Checklists to save some lives - Atul Gawande

Working with help of technology nudges us to be obsessed with tabulation, synchronization et al which unconsciously drives us to look for referential integrity, synthesize the abstractions, connecting the dots and more in unlikely places. Some times it does lead to endless loops but yet that remains one of the main strengths of ones thinking. Given such a complex integrated evolving phenomena unleashed by the technology (leave alone the eternal complexity of us, nature and universe), it should be a no brainer to follow some mundane checklists by the doctors to save lives (wish it was that easy to override this human dissonance).

This is the theme of Gawande's new book - 

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right  and here's a talk on that theme:

Unscientific America ...

One of the main reason that made me stop watching TV is here but what made me to totally eschew mass media is fact that the genesis of cognitive dissonance evolves from them. The dissonance is chronicled precisely in the book Unscientific America : How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kishenbaum. A great review of the book here:

"Many readers have had a hard time understanding what the main point of Unscientific America is in relation to science communication, suggesting that Mooney and Kirshenbaum don't really know what the point is themselves. I think this is not a lacking on the part of the authors, but rather, it is because the situation is itself undefined and vague, like a battlefield with very few troops spread across a great deal of terrain. Science and society touch in many places but they tend to be discontinuous places. Cable TV shows, but only a couple, are science-oriented (and they all suck). Prime Time TV currently sports forensic science (in a totally unrealistic way) but the presence or absence of science in this venue is capricious and unpredictable. Science is required in high school and college. But so are a lot of other things. Science may or may not be part of a person's weekly media intake. Many Americans probably don't even know when they are looking at science, or when science is in fact making a difference in their lives. Most people probably read, see or hear most of what they consciously encounter from the scientific world in the from of snarky remarks by TV pundits or anchors or sensationalized but uncontextualized "wow" reports about whales or killer bacteria or NASA scientists doing something esoteric but loud and expensive.

Most people do not develop positions on science policy. Most people receive their positions from wherever they receive all of their political views. From Rush Limbauch or Keith Olbermann, or someone. To combine my own personal view (which I have drifted into here, sorry...) with that of Unscientific America: Regular citizens and scientists are separated by a very narrow but very deep canyon, resting comfortably on either side of this canyon and vaguely aware of the others across the way. When science policy issues arise among the citizenry, the scientists don't really play a role. When scientists lobby for their funding from the big agencies and other sources, they don't really account for the people over on the other side of the canyon. This has been the case for years, and over this time, the social and cultural relevance of actual science has pretty much vanished among the populous, and the ability to understand what motivates or interests the general public... or just even how to talk to them ... has disappeared from the culture of science. Not that it was ever there. Looking back, it is clear that the bridges that did exist across this canyon were built by regular people inspired by the occasional super-communicator, such as Carl Sagan. Those bridges were not, in any systematic way, built by the scientists.

Read the book. Respond to it. Help do something to make Unscientific America obsolete. In other words, try to be a good citizen."

I am not sure if I have the heart to read this book. It will make me very sad seeing this great county with so much promise and hope going downhill. I will never be ready to see that happen. The world needs a brilliant and rational America now more than ever.

What the great Indian poet nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote, applies to all denizens of this planet

"Where the mind is without fear
And the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out of the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary sands of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward into ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom,
My Father,
Let my country awake. "

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

Whole point of this blog is to somehow capture what I learn from Max, not by anthropomorphizing him but by canine-morphing myself a little bit. He made me stop and reflect on life. There was no dopamine driven "exotic" changes, in order for me to write an adrenaline pumping thriller but its boring (in a "quintessential" social context) journey coming in terms with oneself in a serene way, with pleasure of seeing the world once again with innocence and wonder. We all had that in us once when we were kids (it's innate) and somehow unconsciously lost it slowly, with no memory of  having that great gift. I am forever indebted and grateful to Max for what he showed and taught me.

Teaching physics to a dog is well .... we all simply KNOW that it sounds ludicrous. Chad Orzel in his new book How to Teach Physics to Your Dog does exactly that. He argues (and of course I concur) that thinking like a dog will help us to learn and understand the mysteries of physics not only better but the whole learning process will be FUN (quantum physics no less!!). Orzel talks about the book here (with excerpts) and this book just climbed to the top slot of my "to be read books" list:

"How to Teach Physics to Your Dog happened by accident. I wrote a talking-physics-with-the-dog blog post at Uncertain Principles in 2007. That post was picked up by BoingBoing, and read by 50,000 people. One of them was an agent, who suggested I should turn the concept into a book.

My initial reaction was skeptical, but after some thought, I realized that dogs and quantum mechanics are a great fit. Anyone who has a dog knows that dogs would readily accept all sorts of weirdness—for example, my dog Emmy constantly expects treats to materialize in the middle of the kitchen, something that I would find quite alarming.

