Monsters! Science! Giddy Joy!

You must join me in saluting an awesome article summarized by Scicurious at Scientopia. It is awesome because it looks at monsters from Dungeons and Dragons (in the course of some totally scientific research about gaze following).

I wish I'd thought of that.

Well, you can be sure that my entire future research energy is going to be dedicated to figuring out a way to make D&D relevant to some totally scientific medical library topic.

Perhaps this will give me the 'in' I need to begin my study of the information needs of liches.

You have inspired me, Levy J, Foulsham T, and Kingstone A! Time to haul out my battered research texts, by which I mean the Monster Manual and associated monster-heavy tomes. There are a lot of monster books published for the d20 System under the Open Gaming License, and for a while I bought every one I could find.

You can never have too many monsters, that's what I say.

Does Not Follow Procedure

Because I tend to get bored, having nothing to do but lie around twiddling my thumbs all day, I rashly proposed a poster for MLA'13, which the organizers rashly accepted.

This means I have to actually make a poster based on my very boring citation-counting project, which is so clearly going to interrupt my thumb-twiddling schedule that I don't know why I ever thought this was a good idea in the first place. I'm having all kinds of questions about poster-making.

Like, do I have to cite references? The helpful poster advice sites talk about a references section, but...uh...I didn't actually do any research in the literature before undertaking my little project. I will hang my head in shame now. I know, it's ironic, considering my entire project is about citations, that I don't have anything to cite myself.

Obviously I should have reviewed the literature first, if only to make sure someone else hadn't already done what I was thinking of doing, but better, but I had an idea I thought was mildly interesting, and I was lazy and wanted to get started, and I just skipped that.

So I did not, in fact, refer to anyone else during the course of my work. Should I pretend I did, or should I just omit references and boldly declare, "Behold, I am a wretched novice researcher, and I didn't consult prior literature"?

The thing is, trying to find something to cite after the fact means more work, which, with all this thumb-twiddling to be done, is not entirely what I'm after. That, plus the fact that I think people in general should make a lot more bold declarations that begin with 'Behold' than they do, is kind of inclining me towards just admitting that I skipped the very important review of the current literature that we're always telling students they should start with, and leaving out the references section.

Or maybe there's a paper somewhere that describes the horrible things that happen to people who don't review the literature before undertaking a research project, and I can cite that.

Ha--actually, if I can find it, I will totally cite that. Don't even think I won't.

Naturally PubMed is Involved

Here's a nice health literacy post from Harriet Hall on Science-Based Medicine, in which she details step by step the research process she takes when investigating an exciting supplement to determine whether it's worth taking.

Whether you are embittered and already filled with suspicion and mistrust regarding the wonderful promises of pretty pills in colorful bottles on the store shelves, or are an optimistic soul filled with hope and enthusiasm, it's probably a good idea to do some research anyway. And sure, I have to say that because I'm a medical librarian, but I would totally think it was true anyway.

This post provides some excellent tips on how to look into and evaluate supplement claims.

Hey, No One, Look at This

Now if it were my job to teach medical students about reading papers, as opposed to just finding them, I would suggest this detailed explanation on Scientopia about assessing the reported results of randomized controlled trials.

As it is, I'll just nod thoughtfully to myself.

Mm-hm.

Learn Something New Every Day

Ah...an important item in the field of Peep research, too long neglected by me (it's from 2003), and passed along by Catalogablog. This study focuses on the research habits of Peeps in the library, offering valuable insights such as the Peeps' tendency to employ advanced search techniques such as consultation with a librarian.

I note that Peeps do appear somewhat more likely than college students, the comparison group, to suffer injury and death on library premises. To avoid unfortunate accidents, then, one take-away message from this study is that Peeps should probably be closely watched while in the library.

But be careful who you have watching them, since some library staff may themselves pose a danger to sweet, sweet candy.

Not me, though. I'm more of a danger to chocolate than to marshmallow. Your Peeps are safe with me.

