Is Home Cooking Bad for Our Health?

Posted on February 18, 2012 by davidbdale

Josh Darpino wrote this bit of counterintuitive thinking for my Comp 2 class, SP11. Maybe it will help you consider food as a topic.

What if I told you that fast food is bad for you. You would intuitively say, “Of course, everyone knows that it is better to eat at home.” Although what if I told you that eating at home may be the same as getting fast food. Now I know some people may eat Cheetos or ice cream and you would say, “Well it is all about eating healthy, fruits and vegetables, ya know.” The real kicker is that what if I told you that fruits, vegetables, and meats are all about as healthy as eating McDonald’s when you buy from a regular supermarket.

The way that food is being produced has changed quicker in the last 50 years than the last 10,000 years. All food is now only being controlled by three or four companies in a food group. The problem with this handful of companies is that they are sacrificing our health and well-being for quicker, better tasting, and cheaper.

The food companies that are being backed by the government are changing our food. Meat is being produced quicker but is riddled with E-coli, chicken has more meat but is filled with antibiotics, and corn is massively produced but is engineered to grow quicker and stay ripe longer inadvertently changing our DNA makeup.

Another problem is that supermarkets give us no choice in choosing these lame foods. It cost twice as more to eat organic than to get something at a regular supermarket. Why even get anything at the supermarket when you can get a meal at a fast food restaurant for three dollars.

Our food has become this unstoppable industry that the common people are blind to knowing what actually happens to our produce. Something has gone seriously wrong and must change to not only raise awareness but to clean up our so-called fruits and vegetables.

Reminder: This post comes to us courtesy of my Spring 2011 student, Josh Darpino. Thanks, Josh!

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Counterintuitive Research Ideas for the Desperate

Posted on February 18, 2012 by davidbdale

If you’re still having trouble deciding on your own research topic, it may be helpful to contemplate the many simple facts of daily life that defy logic, or don’t accomplish what they intend, or seem peculiar until we understand their underlying motives.

SEAT LICENSING FEES.
I understand season tickets to ball games, orchestra series, concert venues, even time-shares. There’s a tangible return for the investment: guaranteed viewing rights or the promise of familiar accommodations. But the “seat licensing fee,” often well into five figures, for the right to continue to purchase season tickets! That’s just magnificent madness. Somebody should be promoted to genius for that concoction, and then shot for audacity. Does the license entitle you to see that games? No! You still ahve to buy tickets for that. Instead, the only thing licensed is the “right of first refusal” to buy the seats when they’re offered for sale. Nevertheless, nutty as it seems, for most participants, these turn out to be good investments and truly valuable commodities that can be resold for big profits.

VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE.
Understandably, you may have no interest in “Second Life,” but since we’re talking about the imaginary qualities of money, how about this incomprehensibility? Second-Lifers pay fake “money” to “buy” fake real estate in this entirely fake universe where muscular avatars roam and live out their fake lives. I don’t know much about the mechanics of the transactions, but I do know in recent years real-world investors have started paying real-world currency to buy these fake plots from fake developers who have somehow managed to transcend the ephemeral nature of Second Life and create “value” others are willing to pay for. Can you get a mortgage from a real-world bank to buy them? I don’t know, but it’s worth a research paper.

CERTIFICATES OF AUTHENTICITY.
These just seem completely counterintuitive to me. Maybe I’m missing something. I’m shopping for sports memorabilia, say, or “official” NFL gear, a hat, if you will, or a used hockey puck, or a collectible coin. All of these items can be counterfeited, have been counterfeited, are often counterfeited, and people get taken all the time by buying fake items. It’s hard to understand why anyone would care, but who am I to judge? I’m sure I’m just as nutty about something. But, I ask you, how does the Certificate of Authenticity reduce the odds of being ripped off? I mean, really, if you can make a convincing baseball cap, how hard would it be to counterfeit a Certificate of Authenticity? And why does anybody trust that the certificate actually applies to the item it’s packaged with? Interesting enough to investigate?

KILLER PRODUCTS.
When is it a good time to tell customers your product can kill them?

