Practical bio-engineering

Since the beginning of time - well ten years aNNyway - we have been running a 1st Year Biology practical in The Institute about Long Bones.  It's about the structure and function of bones and I've written about it before.  Since last year, a change has been forced upon us by EU Health and Safety regulations.  In the past we've asked our technicians to go to their family butcher and ask him (it's always a him) to cut a bunch of long bones in half along the long axis - humerus, femur it doesn't matter: either, both.  This is the work of moments with the band-saw that was part of the normal kit in most butchers shops.  This will give you a sense of a) what a saw can do and b) why it's dodgy to allow these things on general release: moment's inattention and your thumb is on the weighing scale. The EU has now required these potent[ial] hazard to be used only in central meat-processing factories. That's almost the end of craft butchery as a trade: most butchers are now mere retailers of wrapped trays of pre-cut bits and pieces; some of which they dunk in sweet&sour sauce before sale. I hope it's different in Russia.

Looking at more microscope slides . . .  of osteons [L] the cylindrical sub-units of compact bone structure is what I sometimes call unreal science because nobody is finding out anything new: they are making [usually rather crappy] drawings which amount to cartoons and then spending a disproportionate amount of time labelling the various bits with Latin names that most of our students can neither pronounce nor spell correctly.  Task: draw lines between structures in the photomicrograph [L] and these items: lacuna/lacunae; lamella/lamellae; Haversian canal; osteocyte, canaliculus.  Why the Latin ffs? Why not: hole; layer; Haversian tube; cell; small lateral tube ?  It would park a trivial naming-of-parts and allow us to concentrate on polishing observational skills.

Like last year we used toilet rolls as a metaphor for the hollow cylinder that is the long bone's central section [diaphysis for you Latin-Nazis]. This year, instead of using A4 lab-books [average wt about 500g], I dropped by the office to pick up a box of xerox paper because A0 is exactly 1 sq.m in size [in the ratio 1:Sqrt(2)] and xerox paper is 80gsm, we know that a N=500 ream of paper weighs exactly 2.5kg and a boxful = 12.5 kg.  Matt Parker raves on about A4 and why it's waaaay better than US Letter size <huzzah Europe>.

Four toilet rolls weighs very close to 25g, so if they can support a ream of paper that's a weight/load ratio of 1:100.  We had two 16 y.o transition year TY kids auditing the class and I asked them to estimate/guess how much they thought their 4 "legs" would support - "form a hypothesis" in science-speak.  By the time they had hesitantly suggested "1 ream", my most active group had stacked 5 reams, 12 lab-books, three boxes of latex gloves and an iPhone on theirs.  That was close to 20kg or a load ratio of nearly 1:1000!!  I think we were all surprised; and the rolls didn't look anything like failure.

Then one of the girls piped up saying that she weighed 59kg [call that 60kg!?] and maybe we should see how many rolls would be needed to carry her - and a wooden dissection tray to spread the load. We were conservative to begin and put 8 rolls down as support.  A few iterations showed that 5 rolls [30g] was enough but 4 rolls [25g] too little <ploof!> to support a 60kg weight. The feeble looking low quality card-board cylinder is good for holding 2000x its own weight. Then a tall well-built chap cried "Me too!" and declared his weight as 113kg close to double his XX colleague's. A lot of toilet rolls were spread out under the wooden tray but they didn't stand a chance <frrrRUB> and it was man down and mangled cardboard. We then had a bit of a discussion about stacking corn-flake boxes at an aisle-end display in the local supermarket. Much hilarity, only partly tempered when stern Chemistry teacher came into to check on the TY kids. But I brought everyone back to earth with some further reflections on their femurs and how much punishment they are designed to take without breaking: it's a lot.

Verdict: a good way to while away an afternoon.

