Evidence Soup

U.S. agencies aren't supposed to allow political interference with scientific evidence. Good luck with that.

Evidence Soup is back in business. These past 3 months, I've been distracted by a number of things, including a move from Denver, Colorado to the San Francisco Bay Area. So, where were we?

Will "4.37 Degrees of Separation" play at the multiplex? Awhile back I wrote about recent research to test the Six Degrees of Separation theory. New evidence suggests that people are separated by an average of 4.74 degrees (only 4.37 in the U.S.). Doesn't really roll off the tongue, and I wouldn't expect Will Smith to star in a sequel. But this latest research applies only to people on Facebook; a New York Times piece reminds us "the cohort was a self-selected group, in this case people with online access who use a particular Web site".

Desperately seeking scientific integrity. Early on, President Obama launched an effort to ensure that the public can "trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions". His March 9, 2009 memorandum made agencies responsible for "the highest level of integrity in all aspects of the executive branch's involvement". Great idea to de-politicize science, though it's much easier said than done -- as evidenced by the nearly-two-year delay in providing "guidelines" for agencies issuing this policy. Really. Those guidelines were published December 17, 2010 [pdf here].

Oh, and meanwhile the Obama Administration was widely criticized for using sloppy science to support its moratorium on offshore drilling after the BP disaster on the Gulf Coast. It's never simple: In real life it requires weighing risks, factoring in economic impacts, and making political tradeoffs (consider this analysis of the economic impact of that ban - [pdf here]). A scientific integrity rule won't give you all the answers you need when making such complex decisions: It's surely not as simple as determining whether scientific findings were manipulated for political purposes.

As explained in a recent National Public Radio story, now we're seeing the first challenge to federal evidence-gathering under this new regime: It's directed at the Bureau of Land Management (a branch of the Department of the Interior). More about that in a moment.

Why is this so hard? It's been rough going for agencies issuing scientific integrity policies. The basics are straightforward enough: Preventing people from twisting or quashing scientific evidence. But here are some reasons why the process is so problematic.

1. Scope. There's no bright line identifying what "science" should be included in an assessment, and therefore subjected to integrity requirements. This complicates things enough when you're working with "objective" evidence. It's even trickier when you bring in fuzzier stuff, like the dismal science (economics), or risk assessment. How can we say for sure what should be considered? Our assumptions about what's important determine what evidence we recognize - whether consciously or subconsciously. Our choices are influenced by our values - but we may not be fully aware of our values, or we may not want to articulate them in a transparent way.
2. Dissemination. Each agency's integrity policy is supposed to provide for open communication, and guide how evidence is presented to the public (see the 2010 guidelines mentioned earlier). It wouldn't serve anyone to have a free-for-all; consistent, controlled dissemination can improve usefulness and understanding. But not everyone agrees on the rights and responsibilities of scientists who want to discuss their findings with the public.
3. Whistle blowing. Among the substantial hurdles is the handling of whistle blowers. (I suppose if such a policy is going to have teeth, the people who want to blow whistles need to feel they can do so without losing their heads.)
4. Transparency. Scientific groups - such as the Union of Concerned Scientists - say they still want to see external accountability under these policies. So far, investigations of misconduct are internal.

12291 all over again? Thirty years ago, President Reagan signed Executive Order 12291, requiring cost-benefit analysis for 'major' federal regulations (those expected to impact the U.S. economy by $100 million or more). Clinton issued a similar order in 1993. In theory, this should have de-politicized some agency decision-making processes. The results (or lack thereof) were the subject of my doctoral dissertation.

As with the new mandate for scientific integrity, a requirement to weigh regulatory costs against benefits leaves lots of room for interpretation, and requires value judgments. When EPA issues a rule under the Clean Air Act, it's difficult enough to estimate how many hospital visits or early deaths are caused by a particular type of airborne particulate matter. But figuring out the social costs is harder still: Requiring businesses & governments to reduce those emissions can lead to job cuts and economic loss, which themselves cause poverty and negative health impacts.

