HENRY

Joe Queenan in the LA Times tries to justify his hatred of sharks, hyenas and anacondas:

Like most people in this country, I have long hated sharks, largely because of what they did to Robert Shaw in “Jaws.” For years, I thought of sharks as mindless, demonic eating machines, an attitude reinforced by the harrowing story Shaw told Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider about the 1945 Japanese torpedo attack on the U.S. cruiser Indianapolis. Although many of the 880 casualties died because of exposure or drinking saltwater, many were eaten by the tigers of the deep. So, all in all, it seemed almost unpatriotic not to hate them.

Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called “Project Nim.”

Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was attempting to find out if a chimpanzee could learn to communicate using American Sign Language.

“Everyone knows that words are learned one at a time,” but something happens when children begin to combine words and create true language, Terrace says.

The question, he says, was, “Could Nim do this?”

University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.

The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study’s final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment.

The instructions for packing a fresh brain for shipment to the New York Brain Bank. Step 1: Put the fresh brain (A) in the first ziploc bag…

Now, I’m really skeptical of the six-degrees of freedom stuff, and mildly skeptical of small world network things in general (lots of shiny, little usefulness). However, I may be swayed by some new research coming out of Microsoft (?!) who tracked a metric crap-tonne of instant messages traveling through the MSN network:

Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and Jure Leskovec, who was an intern at the time, crunched through masses of data, logging a month’s worth of global ‘instant messaging’ conversations using Microsoft Messenger — software that facilitates chat, in a similar way to e-mail, but in a more instantaneous and less formal fashion. The researchers then counted how many messages were sent and from where: in total they tallied up a whopping 255 billion messages sent in the course of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people during June 2006.

They found that the average path length is just over the Kevin Bacon gold-standard, at 6.6 nodes between any person. The full paper is available here.

Kenneth Chang in the NY Times talks about The Grim Story of Maya Blue:

The vibrant sky color can be seen on pottery, murals and other artifacts produced by the Maya people of Central America centuries ago and the unusual, durable pigment remains vibrant today long after other colors have faded away.

It was also the color of Chaak, the rain god, and of human sacrifice.

Oh this is going to be a scandal - a large-scale meta-analysis of anti-depressant medication has shown that Prozac, the third most prescribed antidepressant in the US, doesn’t work.

The paper (Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration) obtained all the clinical trial information from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about the six most widely-prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) - fluoxetine (i.e. Prozac), venlafaxine (Effexor), nefazodone (Serzone), paroxetine (Seroxat, Paxil), sertraline (Zoloft, Lustral), and citalopram. The authors then compared the effect of these SSRIs to a placebo (a pill with no effect).

Strikingly the results of this meta-analysis show that “the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medications is below recommended criteria for clinical significance”. Or, the effect of these drugs is not significantly different to that of the placebos. Even more damning, the authors show that whilst the SSRIs have more of an effect on people with higher levels of depression, this is because the placebos stop working as well at higher levels of depression.

The Guardian has some excellent coverage on this paper, where they quote one of the co-authors:

“Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed,” says Kirsch. “This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported.”

Ouch, and what’s worse, once these findings get reported in the media, all that placebo effect is going to disappear too, making these as worthless as candy.

Kirsch, I., Deacon, B.J., Huedo-Medina, T.B., Scoboria, A., Moore, T.J., Johnson, B.T. (2008). Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. PLoS Medicine, 5(2), e45. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045