Spotlight-on-Science

Reversal on Negative Findings for CAD in Mammography

2011-12-21T12:09:00.000-05:00

I have recently published an article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (Oxford University Press) a leading medical journal. It is a letter in reply to a recently published and highly publicized study on the use of computer-aided detection (CAD) technologies in breast cancer screening via mammography. That study, published late last summer was the world's largest study on the effects of computer-aided detection technologies in breast cancer screening (in terms of the number of examinations incorporated into the analysis - 1.6 million screening examinations). The study reported largely negative findings for the performance of breast cancer screening with the help of computer-aided detection technologies.

My letter in reply has indicated that their method for evaluating a screening center's sensitivity is not appropriate for comparing centers with and without CAD technology. I demonstrated that the method used for evaluating how sensitive a screening center is to detecting cancer can easily overestimate the sensitivity of the control centers (with no CAD technology) relative to the experimental group (the ones with CAD technology). This means that the methods chosen by the authors have the potential to result in a misleadingly small improvement in test sensitivity between the groups we are comparing (CAD and no CAD).

I also highlighted that their own results indicated a statistically significant shift in tumour yield towards pre-invasive malignancies. A cancer that is pre-invasive has not yet invaded into neighbouring tissues and typically results in a much better treatment and survival prognosis than invasive cancers. Their own results demonstrate that there was a shift (that should not be attributed to randomness based on their own statistics), towards more pre-invasive tumours among those centers with CAD technology.

You can read my article in the journal through this link, but because of standard academic publication practice, it is behind a paywall. Since a copyright was taken out on the letter, I cannot reprint it here. It will also be appearing in the journal's upcoming print edition. You can also access it through a University who pays the journal for the service of providing their students and faculty with access.

I was pleased to see that the exceptional breast cancer and statistics researchers at the University of Chicago (Bob Nishikawa, Maryellen Giger, Yulei Jiang and Charlie Metz) also published a letter on problems with this recent study. I was fortunate enough to have Bob Nishikawa, the Director of Breast Imaging at the University of Chicago as the external examiner on my PhD thesis years ago.

Site Update: Nature Blogs

2011-10-06T10:37:00.000-04:00

This website was originally founded under the name With A Grain of Salt and was eventually listed with Nature Publishing Group's network of independent science themed blogs / websites (you can check out their network over at blogs.nature.com). More recently I have revamped this website to look more professional and renamed it Spotlight on Science. Under the new name, this website has been re-included into Nature Publishing Group's network of high quality independent blogs.

Admission to the Nature Publishing Group blog network is at the discretion of Nature's editorial staff and the decision is made under the advisement of the results of an election voted on by existing members of the nature blogger network. As a member I will have the ability to vote on the addition of new blogs into Nature's network. It is an honour for Spotlight-on-Science to be included among the high quality blogs deemed meritorious by such a prestigious organization as Nature Publishing Group.

This website gets featured on pages over at Nature (here is an example) and interesting articles produced by Nature bloggers get featured on some of Nature's sites.

Detecting Breast Cancer by Assessing the Lesion's Margin

2011-10-04T10:32:00.000-04:00

I recently published an article with the journal Academic Radiology. The paper presents a method for assessing a tumour's margin towards the detection of breast cancer from state-of-the-art MRI examinations. Malignant margins tend to appear diffuse and variable by virtue of cancerous lesions being characterized by invading into neighbouring tissues. Margin measurements also have potential applications in the assessment of whether a lumpectomy (removing a lesion via surgery) actually successfully removed the entire tissue of interest, however, this article is focused on using the margin measurement towards a more accurate diagnosis of breast cancer from MRI examinations.

Computer-aided detection and diagnosis systems are one of my primary areas of research interest. Here is a link to the article (currently in press) over at Academic Radiology. I am not reproducing the article in this post as it is subject to copyright laws (journals vary considerably in what type of copyright they take out on different types of articles that they publish).

Statistical Significance and the Publication Process

2011-09-29T21:08:00.000-04:00

In theory if you have an original presentation of data, or an original collective argument on a given scientific topic then, in order to get your ideas "out there" and heard among other scientists you submit your work to the peer review process. If the peer reviewers agree that the work holds merit then the work will be published. Unfortunately this publishing paradigm is an idealization - with journals commonly making subjective decisions as to what should be sent out for peer review.

I wrote a paper highlighting some of the common problems I see in the way standard scientists use statistics such as equating a statistically significant finding with a qualitatively significant one. I have not been able to find a journal willing to send the accompanying paper out for peer review, so instead of getting frustrated I've decided to simply post the article on the Cornell University Library (Arxiv). It doesn't get peer reviewed but at least scientists might read the article this way.

Just because an article should be read by many scientists out there, doesn't mean that there are any reputable publishing organizations willing to submit the content to the peer review process. An educational piece is not likely to generate citations and thus would be liable to adversely affect a journal's impact factor (a measure of how often a journal is cited and critical to a journal's perceived prestige within the scientific community).

Here's the link to the article's page at Cornell, and here's a link to the publicly hosted pdf file. If you have any comments feel free to let me know.

Jacob Levman, PhD

On Digital Infrared Thermal Imaging for Breast Cancer Detection

2011-09-09T13:16:00.003-04:00

I recently got a letter published in the British Medical Journal on Digital Infrared Thermal Imaging for the detection of breast cancer. Since no copyright is taken out on these letters, I am reproducing it here:

On Digital Infrared Thermal Imaging for Breast Cancer Detection

Patricia Reed writes that digital infrared thermal imaging for breast cancer screening often receives very poor press and asks for feedback on the technology [1]. Including any breast cancer technology in a clinical trial is a very expensive endeavour. Part of the reason that digital infrared thermal imaging receives poor press in the media is because of the existence of studies that have demonstrated the technology to have sensitivities to the detection of breast cancer of just 18.6% [2] and 39% [3]. Furthermore, the technology as it is presently used takes a simple surface thermal image of a patient's breast. This provides thermal information from regions close to the skin surface, however, the technology is of questionable value when applied to small malignant lesions located far from the surface of the skin. In the future we will be able to make accurate in vivo temperature measurements in three dimensions across the patient's breast and at that point thermography may be shown to be an extremely powerful technology for the detection of breast cancer. However, three dimensional temperature measurements are more likely to be accomplished through technologies such as MR-thermography (based on using an MRI machine) as opposed to digital infrared thermal imaging. At present MR-thermography has technical limitations which restricts its potential use in the detection and characterization of breast cancer.

As for whether digital infrared thermal imaging based thermography can play a preventative role in screening by detecting abnormal vasculature is questionable. It is common for abnormal vasculature to grow after the formation of a malignant tumour in response to signaling factors released by the cancerous cells indicating their need for more nutrients. Thus detecting vascular abnormalities is likely to help in the detection of existing breast cancer. Preventing cancer by warning the patient of the existence of pre-cancerous tissues due to abnormal vasculature is much less likely.

Future breast cancer screening clinical trials are likely to have the burden of comparing any technique of interest with the results obtained by the combination of screening by both x-ray mammography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Some of the earliest mortality data has recently started emerging on the use of these technologies for screening women at high risk for breast cancer. Studies have indicated very high survival rates among those patients with breast cancer 5 to 6 years after their original diagnosis [4-5].

Jacob Levman, PhD
Imaging Research
Sunnybrook Research Institute
University of Toronto

References

[1] Patricia Reed, "Re: Detection rates and mortality for evaluating breast cancer screening," British Medical Journal, (2010), E-Letter 340:c3106-v.

[2] Ernest Sterns, et al., "Thermography: Its relation to pathologic characteristics, vascularity, proliferation rate, and survival of patients with invasive ductal carcinoma of the breast," Cancer, (1996), 77(7):1324- 1328.

[3] Stephen Feig, et al., "Thermography, Mammography, and Clinical Examination in Breast Cancer Screening Review of 16,000 Studies," Radiology (1977), 122:123-127.

[4] Passaperuma K, Warner E, Hill KA, Narod SA, Balasingham S, Causer PA, Wong J, Jong RA, Verity L, Messner S, Eisen A, Ramsay E, Wright F, Yaffe MJ, Plewes DB, "Long-term results of the Toronto MRI breast surveillance study for women with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations," Annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Chicago, 2011.

[5] Rijnsburger, et al., "BRCA1-Associated Breast Cancers Present Differently From BRCA2-Associated and Familial Cases: Long-Term Follow-Up of the Dutch MRISC Screening Study," Journal of Clinical Oncology, (2010), 5265-5273.

Update: News on the Nature Front

2011-08-23T22:01:00.002-04:00

I have good news, I am now part of the editorial board for Nature's Scientific Reports. As an associate editor I will be in charge of the peer review process for research papers in biophysics, cancer etc. The journal removes the subjective decision of how significant a research study appears to be in order to be worthy of publication (which is great!). Instead the publication of papers is contigent upon being technically and scientifically sound as well as original.

The journal is put out by the extremely successful Nature Publishing Group and is also open access - of which I am also very supportive. This allows all research studies published at the journal to be read by anyone in the world (who has the luxury of an internet connection). I look forward to acting as an associate editor at the journal and also look forward to publishing some of my work with them.

Jacob Levman, PhD
Imaging Research
Sunnybrook Research Institute
University of Toronto

Not All Computer Aided Detection Methods Are Equal

2011-08-10T12:47:00.000-04:00

A recent publication in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has indicated that computer-aided detection (CAD) technologies do not aid in improving breast cancer detection via x-ray mammography based screening (here is a news article on the publication). The conclusions reached in this study may be flawed and this article explores some of the issues of why this may have occurred.

The study in question looked at centers that introduced CAD technologies in the United States after the government classified CAD as an insurable, reimbursable medical expense. After the government decision CAD use increased substantially and this study looked at determining the benefits (or lack thereof) of introducing CAD technologies into the screening process.

The main problem with this research study is that it groups many screening centers that have introduced CAD into a pooled analysis. This blurs together the results of many different CAD technologies produced from different medical technology vendors. Not all CAD technologies were created equal and as such we should expect to see variability between the systems produced by different commercial organizations. Commercial systems can be quite different from each other (here are three different examples: 1, 2, 3). In fact, as a CAD researcher I can safely say that there are an infinite possible number of methods for performing CAD. Any given CAD system designer could program the computer to perform the cancer detection in any given way. The researchers who performed this study are not CAD scientists and appear to have overlooked this important issue.

Part of the reason this analytical error occurred is because the U.S. government classified all CAD as an insured medical expense (obliging health insurance companies to reimburse individuals who rely on the technology). When the U.S. government made this decision, it did not consider the issue of significant performance differences between different commercial CAD vendor's products. It is quite plausible that it was correct to fund some CAD technologies, while others perhaps don't perform as well and so should not be reimbursable through insurance.

Additionally, I would like to point out that the study in question looked at the sensitivity for detecting breast cancer for screening centers that introduced CAD technology. This sensitivity was evaluated over many years which can be problematic. After the first year of screening with CAD, the population that a given center is ongoingly screening for breast cancer has changed substantially (provided the CAD system provided a sensitivity increase). This is due to the fact that if the CAD increases sensitivity in the first year of screening then the remaining population that the given screening center is monitoring has fewer cancers left to find (because of the extra cancers that were removed from the population) which can effect the resultant sensitivities in subsequent years of CAD enabled screening. Thus comparing the sensitivity of CAD screening in years 2+ with the sensitivity of CAD screening in the first year can potentially be misleading because the two sensitivities were computed on populations with different prevalence (and potentially presentation) of cancers. This effect was well described by Dr. Nishikawa in the journal Radiology.

My opinion is that some commercial CAD technologies for mammography are effective in their job and consistently produce sensitivity improvements of 10% or more in cross-sectional studies. It is also plausible that the U.S. government has forced insurance companies to fund some CAD technologies that are not assisting in cancer detection. We don't know which CAD systems are performing the best and which ones are underperforming, however, this JNCI study would have been much more informative and helpful if the results had been broken down into an analysis for each different vendor's CAD system.

Jacob Levman, PhD
Imaging Research
Sunnybrook Research Institute

Publication on Malnourishment

2011-06-01T13:48:00.001-04:00

I recently got a relatively short article published on malnourishment with the European Journal of Public Health which is published by the Oxford University Press. The article is titled "Chronic and Recent Starvation and Malnourishment" and is accessible from the journal's website here. If you would like to read the article, I am reprinting it below:

Chronic and Recent Starvation and Malnourishment

In 2008 and late 2010, the world experienced marked increases in the prices for many basic food staples. News reports have focused on these increases in food prices and the resultant associated increase in levels of worldwide food insecurity. The shock of recent dramatic food price increases has motivated many vulnerable people to protest and riot thus attracting attention to the problem of rising food costs. However, the issue of inadequate food leading to starvation and malnourishment has long been a chronic problem receiving little attention.

Evaluation of the size of chronic food problems is challenging due to limited data on the issue. The United Nations has put the number of malnourished people at 925 million [1]. Dr. David Pimentel of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University writes in the journal Science, claiming that the true number of malnourished may in fact be closer to 3 times this amount when factoring in a wide range of definitions of malnourishment (including calorie, protein, vitamins, iron and iodine deficiencies) [2]. The United Nations has claimed that prior to recent dramatic food price increases, 36 million malnourished people die each year [3]. It can be difficult to evaluate the scope of such large numbers. In order to put the mortality figure of 36 million annual deaths [3] in perspective, it is about 3 times the average annual death rate due to World War II, one of the planet's deadliest wars. The United Nations figures are an estimation of the scope of the problem. Estimates need to be employed since adequate statistics are not kept in many of the world's nations with significant malnourishment problems.

Correcting food problems will involve assisting regions experiencing high levels of malnourishment to produce more food. Accomplishing this requires increased public awareness which is typically critical for organizing governments towards committing more resources to rectifying the situation. While food handouts are necessary for helping people's immediate hunger problems, assisting regions to produce adequate amounts of food is preferential in order to both keep down the costs of solving chronic food problems along with encouraging self-sufficiency in regions suffering from malnourishment. At present, relatively meager amounts of public funds are devoted to world food problems. The chronic food crisis receives scant attention compared with many other issues the world faces and the main publicly funded agency devoted to helping with world food problems (the United Nations World Food Programme) receives funding of just 3 to 4 billion dollars per year, a very small amount compared to the budgets of modern nations.

Alleviating world food problems should involve a wide variety of complimentary methods including fertilizer and soil donations, providing paying jobs to help the hungry, food handouts, researching genetically engineered foods and assisting poor farmers to make use of newly developed technologies and farming methods. The situation would also be improved by ending the diversion of food to fuel, most commonly in the form of the United States' corn crops being turned into ethanol. The chief economist of the U.S. department of agriculture has estimated that the diversion of corn to fuel accounts for one fifth of the U.S. corn crop [4]. If that corn were sold as food rather than diverted to ethanol production then the increased supply would cause corn prices to fall which would help poor corn consumers. In addition, financial trading institutions have been investing in the price of food which in turn has the effect of raising the cost of basic staples. Testimony before the United States Senate has indicated that investments in this area have increased from $13 billion dollars in 2003 to $260 billion dollars in 2008 [5]. The price of 25 staples have increased by an average of 183% over those five years.

World food problems warrant far more attention from the public and the world's political leaders than is presently received. The United Nations estimates that malnutrition affects approximately one seventh of the world's population [1]. A separate report from the United Nations also estimates that the malnourished account for 58% of worldwide deaths [3]. Addressing the food crisis has the potential to save millions of lives worldwide.

References:

[1] "Global hunger declining, but still unacceptably high," Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Economic and Social Development Department, September 2010.

[2] David Pimentel and John Morse, "Malnutrition, Disease, and the Developing World," Science, Vol. 300(5617), April 2003.

[3] Jean Ziegler, "Economic, Social and Cultural Rights," United Nations Economic and Social Council, February 2001.

[4] K. Collins, Chief Economist, U.S. Department of Agriculture, "Statement Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry," January 10, 2007.

[5] Michael W. Masters, Masters Capital Management, LLC, "Testimony Before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, United States Senate," May 20, 2008.

Comparing Screening Methods in Long Term Analyses

2011-04-25T11:13:00.001-04:00

I recently got an article published with the European Journal of Public Health, which is put out by Oxford University Press. The article comments on methods for evaluating disease detection (or screening) methods after many years in a longitudinal analysis. Disease detection rates are one of the most common evaluative methods in this scenario and my article explains why that can be an unsafe evaluative method that can lead to the dismissal of newer and beneficial technologies.

You can read the article by clicking here.

Humorous Aside: Trust Me I'm a Doctor

2011-03-09T16:15:00.001-05:00

When I was a little boy I had a favourite T-shirt. I remember being an idealistic little kid and when asked what I was going to do with my life I said: "I'm going to cure cancer". Now I'm 32 and I'm a doctor - incidentally I earned my doctorate in breast cancer detection - one of a gazillion possible research areas that can theoretically help with the fight against cancer.

I never threw out my favourite childhood T-shirt even though it was tattered long ago and hasn't fit me for many many years - my extra belly fat doesn't help! I recently pinned the shirt up on the wall at my house and before doing so took this picture of myself holding it:

I recall being a little boy at the airport wearing this shirt and some women went absolutely gaga for a cute little boy wearing it. If only I still got that kind of attention!

The Problems with Evaluating Detection Technologies with Disease Caught in the First Round of Screening

2011-03-07T12:10:00.001-05:00

My research is focused on breast cancer screening methods, however, the ideas presented here apply to the detection of most diseases.

Ideally, when we want to evaluate how good a given method is for detecting breast cancer, we monitor a population over a long period of time with the given detection methods. Typically, evaluation involves comparing a particular patient outcome after years of being involved in a clinical trial. The most accepted outcome for a disease that kills people is demonstrating a reduction in the number of deaths in the group being monitored (ie. is there a lower mortality rate?). Other potential methods of evaluation include looking at the size and progression of the disease at the time it is detected.

Typically a study is performed and all of the tumours detected by one method are compared with those detected by another method. However, there is a distinction between detecting a disease in the first round of screening and detecting a disease in a subsequent round (ie. an interval cancer). In the case of the interval cancer, we know that the detection methods employed did not catch the cancer in the previous round of screening. However, when we catch a tumour in the first round of screening, we do not know if screening could have caught that disease earlier had the detection mechanism been introduced earlier from the patient's perspective.

Ideally, comparing screening methods would involve looking only at interval cancers. This is a challenge because screening clinical trials tend to catch relatively few interval cancers compared with those caught in the first round. It requires a much longer and inevitably more expensive trial to accumulate many examples of interval cancers.

Incidentally, exciting results have recently been published indicating that adding breast MRI based detection to a screening program results in very few women succumbing to breast cancer. This conclusion is reached while still including cancers caught in the first round of screening.

Jacob Levman, PhD

Humorous Aside: Chutzpah in Science, part 2

2011-02-11T10:51:00.005-05:00

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning: impressive cheekiness, brash, informal shameless audacity.

When I was a PhD student, the department that I was enrolled in (Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto) had an annual set of student seminars. Every year each graduate student needs to give a 20 minute talk followed by questions on their research project. The talks are presented in front of the whole department and they are often stressful on the student.

I began my PhD after completing 2 computer degrees and had negligible levels of biological and medical knowledge. When it came time to give my first student seminar I was really nervous. I rushed through my 20 minute presentation in 15 minutes and generally could have done a lot better.

By the time my second year rolled around I was back to my chutzpah-filled self and was pleased to be able to give a cheeky introduction to my research project in my student seminar. Incidentally, in our second year as graduate students our student seminar was not only graded, but would go on our permanent academic transcript.

I decided to make use of humour in introducing my research area of computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer from state-of-the-art MRI examinations. I began with a self-deprecating introduction: I said something to the effect of: Why would we be interested in using MRI given that it has all of these problems?

I then listed a series of MRI's shortcomings, such as how it is expensive and involves the injection of a contrast agent. I then mentioned that MRI can also be hard on the patient and showed the room the following Simpsons video of Mr. Burns getting an MRI (note the video has sound):

I then commented that the reason we are interested in using MRI is because it has been shown that it heavily outperforms x-ray mammography in catching cancer in women at high risk for developing the disease.