Stock prices for the big four US cigarette makers soared the day after the government settled its case against them and levied billions of dollars of fines. The terms of the settlement forced the companies to stop advertising their products in magazines. The companies cannot show people smoking on billboards. They must of course post ever more frightening messages directly on their packages, warning customers exactly what sorts of painful cancers they are buying. The companies are even required to fund an independently-produced big-budget ad campaign, “The Truth Campaign,” promoting anti-smoking messages of all kinds. Yes, these are paid for by the cigarette companies. And yes, stock prices soared when the details of the settlement were released. Did the ban against cigarette ads work? The links might get you started.

KILLING GOOD IDEAS.
How is it possible that business leaders who specialize in killing good ideas succeed, sometimes phenomenally?

They do so by recognizing that even the best ideas are sometimes doomed by development costs or market reluctance. Which would be more interesting as a research topic: following the history of the splendid failures of products that should have worked but never caught on? or the example of an idea that was turned down repeatedly before it finally found its way to market? (I once heard a story of an inventor who wanted to vend hot cheese snacks directly from machines. He got to market eventually, but the product he ended up selling is more like a pretzel bite stuffed with cheese, and a cold one.) On the other hand, Steve Jobs‘s willingness to shoot down brilliant ideas is legendary, and perhaps the key to his success (unless you consider the iPad a pretzel bite).

CHEAP PLAYERS MAKE A BETTER TEAM.
Billy Beane was a very highly-paid prospect his first year in baseball but never performed as expected. Then he figured out why. He’d been paid on the basis of irrelevant statistics.

When he became the GM of the Oakland As, he applied ground-breaking statistical analysis tools to his job of building a team through trades and acquisitions. Among his counterintuitive insights: players who make more errors are often better fielders than players who don’t. They’re catching balls that would have been scored hits. When they miss one and are charged an error, it’s often a ball inferior fielders wouldn’t have tried to field (and wouldn’t have been penalized for missing). For pitchers, wins are irrelevant; strikeouts are not. For batters, what matters is OBP, not BA. Beane built his team by bargain-shopping players other teams undervalued. A classic of counterintuitive thinking from the sports world. The story is now a movie called Moneyball. The statistical analysis method used to make the counterintuitive selections is called Sabermetrics.

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Rise Against ~ Swing Life Away

Posted on February 16, 2012 by tonyshilling

Currently my favorite song.    It’s got that great monotone emptiness with emotional acoustic; good cure for weird moods.

Posted in My Music | 1 Comment

Freakonomics

Posted on February 16, 2012 by davidbdale

Masters of counterintuitive thinking and popular authors of the book Freakonomics and the companion column in the New York Times, Steven D. Levitt, the economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, the writer, find unexpected explanations for human behavior everywhere they look.

Best of all, from the point of view of students with research paper assignments, they do it all by researching the data they uncover while reading about topics everybody else thinks have common sense explanations.

How much does movie piracy actually hurt the US economy? We’re about to launch extremely hazardous legislation to control it, but do the costs justify the new law?

Here, from Levitt—one half of the Freakonomics duo—is an example of a great way to start an essay:

It wasn’t until the U.S. government’s crackdown on internet poker last week that I came to realize that the primary determinant of where I stand with respect to government interference in activities comes down to the answer to a simple question: How would I feel if my daughter were engaged in that activity? If the answer is that I wouldn’t want my daughter to do it, then I don’t mind the government passing a law against it. I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a cocaine addict or a prostitute, so in spite of the fact that it would probably be more economically efficient to legalize drugs and prostitution subject to heavy regulation/taxation, I don’t mind those activities being illegal.

At the Freakonomics blog, the authors also host the opinions of other, similarly curious and dubious thinkers. This excerpt from a recent post sounds like something I have most likely have said in class, although it was authored by James McWilliams about someone named David Owen:

David Owen sees the matter differently. In his incisive and doggedly counter-intuitive new book, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse, Owen gently dismantles the foundation of standard environmental behavior with a series of succinctly turned arguments that, in addition to being presented with considerable wit and self-deprecation, lead us to the conclusion that ecological salvation will ultimately be found in tightly packed cities where mobility is minimized, living space is constrained, and the myriad gadgetry designed to reduce the individual carbon footprint is rendered obsolete by sheer virtue of human density. In essence, the opposite of the way Americans typically live.

For more examples, spend some time at the newer Freakonomics blog, or scour the archives of the 790 articles Steven J. Levitt has authored for the New York Times .

