The Bio-Rad PCR song

Just to finish off our introduction to the brave new world of biotechnology advertising, here is the Bio-Rad PCR song. PCR, the polymerase chain reaction, is a laboratory technique used to amplify DNA that uses thermal cycling units made by Bio-Rad and others.

Buy an automatic pipette from a boy band?

I am sitting now in my office in Bock Laboratories at the University of Wisconsin, where I ran a research factory for 30 years, generating Ph.D.s, Post-Docs, and some information on how our eyes turn light into a nerve signal. (My office as a retired professor is what I call a 'view with a room', and is actually upstairs at the top of the building in which my factory occupied half the third floor.) During that period I purchased hundreds of automatic pipettes (for accurately delivering small volumes of liquid) from the Eppendorf company, ordering from a simple dry brochure, and occasionally seeing an add in a scientific magazine.

Here, then, is my latest "Oh my Gawd, how things have changed" experience. Eppendorf using a Boy Band video to advertise its product:

Bias at the ballot box.

Berger et al. provide an interesting demonstration of how susceptible a voter's choice is to environmental cues. The two types of study done are described in Tim Lincoln's review of this work in Nature:

The first was an analysis of results from a general election held in Arizona in 2000, the ballot for which included a proposition to raise state sales tax from 5.0% to 5.6%, to increase education spending. Polling stations included churches, schools, community centres and government buildings.

Berger et al. predicted that voting in a school would produce more support for the proposition than voting in other places. Indeed it did, but not by much compared with other documented effects on voter choice such as order on the ballot paper. Nonetheless, the effect persisted through tests for various other confounding factors (for example, the possibility of a consistently different level of voter turnout at school polling locations).

The second study was a carefully run online experiment that also involved a proposed tax increase to fund schools. The 'voting environment' was manipulated by exposing participants to typical images of schools or control images. The upshot was the same, with the school images prompting greater (and apparently unconscious) support for the initiative than, for example, an image of an office.

All in all, the authors conclude that what they call contextual priming of polling location affects how people vote. They reasonably wonder whether such factors could, for example, influence voting in a church on such matters as gay marriage and stem-cell research.

But here's a thought. In the event of science spending being on the political agenda, why not offer the lab as a polling station? But maybe dim that fluorescent lighting, and persuade all those bearded fellows in white coats to take the day off — or not, as the case may be.

More from the great curmudgeon...

To follow up my June 15 post, here is an Esquire Magazine "What I have learned" offering from Gore Vidal that my colleague Jim Steakley alterted me to. A few selections:

God has been expelled. I think he knows when he’s on a losing wicket.
I went into a line of work in which jealousy is the principle emotion between practitioners. I don’t think I ever suffered from it, because there was no need. But I was aware of it in others, and I found it a regrettable fault.
There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, “Well, so-and-so will like this,” which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.
You hear all this whining going on, “Where are our great writers?” The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, “I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.” We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.
Every fool I knew had gone to university. I didn’t think it necessary. I’d seen some of the results, you know?
When I was young, I was bored shitless with being desired by others. I don’t look in the mirror anymore.
I lived with Howard for fifty years, but what we had was certainly not romantic love, not passionate love. And it certainly was nonsexual. Try and explain that to the fags.
Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.
When she was running for the Senate, Hillary’s psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately -- I heard she said, “I remind them of their first wife.”
“You got to meet everyone -- Jackie Kennedy, William Burroughs.” People always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the true way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to? Otherwise it sounds like I spent my life hustling around trying to meet people: “Oh, look, there’s the governor.“
For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it’s wrong or not, I’m beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, “It’s existential.” He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.
We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.
Get rid of religion. It’ll do you no good.
As the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know.
I wasn’t like everyone, you know. What everyone did, I was sure not to do.

A memorial for our president...

I simply can't resist passing this on - an article on a proposal, naturally hatched in a bar, to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on the shoreline of San Francisco to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. This is a memorial you can contribute to from your bathroom. The proposal has enough signatures to qualify it as an initiative on the November ballot.

Can 'emergence' put spirituality back into nature?

The anti-reductionist view of emergence undergoes cycles of popularity as a philosophical topic. Valerie Hardcastle gives a rather critical review (in Jour. Consciousness Studies, Vol. 14, No. 11, pp.119-122) of a recent collection "The Re-Emergence of Emergence - The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion" edited by Clayton and Davies (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). This emergentism is 'feel good' stuff. I think most of us get a bit frightened and a bit dried and shriveled up at the implications of strong reductionism in which all the explanatory arrows point down. Reversing the reductionist’s causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that breaks no laws of physics and yet cannot be explained by them is a laudable project, but as Hardcastle wryly notes, one that continues to fail the "where's the beef" test.