Challenging BLM's process. Citing the new scientific integrity policy, a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has filed a complaint against the BLM, saying "The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is carrying out an ambitious plan to map ecological trends throughout the Western U.S. but has directed scientists to exclude livestock grazing as a possible factor in changing landscapes....  [O]ne of the biggest scientific studies ever undertaken by BLM was fatally skewed from its inception by political pressure.... As a result, the assessments do not consider massive grazing impacts even though trivial disturbance factors such as rock hounding are included, [and they] limit consideration of grazing-related information only when combined in an undifferentiated lump with other native and introduced ungulates (such as deer, elk, wild horses and feral donkeys)." I didn't know we had a feral ungulate problem. But I digress.

This is a good example of how choices about collecting evidence can strongly influence the results. NPR explains that the Dept. of Interior has a scientific integrity officer who is responsible for investigating allegations of political interference. I wish him Godspeed.

 

Is 'six degrees of separation' fact or fiction? Social scientists collect evidence to find out.

We've always heard about Six Degrees of Separation. Now let's see if evidence backs it up. As explained in the Mercury News, "The world's population has almost doubled since social psychologist Stanley Milgram's famous but flawed 'Small World' experiment gave people a new way to visualize their interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. Something else has also changed - the advent of online social networks, particularly Facebook's 750 million members, and that's what researchers plan to use."

You can join in. Social scientists at Yahoo! and Facebook have launched the Small World Experiment, "designed to test the hypothesis that anyone in the world can get a message to anyone else in just 'six degrees of separation' by passing it from friend to friend. Sociologists have tried to prove (or disprove) this claim for decades, but it is still unresolved.

"Now, using Facebook we finally have the technology to put the hypothesis to a proper scientific test. By participating in this experiment, you'll not only get to see how you're connected to people you might never otherwise encounter, you will also be helping to advance the science of social networks."

Photo credit: Film-Buff Movie Reviews, where they play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I chose this picture of young Kevin because this weekend I saw a trailer for the Footloose remake. Some things should probably stay un-remade. (I was there to see Crazy, Stupid, Love, which I highly recommend. Kevin's in that one, too.)

Granular smart grid evidence creates 'aha' moment: Data every 15 seconds vs. 15 minutes.

Peak load not at 5:00pm after all? Typical communications from the local utility ask us to minimize applicance use around 5:00pm, because that's when peak load occurs. That's a busy time, no doubt. But our beliefs may be based on incomplete evidence.

Last week's Science Friday was recorded in San Antonio, Texas. The city's mayor, Julian Castro, and several others spoke about efforts to modernize the energy grid there and across the state. Turns out, their peak load happens closer to 10:30pm. This discovery was made after they began collecting very granular meter data during a pilot project.

Aha moment in Texas. Brewster McCracken, executive director of the Pecan Street Project in Austin, explained that "We kind of almost by accident have ended up with the world's deepest database on how people use energy and now gas and water. It's in 15-second increments.... The most granular data before that was 15 minutes."

"... that's obviously going to be pretty impractical and actually not necessary for utilities, but it is very important for product development to understand, you know, if you're going to try to create a product that is of value to a customer, it's really important to understand what the customer wants. And so one of the ways to do that is to find out their data. And we're finding out, for instance, in the summertime, surprisingly, that the peak time of electricity usage in terms of draw on the grid is 10:30 at night. It's not 5:00 in the afternoon, which was a huge surprise."

McCracken continued: "... here's why, actually. And it doesn't show up in 15-minute data. It only shows up when you take it down to a finer level. We do this in my family, a lot of folks do. You turn down your AC when you go to bed at night to make it a little bit cooler. And the AC has such a huge influence on your home energy usage that it's about - the draw, peak draw can be up to 20 percent higher at like 10:30 at night, 10:00 at night, as it is at 5:00 in the afternoon."

Anecdotal evidence from Colorado. It's 10:16pm as I finish this post. Next thing I'm doing? Cranking up the AC and turning in for the night.