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For-Profit Prisons

Posted on February 16, 2012 by davidbdale

The very phrase “for-profit prison” should raise a red flag for anyone on the lookout for counterintuitivity. Once governments were the builders, owners, and administrators of prisons, but budgets for government services and capital investments have not kept up with the astounding growth in prison populations. In short, it’s just too expensive for states to build and run their own prisons.

But in the meantime, prison populations have increased seven-fold since the 1970s. Yes, that means for every one inmate in US prisons in 1975, there are now seven US prisoners. That’s a real growth business! And, as such, it has attracted plenty of big investors who offer to build and administer new facilities to states, promising big cost savings and new jobs to towns that sorely need them.

All that money and profit tied so closely to the number of inmates the state can provide to the owners of the prison creates far too many conflicts of interest to count. Dig into this topic for a couple of hours and you should be able to find counterintuitivity with your eyes closed.

Follow this link to a story from this week, and the links to other resources from this story, to get started. Let me know what you find in the Reply field below.

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White Paper Polio Rewrite – Bill Brooks

Posted on February 14, 2012 by billbrooks175

I have chosen to write about if the vaccine should be mandatory based on the fact that it actually infects about one in three million people instead of curing them (oral vaccine only).  After a quick google search I found a link to a CBS news article written in 2009 about some of the dangers that the polio vaccine itself carries.  This particular column was dedicated to the evaluation claim concerning the pros and cons of the oral polio vaccination.  The article detailed how an outbreak caused from the vaccine can be more dangerous than a “naturally occurring” outbreak because of its ability to mutate into a more devastating virus.  At the time this article was written there were seven documented cases of the vaccine causing such outbreaks.

In this light, I do not think it fair to force the vaccine (especially the oral vaccine) on anyone.  Although the certain tribes may seem overly paranoid to people living in more industrialized countries we must remember that this is their culture and it should be respected.  The one in three million does seem to hold a very low possibility but most lotteries have significantly lower probabilities and many still choose to buy a ticket, so we should we not expect that some people might not want to tempt fate in a similar manner.

Total eradication of the polio disease does seem like an incredible thing but we need to realize the cost of doing something as radical as forcing people in places like Africa and other developing countries to take the vaccine is too high.  We cannot force people to do something that they view as immoral or dangerous even if it appears to be nonsensical.  A common practice in the United States is Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing to accept blood transfusions, even if it will save their lives because they believe it is wrong, this moral is upheld in our society even though to some it may seem odd.  The idea of “crop dusting” over certain tribes might seem good in theory but the hardship that it most certainly will cause is not worth it.

My personal opinions aside, the article detailed how utilization of the oral polio vaccine can cause outbreaks as opposed to preventing them.  A newly vaccinated child who has won this unfortunate lottery and is afflicted with the polio disease can host the virus and it is able to mutate inside the child’s body and become more dangerous, this newly mutated form can more easily be passed to those who have not yet been vaccinated.  This new form of the virus is now harder to eradicate than what the article calls the “naturally occurring” virus.  Outbreaks that number up to 69 children have been reported.  That is 69 children now crippled for life that would otherwise been unaffected.  Often times this is an entire village that is affected.

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/14/health/main5242168.shtml

 

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Advertising Failure- Brett Lang

Posted on February 14, 2012 by langer278

While reading the article on mammogram’s and Dr. Kim’s way of keeping score of his doctors I found multiple types of counterintuitivity in the article. They thought that the keeping score of doctors successes and misses would cause multiple problems in mal practice lawsuits, upset patients, and offended doctors, but in fact had different outcomes. The keeping scores had helped Dr. Kim figure out who was doing well and who wasn’t so he could get rid of and fire the doctors that were missing way to many mammograms. This caused fear in the doctors and made them want to be more successful and work harder and be more careful. They did extra studying of x-rays of mammograms to be able to better find signs of cancer and increase their average. It created a way of competition to increase results and became very succesful. It states now that they are missing one-third fewer cancers, which does not seem like it would bring many mal practice lawsuits on at all. It actually helps make them less likely to come up. The health field was looking for a way to better mammograms success rate and Dr. Kim had found a way, but instead of being embraced it was scrutinized. It turned out to be a very successful solution to a problem no one else could solve and changed the thinking on how bad of an idea it was.