Don't Argue With Common Knowledge

I thought this was an interesting post on Butterflies and Wheels, about a downside of Wikipedia's "let the knowledge of the masses be recorded" approach.

It tells the story of an event in history about which common knowledge says a certain thing, but concerning which a single historian has uncovered source material supporting an alternate course. He tried to update Wikipedia, citing the primary sources he had uncovered, but had his edits reversed because these sources, since they contradict common knowledge, are viewed as somewhat suspicious.

As the author, Ophelia Benson, writes,

There is something fascinating about that. I do get the reason – there are always going to be more cranks and monomaniacs wanting to publish their “original research” than there are genuine historians and people who know how to do original research, so Wikipedia errs on the side of caution - but it does mean that mistaken conventional wisdom trumps accurate new research.

Indeed. Often it's going to be pretty safe to disregard a single person arguing for a revised view of some well-known fact...but on the other hand, sometimes conventional wisdom will be wrong.

I'm still not going to be telling students that Wikipedia is the devil, but this is another bit of evidence to support the contention that you don't want it to be the only thing you ever look at.

Not PubMed Central!

Rachel at Our Bodies, Our Blog has info on HR 3699, and how it could potentially affect PubMed Central, everyone's favorite online repository of free full text journals articles.

If your eyes are already glazing over, just read Rachel's piece--it has bold text for the crucial bits, and everything! Basically, the rule that requires publishers to give free access to many of the articles in PubMed Central is being reconsidered. If you have feelings about PubMed Central, and whether the results of taxpayer-funded research should be made available there, you should perhaps care about HR 3699...even though it doesn't have an exciting name or anything.

Grasping at Wet Straws

At last, a possible answer to the age-old question of why fingers get all prune-y in the bathtub, dishpan, swimming pool [insert other instances of water in which hands might be submerged, as desired].

The NYT Well blog reports on a theory that wrinkly fingers and toes are better at gripping things. Cause they're all textured. Like a tread on a shoe, say.

It's almost too simple, isn't it? Why didn't I think of that?

I mean, aside from the fact that I really never thought much about wrinkly fingers and toes in the first place. Sometimes actually asking the question is the most important step.

Not that the actual research wasn't also interesting. You can read the paper online, at least right now, and it's full of nifty illustrations showing that finger wrinkles line up in such a way as might be expected to allow for optimal drainage of water from the fingertip surface, the better to grab presumably slippery wet things.

Fish. Cranberries. Baseballs in the rain. Children trying to flee the bathtub. Your cell phone that you just dropped in the sink.

I am all over the fact that someone decided to write a paper about this, and hope that their proposed future research is full of solid data and novel conclusions. They want to do behavioral studies to test whether wrinkled fingers in fact possess superior gripping capacity to unwrinkled ones, and I think that's research we could all be part of, in our own way!

My proposed experimental design is as follows:

Start by juggling some wet wine glasses when your hands are dry and your fingertips are smooth, then try again after soaking your hands for about five minutes in water until they get wrinkly.

Count the number of dropped glasses after each attempt. You might want to video record the whole thing, so you can also count near-fumbles.

This will have several exciting results:

• Delicious brand new data for crunching
• Thrilling crashes
• Sparkly broken glass
• Potential gory injury, hence edge-of-the-seat suspense for viewers

OK, I'll admit it, I'm both designing an experiment and trying to appeal to the thrill-seeking youth of today. This is something that has serious YouTube potential, everyone.

If you fill the wet wine glasses with wads of colorful burning paper, even more so. If they're wet because they've been washed with gasoline...I need to go lie down before the excitement overcomes me.

I am generously making this experimental design available to anyone who would like to carry it out, asking not so much as a co-authorship in return. In fact, don't even mention my name in the references. I'm very modest.

Regardless of the form the behavioral studies eventually take, however, I look forward to one day learning more about whether or not wrinkled fingers are grippy fingers.

