Given the pervasiveness of placebo success in medical trials, it always surprises me that the use of placebos by medical professionals is explicitly banned (even taking into account the fact that a person in a position of trust would be deceiving you). However, the above article links to an interesting paper written by Adam Kolber – a Bioethics and Law professor, and author of the Neuroethics and Law blog – on the possible ethical use of placebos by medical professionals. Here is its abstract:

Placebo treatments, like sugar pills and saline injections, are effective in treating pain and perhaps a host of other conditions. To use placebos most effectively, however, doctors must mislead patients into believing that they are receiving active medications. While placebo deception is surprisingly common, its legality has rarely been tested. In November 2006, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a new ethics provision categorically prohibiting doctors from using placebos deceptively. In so doing, the AMA shifted the legal landscape, making it almost certain that courts will decide that placebo deception violates informed consent requirements.

I argue that the AMA’s new policy is overbroad, insensitive to patient preferences, and likely to have unforeseen consequences. While deception is often exploitative, placebo deception can genuinely benefit patients. Absent stronger evidence to justify a ban than we currently have, deceptive placebos should be treated as scarce medical resources–used sparingly but not categorically prohibited.

One glaring problem with this – no matter how valid the conclusions – is that to use placebos safely and correctly we would need physicians who have the time (and inclination) to thoroughly peruse patient histories – something the overstretched NHS is severely lacking.

On a lighter note, it always amazes me that I learn something new and fascinating every time I read more about the use of placebos. This time my education came from the following paragraphs:

Furthermore, studies done in the 1970s showed that when heroin users inject water (sometimes done deliberately to alleviate cravings when drugs are in short supply), they can experience drug-like euphoria and have been observed to show opiate-like physiological signs such as pupil constriction.

This last point also demonstrates that placebo is not solely about expectancy, belief or ‘being fooled’, as the heroin users knew they were injecting themselves with water. Conditioned responses play a role.

Of course, as with most cases of classical conditioning, this response eventually becomes extinct as the initial stimulus (real heroin) is repeatedly withheld. Still fascinating, though!

(Bonus points if you know why I gave this post its title.)

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all… Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing… (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase and entire life.) – Luis Buñuel

The above quote is from The Lost Mariner, a chapter discussing one of Sacks’ patients, Jimmy G, who – due to Korsakoff’s syndrome – lost both his memories from the previous 35 years, and the ability to create new ones. It’s a touching and sad story where you feel that the only redeeming quality is the fact that this man cannot create new memories; at least then he doesn’t know that he has this problem.
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Six months ago my family-life was ticking along as normal; everything was fine. Then, during a routine operation, my grandmother passed away, leaving my grandfather – a very self-sufficient man approaching 90 – alone in their home of 30 years. While interim accommodation arrangements were being made, my grandfather was found unconscious after suffering a stroke and was admitted to hospital – not even two weeks after his wife’s funeral.

Three months in hospital saw him recover well, and he was eventually placed in a geriatric recovery ward in preparation for release. Whenever I visited him he would get angry at the sports results and moan about the “boring sods” with whom he was sharing a ward with and who refused to go outside for a walk around the hospital’s rather beautiful grounds. This was perfectly normal behaviour.

However I was fearing the worst, and it appears that these fears were well-founded. A month ago he started to develop severe dementia, leading me to make the obvious comparisons between him and Sacks’ patient, Jimmie G, whom I was reading about at the time.

The retrograde loss of memory – and losing the ability to create new memories – is a horrible thing to witness; nothing can really prepare you for it. At the same time it’s difficult to become truly sad at this fact: how can we, when the ‘patient’ themselves is oblivious to the fact – and is seemingly content – due to the fact that the condition itself causes them to lack the ability to comprehend what’s going on?

But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being – matter of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch him, and change him… Neuropsychologicaly, there is little or nothing you can do; but in the realm of the Individual, there may be much you can do. – Alexander Luria in a letter to Sacks regarding Jimmie G.

These sort of medical conditions always raise interesting issues, but when combined with the general (and severe) decline of physical health in an older patient, some more interesting – and controversial – philosophical, moral, and political subjects are brought up. An important one of which is the topic of non-eugenics euthanasia.