Michael Shermer offers a very appealing gloss in his "Skeptic" column in the Scientific American, with the title: Sacred Science - Can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature? He specifically reviews a new book by Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred (Basic Books, 2008). Denis Noble also reviews Kauffman's book in Science Magazine. Here are some clips from Shermer's column:
Kaufman:

...reverses the reductionist’s causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that Kaufman says “breaks no laws of physics” and yet cannot be explained by them. God “is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures.” In Kauffman’s emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics... How would a reductionist explain the biosphere, for example? “One approach would be, following Newton, to write down the equations for the evolution of the biosphere and solve them. This cannot be done,” Kauffman avers. “We cannot say ahead of time what novel functionalities will arise in the biosphere. Thus we do not know what variables—lungs, wings, etc.—to put into our equations. The Newtonian scientific framework where we can prestate the variables, the laws among the variables, and the initial and boundary conditions, and then compute the forward behavior of the system, cannot help us predict future states of the biosphere.”... This problem is not merely an epistemological matter of computing power, Kauffman cautions; it is an ontological problem of different causes at different levels. Something wholly new emerges at these higher levels of complexity.

Similar ontological differences exist in the self-organized emergence of consciousness, morality and the economy...economics and evolution are complex adaptive systems that learn and grow as they evolve from simple to complex...they are autocatalytic, containing self-driving feedback loops...such phenomena “cannot be deduced from physics, have causal powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the universe.” This creative process of emergence, Kauffman contends, “is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe.”

Shermer ends noting that Kaufman's:

God 2.0 is a deity worthy of worship. But I am skeptical that it will displace God 1.0, Yahweh, whose Bronze Age program has been running for 6,000 years on the software of our brains and culture.

Neuro-puffs and neuropundits...

Check out this debunking of neuroimaging research on things like political partisanship and superbowl commercials.

A new perspective on culture-specific behavior

Yamagishi et al. demonstrate that the East Asian "preference" for conformity is actually a default strategy to avoid accrual of negative reputation. When the possibility for negative evaluations in a given situation was clearly defined, cultural differences in the tendency for uniqueness disappeared. The framework for analyzing the motivations for choices made by Japanese and Americans in a simple task is described in a summary in Science.

When offered a single colored pen from a group of five pens as a token payment for filling out a survey, Hokkaido students were less likely than Wolverines (Michigan students) to take a particular pen if it were the only one of that color available--that is, they would avoid reducing the scope of choice for subsequent people and thus, by incurring the cost of passing up the uniquely colored pen, not run the risk of making a negative impression on others. In contrast, a cultural psychological assessment would explain this outcome as revealing the preference (higher valuation) that East Asians place on conformity as opposed to the affinity of Westerners for individualism. When the choice task was expanded to include situations where the student was told explicitly that he was the first or the last of the five students to receive pens, the East-West difference disappeared; both Japanese and Americans were less likely to take the uniquely colored if they were the first and more likely (equally so) if they were the last to choose.

Yamagishi et al. suggest that:

... while cultural psychological perspectives are commendable for bringing culture into the mainstream of psychology, they have tended to be oversimplistic in attributing the cause of culture-specific behaviors to internalized cultural norms and values.

Their approach to the issue of the culturally grounded nature of human behavior is:

... from a game-theoretic perspective, and proposes an institutional approach as an alternative to the cultural psychology approach. The institutional approach to cultural differences views culture-specific behavior as strategies adapted to a set of collectively created social incentives. In this framework, no psychological concepts such as self-construals are required to interpret cultural differences, and thus the institutional approach can provide a more parsimonious explanation of cultural differences that can extend toward social science disciplines outside of psychology.

A great curmudgeon of our times...