Dogs see the world as a constant source of wonder, and that’s the appropriate stance to take when approaching quantum physics. Quantum mechanics predicts all sorts of unusual things—particles that are also waves, “virtual particles” created from empty space—but if you put aside human preconceptions about how the world should work, it’s an absolutely fascinating subject.

The quantum rules that govern our universe seem utterly bizarre, but in fact, they’ve been tested to astonishing precision and confirmed in every detail. Take Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), a unique phase of matter near absolute zero. The concepts behind BECs can be tricky for humans, but as you can see in the following conversation, Emmy’s quick to accept them, and find ways to use them to advance her interests.

The best way to learn how the world really works, it would seem, is to think like a dog.

I’m standing in the kitchen, sipping tea and watching snow blowing across the back yard. It’s cold enough that the digital thermometer has stopped working, which puts it in the single digits Fahrenheit. I’m not looking forward to walking the dog in this.
“Pretty cold, dude,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s cold, all right.”
“You better let me outside,” she says, tail wagging. “I’m gonna catch a whole bunch of bunnies!”
“A whole bunch? How do you figure?”
“Well, it’s so cold that they’ll all be together. You know, like one of those Bozo condensates.”
“Bozo condensate?” It’s too early in the morning for this.
“You know. When you get stuff cold enough, all the atoms in it suddenly condense into a single quantum state. A Bozo condensate. Since it’s so cold, all the bunnies will condense together. Then when I catch one, I’ll catch them all. Bunnies galore!” Her whole rear end is wagging.
“Okay, first of all, it’s ‘Bose-Einstein condensate,’ after the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, who came up with the idea and sent it to Albert Einstein, who then worked out more of the details.”
“Whatever.”
“More importantly, though, it’s not possible to Bose-condense bunnies.”
“Sure it is. It happens when things get close to zero, and it’s, what, four degrees outside? That’s close to zero.”
“The temperature needs to be close to zero Kelvin, not Fahrenheit. That’s -495 degrees Fahrenheit, or -273 Celsius. The backyard is nowhere near cold enough.”
“But physics humans make BECs all the time, don’t they? I read it on the internet.”
“Sure. It doesn’t just happen, though. We use lasers and magnetic fields to cool a gas of atoms to within a few billionths of a degree of absolute zero, under carefully controlled conditions inside ultra-high vacuum chambers. It took something like seventy years from the Bose-Einstein prediction to the first observation of a BEC in a gas.”
“Why so long?”
“Well, it’s really hard to do. You need the quantum wavelength of the particles you’‘re working with to be comparable to the distance between them, so you need a low temperature and a high density. But not too high, or the atoms will just clump together and make a solid.””
“Wait, isn’t that the same thing?”
“No, not at all. Solids are held together by chemical bonds between atoms. The atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate aren’t chemically bound, they’re just all in the same wavefunction because they prefer to be together with other atoms. It’s kind of like making a pack of dogs.”
“A pack of dogs?”
“Sure. If you have a bunch of dogs in a big space, they’ll just wander around individually, occasionally bumping into one another, like the atoms in a dilute gas. If you bring enough of them close together, though, they’ll realize that there are a bunch of other dogs there, and that they’d be happier being in a pack. Then they’ll all move together in a group, like the atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate.”
“And if the density gets too high, you’ll have a disaster!”
“Ummm… Sure, I guess.”
“Yeah, ’cause if you pack too many dogs too closely together, they’ll all start fighting with each other, and it’ll be a big messy lump, not a nice coherent pack.”
“Yeah, that’s a nice analogy.” I scratch behind her ears, and she rubs against my leg.
“So, how cold would it need to be to condense bunnies?”
“Well… A bunch of one-kilogram bunnies separated by ten centimeters or so would need to be at a temperature of about 10^-42 Kelvin. Give or take a bit.”
“Oh. That’s really cold.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, if you think about it, compared to that, it’s positively balmy outside.” I look down, and she’s wagging her tail, obviously pleased with herself. “So, taking me for a walk isn’t really that bad, is it?”

I sigh, and finish my tea. “Fine. Let me get my coat, and we can go for a walk…”

What I've been reading

After reading Atul Gawande's New Yorker essays, reading his famous book Better : A Surgeon's Notes on Performance was an obvious choice. It's one scary book (unlike this one), opening up "blatant facts" behind the hospital doors. It's more of a book for doctors but it does offers us lots of hidden insights on the importance of leading prevention driven life.

Besides the eye-opening jargon's, Gawande's one advice applies not only to doctors but to everyone of one of us.
 Write - Make it a habit to write.
It helps us in meta cognition, better introspection and self-reflection.