Sober Evaluation is Key

I'm very fond of this post by scicurious on Neurotic Physiology. She really goes to town with a critical reading of a poorly designed study, providing a shining example of how to evaluate research papers and how to not make too much of reported findings.

Truly an inspiring piece of work.

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Hush, I'm Eating

I was intrigued to be informed by my DASH to Health listserv email that loud noises diminish the ability to taste food.

The summary provided:

In the most recent study, 48 college students donned headphones playing either loud music, quiet music, or silence. Then they were given a selection of potato chips and cookies and told to chow down. Those listening to the louder noise rated both the salty snacks as not so salty and the cookies as not so sweet even though the snacks were the same for all groups.

Do note that this listserv provides information at the lay level, so full citation info is missing. I gather that this article (subscription only, I think) is the one intended, however:

Woods et al. 'Effect of background noise on food perception.' Food Quality and Preference 22(1), Jan 2011, pp 42-47.

From the abstract,

"We conclude that background sound unrelated to food diminishes gustatory food properties (saltiness, sweetness) which is suggestive of a cross-modal contrasting or attentional effect, whilst enhancing food crunchiness."

So you don't taste sweet or salty as well if there are loud noises while you're eating as you do in a quiet environment, but your crunchy food will seem even crunchier.

The full article is rich in detail about exactly how they performed the experiments, as well as some speculation on how noise affects taste perception, but I won't copy the whole thing here. Because that would be illegal.

I guess the takeaway advice is, go somewhere quiet to enjoy your savory pickles and delicious desserts, but if you have to eat something you hate, turn the music way up.

"Shh. This cake is really good."

vs.

"WHAT'S THAT? NO, HONEST, I LOVE THIS DISH! I JUST REALLY NEED TO HEAR THE BASS ON THIS SONG!"

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The Lab is In Your Hands!

This is so awesome.

It is The Lab: a set of little training movies from the Office of Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services, in which you get to make key choices for any (or all!) of four characters involved in a case of research misconduct in a lab.

You can follow, and place yourself in the shoes of, a grad student, postdoc, or principal investigator in a lab, or the Research Integrity Officer for the university. The idea is that you get to make choices for the characters that will have good or bad results within the story.

The bad ending? Research misconduct is discovered, there's a lot of negative media coverage, donors withdraw funding, and the PI is fired, leaving everyone in his lab jobless and forever tainted by the scandal. Avoid this ending!

The production quality is quite good, for a training video. They have decent actors, and spend a little time giving the characters backgrounds and details. I was kind of getting into the story, and I don't even work in a lab, or know anything about working in a lab.

Now I want to make similarly wonderful training videos about PubMed searching in the library!

In the bad ending, the student fails to find any good information and gives a terrible presentation, resulting in shocked silence followed by shunning, lest the taint of bad literature searching wear off on the student's peers.

I saw this wonder on Take it to the Bridge.

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Treat Your Cookies Well

Stephen's Lighthouse points out this article suggesting "that when faced with eating a gingerbread man, 76% of consumers feel some degree of guilt."

Aww...poor gingerbread man. Come here and let me guiltily eat you!

The piece does not cite an article for the original research on which this claim is based, but does summarize several key findings, which purport to reveal some key thing about your personality based on the way you approach the devouring of that poor little gingerbread person.

Do you break off a piece? Bite off a piece? Which piece first?

For instance,

Snapping off a limb (leg): Indicates a tentative nature, a desire to be liked and an unwillingness to be confrontational. Extremely insecure, often puts the needs of others before themselves.

I personally like to go for the head, usually breaking it off, which this piece claims indicates that I am,

Forthright, somewhat aggressive with narcissistic tendencies. Little regard for the views of others. Generally unaware of the effect ones actions are having on others.

Now this may be true of me. I really wouldn't know, since I pay little attention to the way I am perceived by others...hey!