The 'Baby Einstein' evidence debate continues. University sponsoring flawed study pays $175K in legal fees.

There's still a fight over the evidence on Baby Einstein videos, and it's being fought in the press. Today the Denver Post ran the story 'Baby Einstein' DVD creators find redemption in documents suggesting negative study was flawed. (Baby Einstein is a local company.)

I first wrote about the kerfuffle in 2007. It all began when the University of Washington announced a study finding that for each hour-per-day spent watching baby DVDs/videos, infants understood on average six to eight fewer words than those who didn't watch, and recommended that parents limit their use. "This analysis reveals a large negative association between viewing of baby DVDs/videos and vocabulary acquisition," they claimed. (There's a recap of events on Wikipedia. The mainstream press piled on in a big way.)

Much ado about nothing? Initially, I thought this seemed to be a case of a researcher making alarmist statements to the press, not because the evidence was significant, but to promote themselves. And that's still how it seems. I asked back then "Even if this is true, where is the evidence that 6-8 fewer infant words will matter in the long run?" Using this limited research to claim that Baby Einstein (and other) videos are harmful seemed over the top. Another reason I doubted the importance of the study: "Only 17 percent of 384 babies in the survey were put in front of videos for an hour or more each day. The average baby watched only about 9 minutes a day." One has to wonder what factors influenced the children's development during the, um, other 23 hours and 51 minutes of their day.

Show me all the evidence. The creators of Baby Einstein have been fighting back ever since. Bill Clark and Julie Aigner-Clark have obtained internal documents related to the study, and say they've succeeded in having $175,000 of their legal bills paid by the University of Washington. They also say the documents "confirm what they always suspected: The study was deeply flawed and unfairly characterized Baby Einstein products."

According to today's story, the Clarks found "correspondence from one researcher concerned about how certain results were analyzed. While children 8 months to 16 months who watched baby videos fell behind in vocabulary, the study also found that in children 17 months to 24 months, vocabulary increased and the negative effects evaporated." (Apparently that vocabulary rebound was part of the published report but was downplayed in news releases.)

No follow-up. An internal email, between a reviewer and one of the researchers, asked  "What's the notion about how (we're) reconciling the fact that there was an effect on the young kids but it washed out by the time they were 17-24, and we now will be wanting to follow the young kids when they're older?" Apparently there was supposed to be follow-up research with the same parents, but that was scrapped due to cost.

What a waste of resources. Disney eventually was pressured to offer refunds to Baby Einstein customers. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) even wasted time on this. Eventually, as explained in the Washington Post, a separate group of researchers found that although "an hour a day of television viewing won't make your kid a genius, it won't harm his development either.... At first glance, the study's authors found decreased language and visual motor skills in kids who watched more television. But then, the researchers adjusted the results to account for the mother's age, income, education, marital status and vocabulary. And you know what? They found that mom's education level and vocabulary rather than the television greatly impacted baby's."

 

Bad evidence for a good cause.

Remember awhile back when craigslist promised to cut back on its 'adult' classifieds, in response to claims that ads for child prostitution (due to sex trafficking) were rampant on the site? Hmmm. It seems the public outcry -- however well-intended -- may have been based on bad evidence.

Junk science? This is far removed from my area of expertise, but folks who have looked closely at the situation say the so-called studies claiming exponential growth of child prostitution are based on junk science. Shown here is Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University, who says one of the influential studies is based on a logical fallacy (to put it mildly). Some of the accusations about the research methodologies are mind-boggling; I suppose people are quick to accept findings when the stakes are so high.

Links to critiques are provided below. But first (pardon my ignorance), I'm not even sure what's been removed from craigslist since this whole kerfuffle erupted. I looked at their personals section today (for Denver), and saw recent listings for women seeking men, etc.

Evidently, I am clueless. But I don't see how removing some ads from craigslist will help the situation. If law enforcement officials want to hunt down sex traffickers, aren't they better off having the classifieds posted publicly, rather than having this stuff happen over private networks/text messages or whatever? It seems to me that transparency works in favor of law and order.