Haiti earth quake and the human sense

True to its nature, the internet of course has been buzzing with news on Haiti and innovative ways to help. And true to our nature, for most humans outside the decibel of that horrible seismic roar, life goes on as usual without a hint of irony (including thyself). There was this lady, an immigrant from Haiti, who works for different department in the same company as I do. So I went there yesterday to check if her family was in Haiti and everything was okay but only to find out she was laid off late last year (this man made economic quake doesn't kill us but does decimates whatever little happiness we try to hold on to).

The genius of Smith and Hume figured all this out long time ago (good history here):

"If he were to lose his little finger tomorrow, he wouldn't sleep tonight but provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of this own." - Adam Smith.

"The Breaking of a mirror gives us more concern when at home, than the burning of a house, when abroad, and some hundred leagues distant." - David Hume.

Tyler Cowen has a few great posts here and here on why Haiti is still so poor.

Haiti earth quake and dog sixth sense

No matter what I try to write here about Max and dogs in general, there is humongous "nuances" which are anthropomorphically incomprehensible. It's  hard for us humans to get out of the parochial self centered world. It's hard to  simply transform everything that goes on between Max and I into mere words, leave alone trying to quantify it.

Just moments before the earth quake in Haiti, a yellow Labrador sensed the earth quake and ran outside the building.Here is the report:

"Animal instinct, pet owners swear by it. From cats sensing impending health problems like seizures, to dogs barking madly when unfamiliar footsteps appear on the garden path.

Even as far back as 373BC, it is recorded that animals, including rats, snakes and weasels, deserted the Greek city of Helice in droves just days before a quake devastated the place. 

Those without that 'special bond', though, remain skeptical. But doubters, prepare to be converted.

 

CCTV footage has emerged of a news station office in North Carolina seconds before an earthquake struck on January 9.

It shows a dog idly passing the time on the floor before, apparently without any duress, springing up and making a swift exit.

Seconds later seats swing out of position, draws slip open and fixtures and  fittings begin to wobble. Then, the shuddering really starts.

While our K9 friend has escaped prior to the quake, people dash for the exits when the room begins to shake forcibly.

The only question is, why didn't man's best friend warm his unaware human colleagues?"

That's a stupid question, the CCTV footage shows no one in the vicinity of the poor Labrador (duh!!).

Dog Genome and Us

Fascinating report on how we bred dogs with selected mutations and now as a pay back, they are helping us to figure out different human traits and god knows what else is in store(another step in right direction, thanks to genome project).

"To hunt for the genes responsible for the blatant physical differences between, say, a dachshund and a shar-pei, researchers performed the first genome-wide analysis of 10 purebreds. They looked for mutations that were specific to certain breeds, suggesting that they might be responsible for a breed's distinct look. The study, which was published January 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, allowed the researchers to identify a gene linked to curly coats in poodles and another gene associated with wrinkles in shar-peis.

"As geneticists, the thing that we find most interesting is phenotypic variation, so outward appearance," says Joshua Akey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the lead authors on the study. "Dogs are probably the most phenotypically diverse organisms that exist."

"Although humans have been able to create a cornucopia of canine varieties without knowing the genes behind the breeds, understanding genetic variations could shed light on diseases in humans that cause parallel physical changes. Akey says one example of such a morphological similarity is a rare human disease that causes the skin to thicken and fold. The mutations that have been attributed to this disease in people lie in the same gene that bestows shar-peis with their wrinkles.

Akey, whose research focuses on understanding natural selection, began working on artificial selection, or breeding, of dogs when he got a call from Mark Neff, a dog geneticist at the University of California, Davis. Neff had gathered genomic information from 275 dogs representing 10 breeds. For each dog, Neff had determined the sequence of nucleotides at 21,000 positions that are known to vary between breeds."

Akey, Neff and their colleagues used similar types of statistical methods for detecting mutations that arose during through natural selection to find which mutations emerged as a result of dog breeding. The researchers identified 155 regions of the genomes, containing 1,630 predicted genes, which show signs of selection. In the case of the shar-pei, Akey says it was easy to finger the gene responsible for their wrinkles because the region had a signature of selection shared among all of the wrinkly shar-peis, which is not found in any of the nonwrinkly sharpies, and contained only three genes. One of those genes had already been associated with the rare skin disease in humans.

In addition to the variations that appear to affect physical traits, the researchers also stumbled upon mutations that lie within genes that express proteins involved in the immune system. "That's what you typically see when you do these studies in natural populations [rather than artificially selected populations], so that was a little bit surprising," Akey says. He adds that selection for genes that improve immune function probably occurred even during breeding because of the strong selection for protection against diseases.

Next up, Akey plans to look for variations that could account for diverse dog behaviors, such as why pointers point and retrievers retrieve. Scientists have already gleaned insight into narcolepsy through studies with dogs. Like physical traits, humans have bred dogs to serve different functions, from herding to hunting. As such, a plethora of canine behaviors have arisen that, like physical traits, could share similarities with human traits."