This Deborah Solomon interview with Gore Vidal cracked me up so much I wanted to pass it on:

Q: At the age of 82, you will be publishing your new collection of essays this week, which seems likely to confirm your reputation as one of America’s last public intellectuals. Why do you think that critics have traditionally praised your essays more than your fiction, which includes “Burr,” “Myra Breckinridge” and 20 other novels? That’s because they don’t know how to read. I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States . I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in The New York Times .
Are you saying your novels have been critically neglected? I don’t even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view. I’ve never had much attention paid by critics — nor has anybody else in the United States of America, as Mr. Obama likes to call it.
And what about Mr. McCain? Disaster. Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?
Everyone knows he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. That’s what he tells us.
Why would you doubt him? He’s a graduate of Annapolis. I know a lot of the Annapolis breed. Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
So what does that have to do with the U.S. Naval Academy down in Annapolis? The service universities keep track of each other, that’s all. They have views about each other. And they are very aware of social class and eventually money, since they usually marry it.
How, exactly, is your cousin Al Gore related to you? They keep explaining it to me, and I keep forgetting.
What about your grandfather, Thomas Gore of Oklahoma ? He invented the whole state. It was Indian territory. There was no state until Senator Gore.
In 1968, during the Nixon-Humphrey race, you became the voice of liberalism in a series of televised debates with William Buckley. Any plans to be a pundit at the coming presidential conventions? No.
How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year? I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.
You live in California , where last month the State Supreme Court overturned the ban on same-sex marriage . As someone who lived with a male companion for 50-plus years, do you see this as a victory for equality? People would ask, How could you live with someone for so long without any problems of any kind? I said, There was no sex.
Were you chaste during those years? Chased by whom?
Are you a supporter of gay marriage? I know nothing about it. I don’t follow that.
Why doesn’t it interest you? The same reason heterosexual marriage doesn’t seem to interest me.
If we look at the situation apart from you — It’s my interview, so we’ve got to stay with me.
Have you ever considered leaving the United States permanently? No, it’s my subject.
Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction these days? Like everyone else, no, I don’t.
Anyone in the 20th century you might have a kind word about? Yes, I liked Italo Calvino, and I thought he was the greatest writer of my time.
Your new collection includes an essay in which you note, “Calvino does what very few writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty.” What about American novelists? Can’t think of one.
Norman Mailer? Oh, dear, we’re not going to go into pluses and minuses now.
Philip Roth? Ditto.
I admire Roth. He never became complacent. He had no reason to. He’s a good comic writer.
What do you think is your own best novel? I don’t answer questions like that. Ever. And you ought not to ask them.
Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you. I doubt that.

Obama and Neuroeconomics

In the New York Review of Books John Cassidy offers an interesting review of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.

If Obama isn't an old-school Keynesian, what is he? One answer is that he is a behavioralist—the term economists use to describe those who subscribe to the tenets of behavioral economics, an increasingly popular discipline that seeks to marry the insights of psychology to the rigor of economics...One of the reasons this approach has proved so popular is that it appears to provide a center ground between the Friedmanites and the Keynesians, whose intellectual jousting dominated economics for most of the twentieth century...Thaler and Sunstein lay out a number of principles that can be used to encourage better choice-making, and they apply them to various topical issues, including retirement saving, health care, and the environment. In a number of cases, the measures that Thaler and Sunstein recommend are mirrored by proposals in Obama's voluminous policy papers, which can be downloaded from his Web site.

Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

Napier and Jost offer an interesting perspective in their article in Psychological Science. Here is an edited excerpt from their general discussion:

In three studies, using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine additional countries, we consistently found that conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers). This ideological gap in happiness is not accounted for by demographic differences or by differences in cognitive style (liberals becoming less satisfied with their current situation because of the deleterious effects of rumination and introspection - versus conservatives tending to prefer relatively simple, unambiguous answers to life's questions). We did find, however, that the rationalization of inequality—a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals. These findings are consistent with system-justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function. The studies suggest that conservatism provides an emotional buffer against the negative hedonic impact of inequality in society.

The relation between political orientation and self-reported happiness as a function of the Gini inequality index, 1974 through 2004.

Only a theory!

Toasting the Joys of Imbibing Properly

Check out this review by Dwight Garner of "EVERYDAY DRINKING - The Distilled Kingsley Amis". The book deals with more than the physical manifestations of a hangover:

...What also urgently needs to be treated, he observed, is the metaphysical hangover — “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” that looms on the grizzled morning after...Amis recommended, among other things, a course of “hangover reading,” one that “rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim."..Thus he suggested beginning with Milton — “My own choice would tend to include the final scene of ‘Paradise Lost,’ ” he wrote, “with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6” — before running through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eric Ambler and, finally, a poulticelike application of light comedies by P. G. Wodehouse and Peter De Vries.

Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

My son Jonathan sent me this link to an engaging talk by Dan Dennett given some time ago. I heard it back then, and think it is worth passing on...