Highly regulated, I believe that euthanasia would be a crucial addition to our public health system for a few exceptional and well-defined situations and circumstances. However, as this is unlikely to happen, I believe strongly that the topic of euthanasia is so important that it is at least worth serious consideration and debate – not just by medical professionals, but by both politicians and the public.

Of course, views on this vary wildly by culture, religion, and even within each individual (agreeing in some cases and not in others, even when the actual medical circumstances are the same), and for one moment please don’t think my family and I are planning any mercy killings – it just raised a debate between us and I wanted to spread the love and ignite your internal debating chamber.

In my family, many of us have made it clear that if we were in such an awful physical and psychological state that life were no longer enjoyable and was a chore, that we wouldn’t want to be kept alive. One member has even gone so far as to say (in all seriousness), that if this were the case they would be eternally grateful if we were to assist them in dying. Of course, current legislation makes entertaining this thought pointless.

This in itself is not that impressive. What makes this newsworthy, however, is Merrill’s past… as CIO and vice president of engineering at Google.

Google’s corporate information site says of Merrill (for now, at least):

Douglas Merrill joined Google late in 2003 as Senior Director of Information Systems. In this capacity he led multiple strategic efforts including Google’s 2004 IPO and its related regulatory activities. He holds direct line accountability for all internal engineering and support worldwide.

Previously, Douglas was senior vice president at Charles Schwab and Co., Inc, a multinational financial services company. At Schwab, he was responsible for such functions as information security, common infrastructure, and human resources strategy and operations. Prior to his tenure there, Douglas worked at Price Waterhouse as a senior manager, ultimately becoming a leader in security implementation practices. Before that, he was an information scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he studied topics such as computer simulation in education, team dynamics and organizational effectiveness.

Douglas holds a BA from the University of Tulsa in Social and Political Organization, and an MA and Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University.

I for one think this is great news. With the music industry in deep trouble and constantly being crushed by new technologies, they need new ideas… and fast. Litigation is only going to go so far in helping a struggling company to increase its profits.

As I’ve said before; “we can’t hold back technological advancement and especially the evolution of music and its distribution“. With that said, what the big labels need to do is not sue, but evolve. A ‘digital business model‘ is what is required to revive the industry and with this move it seems that EMI have realised this glaringly obvious fact.

This was my most recent introduction to Edward de Bono; the father of ‘thinking outside the box’, and the pioneer of ‘lateral thinking‘: a creative problem-solving technique that involves looking at a given situation from unexpected – and often unusual – angles.

I was first introduced to de Bono in university when his theory of ‘thinking hats‘ was introduced to us as a way to acquaint us with parallel thinking to expand the way we look at information systems. It was an interesting 10 minutes, but after that I had completely forgotten about these techniques ’til now, when I happened upon de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats when brainstorming for books to add to my 2008 reading list.

Reading more about de Bono I find that in another of his books – Simplicity – he argues that the subject of simplicity should be taught in schools as a defining characteristic of quality, something I wholeheartedly agree with. Look at the themes running through the design of most of the successful Web 2.0 (and 1.0) companies and you’ll see that simplicity and usability are at the forefront of every design decision. Look at the design of really great ‘real-world’ objects – simple, right?

Of course, simplicity isn’t everything, and it depends somewhat on your definition of the term. To me simplicity is about delivering more from less by focusing on what’s important to the end-user: a simple – yet effective – strategy which appears to be midway between ‘Getting Real‘ and Don Norman‘s idea of user-centered design.

So, Six Thinking Hats and The Design/Psychology of Everyday Things are on my to-read list (I’ve only read extensive excerpts of the latter) – if I hadn’t already read all of it, Getting Real would be too. I guess all that’s left to ask now is; what does Simplicity/Usability mean to you, and could Marmite bring peace to the Middle Yeast? It’s definitely food for though. (Puns – unfortunately – intended. Sorry.)

Why am I doing this? I feel the proliferation of e-mail and instant messaging in my life has disconnected me from the close relationships I had with people who I once lived with and was close to. I hope that this romanticist approach to my communication can help me reconnect with, and mend, these relationships.