Great thing about all this is dogs don't have to go through the torture in the name of "necessary evil" and I don't even want to talk about Pepper.

How to brag

Epistemological Modesty should be the motto of life and I adhere to it (I am embrassed even to say I embrace this). But yet sometimes especially being this type, people mistake modesty as submissiveness leading to eventual heartache and misunderstanding. A nice research post on how to nudge others towards to the "factual" information using the innate human cognitive biases.

"Over a hundred undergrads read a conversation between two people - a 'show-off' called Avi who boasted about his A-grade in stats exams, and his friend. Crucially, there were four versions of the conversation, with each undergrad participant reading one version. In two versions, the friend raised the topic of the exam before he either did or did not ask Avi what grade he got; in the other two versions, Avi first raised the topic of the exam, which either did or did not provoke a question from his friend about what grade he got. In every version Avi ended up boasting that he got an 'A+'. Afterwards, the students rated Avi's character.

The crux of it: context is everything when it comes to boasting. If Avi's friend raised the topic of the exams, Avi received favourable ratings in terms of his boastfulness and likeability, regardless of whether he was actually asked what grade he got. By contrast, if Avi raised the topic of the exams, but failed to provoke a question, then his likeability suffered and he was seen as more of a boaster. In other words, to pull off a successful boast, you need it to be appropriate to the conversation. If your friend, colleague, or date raises the topic, you can go ahead and pull a relevant boast in safety. Alternatively, if you're forced to turn the conversation onto the required topic then you must succeed in provoking a question from your conversation partner. If there's no question and you raised the topic then any boast you make will leave you looking like a big-head.

The study author Tal-Or thinks the asking of the question is all-important because of our usually mindless approach to conversations. As a kind of mental short-cut we assume that if a conversant asks a question on a topic then they were probably the ones to have raised that topic in the first place. And once a topic has been raised, a subsequent boast is not seen as such a social sin because it's in context.

Tal-Or tested this idea with a second study, almost identical to the first, but instead of the participants rating Avi's character, they were given a memory test on the conversation. As Tal-Or expected, when participants read the story version in which Avi's friend asked Avi about his grades, they tended to mistakenly remember that the friend had also raised the topic in the first place, even when he hadn't.

'In situations ranging from a first date to a job interview, people commonly face the dilemma of how to make their listeners aware of their success without being perceived as braggers,' Tal-Or said. 'The present research provides a possible solution to this dilemma.'

Before you takes these tips onto the streets, there's one major caveat worth noting. Tal-Or only looked at the perception of the boaster in the eyes of onlookers, not in the eyes of one's actual conversation partner."

How We Decide : Jonah Lehrer Talk

How We Decide is on paper back and Jonah Lehrer's book promotion talk is here. Lot of redundant stuff but some good revision on Metacognition and well, Dopamine.

Animals lovers think ALIKE !!

On this year's "Max" holiday card, Teddy Maximus proclaimed - "I think, I emote, Therefore I am".
Check out Irene Pepperberg (of Alex and me) answer to Edge Annual Question: How has internet changed the way you think?

"I THINK, THEREFORE I AM — STILL ME

The Internet hasn't changed the way I think; it hasn't altered one whit the way in which I — that is, my brain—processes information…other than maybe by forcing me to figure out how to process a lot more of it. Consciously, I still use the same scientific training that was drummed into me as an undergraduate and graduate student in theoretical chemistry, even when it comes to evaluating aspects of my daily life: Based on a certain preliminary amount of information, I develop a hypothesis and try to refine it so that it differs from any competing equally plausible hypotheses; I test the hypothesis; if it is proven true, I rest my case within the limits of that hypothesis, accepting that I may have solved only one piece of a puzzle; if it is proven false, I revise and repeat the procedure.

Maybe the Internet has given me more things to think about, but that doesn't fundamentally change the way I think. Rather, what has changed, and is still changing, is my relationship with the Internet — from unabashed infatuation to disillusionment to a kind of armed truce. And, no, I'm not sidestepping the question, because until the Internet actually rewires my brain, it won't change my processing abilities. Of course, such rewiring may be in the offing, and quite possibly sooner than we expect, but that's not yet the case.

So, my changing love-hate relationship with the Internet."

Feels good when thoughts are in harmony with a fellow animal lover!! Internet hasn't changed the way I think but its has helped me to think more, thanks to plethora of information. For me internet has been an instigator, a catalyst -  to start a spark, speculate on something or constantly feed the curiosity and then I go back to the old fashioned way to books and lectures (on internet) to learn and reflect upon. Did internet help me think better? Yes, it did without re-wriring me (may be it did,  I cannot see or feel my NGF).

I think the answer to the edge question differs depending upon our personality - how we use the internet or how we get used (abused) by the internet.