Actually, though, I'd argue with this interpretation, because here's why I go for the head: to put the little gingerbread fellow out of its misery.

If some giant gingerbread cookie is ever eating you, wouldn't you hope it bites your head off first, rather than pulling off limbs one by one while you wait helplessly for the end? I thought so.

Therefore, by going after the head first, I'm actually demonstrating kindliness and deep concern for the effect my actions are having on others.

Well, on the imaginary consciousness of a roughly humaniform pastry, anyway.

Human beings? Whatever. I'll walk all over any one of you if you get between me and the cookie platter, while remaining blithely unaware of the effect these actions have on you.

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Well Slept

Via Well, a sad story for anyone who has trouble getting that regular eight hours of sleep that we're told is optimal (does anyone actually sleep eight hours a night?): we're probably going to get sick, too.

We can tell because some people in a study who slept less than seven hours a night were almost three times as likely to catch a cold as some other people who slept at least eight hours.

As in all things, we must caution against reading too much into the one study referenced, which looked at only 153 people and their responses to cold viruses after their sleep patterns had been observed for two weeks.

This should not be taken either as license for extremes of behavior, which I contend is the main reason we like to read health news stories, or as proof that we're doomed, which is the other popular message. (We are all going to die. But not immediately as a result of poor sleep quality, if judging solely from the information presented.)

Interestingly, "percentage of days feeling rested was not associated with colds," according to the study authors, so you may not even be aware than you're at risk. You could feel just fine, but be an unwitting virus magnet!

Perhaps you're a victim of sleep inefficiency; the people with less than 92% sleep efficiency were five and a half times as likely to catch the cold as the people whose sleep efficiency was 98% or greater.

Five and a half is more than three, you'll notice, so in fact you might be better off getting seven hours of efficient sleep (sleep efficiency is defined simply enough as "percentage of time in bed actually asleep") rather than nine hours of inefficient sleep.

So it's not enough to just be in bed for eight hours. Even being in bed with your eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, will not substitute.

If only that were one of those things that you can actually choose. Yes, I'll take the restful, efficient sleep tonight, thanks! Last night's tossing and turning and waking up every few hours was a lot of fun, but I'm in the mood for something a little quieter this evening.

This actually feels like one of those "stands to reason" type findings. Sure you're more likely to get sick if you're tired and run down. Since common sense sometimes turns out to be wrong, though (thanks, lazy deceitful brain), it can be useful to get some confirmation.

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You Can Do This

For those of us who are not scientists, I recommend this referral from Bad Science to a helpful post by Dr. Alicia White on How to read articles about health and healthcare (PDF).

It's got good tips on evaluating the stories one reads, which tend to be full of exciting claims that grant license to drink beer until we're silly (I'm sticking to my theory that it's all about people wanting license for extremes of behavior).

It turns out that if you read carefully, the research usually does not support sweeping generalizations. (See how I nimbly avoided making a sweeping generalization about how research never supports such things? That's accuracy for you.)

But it's OK: I give you license to eat cake until you're silly. Go ahead! Have at it!

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Oh, How We Suffer!

I am distressed to hear from Well about this downside to the overall awesomeness of life as a redhead: apparently, we don't respond as readily to anesthetic as people with hair of other hues.

The speculation is that a gene mutation associated with red hair is also linked to pain receptors, making the bearers of said genes more sensitive to pain and less responsive to anesthesia. The story specifically discusses the possibility that redheads may be less likely to go to the dentist than other people, perhaps because it's more painful for them.

Distressed though I am on behalf of my color family, I'm not sure I myself got my red from this particular mutation, since I've never noticed that I'm more sensitive to painful stimuli than my dark-haired friends and sisters. In fact, I'm punching myself in the head right now, just for fun!

OK, that part is untrue.