Music becoming a monoculture...

David Huron writes an interesting essay in the May 22 issue of Nature noting the fact that as millions of musical recordings have become available over the web, there has been a

...collapse in the diversity of musical minds. A Nigerian group might sing in Yoruba, but the harmonies are thoroughly Western. Native American Navajo singers make valiant efforts to preserve their traditions, but to the trained musicologist, their singing bears the unmistakable imprint of Western scales. The casual listener hears a wealth of variety; the musicologist detects a rapidly spreading monoculture — albeit expressed in many forms.
...Linguists know how fast languages disappear. Musical cultures may be an order of magnitude more fragile. It will be many centuries before the whole world speaks Mandarin. Meanwhile Western music has swept the globe faster than aspirin. Robust musical cultures remain in China, India, Indonesia and the Arab world, but even in these regions, most people are thoroughly acquainted with Western music through film and television. Less robust musical cultures are disappearing rapidly or are showing deep infiltration by Western musical foundations. Many have already disappeared. There remain only a few isolated pockets, such as the highlands of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya.

Blogging as self-medication

Maybe I've found one of the reasons I do this blog (other than to keep me off the streets): An article by Jessica Wapner in the June issue of Scientific American discusses studies on the therapeutic value of blogging. Blogging is claimed to provide physiological benefits similar to those that have been shown for expressive writing (serving as a stress-coping mechanism, improving memory and sleep, and boosting immune cell activity.) Blogging may act as a "placebo for getting satisfied." The blogosphere offers an antidote to social isolation. (Checking out my 'mdbownds' YouTube video postings reveals that the Debussy Reverie video has been viewed 98,739 times and 157 comments made; this mindblog gets 500-600 visitors each day. While this is social connection, I totally don't know any of you people, except for a handful of friends.) I find fleeting virtual world contacts a pallid substitute for real life huggable friends, and sometimes fret that my time spent hunkering over a keyboard provides too convenient an excuse for the harder work of being a robust member of real (versus virtual) social groups.

For your memorial day holiday hangover

Check out this article by Joan Acocella in the May 26 issue of The New Yorker, "A Few Too Many - Is there any hope for the hung over?"

Brain imaging of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty

A fascinating fMRI study by Sam Harris and colleagues has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 14 adults while they judged written statements to be true (belief), false (disbelief), or undecidable (uncertainty). (Yes, this is the same Sam Harris who wrote "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation."). To characterize belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in a content-independent manner, they included statements from a wide range of categories: autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual. They show that belief, disbelief, and uncertainty are mediated primarily by regions in the medial PFC, the anterior insula, the superior parietal lobule, and the caudate. The acceptance and rejection of propositional truth-claims appear to be governed, in part, by the same regions that judge the pleasantness of tastes and odors.

...the final acceptance of a statement as true or its rejection as false appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions may actually disgust us.
...When compared with both belief and uncertainty, disbelief was associated in our study with bilateral activation of the anterior insula..., a primary region for the sensation of taste. The anterior insula has been regularly linked to pain perception and even to the perception of pain in others. This region, together with left frontal operculum (also active in the contrast disbelief - belief), appears to mediate negatively valenced feelings such as disgust. Studies of olfaction have shown that the left frontal operculum is engaged when subjects are required to make active judgments about the unpleasantness of odors. Thus, regions that have been regularly implicated in the hedonic appraisal of stimuli, often negative, appeared in our study to respond preferentially when subjects rejected written statements as false. Our results appear to make sense of the emotional tone of disbelief, placing it on a continuum with other modes of stimulus appraisal and rejection.
...Several psychological studies appear to support Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection...Understanding a proposition may be analogous to perceiving an object in physical space: We seem to accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise...subjects assessed true statements as believable faster than they judged them as unbelievable or undecidable. Further, because the brain appears to process false or uncertain statements in regions linked to pain and disgust, especially in judging tastes and odors, this study gives new meaning to a claim passing the “taste test” or the “smell test.”

The Neural Buddhists

Check out the David Brooks OpEd piece with the title of this post. You really have to respect Brooks for putting so much energy into understanding contemporary mind science.

...the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is...In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism...In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

If you haven't OD'ed on the internet already....

Have a look at this site, which points to "20 websites that can change your life." (with 2 more added by feedback from viewers). Engaging a number of them (especially twitter) would appear to destroy any remnants of time or privacy that your life might contain.