Now incidentally, the chair of the department (and one of the people responsible for marking me on my presentation) is also named Burns. Peter Burns is an exceptional Ultrasound researcher with multiple patents and highly useful scientific contributions. His lab also produced the technology known as pulse inversion doppler ultrasound which is extremely useful and widely available on clinical ultrasound machines.

In my presentation I still had a picture on the screen of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons who had just had an MRI. I had the picture of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons morph into Peter Burns, the chair of our department who was also in the audience.

While the morphing was completing I asked "Why not use Ultrasound?" and used the parlay to comment on how MRI was outperforming Ultrasound in this application of screening high-risk women for breast cancer.

I got lucky - my jokes went over well, it got a lot of laughs from the room and best of all I have an "A" on my permanent academic transcript for that presentation! Yeah for Chutzpah!

Jacob Levman

Malnutrition and HIV in Ugandan Children

2011-02-10T14:31:00.001-05:00

I recently read a Nutrition Journal study from 2006 on severely malnourished children with and without HIV. It was a very interesting study on an extremely important topic. I am not only particularly interested in the subject of malnourishment but I’m also particularly interested in Uganda, a country where I have visited with my wife who did some of her health professional training (in Occupational Therapy from the University of Toronto) at a hospital in Mbarara.

There is no doubt that both HIV and malnourishment are very serious problems. The study looked at children with severe malnourishment in Uganda and compared those with and without HIV. This was an important study and some of its results were not at all surprising:

The group of children with HIV had lower while blood cell counts and lower lymphocyte counts. The main sentence from the conclusions is also not surprising: “Severe protein energy malnutrition is associated with the depletion of the haematological and lymphocyte subsets, and this depletion is exacerbated by the presence of HIV-1 infection”

However, the more surprising stuff is found in their data:

The children in this study suffered from many problems. What I found the most surprising was that there was very little difference between the rates at which the children suffered from additional problems when comparing those with and without HIV.

Both groups of kids were severely malnourished and divided into two groups: HIV and no HIV. The two groups exhibited almost the same rates for all of these problems: pneumonia, diarrhea, urinary tract infection and bacteraemia (presence of bacteria in the blood). Based on the frequency of these kids suffering from these extra problems, the authors found “no significant difference with regard to [children’s] HIV status”.

The implication would appear to be that severe malnourishment is playing a major role in exacerbating the rates of these problems (pneumonia, diarrhea, urinary tract infection and bacteraemia).

Here's to hoping for a better future, where everyone gets an adequate supply of food.

Jacob Levman, PhD

Humorous Aside: Chutzpah in Science

2011-02-06T11:22:00.005-05:00

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning: impressive cheekiness, brash, informal shameless audacity

When I was a young graduate student I attended a nerdy conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. I was delivering my first small research paper of my PhD and was speaking in a session on medical image analysis for clinical oncology (a workshop of MICCAI). I was the second speaker and when I arrived there was a computer up at the front of the room on the podium. I assumed that it was the computer available to all session speakers and walked right up to it and inserted my USB key. It turns out that it was the computer of Sir Michael Brady, one of the leading researchers in the field, who also was the first speaker and was nearby. He turned and said "That kid's got chutzpah!"

Scientists don't tend to be the most flamboyant types - I suspect it takes less to convince a typical scientist that you have chutzpah than it does to convince the average person. However, to be fair to Sir Brady I can think of a number of amusing "chutzpah moments" of mine, so perhaps he was just being perceptive.

Sir Michael Brady runs one of the world's most succesful research labs in this field at Oxford University. In fact, Sir Michael Brady earned his knighthood for a particularly impressive reason: because so many technologies developed in his lab have become commercialized products. Typically, without technologies making the leap to commercialized products they can only have very limited impact.

Dr. Jacob Levman

P.S. I found these on the internet and found them funny:

If only the good part of chutzpah could be bought from a machine:

Site Update: Nature Publishing Group Network

2011-01-24T11:53:00.008-05:00

This website (formerly With a Grain of Salt) has been added as part of the Nature Publishing Group's network of science-themed independent websites (blogs). Entry is dependent on the opinion of Nature Publishing Group along with the results of an election where existing bloggers admitted into Nature's network are given a vote on new entries. I have since renamed this website Spotlight on Science and given it a more professional layout.

This website was originally founded as a blog with the title With A Grain of Salt and the web address problemsinscience.blogspot.com (all traffic is now being routed to Spotlight-on-Science.com). The site was submitted for consideration and just today was admitted into the Nature family of blogs (a set of good quality science-themed websites).

Nature puts together an impressive collection of scientific publications, it is an honour for Spotlight-on-Science / With A Grain of Salt to be included as part of their network of science-themed independent websites.

The Ideal Scientific Journal

2011-01-21T16:44:00.007-05:00

In the world of science, a journal's quality is typically measured with what's called an Impact Factor. The impact factor is really a measurement of how often any given article published in a particular journal gets cited in other scientific contributions. Journals with high impact factors tend to generate a lot of citations for each of their articles and tend to be quite prestigious.

Whether a given article has scientific importance is not necessarily reflected in its citations over a few years (which is how the impact factor is measured - Spotlight-on-Science has recently published another article on the Impact factor that you can check out here).

Although I have succeeded in acquiring a solid set of scientific publications for a young scientist I have often found that the peer-reviewed journal paper publication process has many flaws. In an ideal world, scientists wouldn't care about issues related to impact factors and would publish all of their work in some sort of central repository, however, this is not an ideal world. Anyone who sets up such a thing will face the fact that without an impact factor, scientists will readily see it as a low quality place for publication. Given that there is a pre-existing bias among scientists towards wanting their work published in journals with high impact factors, I propose the following 'ideal' journal structure that I believe would greatly benefit the world today.

One of the biggest problems with journal publications is that they reject the majority of their work even though the majority of the work deserves to be published somewhere. Most decent journals have acceptance rates below 20% and so most of the work submitted is getting rejected. Many decent studies never get properly published because of the high rejection rates and these issues are also connected with the related problem of how the peer review system breaks down in its standard form. One of the biggest problems with the peer review process is that authors are often not given the right of reply. After a scientist submits their paper to a journal, the journal gets reviewers to critique the study at which point the paper is very often rejected without allowing the study's authors to reply to the negative commentary they received. When a study author is denied the ability to reply to a fair-minded editor then the peer-review process has just failed. It is not a complete review process unless the author gets a chance to have their say as well. To that end the ideal journal would always provide a study's author the opportunity to reply to the negative commentary provided on their work. Although most studies need revisions, most of them have involved a large amount of work on the part of the contributing authors and so studies should not be casually rejected. The journal should publish work from any field, without bias against the many peculiar areas of research that some scientists choose to study. It is critical that the journal publication process not reject papers unless there is a very serious problem in the science of the study. Small contributions and unusual contributions should be able to be published as well. To that end, creating a functional structure for the journal requires a few unusual features. First, the journal would not have a fixed number of studies it publishes in a year. With limits on the number of studies published, as the number of submissions to the journal increases, the rejection rate will increase as well. Not fixing the number of studies to publish avoids this issue.

More importantly, accepting the existence of a significant bias in favour of good impact factors, the journal would be forced (like most others) to try and produce good impact factor scores in order to achieve respectability. As such the ideal journal (as I would imagine it given the present environment) would be general interest, would discourage the use of field-specific jargon and would have 3 tiers in order to facilitate producing respectable impact factors. The top tier of the journal would try to emulate the successes of high profile journals such as Science and Nature by publishing the most generally interesting and broadly relevant studies that produce the highest number of citations. Solid studies that don't meet the editorial staff's high expectations for the top tier journal would get published in the second tier with a lower requirement in terms of being written in a general interest style. Studies whose results are of small significance or whose results are somewhat questionable but not disproved would be published in the third tier. The journal would get 3 different impact factors - one for each tier. The associate editors in charge of each manuscript not only accept or reject the study but make a recommendation regarding which journal tier should publish that paper. Papers are only rejected if there is a serious problem in the science and study authors are not refused the ability to reply.

Another problem with journal publications is money. Some journals charge institutions large amounts of money so that their scientists can access the relevant research. Other journals avoid this by being "open access" but it is common that they request or require that the scientists contribute money in order to guarantee that their research document will be made available on the internet indefinitely. It occurred to me that the costs of storing all of the scientific literature out there are small enough for some modern big corporations. It is plausible that a new journal as I've described could enter into a partnership with a company like Google (who've already produced the useful Google Scholar software). Google could host all of the journal's studies and make money by providing the reader with the kinds of relevant ads they show within programs like Gmail - using a small unobtrusive ad that is selling something similar to what you are reading about. There would be no print publication, all published studies would be made available online. Such a journal would have no physical overhead, it would simply need a legion of volunteer associate editors to arrange for peer review of each article they receive.

As a general interest publication the top tier of the journal would need a good general interest name like: Advances in Research. The second tier of the journal presenting solid scientific contributions could be called Advances in Research A, and the third tier of the journal could be called Advances in Research B. If a scientist is unhappy with which tier their paper was assigned to they have the opportunity to withdraw their paper and submit it to another journal. Additionally, it would surely be impossible for the journal's editorial staff to assign research papers to the different tiers perfectly. As such the journal could also provide special incentive awards for papers in the lower tiers that generate enough citations as to have warranted being included in the top tier.

Such a model might constitute a huge contribution to science and I would love to help make it happen one day.

Jacob Levman

The impact of the impact factor on the scientific publication process

2011-01-13T09:51:00.001-05:00

The impact factor is a measure of how often articles published in a given scientific journal get cited by other research articles. Scientists tend to use the impact factor as the main method for evaluating the quality of a given journal publication. Because the impact factor is the main source of respectability for a given journal publication among scientists, journal editors are naturally biased towards achieving as high an impact factor as possible for their journal. This bias leads to a connected bias: the rejection of studies for which the journal editor qualitatively believes that the study is not likely to generate citations from other scientific research in the near future.

Normally the impact factor is measured over a period of about 2 years. Thus the impact factor is not really a measure of the impact of a given collection of articles, but a measure of the short-term impact of a collection of articles. Some impact factors operate over 5 years, but this is still a relatively short period of time when compared with large-scale long-term scientific progress. Since the impact factor is based on a short period, it contributes to biasing science towards the publication of articles in 'hot' fields with lots of active scientists and the process biases publication away from articles with substantial long term but limited short-term potential benefit.

A great example from the medical literature involves the analysis of longitudinal studies. A longitudinal study is one where you monitor a population for a long period of time. Longitudinal studies are time consuming, expensive and extremely important in medical research. An amazing new technology will often have to clear many testing hurdles in a research environment before proving itself so well that large amounts of funds can be raised for a longitudinal trial. If a researcher has an analysis on methods for evaluating the results of longitudinal trials, then the analysis could be a major scientific contribution. However, longitudinal trials are very time consuming and expensive, thus they are relatively infrequent. The total number of longitudinal trials that may cite a new analysis on how to evaluate the studies may be somewhat small - especially in the 2 years following publication of the new method for analyzing the results. However, the long term potential of such an analysis may be quite huge.

Studies with much long-term potential for a solid scientific contribution may get ignored because of its lack of short term potential (and associated ability to help the journal with its impact factor). This phenomenon makes the scientific publication process unusually short-sighted.

Jacob Levman

Challenges in estimating the increase in the death rate among the malnourished

2011-01-11T12:10:00.007-05:00

A 10-year-old and largely ignored United Nations report estimated that malnourished people die at a rate of about 36 million people per year, accounting for about 58% of worldwide deaths. Proper statistics aren't kept in many of the world's countries, so we don't know if this estimate is correct. However, even if the true value is quite substantially lower, this problem is still of massive proportions. I previously published an article that helps to wrap your head around the scope of the problem by comparing the number of deaths of malnourished people with the number of deaths due to World War II (by these estimates there are about 3 times as many deaths among the malnourished as compared with deaths due to World War II).

Admittedly the comparison is somewhat simplistic. Rather than compare the number of estimated malnourished people dying annually, ideally we would compare the expected increase in the death rate associated with people who are malnourished. If nourished people die at a given rate, we are interested in how much greater the death rate is among the malnourished coupled with how many malnourished people there are in the world.

Clearly, malnourishment is not the only factor affecting the elevated death rate among the malnourished. By virtue of not having enough money for an adequate supply of food, this section of the population typically also does not have the resources to access basic levels of medicine and often need access to hygienic sources of water. However, it likely is common for a hungry person's malnourished state to contribute to a premature death (for example through a variety of diseases exacerbated among those with nutrient deficiencies and low levels of immune system function etc.). If the poorest section of the world's population had living standards of the average citizen of the world, then it seems plausible that through improved access to adequate food, medicine and water many millions of lives could be saved - potentially each year!

Jacob Levman

Humorous Aside: Peer-reviewed rejection

2011-01-08T16:10:00.009-05:00

Peer reviewed rejection can be one of the most frustrating things about being a scientist. Here's some peer reviewed rejection humour with the hope that it can be cathartic for some scientists out there.

I'm a terrible artist - my drawings are limited to not much more than stick figures. However, I also have a comedic mind for which I think cartooning could be a great outlet. I found this picture of a scientist on the internet on a site that advertised it as free clip art and thought it would be fun to turn it into a joke about peer-reviewed rejection. I actually have an old Snoopy comic to thank for the gag but I've adapted it for scientists who are in need of a science specific version of this classic joke.

Humorous Aside: Internet censorship in China

2011-01-07T11:54:00.009-05:00

Article on issues with state-controlled internet usage in China.

In China, the number 8 is the luckiest number. The reason 8 is so lucky is because the word (bah) is synonymous with the Chinese word for rich. Toronto (Canada) has a huge Chinese-Canadian population and if you look at advertisements for new houses in Chinese dominant neighbourhoods, it is not uncommon for new homes to sell for prices such as $288,888. It is well-known to non-Chinese marketers who sell products to the Chinese community that listing prices with lots of instances of the number 8 in it is very good for business. Conversely, the number 4 is avoided at all costs because it is associated with the word for death.

In November, Spotlight-on-Science acquired a page view counter (formerly problemsinscience) which quickly reached the exciting milestone of 8,888 page views . . . well at least that's exciting to Spotlight-on-Science's editor/founder and to some Chinese people. It's gotta be super lucky!

Now this development is of potential interest to many Chinese people who would recognize the page view milestone as a particularly lucky happenstance. Unfortunately, back in May it was discovered that the Chinese internet censors have banned everyone in China from accessing Spotlight-on-Science. As Spotlight-on-Science's editor, I got irritated when I found this out (it nicely explained the site's lack of internet traffic from China) and wrote an article about it. Interestingly, after publishing that article Spotlight-on-Science received a small flurry of page views from Beijing where the website's address is banned. The most plausible explanation would seem to be that the Chinese internet censors checked out the website themselves after noticing that Spotlight-on-Science published an article that was unflattering regarding the Communist party of China's policies.

Incidentally, this website used to have comment boards for every article on the site but decided against continuing the comment boards because no one wants to be the comment board monitor / moderator (a necessary position as there are many whiny commentators out there). Incidentally, a common type of comment was from a Chinese internet sex-chat service. It would seem that the Chinese internet sex-chat comments were all coming from a bot (a computer program in this case tasked with the job of drawing traffic to these particular sex-chat sites). Although it was advertising for a Chinese language site I assume that the bot itself was located outside of China since it wasn't contributing any page views from mainland China. Maybe I should have checked - the bot might have been located in the free Chinese state of Taiwan which has contributed substantial page views to Spotlight-on-Science.

Jacob Levman

The old food crisis, the chronic food crisis and the coming food crisis?

2011-01-06T10:59:00.001-05:00

In 2008 the price for many basic foods increased dramatically. This led to rioting in many countries such as Haiti, Bangladesh, Egypt and many African countries. This chaos and the strains that the food price increases have caused on the world's poor were dubbed a "food crisis", which it surely was. However, older reports from the United Nations claim that the death rate for malnourished people is ridiculously high - 3 times higher than the death rate due to World War II. Even if this is an exaggeration, then this is still a ridiculously large problem, large enough that it deserved the title "food crisis" long before we were using that term in 2008. As such I refer to the ongoing problem as the chronic food crisis.

News recently broke that prices for basic foods have risen higher than they were two years ago when the previous food crisis involving food rioting occurred (according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization). Here's a plot of price indeces for various basic foods that I obtained from this Nature.com article.

It demonstrates a lot of increase in the prices of sugar, oils & fats, and cereals. If these prices remain high then we might be about to experience a second food crisis on top of the existing chronic food crisis.

The first chapter of my book is devoted to the chronic food crisis - you can check it out here.

Spotlight-on-Science has also many existing articles on food related issues, you can check them out by clicking here.

Jacob Levman

There are more benefits from breast cancer screening than simply saving a woman's life

2011-01-04T17:26:00.003-05:00

This past year saw the eruption of a fresh controversy in breast cancer screening. The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issued a report to the Obama administration advising against x-ray mammographic screening for women in their forties. The journal Science reported on the controversy and published a reply letter which was also published here at Spotlight-on-Science. The article pointed out that the USPSTF task force accepted a particular conservative estimate about the number of women in their forties that needed to be screened by x-ray mammography in order to save one life (1900 need to be screened by this estimate). I pointed out that when a fully developed screening program is applied to a large population such as the United States, the use of screening still adds up to many lives saved.

There are associated harms with breast cancer screening such as biopsy procedures performed on women who don’t have cancer, breast compression during the examination and associated stress while waiting for a diagnosis. However, the benefits of breast cancer screening are not limited to the simple measure of how many lives it saves. When a malignant tumour is caught at an earlier stage of development, the associated treatments are easier on the patient and have a higher success rate (as demonstrated in the fact that there is a mortality reduction). X-ray mammography is capable of catching DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ - an early stage of breast cancer) whose treatment success rates are very high.

The devastating effects that a breast cancer death has on the victim’s loved ones is also worthy of consideration. Breast cancer deaths regularly leave dozens of surrogate victims among the woman’s partner, family, friends and colleagues. Women who die of breast cancer typically leave behind many devastated people who typically aren’t part of the discussion of the benefits and harms of choosing whether to be screened for breast cancer.

It should also be mentioned that according to the American Cancer Society, women at elevated risk for breast cancer should get MRI based screening (if their lifetime risk is greater than 20%). Furthermore, there is also a need for more data on identifying women with an unusually low risk for breast cancer as a potentially identifiable group to be studied. The harms of screening may be associated with no benefit in an identifiable subgroup of the population. There may be some excellent potential for harm reduction of the overall screening process by identifying women at unusually low risk for cancer and determining whether screening is still saving lives in this group of the population. One possible idea could involve studying women with absolutely no personal and no family history of breast or ovarian cancers. Hopefully we will see this question satisfactorily answered.

Jacob Levman

P=NP and the million dollar mathematics prize

2011-01-01T19:22:00.011-05:00

The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts is providing a one million dollar prize for the first person who can prove or disprove the P=NP problem. A variety of descriptions of the P=NP problem are available. Simply put, computer scientists have divided computer problems into a series of categories which include P (problems that are relatively easy to solve) and NP (problems that are relatively challenging to solve). The majority of computer scientists believe that P != NP (P is not equal to NP - this expression is repeated below) indicating that many believe problems exist which are too complex to solve for them to ever be classified as P type problems. Recently Vinay Deolalikar of HP labs released a possible proof that P != NP. His work has been subject to some criticisms, however, I am inclined to agree with his goal of proving that P != NP and good luck to him in responding effectively to his critics - that million dollar prize would sure be sweet!

I was thinking about this problem in a general sense - no messy mathematics should be necessary for this discussion. If a problem is thought to be NP and thus unsolveable in an efficient amount of time, and then someone invents a new method for solving that problem algorithmically in an efficient amount of time then that merely would show that that particular problem was not in fact an NP problem at all, it was a P problem lacking an effective method for solving the problem. If an NP problem turns out to be solvable in a reasonable amount of time (in the time it takes to solve a P problem), then we should just call it a P problem.