It may not be easy, but it’s going to be an interesting experiment nonetheless. I’m not just replacing e-mails with letters – I’m planning on sending letters to people who I haven’t spoken to in a while – if you want a letter, send me your address!

*In our paperless office it would be impossible for me to go an entire workday without sending an e-mail – I’m not going to even attempt it for ‘official’ work e-mails… and emergencies, if one should unfortunately arise.

After doing some research and compiling a list of possible subscriptions, I’m presenting them here as a way to keep track of them and also in hope that you may chip in with your thoughts and recommendations to liven up my daily commute.

BBC Worldwide

• Anything from the BBC Radio 4 archives. Highlights include:
  • In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg – “The History of Ideas”
  • Analysis – “Making sense of the ideas that change the world”
  • All in the Mind – “Exploring the limits and potential of the mind”
  • The Reith Lectures – “Annual radio lectures, given by leading figures of the day”
  • From Our Own Correspondent – “Personal reflections by BBC correspondents around the world”
    
  • The Material World – “Reports on developments across the sciences”
    

• The Naked Scientists – “Stripping science down to its bare essentials” (in association with Cambridge University)

• BBC Newsnight - Not strictly a podcast, but you can’t miss Newsnight!
  

National Public Radio (US) a.k.a. NPR

• Intelligence Squared – also known as IQ2 U.S. While you’re at it, check out the live London Debates.
• RadioLab – “Science meets culture, and information sounds like music”
• Science Friday – “Making science user-friendly”
  
• Fresh Air – “Probing questions, revelatory interviews and unusual insights”
• On the Media – “Explores how the media ‘sausage’ is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression”
  

CBC Radio One

• Quirks and Quarks – “Science that defi(n)es gravity”
• (The Best of) Ideas – “…About contemporary thought”

ABC Radio National (Australia)

• All in the Mind – “From dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting – exploring the human condition through the mind’s eye”
• Philosopher’s Zone – “Your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics”
• Big Ideas – “thinking on major social, cultural, scientific or political issues”

IdeaCast – “Breakthrough ideas and commentary from leading thinkers in business and management” from The Harvard Business Review

EconTalk from The Library of Economics and Liberty on “the economics behind current events, markets, free trade, and the curiosities of everyday decision-making”

…Open Source “Inverting the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: not a podcast with a web community; a web community that produces a podcast”

Physics for Future Presidents with Richard Muller – “What every world leader needs to know”

Scientific American’s Science Talk – “Exploring cutting-edge breakthroughs and controversial issues with leading scientists”

Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT) – “promoting ‘slower/better’ thinking”. Part of The Long Now Foundation

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe – “Your escape to reality”

Studio 360 and specifically its Design for the Real World segment – “Get inside the creative mind: a smart and surprising guide to what’s happening in pop culture and the arts”

Philosophy Talk with Stanford University’s Professors of Philosophy – “The program that questions everything… except your intelligence”

The CERN Podcast is recorded in situ at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider with special ‘celebrity’ guests – “A cocktail of entertaining chat shows with a bit of particle physics thrown in”

That’s quite a few isn’t it? Of course there are many more great ones I’ve missed that may be of equal or greater interest to me as all of the above, so if you know of any please let me know (yes, I am actually begging).

How about these popular ones that I left out of the above list purposefully – am I being foolish in demoting these to the footer: Slate’s ‘Daily Podcast’ or ‘Explainer’, This Week in Tech, The Glenn and Helen Show, Shire Network News, This American Life, World Beyond the Headlines, Common Sense, BrainStuff from HowStuffWorks, The Guardian’s Science Weekly, Selected Shorts, The Economist, The Writers’ Block, This Week in Science, Sex is Fun and Open Source Sex with Violet Blue. Regarding those last two: one’s on the physiology of sex and the other is written for women; both are supposed to be interesting; and I imagine they’re both super-NSFW.

Sources or: Where I Found These

• Digg’s Best Podcasts
• Open Culture’s Podcast Library (Open Culture is a great site I first got directed to back in May 2007 with their great collection of Foreign Language Learning Podcasts)
• Ask MetaFilter’s What are the most intellectually stimulating podcasts?