Here's some further reading about the evidence (or lack thereof) on sex trafficking in the U.S. and elsewhere:

Washington Post: Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence: U.S. Estimates Thousands of Victims, But Efforts to Find Them Fall Short. 

The most recent cover story in Westword (the Denver version of Village Voice): Women's Funding Network sex-trafficking study is junk science.

Village Voice has put together a list of references, including the London Guardian article Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution.

 

 

A must-read: Yudkowsky's gentle, brilliant explanation of Bayesian reasoning and evidence. And why we overestimate breast cancer occurrence 85% of the time.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. No videos today, just an important lesson told in an entertaining way. Eliezer Yudkowsky is a research fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artifical Intelligence. Boy howdy, can he explain stuff. He's written some great explanations of Bayes' theorem for non-practitioners. [Thanks to @SciData (Mike Will) for linking to this.]

How Bayesian reasoning relies on evidence. Bayes depends on something called 'priors': These are prior probabilities (think of them as 'original' probabilities before additional information becomes available). We use evidence to establish the value of these priors (e.g., the proportion of people with a particular disease or condition). Bayes' theorem is then used to determine revised, or posterior, probabilities given some additional information, such as a test result. (Where do people get priors? "There's a small, cluttered antique shop in a back alley of San Francisco's Chinatown. Don't ask about the bronze rat.")

Yudkowsky opens by saying "Your friends and colleagues are talking about something called 'Bayes' Theorem' or 'Bayes' Rule', or something called Bayesian reasoning. They sound really enthusiastic about it, too, so you google and find a webpage about Bayes' Theorem and... It's this equation. That's all. Just one equation. The page you found gives a definition of it, but it doesn't say what it is, or why it's useful, or why your friends would be interested in it. It looks like this random statistics thing." Then he walks through a simple example about calculating breast cancer risk for a woman with a positive mammography result. Very hands-on, including little calculators like this:

Risk, misunderstood 85% of the time? The scary part is this: "Next, suppose I told you that most doctors get the same wrong answer on this problem - usually, only around 15% of doctors get it right. ("Really?  15%?  Is that a real number, or an urban legend based on an Internet poll?" It's a real number. See Casscells, Schoenberger, and Grayboys 1978; Eddy 1982; Gigerenzer and Hoffrage 1995; and many other studies. It's a surprising result which is easy to replicate, so it's been extensively replicated.)"

Evidence slides probability up or down. I especially like Yudkowsky's description of how evidence 'slides' probability in one direction or another. For instance, in the breast cancer example, if a woman receives a positive mammography result, the revised probability of cancer slides from 1% to 7.8%, while a negative result slides the revised probability from 1% to 0.22%.

About priors. Yudkowsky reminds us that "priors are true or false just like the final answer - they reflect reality and can be judged by comparing them against reality. For example, if you think that 920 out of 10,000 women in a sample have breast cancer, and the actual number is 100 out of 10,000, then your priors are wrong. For our particular problem, the priors might have been established by three studies - a study on the case histories of women with breast cancer to see how many of them tested positive on a mammography, a study on women without breast cancer to see how many of them test positive on a mammography, and an epidemiological study on the prevalence of breast cancer in some specific demographic."

The Bayesian discussion references the classic Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases, edited by D. Kahneman, P. Slovic and A. Tversky. "If it seems to you like human thinking often isn't Bayesian... you're not wrong. This terrifying volume catalogues some of the blatant searing hideous gaping errors that pop up in human cognition."

You must read this. Yudkowky's Bayesian discussion continues with a more in-depth example, eventually leading to a technical explanation of technical explanation. I recommend that one, too.

You like insightful analysis of interesting evidence, yes? Then start Barking up the wrong tree.

I highly recommend the blog Barking up the wrong tree. Great stuff on psychology, decision-making, and such. Brought to you by Eric Barker - @bakadesuyo on Twitter. (Thanks to Douglas Heingartner for the heads up on this: I recently wrote about his Metastudies.Org.)