It is highly doubtful that a new algorithmic development will ever solve all problems currently accepted as being NP problems within the time frame associated with P problems. One day all or most of those problems will be solved quickly, however, that will be done with the help of faster computers or even alternative architectures that wouldn't even be what we call today a standard computer. Algorithmic developments are sure to help, however, it is hard to imagine even a super algorithm for finding solutions forcing the condition P=NP to always be valid for any problem.

When reading about this prize I thought of the following nerd joke solution (probably only funny to the most nerdy of nerds....):

P=NP iff (N == 1 or P == 0), otherwise P != NP

The following math joke is hosted in many locations on the internet. I thought it would go well with the nerdy joke above:

Jacob Levman

Volcanos, the sun and recent climate coolness

2010-12-23T15:57:00.008-05:00

Europe has been experiencing unusually cold weather with many flights delayed around the continent. Over here in southern Ontario (Toronto, Canada) we've been experiencing an unusually cold December as well. The environment is a great interconnected web, thus a temperature change can not necessarily be attributed to only one cause, but is likely the result of a series of factors.

Possible contributing factors include the recent large volcanic eruption in Iceland. Click to enlarge this gorgeous picture of the Icelandic volcano (Credit R. Th. Sigurdsson):

When a volcano erupts it lets off reflective particles into the atmosphere. These particles reflect light that would have otherwise made it to the earth's surface and contributed to warming the planet. Thus when a volcano erupts we might expect the planet's temperatures to drop accordingly for a period of time. The recent eruption in Iceland was an unusually large one, grounding airplane flights across Europe. We don't know how much cooling to expect due to the eruption.

An additional possible cause for recent climatic coolness is reduced solar activity.

Click to enlarge this beautiful photo of the sun from NASA:

Measures of solar activity such as the solar cycle length have indicated a reduction in solar activity in recent years. This reduced solar activity could lead to cooling which could be responsible for some of the recent cooling seen in northern regions. The sun may very well be slower at forcing our climate than the recent volcano and while many solar scientists predict future colder temperatures due to the sun, we don't know how long it will take to see these effects (if ever).

There are many effects potentially influencing our changing climate. Since we do not know with certainty the relative contributions of recent volcanic activity nor the contribution of recent variations in solar activity, then it is likely very challenging to accurately ascertain the climate change contribution of increased levels of carbon dioxide based insulation in the atmosphere in the near future. We need to discern how much climate change is caused by solar variations, how much is caused by volcanos and how much is caused by a variety of factors related to human activity. How will we be able to separate out the amount of change caused by carbon in the atmosphere when we can't definitively say how large a contribution is being made by volcanos and the sun?

A simple analysis of climate change factors by someone with an expertise in data analysis reveals the obvious conclusion: We're going to need years more data to separate out the relative contributions of each of these effects.

Jacob Levman

How many dimensions are there in the universe?

2010-12-13T12:54:00.005-05:00

Theoretical physicists regularly disagree regarding how many dimensions exist in the universe. Some put it at 10 or 11 or 13 dimensions but no one really knows how many dimensions exist in the universe. Some theoretical physicists can be quite passionate about their particular belief in the total number dimensions in the universe even though they know that they don't know what the truth is regarding the true number of dimensions.

A common mechanism for scientists to reach a conclusion regarding the number of dimensions they believe exist is well illustrated by the following cartoon (please mail us if you know the most appropriate source to cite for this comic):

Basically many theoretical physicists are partial towards one particular number of dimensions because the multidimensional mathematics that they develop to represent a framework for the nature of the universe becomes much more simple (or elegant) when a certain number of dimensions is assumed. We of course don't know which conclusions are true.

String theory is another field of theoretical physics which involves expressing the mutlidimensional universe in terms of little strings. Once again this is a theory and we don't know if it is true. I found this cartoon which I found amusing (please mail us if you know the most appropriate source to cite for this comic):

Many of our string theorists support the theory that our universe has 10 or 11 dimensions (11 dimensional universes are sometimes described as involving 10 normal dimensions coupled with a time dimension). I wonder if our species is biased towards concluding that the universe is a variant of 10 dimensions (10 or 10+1 dimensions) because of a pre-existing bias towards preferring the number 10. We have 10 fingers and use a base 10 number system (a number system where the tenth number forms the smallest number represented with two digits). This makes us wonder: if humans had evolved with 4 digits on each hand instead of 5, would we be using a base 8 number system instead of base 10? Would we be more inclined towards concluding that the universe has 8 or 8+1 dimensions rather than 10 or 10+1 dimensions?

A previous brief humourous note on string theory is also available - you can check it out here.

Jacob Levman

Breast cancer screening for women in their forties

2010-11-25T08:53:00.004-05:00

Breast cancer screening for women in their forties has become a hot topic recently because some scientists have argued that the harms outweigh the benefits. A recent article in the journal Science (Marshall, Brawling over mammography, 2010) discusses this issue and presents some scientist's points against screening.

I wrote a letter to the journal describing how the benefits of x-ray mammography add up to a substantial number of breast cancer deaths avoided. Although we don't know the true number of lives the technology saves, I point out that if we had pervasively available screening and all women volunteered for the program at the appropriate period of their lives then the total number of deaths averted is quite substantial. I just found out that the letter got published and since Science did not take out a copyright on my letter I am reproducing it here: (you can also access the letter directly off of their website here)

Mortality, Anxiety, and Politics in Breast Cancer Screening for Women Aged 40 to 50

In the News Focus "Brawling over mammography" (E. Marshall, 19 February 2010, p.936), arguments are presented by prominent scientists for and against x-ray mammography-based breast cancer screening for women aged 40 to 50. The main argument against x-ray mammography screening is that it saves few lives, and its harms (such as unnecessary surgeries and increased patient anxiety) are substantial. Opponents of breast cancer screening for women in their forties should take note of some simple statistics and their profound implications for politicians and society. Marshall's story highlights a study by Heidi Nelson indicating that we need to screen 1904 women in their forties to prevent one death from breast cancer. While it is true that we have to screen many women in order to prevent one breast cancer death, consider the United States' female population of about 157.5 million. If fully developed x-ray mammogram screening programs were available to all U.S. females, and they were to volunteer for the program during their forties, based on Nelson's numbers over 82,000 breast cancer deaths would be prevented in the Unites States (157.5 million / 1904 screened to prevent one breast cancer death).

Scientists who argue against the use of mammography for women in their forties should consider how politically and morally unacceptable the elimination of this screening would be. No politician would support the elimination of x-ray mammography screening given the total number of lives that are at stake when we consider mammography's effect on society as a whole.

Additionally, Marshall points out that some opponents of x-ray mammographic screening for women in their forties rightfully state that a false positive diagnosis from a mammogram is sure to cause the patient substantial anxiety. Patient anxiety is difficult to measure. Although it should not be dismissed, the anxiety of patients receiving false positive diagnoses and unnecessary surgery after mammographic screening does not necessarily outweigh the alternative anxiety of a population of women that aren't screened but worry about their lives.

Jacob Levman
Sunnybrook Research Institute
University of Toronto

Google Alerts - A scientist's unsung friend

2010-11-22T13:58:00.008-05:00

For a while now I have been experimenting with using Google Alerts as a tool to help me in research. For those who don’t know, Google Alerts is a simple application that will e-mail you whenever it finds a new page on the internet containing the search words that you provide.
One of the most common uses of Google Alerts is really an extension of vanity surfing (vanity surfing is searching for your own name on a search engine like google). Using Google Alerts as an extension of vanity surfing can actually be useful to the scientist (it will inform you whenever a new entry appears on the internet with your name on it), this can be helpful to alert you if other scientists are commenting on your work online.

Of far more interest than using Google Alerts for vanity surfing is to use it to monitor the internet for new entries in the scientist’s area of research. For example, I am in breast cancer detection research based on the use of MRI and computer-aided diagnosis technologies. I have Google Alerts for the search terms “breast MRI” and “computer-aided diagnosis”. Every day Google Alerts gives me a listing of the latest internet entries on these topics. This has not only assisted me in staying on top of current developments in my research field, it has also informed me of the existence of journal articles that I would subsequently reply to and perhaps even more poignantly, Google Alerts has informed me of relevant research results prior to their associated conference presentation.

Although I do get a few Google Alerts e-mails each day (one for each topic I’ve signed up for) the main disadvantage is that it requires perusing each of the entries in these e-mails each day – which can be time consuming. However, scientists are free to refine their search terms to be more specific (thus reducing the number of entries in the alerts). I have already benefited in multiple ways by using Google Alerts, I would recommend trying it out to any scientist.

Jacob Levman, PhD

Imaging Research

Sunnybrook Research Institute

University of Toronto

Preoperative MRI can be used without increasing mastectomy rates

2010-11-21T23:19:00.003-05:00

RSNA (Radiologists' Society of North America) holds a gigantic radiologists conference every year in Chicago. This year's conference starts one week from today and apparently one of the presentations on the first day will be from Fabio Chiesa and colleagues from the University of Milan's School of Medicine. Apparently they will present data from 2003 to 2008 showing that preoperative MRI examinations of the breast do not necessarily cause increases in mastectomy rates.

This is a significant finding, particularly as another recent study demonstrated a 6% increase in the mastectomy rate when a preoperative MRI was performed (COMICE trial). This has been used as an argument that preoperative MRI is not good for patients (Kell, Magnetic resonance mammography, British Medical Journal, October 2010).

Thanks to this article, we have the following preview of their data, where the numbers and percentages of mastectomies are provided for each year, and then the number of preoperative MRIs performed is provided afterwards. Even though the number of MRIs has been increasing there hasn't been a corresponding increase in the mastectomy rate.

"25 of 121 (20.7%) in 2003

25 of 159 (15.7%) in 2004

22 of 140 (15.7%) in 2005

21 of 161 (13%) in 2006

26 of 182 (14.3%) in 2007

49 of 220 (21.4%) in 2008

There were three preoperative MRI examinations in 2003, two in 2004, 13 in 2005, 14 in 2006, 31 in 2007, and 42 in 2008,"

This would seem to indicate that MRI technology does not necessarily need to cause an increase in the mastectomy rate. This is good news for researchers like me who are trying to improve breast MRI based cancer detection technologies and great news for women at high risk of developing breast cancer as MRI has recently been shown to improve breast cancer survival among those at elevated risk for the disease. Ideally we can avoid unnecessary mastectomies for women who receive breast MRI examinations.

Jacob Levman, PhD

Imaging Research

Sunnybrook Research Institute

University of Toronto

Brief: MRI lowers the mortality of women at high risk for breast cancer

2010-11-17T21:10:00.005-05:00

This is very exciting news. The New York Times has just begun reporting on a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Dutch researchers monitored a group of over 2,000 women at high-risk for breast cancer with magnetic resonance imaging technology (MRI). After 6 years of follow up only 4 of the very high risk patients (BRCA mutation carriers, 50-85% lifetime risk) died and 100% of the moderately high risk patients (15-50% lifetime risk) survived. The author's compare their impressive results with other studies which showed that 5 year survival without MRI based detection yields a 74% survival rate.

MRI helps improve breast cancer survival by contributing to catching tumours early when treatments are much more effective.

These results are very exciting, it is challenging and requires many years to demonstrate that any technology built for screening cancer is contributing to saving lives, MRI has reached a huge milestone with these exciting new results.

Statistical significance is not the same as significance

2010-11-17T10:54:00.009-05:00

There is a lot of confusion among scientists regarding the appropriate use of statistics. A recent short letter on statistics published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) helps illustrate this problem. CMAJ does not take out a copyright on the letters so we're reproducing it here, although you can access it directly from their website.

Statistical Significance is not the same as Significance

The recent interesting and beneficial article by Ware et al. [1] has been followed up with a response letter regarding the use of statistical testing [2]. This follow-up letter correctly points out that statements such as “nonsignificant degrees of relief” and “higher but not significant”, are both common in the medical literature and should be avoided [2].

I agree with the points made by Cragg [2], however, I feel that the clinical readership could benefit from an even simpler explanation of why statements such as “higher but not significant” should be avoided.

The word ‘significant’ is qualitative. Any individual researcher or clinician is able to decide for themselves what constitutes a ‘significant’ effect. The word ‘significance’ is not synonymous with the term ‘statistical significance’. Statistical significance is typically defined as a p-value below 0.05, which means that there is a less than 5% probability that the observed data occurred due to random chance. Experimental data that achieves ‘statistical significance’ would not necessarily be qualitatively described as significant. Furthermore, experiments with very few samples may yield a qualitatively significant effect that does not achieve statistical significance.

Thus, in the literature, the words ‘statistical significance’ should not be replaced with the word ‘significance’ as it can lead to confusion due to the different meanings of the terms.

Jacob Levman, PhD (Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto)

[1] Ware et al., Canadian Medical Association Journal (2010) 182:E694-701E.

[2] Cragg, Canadian Medical Association Journal (2010) Reply to 182:E694-701E.

The chronic food crisis

2010-11-05T13:19:00.014-04:00

The chronic food crisis has been the subject of numerous articles on Spotlight-on-Science.

The chronic food crisis also appears prominently in my book Spontaneous Combustion. I have recently finished a multimedia presentation on the chronic food crisis and have made it available here. As can be seen, multimedia presentations are not part of my standard skill-set but thought it was worth a try since the problem is so substantial. Note that the video has music (Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World). I am hopeful that Louis Armstrong's estate will not be upset since it is being used in a non-profit manner in an effort to help the poor.

Jacob Levman

One of its main shortcomings was a lack of impressive visual imagery. The following similar multimedia video has also been included - it does a much better job in terms of visual imagery.

An Infomentary on Global Food Crisis - More free videos are here

Here's to hoping for a better world where no one goes hungry.

Humorous Aside: The nature of scientific mistakes

2010-11-02T12:23:00.005-04:00

Mistakes are part of the nature of scientific research.

Scientists should be well aware that they make mistakes. The content of Spotlight-on-Science is regularly reviewed and revise when problems are noticed. At times Spotlight-on-Science is sharply critical of other scientists, however, all scientists need to be prepared to revise mistakes in their work. If someone catches a mistake in the content of Spotlight-on-Science, please contact us and we’ll do our best to either correct the issue or respond appropriately.

Humorous Aside: The changing face of peer-reviewed publications

2010-11-02T12:05:00.002-04:00

The process of getting one's research published has changed dramatically over the years. When Einstein was a young man he didn't have a PhD and was working in a patent office. He was brilliant, and managed to get multiple research papers published in Physics journals even though he didn’t have a PhD nor an academic appointment. He was the ultimate outsider.

In today’s peer-review publication climate I would be shocked if a young outsider scientist with no PhD and no academic faculty position would ever be able to get a ground breaking new physics idea published in one of the world’s decent journal publications. I suspect that most journal editors would be too apprehensive about publishing an outsider's arguments as it may lower the journal's prestige among the scientists who would otherwise publish therein. Even scientists with ground-breaking ideas, a PhD and an academic appointment regularly find their work stymied in the peer-review process.

I like this comic about Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree waiting for another apple to fall on his head so that he can satisfy his peer-reviewers and finally get his theory of gravity published!

Evaluating magnetic resonance mammography

2010-10-29T14:04:00.011-04:00

Breast cancer detection can be a contentious area of debate. A recent article published in the British Medical Journal is presented here. The article acts as a reply to an article written by Dr. Kell who argued that MRI was providing no benefits to patients who've already been diagnosed with breast cancer. My reply points out that cancer detection rates are not necessarily a good way to evaluate a new screening method after years of monitoring a population (ie. in longitudinal studies). It sounds counter-intuitive but the reasoning is simple: If you're monitoring a population and you add a new screening method that is more sensitive, then it picks up more tumours as it is initially applied but by catching those tumours it has created a population that has fewer tumours remaining which lowers the cancer detection rate. Thus comparing cancer detection rates after years in a longitudinal study might be a very bad way to compare the efficacy of a new screening method! Surprised?

You can check out the article here

BMJ didn't take out a copyright on the letter so we are reproducing it here:

Evaluating magnetic resonance mammography

The article titled "Magnetic resonance mammography" by Malcolm Kell [1] presents a simple yet important point: women who've had breast cancer detected (for example by x-ray mammography) who then get an MRI examination may receive an unnecessary mastectomy.

Aside from simply warning about unnecessary mastectomies, Dr. Kell refers to the literature on detecting cancer in the contralateral breast with MRI after an initial diagnosis of cancer. Dr. Kell states that "the notion that detecting occult disease with magnetic resonance mammography would benefit patients was not borne out after longer patient follow-up." The reason that Dr. Kell has concluded that no benefit is available to the patients is because the "rates of contralateral disease are the same (6%) at eight years regardless of whether or not magnetic resonance mammography was performed at diagnosis."[2] Dr. Kell has jumped to a potentially incorrect conclusion. If MRI is more sensitive than mammography, then after many years of monitoring a population we might expect MRI to produce detection rates similar to those in mammography. This sounds counter intuitive, but the reasoning is quite simple. If MRI is more sensitive to detecting malignancies in the contralateral breast, then near the beginning of MRI based contralateral breast screening, the technique will catch more cancers than would have been caught by a less sensitive screening method. After initially catching many cancers, the MRI monitored population has fewer malignancies left to be caught in future rounds of screening. Thus MRI's task of screening the patient population becomes more challenging after years of screening by virtue of creating a more challenging pool of patients to screen. This effect has been previously reported, where Dr. Nishikawa showed that long term rates of detected disease are not necessarily a good method for evaluating a newer more sensitive screening method [3]. Dr. Nishikawa's paper was written in the context of screening patients for cancer with and without computer-aided detection technologies [3], however, it appears as though his arguments apply much more generally, including in MRI based screening of the contralateral breast after a diagnosis of cancer.

To determine if detecting occult contralateral disease with MRI benefits the patient, it may be inappropriate to compare rates of contralateral disease after many years of surveillance. The fact that MRI detects occult contralateral cancer in 3-4% of patients with a recently diagnosed malignancy [4-6] indicates that MRI is doing its job of detecting small occult tumours. Additionally, to determine if detecting occult contralateral disease with MRI benefits the patient, we can look at the size, grade and nodal status of the tumours being caught by MRI and whether or not catching these tumours earlier on in their development means that the patients will receive easier treatments for their disease.

Dr. Kell states that "Magnetic resonance mammography identifies occult disease in the breast that may not be visible on other imaging modalities, and this may lead to inappropriate treatment decisions."[1] While it is possible that MRI exams can lead to inappropriate treatment decisions, an inappropriate treatment is a very strong possibility when we don't bother detecting an existing occult cancer in the contralateral breast. The author's quote implies that a patient's most appropriate treatment may involve leaving a detectable yet undetected tumour to grow inside the patient and to not specifically treat it until years later after its detection by a less sensitive method. Waiting until the tumour grows before detecting it and providing the most appropriate therapy may lead to treatments which are harder on the patient.

Jacob Levman, PhD, Imaging Research, Sunnybrook Research Institute, University of Toronto

[1] Kell MR. Magnetic resonance mammography. British Medical Journal, 2010;341:c5513.

[2] Solin LJ, Orel SG, Hwang WT, Harris EE, Schnall MD. Relationship of breast magnetic resonance imaging to outcome after breast-conservation treatment with radiation for women with early-stage invasive breast carcinoma or ductal carcinoma in situ. J Clin Oncol 2008;26:386-91.

[3] Nishikawa RM, and Pesce LL. Computer-aided detection evaluation methods are not created equal. Radiology 251: 634-636, 2009.

[4] Lehman CD, Gatsonis C, Kuhl CK. MRI evaluation of the contralateral breast in women with recently diagnosed breast cancer. N Engl J Med 2007;356:1295-303.

[5] Pediconi F, et al. Contrast-enhanced MR Mammography for Evaluation of the Contralateral Breast in Patients with Diagnosed Unilateral Breast Cancer or High-Risk Lesions. Radiology 2007;243(3):670- 680.

[6] Lee SG, et al. MR Imaging Screening of the Contralateral Breast in Patients with Newly Diagnosed Breast Cancer: Preliminary Results. Radiology 2003;226(3):773-778.