I've never avoided the dentist due to fear of pain, though, and have found the anesthetic used on me to be quite effective. More than once I've bitten half through my lip in the aftermath of a dental procedure because I couldn't feel it (when it's numb, isn't a lip pretty much twice as big as usual, and always in the way of whatever you're trying to say or eat or sip cautiously through a straw?)

More research is clearly called for, given that this is a topic of such obvious importance to the world.

In the meantime, dentists, if you have red-haired patients, give them some extra drugs. Maybe that's what my dentists have been doing with me, and I never knew.

Oh, hey, I did need an extra dose of anesthetic drops at my last eye exam, where they touch that thing to your eyeball to measure the pressure. I kept involuntarily flinching because I could feel it touching. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it felt weird enough that I couldn't keep my head still.

Maybe my variant of the red gene is extra sensitive to eyeball touches, but not tooth pain. I'm telling you, we need more research!

Phone Calls and Kisses

Been gettin' an awful lot of sales-related phone calls the past couple of weeks.

Not sure if my number expired from the National Do Not Call Registry (it says numbers don't expire, "due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008," but I can't remember when I registered, so maybe it grandfathered into expiration?), or if times are so tough that organizations that are exempt from the list have taken to desperately phoning everyone they can think of.

Anyway, it makes me understand why people like Caller ID. Seriously, I don't even want to pick up the phone anymore.

My current strategy, rather than pay for Caller ID, is to quickly say "hello? Hello?" and then promptly hang up if I don't get an answer. Those auto-dialers usually don't put someone through right away, so a quick disconnect can save an annoying conversation about my long distance service.

I think the odds of my missing out on hearing that I've won the lottery or been blessed with the birth of my first grandchild are pretty low.

Also, I re-registered on the Do Not Call list, just in case.

If you need something to distract you from worrying about my crushing phone problems, and you're also looking to advance the frontiers of science, please enjoy the Kissing Experiment on the Intersection.

The author is taking "an interdisciplinary look at why and how we kiss, drawing on neuroscience, classical history, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and popular culture."

You can further the research by taking a look at 15 photos of kissing couples and deciding whether the kisses strike you as erotic, friendly, or suggestive of a relationship between the two people. I'm already interested in the eventual book.

Good News for Beer-Drinkers

At least, not bad news. When you break it down, it's actually pretty much the same thing that research usually gives us: moderately interesting news that is not a license for extremes of behavior.

But that's not the stuff of headlines! No one wants to hear that something moderately interesting has been learned.

You can blame a sensationalist media with a fondness for grand sweeping statements if you like, but my new theory as of two minutes ago is that we all (sweepingly! and without exception!) want a license for extremes of behavior, and unless you promise that, you got nothin' in terms of public interest.

Anyway, the story is that researchers in Spain got some volunteers to exercise until they were about to fall over (as so many of us do so often), tested "their hydration levels, motor skills, and concentration ability," and then gave them either water or beer.

Upon further testing, they found that beer was slightly better at rehydrating the volunteers. Yeah, it even says "slightly" right in the news item, which means that in practical terms the results may not even have been statistically significant, but whatever. That's boring talk that does not lead in the direction of license for extremes of behavior.

Beer drinkers are celebrating, but obvious questions arise. For example, the study involved "two pints of Spanish lager." How can we be sure that, say, Belgian lager would have a similar effect? Or Spanish ale? I imagine that future studies to compare the rehydration effects of different beers are forthcoming.

Inquiring minds might also want to know how beer compares to those specially formulated neon-hued sports drinks one sees, and further, how it compares to chocolate milk, which another study suggested is superior to the aforementioned sports drinks in this department.

Inquiring minds, when you come down to it, desire to know what is the King of the Rehydration Mountain, the better to make sweeping statements about how we should all go forth and drink whatever it is until we're about to fall over.

License! I'm telling you, it's about the License!

Honestly, I'm rooting for chocolate milk.

Oh, Drugs, Drugs, Drugs...

An interesting article in the New York Review of Books discusses the familiar concern of pharmaceutical company sponsoring research, conferences, continuing education, and physicians' general well-being (everyone loves those free pens!).