The expected result, of course, is that there would be an even spread of deaths and birthdays throughout the year with no real correlation between them: 25% of the deceased dying within 3 months of their last birthday.

Surprisingly, however, the results showed that 46% of of those surveyed died within a three month period following their birthday. Furthermore, more than 3 out of every 4 deaths occurred within the half-year following their birthday, with a measly 8% passing away during the three month period prior to another birthday. In Innumeracy, Paulos goes on to show us that the probability of theorising that 46 or more percent would die within this time period can be computed to be so tiny it may as well be considered zero.

Thus we are shown that a person’s mental state plays a large part in their death, and that the desire for (or shock of) a final cultural milestone may be all that’s keeping many aged from their death.

Why am I worrying writing about this now? This Sunday sees me visiting my grandfather (and final grandparent) in hospital on his 89th birthday; after reading that, wouldn’t you be thinking the worst for the coming months? I’ve had my fair share of grievances over the past 6 months, I don’t particularly want more.

To cut a long story short, I have now pencilled-in a trip to Shrewsbury for the weekend following next year’s anniversary as not only is Shrewsbury Darwin’s birth place, but it’s also the location of an annual, month-long celebration of his life and work, and also where my father currently lives. Two birds, one stone, and all that jazz.

On a slightly different note, all this talk of hard science is making me want to mention the book I’m currently reading: John Allen Paulos’ Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. Initially sceptical that it would be written for the maths-newcomer, I became impressed as Paulos describes with gusto the common – and frankly dangerous – pitfalls that everyone faces when living in an innumerate country. Encouraging his readers to view the world in a more quantitative way, I found myself grasping for paper and pencil a few times as he succinctly describes potential consequences of innumeracy:

• Inaccurate reporting of news stories and insufficient scepticism in assessing these stories
• Financial mismanagement and accumulation of consumer debt, specifically related to misunderstanding of compound interest
• Loss of money on gambling, in particular caused by belief in the gambler’s fallacy
• Belief in pseudoscience: “Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence.“
• Poor assessment of risk, for example, refusing to fly by aeroplane (a relatively safe form of transport) while taking unnecessary risks in a car (where an accident is more likely)

It’s a book I definitely recommend for both the innumerate and the mathematically proficient. The former will learn a lot and hopefully gain a renewed sense of wanting to brush up on those GCSE maths skills, while the latter will get introduced to some interesting topics – a couple of which I covered in my previous post on mathematical ‘paradoxes’.

Off on another slightly related tangent, I recently came across an interesting article Prof. Paulos wrote for ABC News: 12 Irreligious Questions to the Candidates (via kottke):

Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?

Ah to hell with it, have another tenuously-linked topic… The above book (Innumeracy) has renewed my interest in performing mental math and better thinking – a personal development subject I first started working on about 12 months ago with the help of the Mentat Wiki – an interesting website from the author of Mind Performance Hacks. Providing you with new memory ‘systems’, you can use these to perform some useful (and not-so-useful) memory feats and improve your maths, all without the use of a calculator or other aid.

Yeah, that’s right baby: squaring and cubing large numbers… in my head! Hell yeah, that’s how I roll!

And seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day, have some VD cards you can send to your ‘loved’ one. Perfect. (Bitter? Me?  No.)

“…It is not surface, it is not the last thing that needs to be considered, it is the thing itself” – Stephen Fry

Unformatted code is analogous to an essay without paragraphs – or perhaps a paragraph without punctuation: all the data you need to understand the ‘essay’ is there, but without the correct formatting it just appears to be a jumble of words without any real thought or structure behind it. To fully understand the program (essay) we must be able to decipher the constituent parts and understand them as separate entities as well as inter-related parts. In programming, formatting and indentation aid understanding – without them, this task becomes exceedingly difficult. It’s the same as how without punctuation, we cannot fully understand the context of a sentence or paragraph.

It was here that I wanted to write about whitespace and its importance in programming, graphic design and photography. However, browsing the Internet to find some good articles to plagiarise verbatim reference and cite correctly, I came across a great piece on the powerful use of whitespace from A List Apart. Focusing on the design of both web and print media, the theories found there can be translated to many different types of content: advised reading if – like me – you’re a newcomer to design and usability theory.