P.S. As cited in the article, Dr. Nishikawa is to be thanked for noticing this effect when evaluating x-ray mammographic screening methods with and without the use of computer-aided detection. His article is written accessibly - you don't need to be a super computer-aided diagnosis nerd to read it, you can check it out here.

Unnecessary testing and thermography

2010-10-21T10:47:00.006-04:00

Spotlight-on-Science recently wrote an article about the problems with thermography – you can check it out here. At present many companies exist which offer breast cancer screening by thermography (taking a simple thermal image of the surface skin of the breast), however, finding a medical doctor / radiologist who is equipped to interpret the thermogram image is much harder (and an absolutely necessary step for thermography to be useful to the patient). Unfortunately, thermography has been shown to have a terrible sensitivity to catching cancer though it has received a lot of hype.

Much of the support for thermography has come largely because of one 30-year-old peer-reviewed research paper which says that having an abnormal thermogram is a risk factor for breast cancer. This merely means that if you get a thermogram and the image says you’re abnormal then the chances of you getting breast cancer in your life is substantially increased (compared to what you thought your risk was prior to getting the thermogram). This conclusion doesn’t mean that thermography is a good way to detect breast cancer, it means that an abnormal thermogram indicates you might get cancer at some point in your life. This study is 30 years old and even this conclusion regarding risk factors needs a thorough verification.

Other technologies like x-ray mammography, nuclear medicine and MRI have progressed substantially over the past 30 years and many studies indicate that either MRI or nuclear medicine are the most sensitive methods for detecting breast cancer.

Thermography is not an adequately proven technology, making its use a potentially unnecessary test. Funny times and McHumor have some cartoons that complement these ideas:

Jacob Levman, PhD
Imaging Physics Research
Sunnybrook Research Institute
University of Toronto

News Brief: Hunger Still at Astronomical Levels

2010-10-20T10:42:00.005-04:00

Recent news reports have indicated that the number of hungry people in the world has dropped to 925 million - down from just over 1 billion.

The cause of the decline was primarily attributed "to better economic prospects in 2010 and the fall in food prices since mid-2008."

It would seem that the number of hungry is highly dependent on people's ability to make money and the price of food. Further reductions in the price of food should help to further alleviate the massive levels of chronic hunger in the world. Keeping food prices low should be a worldwide priority for the benefit of the poor.

The chronic food crisis was the subject of a recent book available on Amazon.com - Spontaneous Combustion: What you don't know about Science and Humanity will blow your mind!

Humorous Aside: Einstein's inspiration?

2010-10-18T10:42:00.008-04:00

Einstein gave us so many scientific contributions. Not the least of which was a relationship between energy and matter and insights into the nature of time. I wonder if his inspiration for these theories went through any stages like this:

Special thanks to Gary Larson for creating one of the world's best comics: The Far Side

Hunger deaths comparable to World War 2 deaths

2010-10-14T22:57:00.009-04:00

I decided to write this article and put it on my blog for World Food Day. Maybe I’m a dreamer but it would be great if one day we lived in a world where no one went hungry.

No one knows for certain how many hungry people die every day but according to United Nations figures, malnourished and starving people are dying 3 times faster than people were dying on an average day of World War 2! Chronic mass starvation and malnourishment deaths are not well reported – they are not typically considered newsworthy because by many people's thinking they are not news if they are a chronic problem (news being something that's new, chronic problems being something that’s old). The lack of worldwide knowledge of the scale of this problem is staggering. Even if the United Nations’ published numbers [1] are grossly exaggerated, the problem is still of massive proportions.

The United Nations estimates that there are 1.02 billion malnourished people in the world and 1.4 billion that live on less than $1.25 each day [2]. However, there are varying estimates on the size of these problems: in an article in the prestigious journal Science [3], Dr. David Pimentel of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University states that the true number of malnourished people may be as high as 3 times this amount when we include a wide variety of definitions of malnourishment (including calorie, protein, vitamins, iron, and iodine deficiencies). According to the United Nations World Food Programme and the Commission on Human Rights almost 100,000 malnourished people die every day [1]. Even if these estimates are a gross 10-fold exaggeration we are still looking at a ridiculously massive and widely neglected problem. Currently only small amounts of money are spent on world hunger. The United Nations World Food Programme has an annual budget of only about 3 billion dollars and there are many hungry people that they are unable to feed. A relatively small wealthy country like Canada could double the UN World Food Programme’s budget with just over 1% of its federal budget.

If you want to read more on this topic, there’s more in this blog and in my book Spontaneous Combustion: What you don’t know about Science and Humanity will blow your mind! Chronic hunger is the scourge of our times. Here’s to hoping for a better world.

Jacob Levman, PhD (Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto)
Sunnybrook Research Institute
University of Toronto, Canada

[1] Jean Ziegler, “Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” United Nations Economic and Social Council, February 2001.

[2] Sudeep Mozumder, Merrel Tuck, “New data show 1.4 billion live on less than $1.25 a day, but progress against poverty remains strong,” The World Bank.

[3] D Pimentel, L Morse, "Malnutrition, Disease, and the Developing World," Science, April, 2003 300(5617):251.

Be cautious with thermography

2010-10-13T12:17:00.011-04:00

The Huffington post recently published an article by a medical doctor on the greatness of thermography as a mechanism for breast cancer detection, you can access it here.

As a breast cancer researcher, I took issue with this article because it was written by a medical doctor and provides women with some highly questionable advice (for instance: "Thermography is a better technology [than mammography]"). Dr. Northrup does not appear to be equipped to determine which technology (mammography or thermography) is better. Dr. Northrup’s main reason for believing that thermograms are the best in breast cancer detection is because of this very old study (30 years old in fact):

M. Gautherie and C. M. Gros, "Breast Thermography and Cancer Risk Prediction," Cancer, vol. 45, no. 1 (January 1, 1980), pp. 51-56.

The main point cited from the paper is that “an abnormal thermogram was 10 times more significant as a future risk indicator for breast cancer than having a history of breast cancer in your family”

This means that thermograms will give you an indication of the likelihood of you developing breast cancer at some point in your life. It does not mean that a thermogram is a good mechanism for detecting a malignant tumour from the image it generates.

Let me inform: back in the 1970s we did not have a good way to reliably detect small (2 to 3 mm) tumours. Small 2 mm tumours far from the surface of the skin are unlikely to cause a detectable difference in skin surface temperatures on a thermogram by virtue of being far from the skin surface which is where the thermogram image is acquired.

Furthermore, a more recent study has shown that “An abnormal thermogram was found in 18.6% of patients with [invasive cancer]”. So thermography only had a sensitivity of 18.6% for invasive cancers – extremely poor!

The authors conclude that “An abnormal thermogram is associated with large tumor size, high grade, and lymph node positivity”. So in other words, thermograms may help us catch tumours that are so large it may be too late to save the patient: high grade, large tumour and lymph node positive. (citation: Sterns et al., Cancer, 1996)

Another study from 1977 shows that thermography has a low sensitivity catching only 39% of tumours compared with 78% for x-ray mammography. (citation: Feig et al., Radiology)

I was surprised to see Dr. Northrup write a whole article about how great thermography is, how much better it is than mammography (which has been tested WAY more extensively) and not even mention any of the newest and highest performing breast cancer detection methods such as MRI and nuclear medicine.

I happen to be a researcher trying to further improve the already impressive breast cancer detection results obtained by using MRI technology. It has been shown that MRI can catch extremely small tumours that are far away from the surface of the patient’s skin. One of my own research papers provides an illustrative example of a small 2-3 mm tumour caught by MRI at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. (the MRI lesion is available: Academic Radiology, Vol. 16(9), 2009). MRI has been compared with mammography, ultrasound and clinical breast examination and been shown to be by far the most sensitive method for detecting breast cancer from high-risk women (an example study demonstrating this can be found here).

Interestingly, I am trying to improve MRI based breast cancer detection with computer-aided diagnosis techniques (having a computer replicate the function of a radiologist medical doctor so that the computer can act as a second reader to improve the screening process). I found this interesting study looking at using computer based pattern recognition techniques to detect cancer from thermograms, however, the researchers were able to “only accurately diagnose about 61.54% of the breast cancer cases” indicating that correctly diagnosing breast cancer from thermograms is very challenging (citation: Ng et al., Journal of Medical Engineering and Technology, 2002).

Readers should be warned about relying on thermography for breast cancer detection, particularly since some studies show that it performs extremely poorly!

Jacob Levman, PhD (Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto)
Sunnybrook Research Institute, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Imaging Research, Toronto, ON, Canada

New developments in statistical machine learning research with application to breast cancer detection

2010-09-13T12:49:00.015-04:00

Article on a new statistical machine learning technique recently published and presented. The technique's abilities have been demonstrated in breast cancer detection from state-of-the-art MRI examinations.

I've returned from Argentina and the conference (IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society) was highly successful. I was supposed to hang around my poster for 1.5 hours but it ended up being closerto 3 hours because my research got a lot of interest from the other researchers attending the conference. The paper presents an applied mathematics solution to a multidimensional statistical pattern recognition problem known as classification or supervised learning. It is compared with the support vector machine (one of the very best pattern recognition techniques available for this problem) and demonstrates its use as a breast cancer detection mechanism from MRI examinations. The paper itself should soon be indexed on the ieeexplore website, however, it should be okay to publish the conference poster here at Spotlight-on-Science as it is not doing any good now that it has been presented. IEEExplore hosts the conference paper I wrote, but not the poster that I presented at the conference.

Click on the image to enlarge (the file is quite big!)

For the nerds out there this is a technique to draw a manifold or boundary (a plane in high dimensional space) that separates two groups of high dimensional numbers. This is used in breast cancer detection by making multiple measurements per region of tissue. This technique combines the measurements taken to predict the location of cancerous tissues. This is a potentially highly useful application of multidimensional mathematics. The application field for this type of equation is sometimes called machine learning, supervised learning or classification in the literature.

While I was away in Argentina I was struggling along as a gringo with next to no Spanish abilities - if only I had these dolphins around to help me translate: (once again, thank to Gary Larson and the Far Side)

September 11th

2010-08-23T16:23:00.009-04:00

A short article on peculiar personal effects of September 11th and an interesting technical conference in Argentina.

I am off to the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society conference which is being held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I am presenting a paper that takes the established statistical pattern recognition technique known as support vector machines and reformulates the mathematics of the approach such that the entire technique can be summarized with a single mathematical equation. The equation is producing superior test results on my MRI breast cancer data and to a super-nerd like me, it seems like an elegant solution to this problem. A journal paper version has been drafted and will be sent out to a peer-reviewed journal shortly.

After enjoying the conference and a little vacation with some fine Argentine red meat and red wine I will depart Argentina on the 10th and make it back to Canada on the 11th (September 11th - a spooky day to fly).

Incidentally that made me think of a story - nine years ago I started a job at a software company in downtown Toronto called Alt software. A few days into my job was September 11th (2001). It wouldn't be long before everyone started panicking that all the airlines were going to go bankrupt, they all canceled their orders with Boeing (and other airplane manufacturers) who put new airplane development on hold which froze work with Honeywell (who was contracted to design that airplane's electrical and computer systems) who then froze work with Alt software (who was contracted to develop 3D graphics software for next generation airplane pilot consoles). At the time, most of Alt software's contracts were based in the airline industry and facing a sudden lack of revenue the company laid off many of their staff including myself who only worked there for about 2 months. A good thing that I remember about that job is that I built a little program that allowed you to test other computer programs under constrained CPU conditions (testing a program when the computer is busy with other stuff). The program allowed you to control how busy you made the computer. Although I only worked there for 2 months or so this program that I wrote was distributed to the company that contracted us - Honeywell International. To a nerd like me that was cool.

No new content will be published on this website until I return mid-September.

Jacob Levman

Humorous Aside: Che Guevara and the capitalist comeback

2010-08-20T20:50:00.009-04:00

Just when you thought Che Guevara's reach couldn't extend further into modern capitalist society:

In 2006 I presented a paper at a conference in Copenhagen. After the conference was over I visited my wife's family in Austria. While I was there I found this product and couldn't resist buying it as I was dumbfounded that it even existed. It's been sitting in my cabinet ever since until today when I noticed it again.

When I saw it I remembered this old joke I thought of at the time:

It's a communist revolution into the capitalist energy drink market!

Above Che's head it reads "THE REVOLUTION OF ENERGY"

Humorous Aside: Governments unite against free communications

2010-08-05T16:10:00.011-04:00

Research in Motion's blackberry is being banned or having its communications restricted around the globe because its communications equipment is too secure for a repressive government to see what its citizens are saying to each other. It is happening in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia - you can check it out here. (August 12th addition: India just added itself to this list of nations trying to restrict communication freedoms)

Why is it that these nations want to ban the blackberry? The first and most obvious reason is that they do not want to allow any oppositional political organization happening without them knowing about it. The second reason I can think of is to avoid embarassments - no one likes being embarassed. If something embarassing to them starts spreading on the internet or on cell phones, they can filter it out by banning certain terms, but with the blackberry they lose control of this. One can't help but wonder exactly what communications these governments are wanting to access and whether such abilities would be used to spy on political rivals or worse.

It occurred to me that I recently read an embarassing story about how wealthy Indonesians drink a type of fecal coffee (the beans are fermented in an animal's stomach, excreted, cleaned and made into a rich smooth coffee). Perhaps the Indonesian elites who are responsible for trying to spy on blackberry users merely want control of the flow of embarassing cat-poop-coffee jokes making fun of their favourite beverage.

Humorous Aside: 4 men in an apartment ...... and their food

2010-07-29T10:06:00.008-04:00

A funny personal anecdote on food, communal living and multiculturalism.

This past weekend I had a great time visiting my friend Ronesh who has moved out of Toronto west of the city. Ronesh is from India and moved to Canada to study at University. When he was in undergrad he shared a 4 bedroom apartment with a guy from Canada, a guy from Iran and a guy from China. On the weekend Ronesh was telling me a funny story about back when they all started living together.

It turns out there was initially a proposal to approach shared living from a communal point of view: that is, people wanted to share the costs of food and thus everyone would have access to all the food in the house. The Canadian guy, the Indian guy and the Iranian guy were all happy to try this plan. It turns out the Chinese guy would have nothing of that and elected out of the rest of the apartment dweller's experiment with communist based living.

We joked on the weekend about how maybe the reason for his rejection of the plan was because of China's history of forcing communism on the masses: any experience of that sort of thing will be enough to make anyone reject communism.

The joke continues as two of the three who chose to eat communally (the Indian and the Iranian) quickly began getting annoyed at how much food the Canadian ate!

(it turns out the average Canadian eats 3532 calories per day, the average Iranian eats 3043 calories per day and the average Indian eats 2351 calories per day - source here. Out of interest the average Chinese person eats 2980 calories per day)

The disproportionate national calorie consumption rates were made worse because the Canadian roommate was both a varsity rugby player and a reasonably big guy.

I've written many times in this blog (see below) about the problems in world food production and distribution (ie. that many people don't get enough nutrients, many of whom starve to death). Countries like Canada produce way more food than they need to feed their populations and as such could be making a much greater contribution towards alleviating the world's food crisis. In this context I found this story particularly amusing since it involves people coming from poorer countries to live with and subsidize the food of a citizen of this wealthy high consuming nation (Canada).

Humorous Aside: What's new pussycat?

2010-07-21T11:56:00.012-04:00

I recently read in the news (the globe and mail) that in Indonesia they have a delicacy called Kopi Luwak which is a special kind of coffee prized for its smoothness.

It turns out it is really expensive (about 200 dollars for a pound) and the reason for the hefty price is that it is harder to make than normal coffee. Harder because first they must feed the coffee beans to a cat-like animal called a civet (it is similar to a mongoose) and looks like this:

The beans ferment in the cat's stomach and eventually get pooped out. The pooped beans are then cleaned and roasted to make the coffee.

The ridiculous costs for this drink make me think of wealthy Indonesian elite sitting on sidewalk cafes and beautiful beaches sipping their cat poop coffee ;-)

Maybe someone should start a new franchise chain to sell the stuff - they can call it Starkucks. As I said previously, Kopi Luwak is prized for its smoothness. Starkucks could adopt the slogan: our coffee is smoother than ex-lax.

August 19th update: I've heard a rumour that right here in Toronto there is a coffee shop (apparently on Eglinton Ave.) that sells this cat poop coffee. Mmmmm mmmm good! Apparently it sells for only 15 dollars per cup!

Pre-censored in China

2010-05-18T18:28:00.014-04:00

It was recently discovered that this website comes pre-censored in China. The website is hosted by Google's free service which apparently has long been censored in China. It would seem that the Chinese Communist government doesn't like it that anyone can create a website in this space and write anything they want!

The founder of communist China, Mao Tse Tung told all of the Chinese to smelt steel in their backyards. The steel was terrible - and so was Mao. If someone came to my door with a gun and told me to smelt steel in my backyard I would do it - and the steel would suck too.

Now in modern China, the communist party has moved away from Mao's ridiculous ideas on development (like forcing the citizenry to smelt steel in their backyards) and embraced a form of capitalism. However, they hung on to traditional communist practices of message control (hence the blogspot ban) and feeding the population large quantities of propaganda.

So the Chinese communist party heavily censors everything that looks bad on them: the Tiananmen square massacre, the brutalization of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, corruption of any kind by a high level communist government official.

Just today I thought of how similar post World War 2 Chinese history has been to the book Animal Farm. The book is a parable (mimicking communism) that takes place on a farm where the animals take over the farm from the farmer in a revolution (animals representing the people and the farmer representing the former nobility). But by the end of the book the animals running the farm (the pigs incidentally) were behaving just like the former farmer (nobility) - living it up at the expense of the rest. The Chinese government appears to fit this role beautifully.

The upper brass of the communist party of China are extremely rich - many individuals are in charge of national corporations. Through their government, the Chinese people own billions of dollars of unused money. Simultaneously, they preside over a nation with huge numbers of ridiculously poor people.

Perhaps they should rename "The Communist party of China" to "the Capitalist Dictatorship party of China".

Addition: according to this website China has a total of 2.85 trillion dollars in foreign reserves. That money could have a huge impact on China's poorest inhabitants, if only the Chinese leadership were interested in investing much more substantially in their poor (they have the money that it would take readily availble).

Preventing cancer and other problems with alkaline pills?

2010-01-09T17:20:00.006-05:00

Cancer cells proliferate in acidic environments. A healthy human is free of cancer and is not acidic (typical healthy pH is slightly basic: 7.4). But it is common for people to have unhealthily low pH levels (more acidic).

Coffee, alcohol and meats are all extremely common and they lead to a more acidic body. Body acidity is good for cancer growth and I would love to see a study which estimates a person's cancer risk factor if they have an acidic pH level. Acidic pH levels have also been associated with a number of other medical problems like muscle pain and joint pain / arthritis.

I love meat and many other acid inducing foods and drinks. Today I took a pH test which came in at around 6.6 - 6.7, anything below 7.35 is called acidosis. I am now taking alkaline pills and am hoping to get my pH back up to 7.4, if it helps alleviate my muscle and joint pain I will write about it (and that would be awesome). Given that cancer proliferates in acidic environments, I can't help but wonder what worldwide cancer rates would be if everyone took alkaline pills to make sure their body's pH is kept at a healthy 7.4. Or another way of putting it is: we need to know the risk factor for cancer associated with an acidic pH.

Creating money

2010-01-06T11:24:00.019-05:00

An article on the peculiarities of the ways we create money.

Our present system is hyper-capitalist (don’t get me wrong I do like many aspects of capitalism, particularly when competition results in lower prices for the basic necessities of life). However in our capitalist system money is created in three ways:

1) The logical way: the central bank (Bank of Canada, Federal Reserve, etc.) literally prints extra paper money (through the mint).

2) The normal (but weird) way: A commercial bank creates a loan and thus gives money to the loan recipient. It is normal for a bank to have many more loans than assets (due to the widely used fractional reserve banking system). The sum of all the bank’s loans less its assets is money that has been created (effectively printed!) in our ridiculous system. (the money did not exist before the loan existed but when the bank approves the loan, the money is created – the bank doesn’t need to physically print this money, just to account for it on a computerized ledger sheet somewhere). It is government law that allows banks to create money in this manner.