There was also a problem with this idea od double checking women for mammograms to make certain they had no cancer. Women were feeling offended or something was wrong for being brought in a second time to be checked, but if they were told they were fine the first time and found to have cancer the second then they may have just had their life saved.  this quote by Ms. Veenstra demonstrates this exact way of thinking being utterly changed. ”After I got over my initial shock and anger, I appreciated that someone was checking and double-checking,” she says. ”It’s unbelievable to me this is not nationwide.” this shows how she had been so mad to be brought back into the doctors, but ended up having her cancer found and her life saved. When this was explained to her by the doctor her anger changed to a very gracious and appreciative mood. i know  my little brother’s grandmother had been just recently double checked on her mammograms and they had found she had cancer. If they had just done the one check it could have been missed and she wouldn’t have had a clue. People way of thinking can be changed drastically when they consider something they see as a hassle or aggravating to do again ends up saving their life.

People’s intuitions about Dr. Kim’s way of keeping stats changed greatly on how successful and big it became. People change their mind when something becomes successful, or many people start to follow or back behind the idea. If you change one person’s thoughts on the subject you can eventually change millions until they see how great of an idea you created and how many lives are being saved with your way of doing things. That is exactly what Dr. Kim did by proving the success of his statistical and double checking approach in mammography and allowing people to see the mammogram problem in his light of thinking to prove how successful a solution he had come up with.

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ASP SOURCE- aime Lonsdorf

Posted on February 14, 2012 by aimelonsdorf

MMPR Vaccine and Autism: Vaccine Nihilism  and Post Modern Science

Gregory A. Poland, MD

“This predictable sequence of falling [measles and mumps vaccine (MMPR)] coverage levels, followed by outbreaks of disease, has occurred because of decreased public confidence in the safety of the MMR vaccine. In large part, this has resulted from incorrect as- sertions that the vaccine plays a role in the development of autism, an idea promoted by Andrew Wakefield.^’^ No cred- ible scientific evidence, however, supports the claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism, and indeed, national medical authorities and scientific professional societies have unani- mously denounced that claim.”‘ More than 20 studies have found no evidence of connection between receipt of the MMR vaccine and autism disorders.*’^ In fact, Britain’s General Medical Council determined after its hearings that Wakefield was guilty of dishonesty and serious profession- al misconduct with regard to his MMR-autism research.*” -Gregory A. Poland, MD

 

This claim identifies that there is no direct link between the MMPR vaccine and autism. Poland had previously stated that “Measles is the most transmissible human disease known,” and that to prevent outbreaks there needs to be approx. a 96% coverage. However, because a large amount of the world’s population believes the faulty study conducted by Andrew Wakefield, there has been a decrease in vaccination and a rise in the amount of Measles and Mumps outbreaks globally. The increasing amount of outbreaks followed the inconclusive study and have continued to grow, even after Wakefield’s study gad been disproven.

“..there is no causal connection between childhood vaccines and autism.”

This claim makes my previously posted argument appear weak. In the CNN article i had found, it stated that although there is no direct medical connection between the MMPR vaccine and other vaccines, there is still some belief that the vaccinations can cause or irritate already existing autism. However, my current source, denies this claim. Personally, i find Poland’s article to be a more reliable source based on his medical degree and the fact that his article was posted in a medical journal.

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=11&sid=f444f812-f4da-4425-b359-14f776fba774%40sessionmgr11&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=65538141

My other claim, stated certain foods such as wheat and dairy products could irritate already existing autism and that autistic children should take vitamins and other food supplements in hopes to avoid an increased case of autism. The claim is highly supported.According to the Harvard Health Letter’s article, “Getting out the gluten,” gluten, the by product of wheat, barley and rye, is increasingly becoming the number one factor in cilliac disease and various autoimmune diseases. Others, such as myself, are just unable to digest gluten properly and are getting largely irritated stomachs, gastrointestinals and are finding it hard to have sufficient bowel movements. In cases concerning autism, there is a “…’buzz’ about autistic children improving once they’re on a gluten- free diet.” There is however, no current conclusive evidence. But, the article states that autistic children who have an actively gluten free diet have shown lower risks of other severe illnesses that often come with autism. For example, irritated bowels and acid-reflex are common illnesses acquired by people with autism; most who are gluten free do not carry these traits.

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=f444f812-f4da-4425-b359-14f776fba774%40sessionmgr11&vid=7&hid=11

Posted in White Paper Polio | 1 Comment

Grade Levels 2

Posted on February 10, 2012 by davidbdale

I wrote two sentences in my recent post “Counterintuitive Econundrums,” that I realized while I was writing them contained about a paragraph of material each. They’re not perfect sentences, and I won’t try to edit them now that they’re on the blog, but their advantages over the paragraphs they represent make them fit models of writing that earns better grades.