The piece, which reviews three books, is also a nice, concise overview of several other drug-related issues we may remember from previous reading, including: 

• incompletely revealed study results, where write-ups of negative results are unlikely to be published and positive ones may be written to make a drug seem more effective; 
• promoting drugs for off-label uses for which they haven't been proven to be effective; 
  
• highlighting vaguely-defined ailments like social anxiety disorder as serious and requiring medication; 
  
• advertising directly to consumers to convince them they need particular drugs.

Even the hallowed DSM is based more on "a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry" than on hard evidence.

It doesn't even talk about the much-lamented high cost of prescription drugs and how that could be tied into the promotion of new medications of generics and all that. But let's just sum up thusly: 

Drugs: a Complex Issue. (I also considered Drugs: Gimme Some!)

The article is rather disheartening, concluding that 

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines

but it's a good read. Well, I'm off to fling my prescriptions out the window.

Where There's Smoke, There's Research

Alan Blum was at Boston University Medical School today to talk about universities' relationships with tobacco companies. 

He argues that universities should not accept tobacco money for research, or permit them to recruit on campus, period. We know tobacco is harmful, so from a public health standpoint it's flat wrong to enter into relationships with them: taking their money puts us inevitably into a position of support for their existence, and this is not something an educational institution should be doing.

He says that the idea of scientific research being carried out at prestigious institutions has been used by the tobacco industry for decades to promote their image of corporate responsibility, healthfulness or at least less-unhealthfulness, etc. Universities that accept their money (even if these universities don't all give the companies veto power over the results they publish) are culpable. 

It's a pretty fierce call-out.

The whole "consenting adults should be allowed to risk their lives using whatever products they want" argument was set aside here, which made sense to me since it's not the relevant part of the discussion in public health terms; regardless of the choices consenting adults should be allowed, the question of the moment was whether or not educational institutions should be supporting the industry that's promoting their arguably bad choices.

And I have to concur, it's one thing to say people should be allowed to smoke if they want, and another to say that we (in a general sense, not me personally) should encourage them to do it, whether directly or indirectly.

On the other hand, as someone from the audience mentioned and Mr. Blum concurred, we (once again, in a general sense, not me personally) need money to do research. These big studies, which undeniably provide some good information, don't fund themselves, and there's not always a government grant. 

Where is a good place to get money? Is any source of money 'clean'? Is it better not to do research at all than to participate in the process of a industry that, as a Philip Morris representative in a video clip stated bluntly, makes "a product that harms people"?

It's an interesting question, and it was an interesting talk. It's awfully hard to have clean hands in life, isn't it?

But I Don't Want to Wait That Long!

Nevertheless, this promises to be interesting and useful information once it's collected.

Genetics and Health observes that a study is beginning to determine whether having genetic information about their personal health risks will actually cause people to make choices for their lives that result in better health.

If I know I have a genetic susceptibility to Illness X, will I take special care to avoid other things that might contribute to developing it? Will I lead a well-planned and healthy life to make sure I limit my non-genetic risk as much as possible, since I know the genes are against me?

Or will I just think, "heck, Illness X is gonna get me anyway, bring on the alcohol/tobacco/forbidden foodstuffs/risky sex/side-effectsy-medications/explosives/bad television/recreational drugs"?

Since personalized genetic testing has not been available for long, it's not surprising that we don't know how to answer those questions. Good thing the Scripps Translational Science Institute is starting a 20-year study to find out.

I am, as indicated, saddened that it will be a while before we hear anything from this study, but that's research for you. 

In the meantime, since I haven't had my own genetic code examined (I'm curious, but not enough to pay for it), I personally will continue with my accustomed habits regarding alcohol/tobacco/forbidden foodstuffs/risky sex/side-effectsy medications/explosives/bad television/recreational drugs. 

Especially explosives.