3) The super weird way (quantitative easing). This method combines the first two methods in a spectacularly ridiculous way.
The government creates new money (through a loan) and hands it over to a commercial bank. The commercial bank then counts this money as an asset and loans out much much more money to home owners and businesses then charges interest on ALL of the outgoing loans they made. (quantitative easing is pretty weird - if anyone wants to help clarify this please send me an e-mail or post a comment)

Interestingly enough, most commercial banks’ loans heavily outweigh their assets. So if we wanted to know exactly how much money has been created in any given currency then we would add up the total amount of money printed by the central bank plus the total of all of the loans (less assets) of all of the commercial banks.

The great irony here is that the private self-serving commercial banks decide who gets newly printed money and get to charge interest on the money they created! The further irony is that the money created by the commercial banks through this loaning process is typically much greater than the amount created by the central banks through standard money printing etc. (in the U.S. there are about 5.4 trillion dollars of mortgage based loans which to my understanding is the bulk of the 8.3 trillion dollars in existence according to the M2 estimate available here)

Changing this system could easily improve government revenues which are flailing all over the world.

Interestingly according to this wiki article on money creation it is estimated that in 1959 the U.S. had 286.6 billion dollars in existence and that by May 2009 the U.S. had 8,327 billion dollars in existence (M2 estimate again). This yields a money growth rate of about 6 or 7 percent per year on average. Now assuming this trend were to continue then in 2010 there would be another 6 percent of the total money supply created. This represents a creation of about 500 billion U.S. dollars in one year! The bulk of this money is going to loan recipients (businesses that convince a bank to loan to them or individuals who get a mortgage based loan from the bank for their house). Those loan recipients have to pay the money back of course but a huge amount of what they pay back is handed to the commercial banks not to the government who is both responsible for our currency and badly needs the funds!

The banks mostly decide whether or not to provide a mortgage/loan based on some actuarial mathematics that are largely automated by computers these days. It would be trivial for the government to implement a loan/mortgage policy directly to its citizens using actuarial mathematics similar to those used by the banks. This has the potential to generate oodles of money for the government and I bet sticking it to the banks would be great electoral politics as long as you don’t cause an economic meltdown. Otherwise the government could cut the citizen a break by simply banning the charging of a markup on the interest rate charged on loan money that comes from the central bank.

I find it ironic that in Canada we call our 1 dollar coin the 'loonie'. Albeit because of the loon on the coin, but it sure seems appropriate when we look at how the money is created in general.

Jacob Levman

Global warming and global cooling

2010-01-01T21:49:00.011-05:00

When volcanos erupt it lets off a bunch of gases into the atmosphere. A big volcanic eruption can actually cause global cooling - light waves that would otherwise have reached the earth's surface and caused some warming were instead deflected by particles in the atmosphere put up there by the volcanic eruption. When we burn some fuel, greenhouse gases are emitted which are known to act as an insulator for the earth (helping us to stay warm by retaining heat).
But having more particles up there in the atmosphere should also contribute to some cooling due to the same effect observed after a volcanic eruption (the extra particles in the atmosphere will intercept some light that otherwise would have made it to the earth's surface and contributed to warming - there's plenty of soot and garbage in the exhaust of our cars etc.).

Here are 3 example ways that burning fuel causes changes in global temperatures.

1) Standard greenhouse gas emissions (ex. carbon dioxide) increases in the atmosphere and acts as an insulator keeping our planet warmer.

2) The act of burning lets off a significant amount of heat into our atmosphere (making the planet warmer)

3) The exhaust from the burnt fuel contains soot etc. that get into the atmosphere which then reflect light that otherwise would have made it to the earth's surface (making the planet cooler). To the best of my knowledge, this is thought to be very small.

It would be cool if we could evaluate the relative dominance of each of these issues. For instance if it turns out that the heat output from burning fuel is contributing a large amount towards global warming then perhaps we could develop technologies that simply trap heat that otherwise would have been expelled (say out the tailpipe of a car). Or use one of the new electricity generating inventions that operate based on a temperature differential - theoretically such devices could be used to charge a hybrid car's battery.

Bringing democracy to the United Nations

2010-01-01T18:30:00.007-05:00

A short point on obvious shortcomings at the United Nations.

I love the idea behind the United Nations: create a forum for world leaders and diplomats in an effort to minimize war and national conflicts. But I also believe in democracy, something the United Nations only pretends to practice. UN resolutions etc. are passed by pseudo-democratic vote in the General Assembly. As in a normal democratic institution, resolutions etc. are passed by some sort of majority vote. The problem is that each world nation gets exactly 1 vote. Liechtenstein (population 35,000) gets one vote and India (population 1.2 billion) also gets 1 vote. It is no wonder people don't take the resolutions coming out of the UN general assembly seriously. Each country's vote should be weighted by the number of citizens in that country that could have theoretically voted for the present leader (ie. the number of registered voters or something like that).

Here's to dreaming of democracy for the whole world in this new year!

Cheers,

Jacob

How much climate change is connected with the solar cycle length?

2009-12-30T13:52:00.013-05:00

There is a big controversy in climate science regarding the magnitude of the effect of solar variations on the earth's climate. This article discusses one of those controversial theories.

I recently found this incredibly interesting article on the internet by K. Lassen at the Danish Meteorological Institute. The article shows incredible correlations between global temperatures and solar cycle length. Interestingly the author above and a colleague published evidence for this theory in Science way back in 1991. Although not the point of the article, it strongly implies that historical temperature variations are predominantly the result of a changing solar cycle length. Plots provided by K. Lassen (see link above) imply that the solar cycle length is periodic and it appears as though we might be near a peak in the periodic signal - thus cooling would begin (we just finished an unusually long cycle). If the solar cycle length is lengthening and world temperatures are still rising then human caused global warming may be even more significant than expected! If the solar cycle length is just starting to drop and world temperatures are also dropping accordingly (or start dropping soon) then human caused global warming might be much smaller than thought.

Check out this plot I got from this site, it shows that global temperatures are highly correlated with the sun spot cycle length.

I have argued below that climate change dollars should go towards a distribution system so that we have the ability to deliver food, water, fertilizers and medicines to poorer and less arable regions hit by the negative effects of climate change. Regardless of whether climate change's cause is human based or solar cycle length based (or anything else) we all have some responsibility to help the world's malnourished peoples. If each of the world's wealthy nations were to give just 100 dollars per citizen per year to the UN World Food Programme, then we could possibly put an end to hunger. For 300 dollars per citizen per year we could probably also provide these people with medicine and some education (as many charities do), although programs designed to help people provide for themselves in a self-sustaining way are preferred.

September 24th addition: I will release my book soon and it includes many non-handout based suggestions for how to help with the food crisis.

Brief: Investing in the price of food

2009-12-26T15:51:00.007-05:00

When a trader buys food products (grains etc.) on the world markets in the hopes that the price will increase they do a huge disservice to poor people in poor nations who have difficulty finding enough money to purchase basic foods such as bread.

If the price of a grain doubles because a bunch of financial trading institutions deciding that grains are a better investment than some other areas (like the U.S. housing market or stocks etc.) then poor people go hungry because they can only afford half the bread! For the good of the poor these financial trading institutions should refrain from investing directly in the purchase of grains and other basic necessities where it would harm the poor if the price were to increase. Better yet it must be possible to create a government regulation that prevents this practice.

Improving government revenues

2009-12-25T14:47:00.010-05:00

From a US Statistical Abstract: there are about 75 million homes in America with about 48 million mortgages. At an average value of just over $100,000 the total amount of money borrowed in the form of mortgages is 5.4 trillion dollars.

The U.S. federal reserve provides 90% of this loan money, so the U.S. federal reserve has loaned out about 4.5 trillion dollars to pay home sellers on behalf of a home buyer and the commercial bank that they chose. The federal reserve charges the commercial bank a low interest rate to lend them 90% of the cost of everyone's mortgage. The commercial bank increases the interest rate they charge the customer without adding any real benefit to that 90% of the mortgage money that they borrowed from the federal reserve. If the federal reserve were to simply loan that money directly to the Amercian citizen then they could charge the citizen an interest rate below the commercial bank rate which would make the citizen happy. The amount they charge the citizen could also be more than what the federal reserve charges the commercial banks at present - which could generate badly needed government revenue (an extra 1% on 5.4 trillion dollars is about 50 billion dollars a year - nothing to sneeze at). The only one who loses are the commercial banks, but I don't think politicians should worry - there are only so many banker's votes out there.

I'm actually Canadian and would love to see the same thing happen here but I got onto the topic after finding the American mortgage statistics I showed at the top.

It might be best if this problem were solved with free market economics rather than having the government get into the mortgage and loans business. The mortgage and loan company of the future could consist of 2 computer systems and almost no staff (one computer system on the internet which takes mortgage and loan applications, one computer system analyzes the applications with actuarial mathematics to decide which applications to fund). A potentially very profitable business with low overhead which could heavily undercut the interest rates charged by the commercial banks.

Funding for fighting climate change and world hunger

2009-12-24T11:26:00.013-05:00

Fighting climate change is thought to be important because if we don't then some regions may produce less food and water in the future and more people will die from starvation and dehydration. No one wants starvation and dehydration to get worse.

Currently we spend about 3.7 billion dollars a year trying to feed the world through the UN World Food Programme. It was recently announced that the U.S. would commit to a climate change fighting plan which involves (eventually) contributing 100 billion dollars per year to dealing with the problem.

If the remaining industrialized world would commit proportionally similar funds then we would have about 300 billion dollars a year devoted to fighting climate change. This is close to 100 times the budget for the UN World Food Programme.

So we're spending 3.7 billion dollars to fight world hunger and dehydration and potentially 300 billion dollars to make sure that climate change doesn't make the problem worse!

I bet if a much smaller value than that 300 billion dollars per year (for climate change) were devoted to the World Food Programme then it could feed the world's 1.02 billion malnourished people - although it may need to spend that money efficiently. We know that global warming has already caused a 0.7 degree temperature increase over the last 100 years, these people who are starving and thirsty are probably already adversely affected by pre-existing global warming. If their region is already producing less food than it might otherwise have (due to the previous warming) then the local price of food is higher than it otherwise would have been (lower the supply of food and the price goes up). The price increase means more people can't afford enough food and become malnourished. Lots of money should be devoted to alleviating present hunger and starvation. Some climate change dollars could be devoted to assisting the poor in arid and hot regions who are probably already affected by climate change.

Charities offer to allow you to sponsor a child (so they are fed, provided with medicine and education) for about 300 dollars a year. On this measure we should be able to support the world's 1 billion malnourished people for 300 billion dollars a year (the amount we as industrialized nations may be commiting to fighting climate change). Interestingly, the UN World Food Programme said that they had a plan to feed 108 million malnourished people on a budget of 6.7 billion dollars - although they were only receiving about 3.7 billion dollars. This implies that the department is actually fairly efficient, costing only about 65 dollars to feed one malnourished person for one year (quite cheap compared to charities offering to sponsor a child for $22 dollars a month - although the charities often also provide medicine and education).

Jacob Levman

An inconvenient truth

2009-12-22T11:23:00.009-05:00

The earth is filled with problems: war, terrorism, climate change, crime, starvation, etc. It can be very difficult to properly assess which problem facing the world is the most poignant and thus the most deserving of our attention and resources, however, food and malnourishment problems appear to be monumentally large.

I have been reading newspapers and political blogs on a daily basis for years and years. While I was always aware of the wide array of problems facing the world it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I discovered just how ridiculously severe one of the problems facing the world is; I would like to offer my opinion that the most poignant problem facing the world today is hunger / malnourishment. Of all the deaths in the world about 58% were of a malnourished person. Lack of food played a role in exacerbating these deaths. Now, trying to solve any of the world’s problems looks like a daunting task and no less so when we look at feeding the world’s 1 billion hungry souls. Societies such as the U.S., Canada, U.K. etc. invested massive amounts of money, resources and lives to bring an end to the Second World War (which claimed on average about 35,000 lives each day). At present there are 100,000 malnourished people dying everyday and although these malnourished people constitute less than one sixth (16.7%) of the world population, they account for about 58% of worldwide deaths! These people need our help! Their stories are not well publicized because these people are disproportionately poor citizens of poor countries who do not have the means to make their problems well known.

A few of the posts below look at this problem in more detail – I hope that my writings on this subject can change people’s opinions about what aspects of international assistance should be our collective focus. I wish I weren't broke - if I had some significant money I would use it to buy ad space in a big collection of the world's newspapers and print an article summarizing the world hunger points that I've made in this blog. Getting the attention of the world's decision makers could lead to this issue being addressed by provoking additional funding commitments. Or earmarking some climate change dollars to alleviating both problems simultaneously. For instance: if we planted many many many food bearing cacti (like prickly pear) in hot, dry and poor regions of Africa and Asia we should be able to significantly increase those regions' food supplies.

Jacob Levman

Food waste and world hunger

2009-12-22T10:46:00.008-05:00

I’ve heard that the world produces enough food to feed everyone. Unfortunately there are 1 billion malnourished people in the world today (according to the UN World Food Programme). The following article presents a quick rough estimate of food waste and compares it with how much food might be needed for the world’s malnourished people.

It is estimated that the United States wastes about 100 billion pounds of food every year. If we were careful and well organized we could transfer the bulk of this wasted food to the world’s malnourished people. Now if we assume that the other industrialized countries such as Canada, Australia, Japan and the European nations produce wasted food at about the same rate as the United States then approximately 300 billion pounds of food would be wasted every year (the sum of these nations having about 3 times the population of the U.S.). This corresponds to about 150 billion kg of food (I prefer the metric system) each year. A person needs about 2000 calories of food per day, and a malnourished person who already has some food would probably need a supplement of an additional 1000 calories each per day (on average – just a guess). This corresponds to about 250 grams of food each day (assuming at least 4 calories per gram) or about 100 kg of food each year to raise a single malnourished person’s food intake to sensible levels. 150 billion kg of food each year could thus provide necessary food for about 1.5 billion malnourished people. As mentioned above there are about 1 billion malnourished people in the world today and 100,000 are dying each day. If we could recover, preserve and deliver just two thirds of all the food wasted in the industrialized world then we could probably eradicate world hunger and malnourishment and in the process save millions and millions of lives. At present it takes just 10 days or so for 1 million malnourished people to die.

We need an organized system to recover and preserve the industrialized world’s wasted food and to deliver it to the world’s poor and hungry. Furthermore, assisting poor regions to adopt more technologically advanced agricultural practices can also help alleviate world hunger.

Unfortunately much of this food is unrecoverable as the food spoils in our fridges and by that point it is too late to send it to someone in need. Ideas to help make good use of this is described in my book (featured with cover above).

Jacob Levman

Follow up on climate change funding

2009-12-18T11:48:00.010-05:00

The dangers climate change presents can be described as follows: if in the future the world is significantly hotter then some regions may not produce as much food or water as they currently do and this can lead to drought, starvation and dehydration. Furthermore, many scientists have pointed out that climate change is likely to cause more episodes of extreme weather conditions. Extreme weather patterns (like say a tsunami or hurricane) can appear quite quickly and can have devastating effects on the local population’s ability to feed itself. This is all the more poignant in poor countries where the local populations tend to lack adequate financial resources.

In order to compensate for the effects of global warming it is critical for the world to develop distribution methods to facilitate providing food, water or medicine to people in need at any corner of the earth. There is plenty of evidence that earth’s temperatures have risen over the last 100 years. While we should always do our best to prevent future extreme weather patterns, we have a collective need to be able to endure whatever weather mother earth throws at us. Many scientists predict increased extreme weather patterns which is supported anecdotally by looking at the large number of extreme weather problems we’ve had in recent years (like the recent tsunami or the series of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico region). When an extreme weather pattern hits it is imperative that we be able to deliver food, water and medical supplies to the region as quickly and effectively as possible.

I would like to recommend that some of the money being earmarked to fight climate change be devoted to developing a distribution networks to help ensure that no one (no matter where they were born) will be wanting food or water if their region is subjected to harsh weather conditions.

Jacob Levman

P.S. A big hunk of climate change money should be devoted to funding every scientist and engineer in the world who has a mildly plausible research idea that may one day assist in preventing catastrophic climate change. Betting on a future technology to save us from this problem is probably far better than expecting a very expensive emissions reduction strategy to significantly improve the earth's climate.

Funding to fix climate change and making sure the world doesn’t go hungry or thirsty

2009-12-17T11:04:00.011-05:00

Today in the news it was announced by Hillary Clinton (secretary of state for the Obama administration) that 100 billion dollars per year was what the Americans were offering as part of a multinational deal to help fight climate change.

That is a lot of money. However, it is not clear how this money would be spent. One of the main concerns about climate change is that eventually some of the world’s regions will not produce as much food or have as much clean water as they do presently and so this may cause poor people in the future to die of starvation or dehydration. This is where the problem comes in – I have been reading the newspapers (one could say religiously) just about everyday for as long as I can remember. Sometimes when one particular region is subject to some particularly problematic circumstance then deaths due to starvation can increase dramatically, this can result in news articles being written about the crisis thus raising people’s awareness of the problem and encouraging them to help (for instance, I recall when I was a child there were severe droughts in Ethiopia or more recently how North Koreans were often going hungry so that Kim Jong Il could feed his millions of soldiers). Despite reading the news religiously it wasn’t until very recently that I discovered how severe and persistent the problem of world hunger really is.

There are more people dying everyday right now whose death is linked to malnutrition than there were dying in a typical day during World War II. We really should be taking vast amounts of money towards an international agreement to fight world hunger, unfortunately, this issue is not well publicized. The United Nations estimates there are about 1 billion malnourished people in the world (mostly in poor countries). A multinational agreement with the amount of funds being proposed to fight climate change could surely be super beneficial to our planet and humanity if earmarked for fighting hunger and giving people clean drinking water. Now part of the mandate of climate change funds is to prevent a future circumstance whereby some lands won’t produce enough food to feed the local population. But we already have this problem! I think it would be best if the mandate of any climate change agreement is expanded to alleviate conditions (like starvation and dehydration) that climate change can contribute to. Thus a large amount of any climate change funds could be immediately earmarked for relieving existing starvation and dehydration issues that already occur around the planet. There's a 0.6 or 0.7 degrees Celsius temperature increase over the last 100 years, thus the world’s hungry poor people who don’t have adequate water supplies are likely already being adversely affected by climate change that started a century ago. These people should be helped right now!

Normally it is expected that this money would be devoted to reducing greenhouse gas emissions which are known to sit in our atmosphere and act as a heat retaining insulator – thus leading to planetary warming. There are many approaches to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions; the least appealing one to me is a carbon swap / carbon credit type approach. First of all no business is going to want to admit just how many greenhouse gases they are emitting because they will have to pay more money to compensate for their emissions. So if we can’t trust the businesses to universally and accurately report their emissions then we will need an expensive set of government regulators and inspectors to force the companies to comply. I am skeptical that such an approach will even work, although I do expect that it will cost a lot of money. Furthermore, governments which have a bad track record of forcing their companies to behave themselves are even less likely to produce accurate numbers for their greenhouse gas emissions. What’s to stop a company from emitting a LOT of greenhouse gases on the many days when no government inspectors are present? Furthermore, those companies that buy a carbon credit to compensate for their polluting will buy it from someone else who has polluted less. In theory this sounds good – a polluting company is forced to pay money to a green company. Once again I am skeptical that regulations will effectively force the polluting company to pay, but an even more ironic circumstance will happen when a polluting company does pay but pays the carbon credit to a company which no longer operates an unprofitable formerly polluting factory. This unprofitable polluting factory was already shut down and we got the benefit of the reduced greenhouse gas emissions already. It doesn’t make sense for a polluter to send money to this company to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions as money would be paid but there would be no net reduction in overall greenhouse gas emissions.

A much much better strategy to reducing greenhouse gas emissions would be to invest lots of money into new technologies that one day will provide us with a more economical option than our present polluting options. If a green energy option were cheaper than our present polluting options then we would dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions through standard capitalist free market economics (everyone would choose the green option because it saves them money and the benefit for the planet through reduced greenhouse gases would be a positive side effect).