Example 1

My favorite econundrums puncture the inflated claims of greenness too often made by commercial operations determined to sell us something they pretend has big environmental advantages.

This sentence packs a lot of material and delivers it in a steady stream that needs no punctuation. Commalessness is not a requirement of good writing, but it’s good evidence of fluency, which is required. Let’s unpack the sentence into its component claims.

Commercial operations are in business to sell us something. Because they know a large percentage of consumers are more likely to buy something that is kind to the environment than a similar but planet-killing product, they promote their products as green. Often they exaggerate the environmental friendliness of their products to trick us into making purchases that don’t really benefit the planet. Econondrums sometimes puncture the inflated claims of the companies that exaggerate their environmental benefits. Those are my favorite econonundrums.

Example 2

Electric cars make me furious, for example, because their manufacturers pretend exhaust pipe emissions are the only measure of a car’s environmental impact, conveniently ignoring the damage done to the planet to produce the electricity in the first place, a huge percentage of which is lost to transmission before it ever starts the car.

The sentence is a little long and might be better phrased, but as it stands it’s certainly not as clumsy at the version it represents, which takes way too much space to spell out the same claims:

Electric car manufacturers claim that their cars cause less environmental damage than cars that burn gasoline. They support that claim by measuring the amount of environmentally-damaging exhaust that gasoline engines emit when they’re driven. While they are correct in saying their cars don’t emit gasses, they are wrong to claim that exhaust gasses are the only way to measure environmental impact. The electricity required to power their cars is not environmentally clean because it can’t be produced in the first place without damaging the planet in some way; what’s more, a huge percentage of the electricity generated at power plants is lost in the miles of transmission wires from the plant to the charging station before it ever gets into the car. Therefore, claims that electric cars are cleaner than gasoline engine vehicles make me furious.

As I did at the close of the first Grade Levels post, I invite you to respond here if this is helpful, or if you feel the need for additional samples, better models, or even revised versions of your own paragraphs before or after you’ve posted them. If I can model better writing for you, I’ll be happy to try.

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Counterintuitive Econundrums

Posted on February 10, 2012 by davidbdale

If you’re racking your brain for a good counterintuitive research topic, the ecology team at Mother Jones have cooked up a series of columns you should cull for inspiration. They’re full of challenges to “common knowledge” claims many of us take for granted. Are animal shows cruel? Let’s investigate. Are products made from bamboo more eco-friendly than if they were made from trees? Let’s investigate.

In most cases, a certain amount of research has already been done by Mother Jones writers so you’ll have to find your own angle on the topic to avoid simply adopting their premises and conclusions, but there’s always plenty left to investigate on the tantalizing questions they raise.

My favorite econundrums puncture the inflated claims of greenness too often made by commercial operations determined to sell us something they pretend has big environmental advantages. Electric cars make me furious, for example, because their manufacturers pretend exhaust pipe emissions are the only measure of a car’s environmental impact, conveniently ignoring the damage done to the planet to produce the electricity in the first place, a huge percentage of which is lost to transmission before it ever starts the car. How green is your Prius? Let’s investigate. (Now, a 100% solar car . . . ? Or a car powered by magnets or gravity? Hey, a guy can dream.)

Follow a link or two to the Mother Jones website and decide if there’s anything here to interest you. If you like the idea, but not the particular topics, do a search at the website for econundrum. You’ll find hundreds.

How Green is that Organic Turkey?

Will Climate Change Wipe Out Maple Syrup?

Should We “Force Migrate” Endangered Species to Save Them?

Is Your iPad Evil?

The particular and brilliant advantages of these topics are that they’re narrow enough to be manageable and specific enough to quickly snag reader attention. Nobody (myself included) wants to read a research paper that pretends to prove such enormously broad claims as “Global Warming is Real” or “Global Warming is Man-Made,” and I will refuse permission to anyone who floats such proposals. But: “Is It Wise to Migrate the Spotted Treefrog?” is a way to address the big issues of climate change engagingly.

If this sort of question appeals to you, I would actively support you to do counterintuitive research into what’s green and what’s not that could really benefit the world.

Posted in Counterintuitivity, David Hodges, Professor Posts | 1 Comment