over 200k per anum per person, which doesn't compare well with what I guess an executive director at a big name securities firm in New York makes, never mind the $10 billion per anum in fees these firms take in from hedge funds alone. But believe me, I'm not surprised people would risk so much for so little. But then I wouldn't be surprised if the SEC didn't add another zero to the take at a later date.