Hopefully one day all of humanity will have an adequate supply of food and water.

I was thinking - when dealing with such huge amounts of money it would be a real shame if we just throw money at the problem and expect everything to work out.

Jacob Levman

Brief: Government spending and world hunger

2009-12-01T21:02:00.010-05:00

Many of the world's governments are willing to spend billions of dollars in the cause of fighting climate change. The world's governments are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure that their banking institutions and insurance companies don't go bankrupt (out of fear of causing a prolonged recession / depression). When at war nations are willing to spend obscene amounts of money waging them.

In World War II 62-78 million deaths are attributed to fighting, civilian casualities and industrial scale extermination. The war lasted for about 6 years yielding on average ~35,000 humans dying everday due to the horrific war (the deadliest in history). By UN estimate, at present almost 100,000 malnourished people die everyday representing over half of all deaths (16,000 of which are children . . . every day!). There are 1.02 billion undernourished people in the world today (according the United Nations World Food Programme). The amounts of money devoted to solving this problem are tiny compared with the resources devoted to so many of the world's problems. The UN World Food Programme has a budget of about 3 to 4 billion dollars per year. There has been talk of spending hundreds of billions of dollars anually on climate change, we already spend hundreds of billions of dollars on farm subsidies and hundreds of billions of dollars on bank bailouts and wars. The chronic food crisis is a hugely neglected problem - hopefully one day it will be rectified.

Banks and collusion in Canada

2009-11-28T20:27:00.009-05:00

When the economy got bad and the Canadian bank's bottom lines started looking slim they decided to steal from their customers! Many of the main banks raised the interest rates they charge on their customers in unison early this year (which is probably an example of a violation of collusion laws). The banks decided to blindly steal from everyone right when the economy was worsening and many people really were struggling.

Ironically, the recession has taken a toll on my family quite substantially (my wife and her sister run a small business) it came to the point where we needed some extra financial assistance but the bank refused to increase the amount of money we've borrowed against our house out of fear of increasing my debt servicing charges (they would have increased by up to 30% had this transaction been completed). The bank said they would be happy to help us once we are making more money - in other words they'll help when we don't need the help anymore. The hilarious thing is that the bank didn't care about increasing my debt servicing charges by 40% back earlier in the year when they decided to steal from me and their other customers (which is more than the 30% that they used to justify rejecting helping me).

As the recession was going strong, the government (through the Bank of Canada) was lowering interest rates to help the economy and to lower people's and business' debt servicing charges thus making enduring the recession less painful. The banks used the fact that the rates were dropping quickly as an excuse to steal an extra 1% in interest charges from their customers. It was calculated that people would either not notice or stomach it because the government was providing so much interest rate relief. I use the term "to steal an EXTRA 1%" because when someone has a mortgage the bank only has to have 10% of the loan value but charges you interest on the whole 100%. The remaining 90% comes from the Bank of Canada which is provided to the banks at a well publicized interest rate (currently only 0.25%). The banks borrow 90% of the mortgage at 0.25% and hand it over to you - charging you 3.25 or 4.25 or 5.25% - they never even had that money in the first place! But what would a whiny banker say if they were in the room with me right now: "but we incur risk, what if the person defaults on their loan?" well incidentally the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (a government company!) actually insures the risky cases (all cases where the homeowner puts less than 20% of the mortgage cost down). So the government is lending money to people who add nothing to the value of that resource but they turn around and lend it to you and me at hugely inflated prices (right now its like 13 to 20 times the rate they borrow the money at!) and even if the person can't pay the bank back the government takes care of that problem anyway: through the CMHC, the government fixes the problem for the bank but not the person who couldn't pay the bank and just lost their home.

So what should be done about this? The banks clearly need regulations: if the bank is operating in a privileged capacity to hand out loan money that came from the government, then the bank should not be allowed to charge more than the amount the government is lending it at. I wouldn't complain if the government started dealing directly with homeowners and cut the bank out of the equation all together. That Bank of Canada money belongs to ALL Canadians. It is the government's responsibility to make sure that the banks don't abuse us all. If any politician wants an issue that they could use to help get themselves elected or re-elected then perhaps they should focus on stopping banks from stealing from Canadians. Most Canadians aren't particularly fond of the banks (beyond seeing some of their fiscal solvency as a reflection of Canadian prudence). Much of their profits stem from their relationship with the Bank of Canada, an instution we as Canadian's have control of through our elected government.

I found this cartoon on the internet available from this cool site and thought how maybe it would be appropriate to name the main mommy pig "Bank of Canada" and the little ones being the commercial banks - suckling off the system. Perhaps the little piggies should also be defecating on people labeled "the public".

Jews and Muslims and the weirdness of history

2009-10-03T16:27:00.012-04:00

History is a fascinating social science. Just about every civilization and culture that has had contact with another have also experienced inter-cultural friction. Among the bristlier subjects along this vein are the struggles between Jews and Muslims and the emotions these subjects evoke in so many.

Considering the fundamental similarities between the religions (monotheistic belief in God and a common spiritual ancestory) it is remarkable how there are types from either of these faiths (or any faith) who focus purely on the differences between their religious traditions and those of others. Many people in today's world appear enthralled to the idea that the world's religions are necessarily in conflict with each other.

In reading I have come across a few tidbits in history that I thought I might share as they might have the ability to show people the big picture: that there were times in the past when the two communities cooperated together --> and hopefully this will help inspire some people to believe that it is still possible for the two communities to cooperate.

When Christians were engaged in holy wars (the crusades) to conquer the holy land, they were often bizarrely brutal. In 1099 120,000 European crusaders sieged Jerusalem. The Muslim and Jewish inhabitants fought to defend their city against the Christian invaders. In the end the Christians were victorious and decided to slaughter the entire Muslim and Jewish population of the city. Also a little known 10th century central asian empire called Khazaria was in fact a Jewish state. The royalty were of turkic descent and converted to Judaism and much of the nation followed suit with time (Judaism was the state religion but the nation comprised subjects from many faiths). An interesting story covers the demise of the nation: Rus (an Eastern European nation of the time) soldiers wanted to pass through the nation to conquer Baghdad / Muslim lands. The Jewish royalty of the time refused to allow the Rus to pass through their territory, thus refusing to facilitate their attack on Muslim Baghdad. The Rus resorted to sacking the Jewish nation instead. Another interesting bit of history (from before the days of Islam): One of the famous cases of the enslavement of Jews was their conquering and enslavement by the Babylonians. The Jews were freed from slavery by the conquering Iranian king Cyrus in 539 B.C.

It would seem to me that if God wants us to learn a lesson from history then it is nice and simple: there are good and bad people of any background/faith and surely we should all cooperate with whomever is good from any background or spiritual tradition.

P.S. Perhaps it should also be noted that people of many many religious backgrounds (Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, etc.) fought for freedom with Allied forces in both world wars I and II.

Science and physics studying consicousness and God

2009-10-03T15:29:00.009-04:00

Physics attempts to explain the universe around us. The universe is broken down into explainable equations and relationships based on a few basic principles that attempt to explain the nature of the universe. In standard physics, explaining the universe has typically been limited to explaining matter (and the fundamental forces that govern their interactions). Very few attempts have been made that try to incorporate other known natural phenomena of the universe - like consciousness - into a mathematical or physical model of the universe. I have never heard a convincing explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness that is based purely on our understanding of matter and the fundamental forces that govern matter's interaction.

It should be noted that the four fundamental forces from the standard model of physics seems likely to be incomplete (the four forces as presently described do not allow for stable atoms --> if energy is applied to an atom and an inner shelled electron is ionized then a chain spectral pattern can be observed where the second shell electron falls into the inner shell and the third shell electron falls into the second shell etc. The atom would not be stable because as the forces are described, the electron moving inwards from the second shell to the first shell has both its kinetic energy and the electromagnetic force (which is quite substantial) pulling it towards the nucleus. If the true physics of the universe were based purely on the standard model of physics then these electrons would regularly annihilate with a subatomic particle in the atom's nucleus and matter would likely be much less stable than we all observe it to be. At present the strong force is thought to drop off extremely quickly outside of the nucleus, however, it seems more plausible to me that it is playing some role in keeping the atom stable.

We know that science is a study of the universe. I like to think that perhaps fully understanding the universe is also to fully understand God. And that one can approach God from any avenue (any or all of the world's religious traditions) or even through logical reason and scientific analysis.

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" - Albert Einstein

The economics of charity

2009-09-21T12:16:00.010-04:00

A short wishful article on the need for larger scale charitable integration with existing capitalism.

If a significant number of companies were advertising that they donate a large share of their profits to charity, then given the option many people will choose to purchase items that involve a charitable contribution. If such an eventuality got very popular then humanity would begin exclusively purchasing products from companies that donate the majority of their profits to charity. Free market capitalism would cause greedy organizations to lose market share. Companies would (just about) universally pledge to donate 50% (or 65% or 95% or 99.9%) of their profits to charitable organizations or else face a potential 0% market share as all customers flock to the companies that advertise that they donate the majority of their profits to charitable organizations.

While this could happen through slow growth in corporate charitable contributions, although I am hopeful something or someone will come along and greatly help speed up this process. Fifty percent of worldwide profits is surely so large that it could have a real impact on the world's billions of poor people.

Here's a funny cartoon I found:

Another cartoon - this time from a big company's shareholder meeting (comic from cartoonstock)

Humorous Aside: The Far Side

2009-09-13T11:46:00.010-04:00

The Far Side is a great comic! You can check it out here. I collected a few of my favorites below.

Did you ever wonder if God is unhappy or unsatisfied with its creation? Our planet sure needs improvements:

It sucks when you find out things aren't the way you thought they were:

If anyone knows where this store is please e-mail me:

I can't tell you how many times I've felt like this guy:

Ever wonder how God sees the world? Does it make decisions like this or just make the decision not to intervene when something like this is going to happen?

With a background in math, I wish this is all it would take to get into heaven.....

Science assisted enlightenment

2009-09-08T16:41:00.009-04:00

Buddhist texts have it that Buddha instructed monks that they could achieve advanced states of awareness through meditative practise that achieves a mental state sometimes described with the term single-pointedness - often achieved by focusing on the sensation of air currents on the nostril area (in Hinduism this is called anapana sati and is said to be able to provide liberation or moksha to the practitioner).

At present humans can use fMRI technology to image the area of the brain that is firing when we experience a particular sensation like moving a finger or seeing a particular image. The Dalai Lama has cooperated with Western scientists to map the areas of the brain that activate when a monk is in an advanced state of awareness. It stands to reason that if we can image ourselves feeling a particular sensation, that one day we will be able to force ourselves to experience that particular sensation with an advanced machine (without having to stick a probe inside our heads) . If such an invention were to exist it could be used to provide enlightenment to anyone and everyone.

I found this cartoon and thought of how many people in the Western world might first ask the way to Vegas before a question that might lead them to enlightenment. However, I think all Westerners would be quite interested in having a device with a button that immediately provides a state of mental calm.

Homosexuality

2009-09-07T09:38:00.013-04:00

Homosexuality has been observed throughout the animal kingdom. Everything from elephants to dolphins to birds have been observed engaging in homosexual behaviour. There is plenty of evidence for the existence of genes that predispose the carrier to homosexuality. From an obvious Darwin - pass on your genes perspective being gay (thus probably/possibly having a pair of recessive gay genes) would not seem like a winning combination for the mere passing on of one's genes. This is one of the main reason based arguments against the naturalness of homosexuality - others don't accept it because of the dogma of some old text (such as the bible).

However, homosexuality is observed throughout the animal kingdom thus is quite natural and normal.

For this practise to manifest itself throughout so many species it seems plausible that there would be an evolutionary advantage to being a carrier of a recessive gay gene while still carrying a dominant straight gene. This pool of the population is liable to have some sort of genetic advantage over people who have two straight genes in order for homosexuality to be as prevalent as it is.

A good example to explain this phenomenon: Sickle Cell Anemia: This is a recessive genetic disorder where if the child receives this recessive gene from both of their parents then their blood cells are malformed and don't work correctly and lifespan is shortened. It turns out that if you are a carrier of the recessive sickle cell gene while also having a dominant non-sickle cell gene then you are immune to contracting malaria, one of the biggest killers in sub-saharan Africa (where this sickle cell phenomena is prevalent). Being immune to contracting one of your region's deadliest diseases would make you more likely to pass on your genes by reproducing (having children).

So the big question is: what would make a person with a dominant straight gene and a recessive gay gene more likely to pass on their genes? (as an overall effect in the population)

The first possible answer that comes to mind is that for males, having both the dominant straight gene and the recessive gay gene might make them more effeminite and potentially more likely to stay and commit to the long term goal of raising offspring (this can be an involved process in many animals and potentially a multi-decade process for humans). Or another way of putting it is perhaps male heterozygotes are more likely to invest in the well being of their offspring. Have you seen the movie March of the Penguins? The movie demonstrates how a male and female penguin would typically cooperate on caring for an egg under extremely harsh antarctic conditions. It turns out that two central park male penguins not only coupled but also were given an egg that needed hatching and cooperated together to succesfully care for the egg!

So, homosexuality? Well that's as natural as Bruno:

I found this picture on the internet and thought of where I live in Toronto (this picture is from elsewhere). In Toronto the gay neighbourhood is centred on Church St.!

Humorous Aside: Professor or worse?

2009-09-03T13:02:00.006-04:00

A professor is a nice cushy job - assuming one has tenure. The following cartoon from PhDComics.com compares a professor with a most unusual alternative career path.

Humorous Aside: Paid too little to lose one's job?

2009-09-03T12:34:00.006-04:00

Some funny comics from PhDComics.com.

Click to enlarge:

Humourous Aside: Grad School and moving towards a post-doc

2009-08-25T13:38:00.012-04:00

Some funny cartoons from PhDComics.com on entering the post-doctoral research phase of academia.

Click to enlarge:

Buddhism and the Dalai Lama

2009-08-16T00:38:00.016-04:00

Buddhism is often referred to as a science of the mind, where principles are accepted or rejected based on the mental reactions they elicit in the practitioner. Principles are also accepted or rejected based on the perception of how closely and accurately they reflect the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (the historical Buddha who lived ~2500 years ago on the Indian Subcontinent). By personal experience I would say that the correct application of logic is inclined to elicit a positive mental reaction in the practitioner.

I have recently been having a variety of difficulties in my life and found myself reading one of the Dalai Lama's books (cited below) but I was inspired by a passage (page 162) "In battle, the mind supported by logic will always be victorious over the mind that is not".

The book is "Many Ways to Nirvana - Reflections and Advice on Right Living" by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Having had many challenges with combining a spiritual practice with a busy lay modern Western life I was attracted to this book because of these words on the back cover: "His Holiness the Dalai Lama Interprets the Ancient Wisdom of the Buddha for Living in the Modern World"

On page 17 the Dalai Lama was discussing the Buddhist idea of the non-self – ie. That a substantially existent person does not exist. Call me a realist but I think that myself and the Dalai Lama substantially exist. The Dalai Lama goes on to say that adopting this philosophical notion can reduce craving, grasping, and attachment. By experience I agree that this is the case, however, I am not convinced that that makes the non-self a relative truth nor an absolute truth. Craving, grasping and attachment are reduced when denying our own existence because we also deny their validity/existence implicitly in the process of self denial. Some Buddhists deny the self and the soul (anatman) but they accept that we have a consciousness that transmigrates through bodies (pg. 156). Accepting that we have a consciousness in such terms but not calling it a soul seems odd.

I have to admit that I was disappointed with the subject of God in the book (pg. 81 and 157). It seems as though Buddhists don’t accept God (typically), though my understanding was that Buddha merely refused to answer questions regarding God’s existence. Buddha also taught his followers to be inquisitive.

Lately I have been very interested in the concept of pre-destiny. The idea has appeared twice in this book (p. 76 and 116) however, I was disappointed that the Dalai Lama sidestepped discussing destiny in favour of re-affirming free will (thus operating under the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive). In Buddhism it is common for phenomena to be dismissed as being inherently illusory, but I haven't seen much discussion of the idea that it is free will (choice) that is what's inherently illusory (it feels real but maybe its not, and if its not then that strongly supports predestiny).

On page 123, the Dalai Lama writes "The only way to find out is to examine his teachings and to inquire about the Buddha’s devout followers". I was thinking maybe it would be wise for a monk to meditate until they reach one of the jhanas then focus their mind on the historical Buddha and then ask him directly whatever question they have.

On page 13 the Dalai Lama mentions that these three schools of Buddhist thought (Sautantrika, Cittamatra, Madhyamika) accept "that the disintegration of a particular conditioned phenomenon is not dependent on a fresh cause for its disintegration". I had a big problem with this because the proton is a basic sub-atomic building block (thus a conditioned phenomenon in Buddhist-speak). A proton can decay (change into something that is not a proton) if it collides or interacts with another sub-atomic building block (ie. Disintegrate due to a fresh cause), however, science has found no evidence that the proton undergoes natural decay (ie. no evidence that the proton will ever disintegrate without a fresh cause). As I’ve posted previously: based on data from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory if a proton does decay its half-life is at least 200,000 trillion trillion years. This is so big it’s ridiculous! We might as well be calling it a hugemongousbagillion years! That is about 15 million trillion times the known length of the universe (from the big bang to now ~13-14 billion years).

I would like to point out that I have enjoyed the Dalai Lama’s writings and greatly respect the man.

I would also like to say that my very favourite part was on page 115, where the Dalai Lama states that having one global religion would not be good. I couldn’t agree with him more! And good for him for leading a religion that does not aim to convert others.

One thing I have learned, if I’m having trouble living happily in the moment it sure can help to watch my adorable daughter Mattea.

Jacob Levman

World religions and predestiny

2009-08-06T11:02:00.012-04:00

Reason can be used to support the concept of predestiny, an example of which is demonstrated as follows: What happened in our past was fixed (the thoughts we had, the actions we took etc.). In the present we can choose to do this or that but go a moment into the future and we can look back at what we just called the present and see that we chose to do one particular thing in that moment. Thus although we supposedly have a choice in the present, there is only one thing in the present that we are actually going to choose to do. Thus it would appear that all our choices/actions were/are predestined.

Another way of thinking about it is by counter example. For predestination to not be true, then the present moment must be fundamentally different than all the moments in the past. It seems almost egotistical to think that our consciousness in the present moment is fundamentally different or special compared to what our consciousness was in our past.

Now I've been very interested in using reason to study and analyze the world's major religions. Reason has led me to the concept of predestiny, which appears throughout many of the world's religions: The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all have predestiny playing significant roles. Ancient Jewish thinkers such as Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph and Maimonides have argued in favour of predestination (while simultaneously accepting the existence of free will). The New Testament has many references that imply the existence of predestiny (while not excluding free will). Augustine of Hippo and John Calvin (of Calvinist protestantism) are good examples of famous Christian believers in predestiny. Predestiny is a central concept in Islam appearing throughout Islamic religious texts and philosophy. Hinduism is a particularly diverse religion. Predestiny does not normally play a central role in the religion, which has quite an emphasis on karma (sort of a morality of the universe linked with our choices and actions) which is commonly associated with free will (which is often thought to conflict with predestination). However, the Dvaita school of Vaishnavites (Vishnu followers) do believe in a form of predestination (note that Vishnu is said to reincarnate as the Kalki and to fulfill a bunch of prophecies that are highly similar to those predicted for the messiah from the Abrahamic religions). It is commonly thought that free will and predestiny are two mutually exclusive concepts (ie. that they can't co-exist). However, I strongly disagree with this: I believe that for all intents and purposes we have a choice (complete with moral implications) but that all the choices that we make are predestined.