Just the interesting stuff. For each research topic he covers, Barker puts together a snappy summary that gets right to the point. Some examples of the things he writes about:

Do smart people perform worse than dumb people on some cognitive tasks? "[T]here are some cases where additional working memory has no benefit - or can even be a disadvantage. A great example of this can be found in Decaro et al's recent article in Cognition, who show that subjects with higher working memory capacity are actually worse at learning complex rules in a categorization task...

Can you tell if a politician is liberal or conservative just by looking at them? "[P]erceivers were more accurate when they rated politicians whose attitudes were opposite to their own position.... Finally, politicians who were rated accurately had higher chances of being reelected to the following parliamentary session."

Don't delay, start reading Barking up the wrong tree today. Barker provides citations to his sources. Also, I like how he includes links to related previous posts, and provides book recommendations. 

Text mining accuracy: Reliable evidence, or just fish stories?

Goin' fishin', instead of just a-wishin'. If you're doing text analytics, how do you measure evidence of success? On the SAS blog The Text Frontier, Richard Foley offers a helpful explanation of statistical classification techniques being used. In Fishing for Accuracy in Text Analytics, he describes how accuracy is determined - and explains why other evidence is sometimes better suited for assessing whether you're meeting your objectives.

Here, we're talking about statistical methods for classifying data, not necessarily rule-based classification. Thanks to Ralph Winters (RDub2 on Twitter) for posting this article on the LinkedIn group Data & Text Analytics Professionals.

Foley uses a fishing metaphor to explain text mining. "Fisherman typically have a fish locater that tells them where the fish are. The fish locater shows a collection of fish, gathered in a certain area.... You can think of this locater as a crawler gathering the documents that relate to the topic at hand, so you would have a grouping of fish or documents." Extending the metaphor, he talks about fishing with a net, or with various types of lures - including ones designed for specific species. If you're trying to catch a certain type of fish, and only that type of fish, than a custom lure is probably what you want: It will improve your accuracy.

Choose your weapon. But Foley explains, "I can also use a net, which in one fell swoop will catch everything in the area at one time. The problem is I’ll catch everything including sticks and other fish." These other undesirable fish correspond to false positives in text analytics.

Is it the evidence you need? Text analytics proponents often talk about accuracy. But that's not always the best evidence for determining whether you're achieving your business objectives: You might be better off with a net, not a lure. Foley: "In some cases, the net... is more important. An example in the real world would be looking for fraud: you want to make sure you get all the potential fraud cases, you aren’t worried as much about the false positives." In assessing the success of a text analytics effort, he reminds us to ask ourselves questions like these:

1. Was the workload reduced?
2. Were we able to spot trends?
3. What marketing lift was achieved?
4. Was risk reduced?

Again with the Power Balance Bracelets: Another look at the evidence.

Today's Fun-with-Evidence Friday takes a second look at the evidence on Power Balance bracelets. Little did I know when I first wrote about these hologram thingies that How do those Power Balance bracelets work? I think it's because of the 20-Hz difference between a genius and an ascending colon. would become (by far) the most-linked Evidence Soup post.

Since then I ran across the Not-So-Friendly Humanist (who I took an immediate liking to, based on the name). He's done some nice analysis of PB bands. (Referring to angry responses from proponents of woo, NSFH uses the word quacklash, which gives me another reason to like him -- he credits Jack of Kent for the phrase.)

My most cherished email. Ever. Speaking of backlash, the best anonymous comment I've received so far - apparently responding to my observation that some references to supporting evidence led to product web pages (not research), or returned 404 errors: "Your PC must be rubbish, because these links work fine."

<snort> This is from a cartoon and writeup by Mark Russell in Australia's The Age, wondering if the bracelets are real, or whether NBA players should save their money. I remind myself that endorsements do provide a persuasive, social-proof source of evidence - but shouldn't be the only form of evidence.

