Looking a (small) gift-horse in the mouth

I came across an interesting article by Dana and Loewenstein (2003) that i vaguely heard of once before about the influence of small pharmaceutical gifts on doctors' decisions.

The basic questions are:
1) do gifts influence doctors' beliefs/prescribing habits, and
2) is this a function of gift size

Both doctors and regulating bodies must think that 1) and 2) are true, since the recent guidelines of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America define gifts of "more than nominal value" as inappropriate. And surveys show that physicians view small gifts as ethically more acceptable than large gifts, and they don't think that small gifts tempting enough to influence physicians' prescription choices.

Pharmaceutical companies also believe 1) is true, but many restrict their own employees from accepting even small gifts. => big pharma knows something we don't.

Thus policies that restrict gift sizes will be useless if biases introduced by gifts are not related to the size of the gift.

Here's the scenario:
-Pharmaceutical companies employ representatives who meet with physicians with apparent success to aggressively promote newer and typically more expensive drugs
-a study of 29 empirical articles showed that physician interactions with pharmaceutical companies led to increased prescription costs and nonrational prescribing
-all this is questionable, because from 1989 to 2000, the US Food and Drug Administration judged 76% of all approved new drugs to be no more than moderate innovations over existing treatments, with many being a modification to an older product with the same ingredient. In 2000, the average price of these standard-rated new drugs was nearly twice the average price of existing drugs prescribed for the same indications.

some outcomes

• - one retrospective study24 tracked house staff who attended a grand rounds given by a pharmaceutical company speaker and found them more likely to indicate that company's drug as a treatment than did their colleagues. However, many of the house staff did not recall what company sponsored the grand rounds (this reminds me of the Overcoming Bias blog)

• -a positive correlation has been found between the cost of physicians' treatment choices and their amount of interaction with pharmaceutical company representatives

Frame of reference bias
Alas, it seems that we are the centre of our own universe, where translational invariance to another's frame of reference does not apply (unlike the laws of physics). "A recent study of medical residents26 found that 61% reported that 'promotions don't influence my practice,' while only 16% believed the same about other physician's practices. Clearly, it cannot both be true that most physicians are unbiased and that most other physicians are biased!! Furthermore, medical students recognize gifts as more problematic for other professions than they are for medicine."

Interestingly, all this works the other way around too. "Patients, while somewhat more concerned about the possible biasing effects of gifts than physicians, seem to be vicariously self-serving in their perceptions, believing that other individuals' physicians are more likely to be biased by gifts than their own physicians."

The article concludes that, without properly understanding the sources of conflict of interest, it is impossible to make policies to regulate it. They recommend that pharmaceutical gifts of all sizes should be prohobited, as even small is big in this case.

Complexity theory, power laws, bears and honey

Following from my comment on Laszlo's last post, I looked up one of the topics that always burns in the back of my mind: complexity theory.

As a first stab, I read this article from 2001. Old, so perhaps you have heard about it already?

In a nutshell, paleontologists are puzzled by the dramatic discontinuities in the extinction patterns of life on earth over its history. Occasionally there are cataclysmic episodes that causes mass extinctions. Physicists call this phenomenon Self-Organized Criticality (SOC).

"In recent years, some physicists and other adherents of a new field called complexity have argued that the answer involves a simple mathematical theory -- the same one that may explain the collapse of a sand pile or a crash in the stock market. But their suggestions have drawn fire from paleontologists, the group traditionally charged with investigating life's past."

The SOC physicists traced the lengths of time that ancient groups of animals had survived, and found (surprise!) a power-law behaviour: most of the time, things were quiescent, but occasionally there was a mass extinction--the same behaviour typically seen with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and solar flares. This didn't have to do with external events (like an asteroid hitting the earth), but evolved as a consequence of how the different species interacted with each other. The complexity theorists say that the power-law "fingerprint" is indicative of a system in a critical state.

The main jam was that the paleontologists re-analyzed the data "with the appropriate statistical tests", and no power-law behaviour emerged. They again tested it with a new database of 36,000 genera showing when the groups appeared and when they vanished ("the best data set that is available at this point in time"), and still no evidence of a power-law pattern was found.

Another complexity theorist put it this way: "It's not enough to say that self-organized critical models give power laws, and we see power laws in the fossil record, and therefore they must be self-organized critical. That's logic on the same level as saying, 'Bears like honey, my wife likes honey, therefore my wife is a bear.'"

As a result, Richard Sole, one of the SOC physicists, has modified his ideas and decided to collaborate with Douglas H. Erwin, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution, to see if complexity theory can help explain the appearance of new species after major biological crises.

I doubt this is the last we hear of complexity theory bashing heads with other fields--perhaps this happens on a power-law basis??--and i'm sure there is a lot of interesting stuff to mine...

How to present a complex idea concisely

Better a narrow description than a vague one.

One reason founders resist describing their projects concisely is that, at this early stage, there are all kinds of possibilities. The most concise descriptions seem misleadingly narrow. So for example a group that has built an easy web-based database might resist calling their applicaton that, because it could be so much more. In fact, it could be anything...

The problem is, as you approach (in the calculus sense) a description of something that could be anything, the content of your description approaches zero. If you describe your web-based database as "a system to allow people to collaboratively leverage the value of information," it will go in one investor ear and out the other. They'll just discard that sentence as meaningless boilerplate, and hope, with increasing impatience, that in the next sentence you'll actually explain what you've made.

Your primary goal is not to describe everything your system might one day become, but simply to convince investors you're worth talking to further. So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right answer by successive approximations. Begin with a description that's gripping but perhaps overly narrow, then flesh it out to the extent you can. It's the same principle as incremental development: start with a simple prototype, then add features, but at every point have working code. In this case, "working code" means a working description in the investor's head.

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/investors.html

Chimps and grad students

Quick youtube clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVlJv7ZkvGA
Chimps were trained to remember a grid of numbers on a touch screen presented for a brief period. Afterwards they had to touch squares on the grid covering up the numbers, in ascending order. Grad students trained for the same period of time performed much worse in this task! Good thing we don't live in the trees.

Chimps for postdocs!!

Ownership of ideas vs. the value of collaboration in scientific research

This is something that has been troubling us for the past while: What to do with ideas that you are not paid to come up with? Can we work on them in our own time? What if the idea requires validation from data you do not have access to, or critical commentary from someone who pays you to think about something else?

Here is a suprisingly frank debate I came across.

The story of the blue brain project

A very cogent piece of science writing for the lay reader.

What you should know about organic food cerification

MOST of the chicken, fruit and vegetables in Ellen Devlin-Sample’s kitchen are organic. She thinks those foods taste better than their conventional counterparts. And she hopes they are healthier for her children.

Lately, though, she is not so sure.

Read more here:

cudnt resist this

im sure some of us wud remember the "rotten burough" (is it spelt okay?) from black adder where

Mr Black adder is the polling officer, the vote counter, the only voter and personal advisor to boldrick(who ran for those elections)..

amazingly I found this, 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/A-polling-station-for-one-voter-/articleshow/4213160.cms