The main religion in which I cannot find an associated concept of predestiny is Buddhism (interestingly a religion/philosophy whose teachings I have felt an affinity for throughout my life). Instead, the only related concept I can find in Buddhism is impermanence (which to an outsider seems like the antithesis of predestiny). Now I'm no Buddhist monk, but I have read a fair bit of Buddhism for a Westerner. One thing that has struck me about the historical Buddha are references that indicate that he had no interest in being the central figure of a world religion (which would reflect the enlightenment he had obtained - after reaching enlightenment two people/beings are said to have had to convince him to become a teacher, otherwise he probably would have just enjoyed his enlightenment and assumed no one would have understood him). Buddha also made very specific predictions that now look next to impossible to ever come to fruition: he predicted that after 500 years (later changed to 2500 years) his teachings would dwindle and once completely forgotten then a new Buddha would appear to teach the dharma (and that this would be preceded by having his remains gathered together and burned at a particular site in India). But if Buddhist teachings were all forgotten, who would collect his relics for the burning? (only a Buddhist would do such a thing, but it would be impossible for this to occur if Buddhism had been totally forgotten thus there would be no Buddhists). Furthermore, it seems unlikely that Buddhism will ever be forgotten given the nature of the internet and the existence of many hundreds of millions of Buddhists in the world today. While these 'mistakes' may lead someone to believe that Buddha was making incorrect predictions, perhaps these seemingly flawed statements were part of another Buddhist teaching: Buddha was very specific about teaching Buddhists to not be married to his teachings. One of Buddha's famous lessons regarding his teachings was that they are like a raft that you use to get to enlightenment, by the time you have reached enlightenment you have to have left the raft behind. Buddha didn't want people entranced to him and his teachings as it would act as a barrier to their enlightenment.

Einstein, light and the photoelectric effect

2009-08-05T15:14:00.014-04:00

Einstein has blessed us with a huge quantity of scientific contributions. I'm a huge fan of the ideas he was presenting with relativity. He has also furthered our understanding of some of the properties of light. However, Einstein also said some strange things regarding the energy of light in trying to explain the photoelectric effect.

Einstein made the claim that the energy of light is proportional to the frequency of the light times a constant. This allowed for some very simple mathematics that agreed perfectly with experimental results regarding the photoelectric effect (energy of the liberated electron). But by definition the photoelectric effect is such that we measure the electrons that flow as a result of an interaction between an incoming light wave and the electron itself. Einstein neglected an amplitude term in the energy of light equation he postulated, even though he knew that light had many wave properties and that the standard equation for the energy of a wave includes an amplitude term.

It is well known that if the brightness of incoming light is too dim then no photoelectric effect will be observed (ie. if it isn't bright, your solar panel generates no electricity). It seems plausible that this is because the incoming light merely lacks the requisite amount of energy to cause the photoelectric effect due to not enough amplitude. This lack of photoelectric effect in dim lighting would probably be explained as too few photons reaching the solar detector in standard terminology. The photon was a description of light as a particle created by Einstein, he gave the photon just enough energy to cause the photoelectric effect! If the universe produced a basic particle of light, wouldn't it be weird for its basic amount of energy to happen to be the amount necessary to cause the photoelectric effect, which Einstein happened to be studying at the time that he created the concept of the photon?

One of the properties of the photoelectric effect is that if the amplitude of the incoming light wave (or the number of photons in standard terminology) increases, then the number of electrons liberated by the photoelectric effect increases though their energy does not (it's affected by the frequency of the light wave). The photon based explanation is simple: more photons cause more interations with electrons. But a wave based explanation is equally simple: a wave with more amplitude has more energy and thus has the ability to interact with more than one electron.

Compton scattering was used as evidence supporting the existince of the photon, however, I suspect the effect could also be explained with a wave model of light.

I do not believe that it is appropriate to quantize energy (in any form including light). There can always be a smaller amount of energy than whatever value we set for a quanta of energy. I believe that the interaction between light and the electron in the photoelectric effect can be best explained by modeling light as a wave.

Humorous Aside: Intrinsic angular momentum

2009-07-22T14:56:00.010-04:00

Quantum theory has some unusual ideas. A particularly unusual one is that a subatomic particle has an intrinsic angular momentum. The idea is as such:

any given sub atomic particle is spinning
however, the amount that particle is spinning never changes

It seems to me a strange concept that a sub atomic particle could not have its amount of spin changed via a simple interaction with other particles or some other circumstance.

When thinking of the funny nature of some quantum conclusions (like that a particle has an intrinsic never changing spin), I thought of Prof. Shwartzman here from the Far Side:

Hmmmm ... funny joke but I wonder if Prof. Schwartzman needs to fine tune his invention - while 'hey' is surely my dog's most prominent word, I'm sure he says the odd other thing as well. Similarly, I wonder if we merely need better methods for determining the angular momentum of a given sub-atomic particle.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle

2009-07-14T21:13:00.012-04:00

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that we cannot know certain pairs of physical properties such as a particle's position and momentum precisely and simultaneously.

In science lingo the word principle is quite a strong word. For instance, the law of conservation of mass is also referred to as the principle of mass conservation.

Many experiments have been performed whose results seem to support Heisenburg's theory. However, the nature of the theory is such that it is extremely challenging to disprove. Many lines of thought in physics have it that the universe has many dimensions. If this can be demonstrated then perhaps Heisenburg's theory could be disproven with the help of a cool trans-dimensional experimental apparatus.

Detecting cancer with MRI based pH imaging

2009-07-06T12:36:00.009-04:00

It is known that cancerous tumours tend to exhibit acidic pH levels. In fact the urine of patients with advanced cancer can be extremely acidic. It is plausible that the acidity of cancerous tissues is detectable via MRI when the tumour is still very small.

I have found three studies that have looked at measuring pH levels with MRI with the help of a contrast agent [1,2,3]. However, these studies were not applying the technique to the detection of cancer. Since we know of the potential acidity of malignant lesions, using pH sensitive contrast agents (or similar techniques) seems like a good research avenue for the detection of cancer.

Furthermore, it would be interesting to see how effective targeted delivery of a basic solution (to raise the pH level of the tumour), can assist in cancer treatment. Targeted drug delivery is an interesting area of research that can be guided with a variety of imaging techniques.

[1] S. Evans, L. Hall, “Evaluation of a range of MRI-active pH indicators using a multiple-sample method,” AIChE, vol. 51(5), 2005.

[2] K.-E. Lokling, et al., “pH-sensitive paramagnetic liposomes as MRI contrast agents: in vitro feasibility studies,” Magnetic Resonance Imaging, vol. 19(5), 2001.

[3] N. Raghunand, et al., “Renal and systemic pH imaging by contrast-enhanced MRI,” Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, vol. 49(2), 2003.

I found a study published in Nature in 2008 that looks at this problem by performing pH imaging using a tagged form of baking soda (which can also apparently be used to treat a tumour as my wife has posted in the comments section). I wonder if the aforementioned [1,2,3] contrast agents would be helpful in this problem, or if techniques like the one published in Nature can be used for treatment as well as detection.

Humorous Aside: Funny Farside cartoons

2009-06-30T01:01:00.014-04:00

I love the farside, special thanks to Gary Larson for producing such a hysterical cartoon as the Far Side.

Science is a funny thing, if you don't have a complicated way of confirming basic things you can be out of luck.

The world can be cruel to us nerds:

I wish I had this kind of clarity in life:

Buddhism and the permanence of matter

2009-06-29T23:52:00.011-04:00

The Dalai Lama (the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and one of the world’s most prominent Buddhists) has indicated that he believes that Buddhism is ready for scientific analysis in the age of reason. I agree with this assessment – indeed I believe all the world’s religions need to be ready for scrutiny and analysis in the age of reason. To this end the Dalai Lama has indicated that Buddhist scriptures disproved by modern science should be abandoned.

I was thinking about how some ideas from science may conflict with the idea of impermanence which plays a moderately prominent role in some Buddhist texts.

One example may be whether matter as we know it is permanent or impermanent.

At present science has never observed natural proton decay (a theoretical process whereby a proton (a basic particle of matter) will decay thus no longer being a proton). At present, science has not found any evidence that protons do indeed decay. If this is true then protons are permanent and their existence may conflict with some Buddhist interpretations of impermanence. In fact, a physics project in Canada (the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory) indicates that the half-life of a proton is AT LEAST (2.1×10^29 years or 200 octillion years or 200,000 trillion trillion years – note that the accepted age of the universe is only about 14 billion years – a teeny tiny percentage by comparison). This sounds pretty ridiculously stable. Whether the proton will ultimately unravel in trillions of trillions of years or never may one day be demonstrated and would be very interesting in the context of Buddhist teachings.

The Buddhist idea of impermanence is often applied to the nature of a human's life. I have previously argued in favour of predestiny. If predestiny could be demonstrated to be true then the predestined nature of the universe would be fundamentally permanent.

Jacob Levman

Free speech, and technology's role

2009-06-20T18:16:00.010-04:00

Science and technology can play a big role in facilitating people's free speech and in turn assisting in world peace.

It is common for oppressive regimes to respond to political crises by suspending the ability to use text messaging and other communication features on all of the nation's cellular phones. This limits the ability of the protesters to expose the brutality of the regime - it would be great if one day everyone had a cellular phone whereby it would be impossible for a political leader to prevent the customer from using the device as it was intended. I think all that is really needed is an affordable cell phone that can be used anywhere in the world. If the technology requires base stations (devices on the ground that typical cell phones talk to) and infrastructure that would have to be in the local country then the service will always be subject to the whims of those in power. A long time ago Motorola had a phone that provided this service (worldwide portable phone) but it was big (it needed to be able to talk with a Satellite in orbit) and expensive - clearly ahead of its time. Once the costs of these devices come down it will be an amazing thing for people who live in oppressive countries.

String Theory

2009-06-15T14:42:00.010-04:00

String theorists claim that the universe has 9, 10, 11, 13 or whatever number of dimensions (depending on which theorist you talk to). These claims are based on nothing more than mathematics, however, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the universe does indeed have more dimensions than the 4 dimensional space-time that Einstein’s general relativity implies.

It would seem to me that in order to have free will and a choice available to us to do this or that, then both options have to actually be available to us – otherwise we never really had a choice in the first place. Assuming we do make choices in our day-to-day actions, then the chain of events related to the option that we didn’t choose must also exist in the universe. For this to be true the universe should have more than the 4 dimensions implied by Einstein's general relativity. I suspect that without extra dimensions life experience would feel stale.

Another Bohring article?

2009-06-14T23:37:00.018-04:00

Problems with the Bohr model of the atom: it claims that the reason the electron does not degrade and collapse into the nucleus is because the electromagnetic force pulling the electron in is balanced by the centripetal force from the kinetic energy of the electron (moving really really fast around the core). The problem with this model is that maintaining its super fast speed is the only thing that keeps the electron from degrading into the nucleus and letting off a LOT of energy (Einstein's E=mc^2). The universe has been around for some 14 billion years, I think matter is a little more stable than that!

There has to be a force that keeps the electron in a stable orbit – a force that repels the oppositely charged nucleus and electron. I'm arguing that it is in fact the counterpart to the strong nuclear force (repelling oppositely charged particles) that is keeping the electrons in the stable orbital positions that we observe.

So the idea is that an electron stays where it is in orbit around a nucleus because the outward centripetal force plus the strong force are balanced with the electromagnetic force. The strong force is thought to be insignificant at electron orbit distances. I can't help but wonder if at least a little of the strong force is still there and that this amount is just enough to keep the electron in orbit. If the electron loses some kinetic energy and starts moving towards the nucleus, then this strong force coupled with an increased centripetal force (as the electron moves towards the nucleus its orbit becomes tighter) pushes the electron back out to where those forces are balanced with the electromagnetic force.

Also the strong force seems like a plausible explanation for the well-known MRI fat shifting effect. In MRI we image hydrogen. If it is bonded to oxygen (like in water) it rings at a certain frequency, if it is bonded to carbon it rings at a slightly different frequency. The most sensible explanation I can think of would be that the difference in the force exerted by the neighbouring oxygen and carbon atoms accounts for creating a local change in the net electromagnetic-strong force exerted on the hydrogen proton that we are imaging, thus pushing the ringing frequency of the proton slightly. This might demonstrate the existence of a weak strong force at these molecular distances.

Unknowns in the strong force

2009-06-13T00:47:00.008-04:00

The electromagnetic force repels same charged particles and attracts oppositely charged particles. Similarly, the strong force attracts same charged particles
It is also possible that the strong force also repels differently charged particles. The repelling of the differently charged particles may help account for the stability of an atom (so that the electron does not degrade into the nucleus due to the electromagnetic force). However, the information I find usually says there is no significant strong force beyond about 1 fm (a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a meter). The distance between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron is about 50000 times greater than this rough limit for the strong force. This implies that the strong nuclear force plays no role in maintaining the distance of the atom's electron(s).

In the widely taught Bohr model, the orbit of an electron is maintained by a balance between the electromagnetic force that draws the electron towards the core and the centripetal force caused by its fast orbit. In such a model if the electron were to be hit by light and were to lose some energy/velocity, its orbit would degrade and it would eventually annihilate with the nucleus, letting off considerable energy. Matter appears to be much more stable than this. It seems plausible that the strong nuclear force plays a role in maintaining the stability of the atom by repelling the electron.

Humorous Aside: The significance of scientific research?

2009-06-12T10:59:00.012-04:00

Once a scientist's experiments are complete (measurements taken, data collected) the scientist is typically expected to show that their research is statistically significant. A previous article shows that the main statistical significance test that people use was created in a beer factory over a hundred years ago and was only used on sets of up to 10 samples (way too few by today's scientist's standards). If you collect a lot of samples, the test will almost always give you the significance you're looking for. Luckily I discovered a new statistical significance test on the internet that will allow us to compute a number to determine if our research was worth anything (thank you PhDComics.com).

(click to enlarge)

Science assisting world peace

2009-06-11T11:55:00.011-04:00

Science and technology have been advancing at a remarkable pace. One large contribution to changing our lives is the cell phone - not least of which because modern versions have the ability to take photographs and capture video clips.

Citizens who take pictures and video clips of injustices that they see can broadcast the information immediately - oppressive states have been losing their grip on the flow of information for a long time. Cell phones (like most technologies) have been steadily coming down in price for a long time (this is where capitalism finally gets to shine). In the not too distant future every human will be able to afford a basic cellular phone that can take a picture and be used for a coordinated vote. While the cellular phone does not provide protection from a bullet, it does allow another to take a picture and spread it instantaneously. If this does not result in the downfall of oppressive regimes it should at least force them to behave themselves.

At present undemocratic and brutal regimes retain their power by banning/brutalizing/censoring the media (which can act as an alternative voice to accepted government opinion).

P.S. If science ever led us to super cool futuristic technologies like Star Trek's transporters then world peace would be all the easier to achieve (use the transporter to take the weapons away from abusive people).

MRI: Why do some things ring and some things don't?

2009-06-11T00:20:00.016-04:00

As mentioned on previous posts MRI works because a proton in a strong magnetic field will polarize. We use it to image hydrogen along with a collection of isotopes (somewhat irregular configurations of matter where the nucleus has an unusual number of protons or neutrons). However, other than hydrogen, magnetic resonance has not been reported in all the remaining elements (just isotopes). But in MRI we are typically merely imaging protons which occur naturally in all elements and isotopes. Why is it that we observe no magnetic resonance phenomena in the elements? (except for hydrogen).

I think it is helpful to remember that elements and their nuclei are known to be quite stable. The strong forces between the sub-atomic particles provide nuclear stability. These forces can be so strong that an extraordinarily large electromagnetic field would be required to polarize one of the protons.

The simplest element that is not known to exhibit magnetic resonance is helium.

A helium nucleus has 2 protons (red) and 2 neutrons (blue):

The 3 quark model describes the proton (red in image above) as two positively charged up quarks and one negatively charged down quark (net charge +1) as in:

The 3 quark model also describes the neutron (blue in the nucleus of the image at the top) as two negatively charged down quarks and one positively charged up quark (no net charge).

Since protons and neutrons are very close to each other in the nucleus, and since we know that the protons and neutrons can be made up of two different configurations of quarks, it could also be possible that the stable state of the nucleus of an element is due to a particular orientation of its proton's and neutron's quarks.

The strong force is known to be extremely strong at these distances within the nucleus. Since we have a total of 6 positively charged up quarks in the nucleus it would make sense for the strong force to attract them all towards each other. Then perhaps they enter into a stable (or semi-stable) configuration with positively charged up quarks attracted to each other and thus in the centre of the nucleus. Negatively charged down quarks would then be further away from the nucleus' centre.

Perhaps the reason no magnetic resonance (bell ringing) has been observed among elements (only hydrogen and isotopes) is because we are not using high enough magnetic field strengths to polarize the protons to the main magnetic field as opposed to the natural polarized orientation within the nucleus.

Humorous Aside: Thesis realism

2009-06-10T14:30:00.011-04:00

Some jokes from PhDComics.com on keeping realistic thesis expectations.

This comic was impossible to resist for a nerd like me:

For those not familiar with nerdy math the equation on the left is basically saying:

Your expectations of your thesis are not within the realm of reality or more literally: Expectation of thesis is not real.

My thesis was a composite of a few studies slapped together. (click to enlarge)

I also got comments from my supervisor about the need to tie them all together! ;-)

Functional MRI

2009-06-10T13:12:00.009-04:00

Functional MRI is an exciting idea: it allows us to create a map of how the brain responds when the person being imaged is subjected to some particular stimuli (say being shown a picture or told to perform a task). Functional MRI (fMRI) involves taking a measure of the amount of oxygen in a particular location of brain tissue. When a person’s mind activates with a particular thought/concept/action the activation can be measured by observing an increase in the amount of oxygen present (oxygen is delivered to activating regions by hemoglobin).

However, oxygen is only measured indirectly, we actually sample hydrogen protons many many times to detect small changes in the overall amount of oxygen present. It would seem sensible to perform these functional MRI analyses after having the subject breathe air with a significant concentration of oxygen-17 (which can be imaged in MRI), then image the oxygen-17 concentration instead of the concentration of hydrogen protons bonded to oxygen. This would make the fMRI measurements more direct to oxygen measurements as opposed to the present indirect method - it may also circumvent the present requirement of acquiring a ton of samples just to determine that the oxygen concentration has changed. Oxygen-17 based MR imaging has been proposed [1,2], however, I have never seen it used in an fMRI type analysis.

[1] J. Pekar, L. Ligetti, Z. Ruttner, R. Lyon, T. Sinnwell, P. van Gelderen, D. Fiat, C. T. Moonen and A. McLaughlin, In vivo measurement of cerebral oxygen consumption and blood flow using 17O magnetic resonance imaging, Magn. Reson. Med., 21, 313-319 (1991).

[2] http://www.case.edu/artsci/chem/faculty/mateescu/ISMRM-3-2004.pdf

Measuring the strong force with MRI

2009-06-09T23:38:00.013-04:00

MRI works because a proton that's in a strong magnetic field will polarize/align with the field and then behaves like a bell when it's hit with a radio wave (it rings back with another radio wave that we listen to in order to make an image).

Now typically in MRI we image hydrogen's proton in water (where it is bonded to oxygen). If we image hydrogen's proton in fat (where it is bonded to carbon) then the tone at which it rings changes slightly. If we image a sub-atomic particle with another proton/neutron right nearby in the nucleus (deuterium, helium 3, …) then the tone of ringing shifts much more. Potentially, these ring tone shifts could be an excellent way to further investigate the strong nuclear force (at present there is no mathematical equation defining the force which seems unsatisfactory). Ideally we could build an apparatus whereby we could control the distance (down to ridiculously small values) between two groups of protons. It would simplify our calculations if we could adjust the main magnetic field such that the ring tone (frequency) remained stable and we looked at the change in the main magnetic field (that keeps the ringing frequency stable) as a function of distance. From this change in magnetic field strength we might be able to calculate the strong force (when we factor in the known electromagnetic force) as a function of distance.

A ridiculously challenging experiment but whose results could be very interesting!

Free will, predestiny or do we have to choose?

2009-06-08T20:51:00.006-04:00

We all have the ability to use our memories to look back at past events. If we were to do so we would be aware that at one particular point in our past we chose to do some particular thing. In the present moment, free will implies that we have the ability to choose to do any particular thing.

In the past we supposedly had this ability too, but we chose to do one particular thing that leads us to our present moment. In the future we will be able to look back at the present and see that at this point I chose to write this sentence (and you chose to read it) – that we chose to do this one particular thing. Furthermore, someone one billion years from now could look back at any point in our lives and observe that we chose to do whatever we did.