"Designed to..." doesn't cut it. Back to our Not-So-Friendly Humanist. He's a good writer, offering well-reasoned critiques of vague claims. For example: "You can often tell when a claim is a bit suspect when you get language like this.... 'Power Balance holograms are designed to work with your body’s natural energy field.' Notice the ‘designed’. It doesn’t say they do work with your body’s energy field, whatever that means, just that that’s what it was designed to do. There’s similar language in a section titled ‘How does the hologram work?’ which is something I wanted to know too. Unfortunately it doesn’t answer its own question. 'Power Balance is based on the idea of optimizing the body’s natural energy flow, similar to concepts behind many Eastern philosophies.' Based on the idea, designed to resonate.... Does the hologram produce a field? What kind of field?"

Placebo bands - entrenched in Hollywood? These things aren't just for superstar athletes. Russell Crowe has been spotted wearing a Power Balance bracelet (or some other flavor of hologram band). Many have started calling them placebo bands - I was delighted to see some Twitter folks (including @Skepdude) imagining them playing pivotal roles in Hollywood movies: They've been writing #PlaceboBandMovieLines such as "I'll get you, and your little placeboband, too." or "We're gonna need a bigger placeboband."

NSFH goes to town on those who say if holograms didn't work, people wouldn't wear them: "Ah yes, ...and 30% of people in France wouldn’t use homeopathy if it didn’t work... they think they’ve seen the evidence when really they’re suffering from recall bias and confirmation bias. That’s why the Randomised Controlled Trial is the gold standard of testing these kinds of claims." Agreed.

Quick recap. Here's my original post in case you haven't seen it:
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[30-April-2010] Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. Let's take a look at the Power Balance bracelet, which some people claim can improve athletic performance. PB is described as "performance technology that uses holograms embedded with frequencies that react positively with your body’s natural energy field".

PB uses a 'test' to convince people that the technology will work (more about that below). PowerBalance.com says a test video is coming soon. But they already have a heck of a testimonial: Shaquille O'neal says “I came across Power Balance when someone did the test on me. That night, while playing for the Phoenix Suns, there were about three of my teammates with the product on and we won that game by 57 points! I kept feeling something when I wore the bracelet, so I kept wearing it. When I took it off I went back to normal. I’ve been wearing the bracelet ever since.”

The lucky charm effect? It could be that these work - at least temporarily - because the wearer believes they work. Thursday's Wall Street Journal had an excellent story on The Power of Lucky Charms. There is peer-reviewed evidence that "a belief in good luck can affect performance." An article in the upcoming June issue of Psychological Science reports a study in which "participants on a putting green who were told they were playing with a 'lucky ball' sank 6.4 putts out of 10, nearly two more putts, on average, than those who weren't told the ball was lucky. That is a 35% improvement." Positive thinking can make a difference in cases where someone has the ability to influence an outcome.

As shown here, Power Balance pendants are also available, made of "sterling silver from Bali.... equipped with two PB holograms embedded on the back under a clear epoxy resin window for easy viewing." SLAM, a basketball web site, recently did a Q&A with Josh Rodarmel, one of the Power Balance founders, who explained that his father "was into this technology that was similar to Power Balance, but it was like $500-600." So Rodarmel's brother, Troy, "started researching what Mylar bags were made of and figured out that it was basically a hologram. That’s how we became able to mass produce it at an affordable rate."

Just a stage trick? The bracelet is available for $49 US from amazon, with mostly negative reviews (amazon marketplace merchants offer it for under $30). My favorite product review says "'Applied Kinesiology', which is the demonstration used to sell these bracelets, is an old stage magician's trick. If you fell for it, you've been had. This product is a con. There is no plausible hypothesis behind it, and well established stage trickery explains why the demonstration is always successful." (More about applied kinesiology demonstrations here.)