Clicking through to the author’s website I discover that not only does Mark Boulton work a leisurely 5 minute stroll from my current place of work, but he also creates interesting and beautifully simple presentations – my favourite of which is Better Typography; produced for the Berlin Web 2.0 Expo on the importance of typography in design. With its practical and usable examples and vivid depictions of the impact typography can have, I advise giving it a read. Mark’s kindly allowed me to mirror the presentation locally, and I feel that Paola Antonelli’s TED Talk is a perfect compliment if you’re reading about design and typography for the first time.

Finally, if anyone has a good book recommendation on design, usability, etc. it’ll definitely make a welcome addition to my Intelligence by Osmosis series.

Regardless, below are my top 10 lists of 2007. You know the ones – they proclaim to contain the best 10-or-so of something from the 12 months that have just passed? Come, soak up the nostalgia:

• The Best 19 Movies You Didn’t See in 2007 – Looking for the best independent films of 2007 that didn’t make it big? Well then, this is the list for you. A great list to accompany this is /film‘s ingeniously compiled 25 Definitive Movies of 2007. A ‘glass-is-half-empty’ kinda person? Well how about the 9 Worst Movies of 2007?
• Top 10 Food and Drink Hacks – I love this stuff. While it’s got nothing to do with 2007, it’s got everything to do with making your life just that little bit easier. This is the reason why I once read Lifehacker religiously: reading this list makes me want to resubscribe to their RSS feed. In fact, I will.
  
• Top 10 Viral Videos of 2007 – Watching these videos you may laugh (Don’t Tase Me vs. MC Hammer), stare in amazement/puzzlement (Daft Hands/Prison Inmates Performing ‘Thriller’), or simply cringe and wonder how it all went so wrong (Miss South Carolina Teen USA). The list could be refined though: where’s Chocolate Rain, Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip and the Finger Painting Turtle-Kid?
• 10 of the Most Interesting and Entertaining Images of 2007 – The top 10 viral images of 2007. That means, that if you have an email address, you’ve undoubtedly seen these 10 times already.
  
• 7 Things We Should Pretend Never Happened – I knew I was going to agree with most of this list as soon as I read the headline for item number one: Huddled Masses Lining Up for Bullsh!t.
  
• D!ckheads of the Year – Like Ronseal, this list does exactly what it says on the tin. Erik Prince of Blackwater, College Republicans, Congressional Democrats and – of course – George Bush… all nominated by Rolling Stone for the honour of being ‘D!ckhead of the Year’.
• Top 10 Astronomy Pictures – I’ve never been a huge astronomy fan. Yeah, the Universe is fascinating and full of mystery; but there’s something inherently unknowable about it that – for some reason – distracts me from its splendour. Nonetheless, these images are truly captivating.
• Top 10 Most Pirated Movies and TV Shows of 2007 – Bored and trying to think of something to download and watch? I’m not as that’s illegal, but if I were (hypothetically speaking, of course) I would go here to see what films and TV shows were downloaded the most last year.
• Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 – From the Ashera GD hypo-allergenic cat to super CO2-absorbing trees, it’s been an interesting year in genetic engineering and Wired does the this round-up for us. If genetic engineering isn’t your scientific tipple, why not have a look at their Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007 instead?
  
• Best ‘Professional’ Photographs of 2007 – There’s UNICEF’s Photo of the Year, National Geographic News’ Top Ten Photos, and The Press Photographer’s Year Awards (my personal favourite, yet also the one with the worst website). Of course, it’s not just professionals who take captivating photographs, and so PhotoCompetitions.com has the definitive list of amateur and professional photography competition for your perusal.

As a bonus, have the following too:

• My favourite round-up of interesting links from the past year: Jason Kottke’s Best Links of 2007
• The best ‘personal’ round-up of the past year: The Girl in the Cafe’s The Year That Passed
• The best post detailing the biggest news stories of 2007: (cough-plug-cough) My Top 10 News Stories of 2007.
• Update (16th Jan) – The best single post of the entire year? It has to be Carl’s Why I moved from Boston to Nashville or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Writing Everything in Snowclones – you had me at ‘sliced lolcats’.