If everything that happened prior to now was fixed and happened the way it did, it seems ridiculous to assume that the same won't still be true a few moments from now (and then again and again off until infinity).

These ideas point heavily in favour of a predestined universe, but I have to admit it sure feels like I have a choice about what I write on this blog.

Perhaps predestiny need not conflict with having free will or choice. Perhaps what we call choice we do indeed have in the moment, however, the choice that we were going to make was predestined because someone a thousand years from now could look back on your life and see that you chose to do whatever it was that you were predestined to choose.

Think about it like this: It is possible for a person one billion years from now (with an advanced video camera that can look through time) to look back on your life and see that at any point in your life right up to your death you did one particular thing. Now you haven't yet made all the choices that will lead you through your life towards your death but you are destined to corroborate with the observations that could be made by some advanced person in the future regarding your choices in life.

Physics: MRI a quark based dipole?

2009-06-04T12:00:00.016-04:00

In MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) an image is obtained by placing a person in a strong magnetic field. The strong magnetic field causes the proton of a hydrogen atom to align with the field. A radio wave is applied to the person which causes the proton to be knocked out of alignment with the magnetic field. The strong magnetic field causes the proton to return to its original state, and this process of realigning lets off another (much smaller) radio wave, which we listen to. The final image is formed from measurements of the strength of these radio waves that emanate from hydrogen protons in the body.

About 40 years ago particle physicists proposed a 3 quark model of the proton (see figure below) made of two up quarks and one down quark. We know the electric charge on a proton to be 1, and it was discovered that each of the two up quarks had a charge of 2/3 and the one down quark had a charge of -1/3 (making the overall charge of the proton 1). Now some particle physicists have stressed that studying quarks is challenging as they are always unstable. If hydrogen is placed in a very strong magnetic field and we know its proton aligns with the magnetic field, I can’t help but wonder if it manages to align simply because it enters a stable (or somewhat stable since the triad of quarks would probably be spinning) 3 quark state with the two up quarks pointing towards one end of the strong magnetic field and the one down quark pointing in the opposite direction. At present only some substances are known to exhibit this magnetic resonance phenomena (hydrogen, carbon 13, helium 3, etc.) but I can’t help but wonder if the reason that some substances exhibit the phenomena while others do not is because of the configuration of protons (and neutrons) in the nucleus of the atom. The configuration of protons will heavily affect the strong nuclear forces exhibited within the atom – it is possible that these strong forces prevent any of the nucleus’ protons (from those elements that do not exhibit magnetic resonance) from entering a state where MRI based ringing can occur. Perhaps the proximity of the quarks in a neighbouring proton/neutron is what prevents any given proton from ringing (ie. strong forces attract the various quarks thus tying the nucleus together in a way that prevents MRI based ringing at currently used field strengths). Note that those elements that do exhibit magnetic resonance either have just 1 proton (hydrogen with no proton-to-proton strong force interaction) and a bunch of isotopes (irregular configurations of protons and neutrons).

The 3 quark model of the proton:

It would also be interesting to see an experiment whereby a hydrogen atom is kept still (at low temperature) in a strong magnetic field. The nucleus is then examined thoroughly to see whether the proton appears to be in a stable or semi-stable 3 quark model state.

The problems with currencies

2009-06-03T00:02:00.011-04:00

As everyone is aware, the world's economic transactions are performed in a variety of different currencies. Currency traders share a generally accepted range of possible exchange rates for different currencies with respect to each other. If a new event occurs that appears to weaken a particular currency, currency traders are liable to buy and sell in a pattern that adjusts the exchange rate to devalue the currency.

Frankly, I would expect the value of a given currency with respect to another to depend on the size of the economy (a measure like GDP gross domestic product would be a common one) and the amount of money that exists in that economy. I would expect that the exchange rate of any given pair of currencies ought to reflect the ratio of the GDP type measure to the amount of that currency in existence for the two currencies. The only 'value' in a given currency is speculative. At present, exchange rates are heavily affected by the GDP value of a given currency – typically scaled on a per capita basis. I'm saying that for comparative purposes a more telling measure would be to scale these GDP values by the amount of that currency in existence.

When a central bank adds new loans to its books (in my understanding, typically) it is creating money that didn't exist before. So if a central bank adds a new loan for the value of 90% of every mortgage (see post on the economics of mortgages). Then that central bank has printed a huge amount of money – it helps its own citizenry to enjoy a good standard of living by facilitating them to become home-owners. It's also an amazing service that the banks exploit to charge the customer exorbitant amounts of money just to hand the customer some government money.

Now I don't know the inner workings of the bookkeeping of central banks. When a citizen pays their mortgage to a normal bank that bank in turn pays back the central bank (90% of the mortgage was provided by this government institution). When the central bank receives these funds what does it do with them? My understanding is that the money never really existed in the first place so it is accounted for as such in a ledger somewhere. But the sum of all the active loans the central bank has issued is the same as having printed that money.

When the central bank provides 90% of the mortgage funds it is all done on paper between them and the commercial bank. This is the same as the central bank printing some extra cash for those mortgage funds and handing it to the home buyer (through a bank which charges you interest on the government's money). The home buyer then hands it over to the home seller. Since 90% of the cost of the mortgage on every house is provided by a loan from the government, the central banks have been 'creating' loads of money. To get a good idea of the appropriate value of any given currency we would need to have a good idea about how much money the central banks have 'created' in this fashion and how much the commercial banks have created through their own loans. I would find this information fascinating.

The problems with mortgages

2009-06-01T19:37:00.011-04:00

Economics is a fascinating science (physical scientists often look down upon the social sciences, however, social sciences are simply areas of scientific study that are affected by human behaviour – a fascinating challenge for the researcher).

Present law in Canada and the United States says that a banking institution can issue a mortgage while only actually having 10% of the amount of funds needed for the mortgage. The bank borrows the rest of the money from the central bank (a government agency: the Bank of Canada or the Federal Reserve in the USA). The banks are charged a remarkably low interest rate from the central bank and in turn charge YOU a higher interest rate on money they never even had!

The banks get to charge interest on money they never even had, which is almost like a license to behave like a mint (a money printer). When the subprime mortgage crisis hit the United States an interesting question could/should have arisen: “Why would a financial institution sell mortgages at such low interest rates (subprime)?”. The answer in hindsight is obvious: as a mortgage issuer the financial institution gets to charge you interest on money that they never even had! The bank's policies could be summed up as such: Who cares if you give some customer a low interest rate – we're charging interest on money we don't even have! Any mortgage is a profitable mortgage! But then people started defaulting on their mortgages, house prices dropped and the banks were left with houses they can't sell (hence the collapse of so many banking institutions). To make matters even more ridiculous many hundreds of billions of government dollars have been used to prop up banks that were failing due to their own greed (a lot more has been spent here than on the General Motors bailout – see post below).

I have money borrowed on a line of credit (secured by my house), and recently my bank (simultaneously with a host of other Canadian banks) decided to increase their interest rates by 1% (sounds like collusion to me). Now, 1% may not sound like much but when you consider that my interest rate went from 2.5 to 3.5%, that represents a 40% increase in my debt servicing charges. Times are tough economically and a lot of people (like me) are struggling to make ends meet. It is awfully hard to swallow paying more to the banks just because their profits are looking a little meagre this year (the Canadian banks have been praised as being among the most economically healthy in the world – surely this is part of the reason). Interestingly, when the economy started to tank the central banks (government agencies) started lowering interest rates so that borrowing money became cheaper. This was an attempt to assist citizens who were having a hard time economically. I really appreciated the reductions in interest rates – but so did the banks. On at least one occasion since the economic crisis hit, the banks (at least in Canada) did not match the lowering of interest rates that was provided by the government. This amounts to stealing (by increasing the amount of interest charged on money they never even had) and happened before the more recent 1% interest rate increase. This practise should be banned.

I found this appropriate message on the internet:

(I prefer to think of this as a revolution in banking - nothing violent ;)

Now the federal reserve (or the bank of Canada) provides an amazing service: they will provide a super low-interest loan for a mortgage. Unfortunately, this government service is provided only to the banking institutions: the rich get richer. If any citizen wants a mortgage they have to go through the commercial banks which charges the citizen a huge overhead in order to hand them government money.

Problems with economics policy

2009-06-01T15:32:00.015-04:00

Currently the United States and Canada are funneling something like 60 billion dollars into General Motors (GM) and in exchange they are receiving 72.5% ownership of the company. The company has recently announced that it has over 170 billion dollars in debts. So the Canadian and US governments have just paid 60 billion dollars for the privilege of owing another 125 billion dollars (72.5% of 170 billion). GM will use $4-billion of the Canadian loans to address the shortfall in its pension plans. In addition, the company will inject $200-million into the pension plans over the next five years, making them fully solvent." So part of the plan that the government has funded is to provide GM with loans and GM will use 4 billion dollars of the Canadian loans to pay the pensions of former employees, and GM plans to 'fix' its pension problems by investing only 40 million dollars per year to make "them fully solvent" (ie. economically healthy). This is preposterous! How could 40 million per year fix a problem that needs 4 billion dollars right now?!

GM will forever have pension obligations to its many retired workers and is not going to be in a good position to compete with new auto companies that have a fraction of the labour costs and no obligations to retired workers (see Tata motors of India or Kia of Korea). This is a bad investment plain and simple - Canadians and Americans will be paying for it for some time. I can understand the politicians' position that letting GM fail could be catastrophic - but if GM collapses anyway then the owners (now the taxpayer) are on the hook. This 'investment' could easily turn into a never ending sinkhole for public funds. To make matters worse, Stephen Harper (the prime minister of Canada) just announced that the most recent 9.5 billion dollars the Canadian government is loaning (giving) to GM will not be paid back - what a return on investment!

Now GM has about 123,000 employees in North America. The bailout is costing about 60 billion dollars or almost 500,000 dollars per employee. Why not let the company collapse, give each GM employee job re-training and some welfare-like payments until they can get back on their feet? This would be WAY cheaper and with the present plan GM may collapse anyway.

Now what about the potential impact of a loss of 123,000 jobs (for arguments sake lets double it to 250,000 jobs in order to account for job losses at companies that supply GM with parts and other companies that rely on GM's employees for the main sources of their revenue). The United States and Canada have about 160 to 170 million workers between them. The loss of 250,000 jobs would amount to about 0.15% of the workforce - this is a drop in the bucket when cast in the scale of the North American economy. In other words why spend billions to prevent a rise of 0.15% in the unemplyment rate? If GM were to collapse, North America could surely continue on without it.

I myself have my own collection of debts that appear challenging to pay off. Now that I am getting to the end of my graduate degree I find myself looking for a job whereby I might be able to make a dent in my debts. On account of my academic background I have been looking for entry-level professor type positions, but recently I found this average salary cartoon which is seriously making me wonder if I took a wrong route and should have become a football coach!

Jacob Levman

P.S. This story was reported on in the Globe and Mail (June 1st, 2009)

The Bohring model of the atom

2009-05-27T23:30:00.010-04:00

It is kind of weird that we use the Bohr model of the atom, a man who advocated that quantum mechanics as a theory was complete (despite all its partially explained weirdness - presumably he felt it meshed well with his model of the atom).
Interestingly, it is known that Einstein found quantum theory “quite intolerable that a [fundamental particle] exposed to [a force] should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to [move], but also its direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist”. In addition to quantum theory being a bit too weird to accept in its present form, the Bohr model of the atom has other things that I'm just not comfortable with.

A defining feature of any model of the atom should be that it allows for the elements we know of to be stable. The standard model of physics says that there are four fundamental forces in nature, but when trying to understand why an element like hydrogen or helium is stable, only two fundamental forces are relevant: the electromagnetic force and the strong force. As many know the electromagnetic force involves negatively charged things being attracted to positively charged things. So hydrogen, has its two sub-atomic components (the proton and the electron) strongly attracted to each other by the electromagnetic force. However, the strong force acts in an opposite manner to the electromagnetic force – it attracts two particles that have the same charge allowing an atomic nucleus with many positively charged protons right near each other. Now for hydrogen to be stable I suspect that the strong force must also have a counterpart whereby oppositely charged particles are repelled from each other, otherwise the electromagnetic force would cause hydrogen's electron to obliterate into its proton regularly - hydrogen would be unstable.

Now if a nucleus has 3 protons like with Lithium, then it would make sense for the nucleus to exert some strong force to repel the element's three electrons. I expect that there has to be a force that repels the three-proton-nucleus and the orbiting electrons for the atom to be stable.

The Bohr model of the element Lithium:

Humorous Aside: God spawns the peer review process

2009-05-26T22:15:00.004-04:00

A hilarious comic from the farside on God.

God spawns the peer review process:

The weight of an electron

2009-05-26T22:02:00.012-04:00

One of the main experiments to determine the weight of an electron in an educational physics class involves balancing a metal beam partially inside a solenoid (inductor – a big cork screw of tightly wrapped wire). The problem with this is that the force applied by the solenoid is dependent on the type and orientation of the metal balance beam inside core of the solenoid.

The other main way to measure the weight of the electron is by Thompson's charge-to-mass ratio experiment.

Picture provided courtesy of NYU website.

The inductors (solenoids) let off a gradient magnetic field which will affect the path of the electron throughout its journey through the experimental apparatus - it can be very difficult to eliminate fringe fields from a solenoid. This makes an accurate model of the electromagnetic forces on this electron difficult to model mathematically.

Funding for Scientific Research

2009-05-22T10:04:00.012-04:00

Granting agencies disperse funds allocated for science which usually comes from public and charitable money. Private industry also funds scientific research, however it is typically heavily biased towards creating a new product or process that could be profitable. Unfortunately, granting agencies are also inclined to award funds to research that could lead to a new profitable product or process. This occurs by the very nature of the overly commercialized society in which we live – if scientific research is going to affect humanity for the better it is assumed that science will do so by creating a new invention that will have to become a commercial product – thus biasing scientific funding towards more commercializable endeavours.

Basic scientific research has been taking a back-seat in the funding process. Typically it is incremental research that gets funded; to get a significant grant to do some research study you typically need to have a bunch of recent journal papers that are being directly built upon in the (hopefully) funded study. Considering the amount of time it takes to get a paper published in a journal, obtaining significant grant funding is extremely challenging without a long term incremental approach to science. It also helps to be fortunate enough to establish a base of journal papers in one's graduate research to self-cite/self-promote in the grant application.

A friend of mine sent me an article (Elements, April 2009) with this quote that I loved:

Humorous Aside: Those quirky quarks

2009-05-12T14:29:00.019-04:00

If you ever wanted evidence that particle physicists are confused about the physics of very small things then go to wikipedia and read the article that describes the nature of matter. Where matter is made of elements made up of protons, electrons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are made up of quarks. And if you want an explanation of what a quark is, suddenly you’re reading about something called color charge and color confinement - weirdly arbitrary words when trying to describe something fundamental to the universe.

It turns out that scientists assigned 6 different classifications of quarks, but not content to refer to these as different 'types' of quarks they called them different 'flavors' of quarks. The first four of the six flavors of quarks are (and I kid you not) the up quark, down quark, top quark and bottom quark. That's right there is both up/down as well as top/bottom - one would think more distinctive names could be useful. To make things even more hilarious the remaining two quarks are the charm and strange quarks - it seems like only a couple of steps from calling it the 'magic' quark while glaring one's eyes and wavering one's fingers in the audience's face.

Who needs science when we have automatic-science!

2009-05-05T14:39:00.013-04:00

So a few years ago some computer science students made a new computer program that will automatically create a scientist's research paper complete with text, figures, tables, methods, results etc. The papers are filled up with lots of technical terms and a lot of nonsense.

As a lark they submitted one of these automatically generated 'research' papers to the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, which was accepted for presentation at the conference! The 'authors' confessed to their hoax on their website and soon the conference organizers withdrew their acceptance. The program that automatically generates research papers was made available online (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/). You can type in your name as an 'author' and you're sure to get a 'high quality' research publication. I couldn't help typing in my name and seeing what research papers could be automatically generated in my name (actually creating the papers will probably only be funny to nerds like me - note that when I tried it the program was smart enough to self cite my own fictional work 4 separate times, now that's attention to detail!).

Another automatically generated research paper (Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce, by the fictional Herbert Schlangemann) was accepted for publication in the International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering. To make matters even more hilarious, Herbert Schlangemann was invited to be a session chair during the conference (a prestigious invitation that involves introducing a set of speakers and moderating the question period that follows the talks).

Now, these two examples are both for conferences which are often considered an easy place to get research published. Now the main way for a scientist to advance their career is through the accumulation of peer-reviewed journal papers, which as I've said in previous posts can be a remarkably challenging thing to accomplish. Which led me to the question: If it is hard to get a journal paper published, does this mean that those papers that do get accepted for publication in a journal represent good quality research?

Absolutely not!

It turns out that a few students in Iran also took one of these automatically generated research papers but submitted it to a journal: the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation. Hilariously, it was accepted for publication: you can see the final accepted paper here (http://ce.sharif.edu/~ghodsi/soft-group/misc/AMC-paper.pdf).

I think a serious overhaul of the research publication process is in order!

Women in Science

2009-04-26T11:55:00.014-04:00

While women’s rights have lead to amazing strides for women in science, unfortunately, those who do choose the field may still have to put up with chauvinism and exclusionary attitudes.
For example, the former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, while acting in his duties as the institution’s president gave a talk in which he speculated that women may statistically have lesser aptitude for work in the highest levels of math and science. To come to this conclusion he cited the book (Women in Science) by Yu Xie and Kimberlee Shauman, which by his own admission he only perused casually, drawing his conclusions from calculations that were ‘wrong and unsubtle” (in his own words) [1]. From this he observed that men outweigh women 2 to 1 in the top 5% of grade twelve students in math and science, and that therefore men had an inherently superior aptitude for high level math and science. What a silly and unsupported conclusion to draw! Especially when you factor in that Xie and Shauman, the authors of the work he cited, specifically refuted the conclusions he came to.

Some very basic questions need to be answered before giving any weight to Mr. Summers’ words: What is the ratio of men to women who actually sign up for these grade 12 math and science courses? He seems to assume that there are an equal number of males and females signing up in the first place - personal experience would indicate otherwise. Also, how has this ratio of top performing males and females been changing with time? We know that a long time ago the top performing math and science students were all male (as all the students were male in our chauvinistic society). Now, apparently it is about 33% female – has this number been increasing with time? Is it on the road to 50%? How do these gender ratios among top performing math and science students compare when we look at nations with historically more equitable treatment towards women?

(Addendum: interestingly, a recent article in the Globe and Mail (one of Canada's national newspapers) indicated that the vast majority of top performing students in science in Canada are female - this was determined from the set of top performing students at Canada's annual nationally organized science fair. Incidentally this involves upper year high school students - the same age group that was being cited by Lawrence Summers)

Although I have a number of problems with Summers’ analysis and will be ordering Xie and Shauman’s book to look through this issue more carefully, perhaps the best way to sum up the problems with what Summers said is not by looking at what is factually incorrect about it, but to look at the obvious negative effects of his words:

As MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins said: “For him to say that ‘aptitude’ is the second most important reason that women don’t get to the top when he leads an institution that is 50 percent women students – that’s profoundly disturbing to me,” Hopkins said. “He shouldn’t admit women to Harvard if he’s going to announce when they come that, hey, we don’t feel that you can make it to the top.”

If someone is embarking on their education towards obtaining a job, that person is liable to consider the obvious: How much education/training will I require to obtain this job and how much does the job tend to pay? On this measure careers in math and science do not tend to perform well – requiring enormous amounts of education/training but not yielding the top salaries. Given this issue and all the other science complaints presented at Spotlight-on-Science, perhaps women’s under-representation in math/science is because they’re smart enough to choose something else.

[1]http://pospapendix.blogspot.com/2008/11/
lawrence-h-summers-speech-on-january-14.html

Humorous Aside: Job Satisfaction

2009-04-21T23:12:00.011-04:00

I did a quick job satisfaction survey, check out the plot below.