The site Rat Bags granted PB a 2009 Millenium Award, saying the product is effective only in that "The judges tried some of the wristbands on and they unanimously agreed that the bracelets certainly increased the strength of their laughter." Rat Bags recaps a television story featuring a "special bracelet that a skeptic could not explain", and quotes the company's Australian distributor as saying that the Mylar is supposed to restore the body's frequency to somewhere near the 7.83 hertz required.

Not so fast. But there's positive feedback also. On Examiner.com there's a review saying "the Power Balance bracelet - reviewed by triathletes and others - you have to try it". The story says "Research has shown that the cells of the body are capable of finding their own frequency. Other objects can also match a frequency." Quoting VibeLife.net: "For example, if you tap a 440 Hz tuning fork and move another 440 Hz tuning fork near it, the second tuning fork will duplicate the same tone (or oscillate) with the same tone as the one that was tapped." So the PB supposedly allows the body's cells to operate at their optimal level. Does this mean Shaq will score more 3-pointers in his next NBA game?

What's your frequency? This frequency stuff is huge. The researchers behind an addiction therapy site, NewWayClinic.com, explain that "The human body has a normal frequency range of 62 Hz to 68 Hz, as the frequency range lowers due to the constant use of alcohol or drugs, the worse the health condition becomes." Their reported findings include: normal brain frequency (head) 72-78 Hz, brain frequency at 80-82 MHz indicates a genius, healthy body (neck down) 62-68 Hz, disease begins & colds invade 59-60 Hz, ascending colon 58-60 Hz, cancer can set in 42 Hz, death begins at 20 H. Meanwhile, fresh produce is supposed to have up to a 15-Hz frequency, while canned foods have zero. ("Invading pathogenic frequencies (toxins & viruses) are low. Positive beneficial bacterial frequencies are higher.")

The clinic claims that "By using the principles above it is possible to the remove the frequency patterns of nicotine, alcohol or drugs from the body and so help to the stop the physical dependency for that substance(s)." They apply a phase-cancellation technique to treat addiction ("By correctly analysing a substance and applying Formula 23®, we can create a wave, which is 180° out of phase.... [As] each wave cancels the other out, as a result the body requires less substance(s) each day to feel 'normal' until clean.")

Show us the evidence. According to New Way, "there have been clinical studies conducted on the effectiveness of using the above techniques for asthma, allergies & skin disease." They list "success rates" in the range of 78%-93%, but the links they provided were broken, and all I got was 404 errors.
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Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday, everybody.

Evidence "proves" that guided meditation boosts brain efficiency, after only 11 short hours.

When I am stressed and stop to take several deep breaths, I feel much more relaxed and focused. But I still have a problem with a recent media piece on new evidence about meditation - especially since it's on a pretty decent blog, Smarter Technology. The article Meditation Proven to Boost Brain Efficiency isn't a complete disaster, but here's how it could be better:

• Avoid saying "proven". The article reports one study conducted on 45 students at the Univ of Oregon. Maybe use something like "suggests" or "links" or "influences" next time.
• Cite the research being presented. The article provides the names of the investigators, but doesn't provide a link to the published findings, or say what journal they're appearing in. (Though it does say the project is "sanctioned by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences", and includes a photo of one of the researchers accepting a National Medal of Science award from President Obama - which is nice, but doesn't tell us much about the evidence.)

In this study, participants used a technique called integrative body-mind training (IBMT). Here's what the researchers found, according to the article: "Just 11 hours of guided meditation is all you need to make positive structural changes in your brain.... Changes in connectivity were observed in the test group, but not in the control group, after just 6 hours of IBMT and became statistically significant after just 11 hours."

Can you be more specific? This had me wondering: Were they meditating for 11 hours straight, or did this happen over a longer period of time? Because that would stress me out in a big way.

Here's a graphic of a human brain with some areas colored red and yellow. "Before and after each training session, the subjects' brain functions were measured with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique called diffusion tensor imaging. By examining the fibers that connect neurons together in the brain, the researchers were able to observe positive changes in the portion of the brain that regulates emotions and behaviors, called the anterior cingulate cortex."