Technetium unmissing

If you did a bit of Googling on Monday, you will have noticed, from the Google-Doodle that it was the birthday of Дми́трий Ива́нович Менделе́ев Dimitri Mendeleev [L auditioning for the part of Fagin in Dickens' Oliver Twist]. 182 this week! He doesn't look a day older than Rasputin . Hilarious in-joke cartoon. Mendeleev was a Russian chemist who has some claim to inventing the periodic table of chemical elements which is such a powerful metaphor for t-shirts and graphical display of pretty much any sort of extensive information: periodic table of . . . farm animals . . . Disney characters  . . . Harry Potter. Like Harry Potter competitors, other earlier and contemporary publications of charts to show chemical regularity by Julius Meyer, and Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois have been left in the dustbin of history, along with Johann Döbereiner's theory of triads and John Newland's theory of Octaves. As with Priestley and Lavoisier with Oxygen, acceptance of these chem-explanatory schemes was often along nationalist lines.

Apparently, a key factor in helping Mendeleev to his solution for regularity in the world of chemistry was the fact that he was a regular player of cards especially solitaire/patience.  When he wrote out cards containing the names, weights and properties of each of  the elements then known., it was natural - to him - shuffle them about the table looking for patterns.  Another idea which helped to gain his schema universal acceptance was the humility to accept that we didn't know everything; that there were elements which chemistry had not yet encountered . . . and to leave gaps/blanks in the growing table of affinities. Because he was a scientist, Mendeleev then went off to form hypotheses about the properties that these missing data might possess. This was also a key part of  Döbereiner's theory of triads: the middle of three elements "in line" would be a sort of average of its two flankers. To one of these missing elements, found between Molybdenum and Ruthenium according to the list of atomic weights, Menedeleev gave the name EkaManganese to acknowledge its similarity to the lighter element.  We now know it as Tc Technetium to acknowledge the fact that it is vanishingly rare in the natural world and almost all our stocks have been created by nuclear transmutation in laboratories and atomic reactors.

It is vanishingly rare in nature because it is the lightest element all of whose isotopes are radioactive; every atom ever created in the broiling chunk of star-matter that became Earth has long since changed into something else.  It was thus impossible for Mendeleev and his peers to verify the hypothesised properties of Tc because they couldn't find enough of the stuff to fill the smallest chemical crucible in the lab.  It was found later, initially by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè in 1937, and later in some abundance among the waste of nuclear piles as one of the breakdown products of Uranium and Plutonium. After nuclear physicists had enough scrabbled together to do the chemistry, they were able to measure the wavelengths of light given off when Technetium was heated to incandescence. When this atomic spectrum was shared with the Astronomy Department, the star-gazers were able to report that many red giant stars, in retirement at the end of their long and active lives, showed evidence of Technetium beneath their skins. This proved that Technetium must have been created anew in those stars because any original aliquot would have long since decayed as it has on Earth. That was interesting and informative because it helped cement the idea that elements heavier than Iron must have been created in stars.  What boggles the mind is that these heavy elements are then supposed to have been redistributed round the universe when the creating star went all supernova at the end of its billion year life.

Town and gown

Today, 10th February, is traditionally St. Scholastica's Day. Who?-never-'eard-of-'er?  That's because she lived a long long time ago [she died on this day in 542AD], and indeed may not have lived at all but became a convenient post to hang some theo-political ideas upon.  She is supposed to have been the twin sister of Benedict of Nursia. If you are Catholic or have lived in a Catholic country, you'll know something about him as the Founder of the Benedictines, known as the Black Monks - not to be confused with the much later mendicant/preaching order the Dominicans after whom most of the Blackfriars locations are named. The existence of Scholastica, as an equal to her brother in her powers of theological discourse, encourages women to step out of the kitchen and bedroom and use their minds in the wider world.  If they believed in such things, she might be an appropriate Matron for Women-In-Science.

She was remembered for 500 years in the University of Oxford for a riot that erupted, on 10th February 1355, between the scholars of the college [Gown] and the less favoured people of working Oxford [Town].  It seemed to have started in a pub named the Swindlestock Tavern next to Carfax Tower where the Santander Bank [view?] is now located. Two privileged young buckos, Walter Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield by name, decided that the beer was not up to their drunken standards and threw what was left in their pots in the landlord's face. Fight! . . . melée . . .riot!  The Mayor demanded that the Chancellor to arrest and punish the original perps; Chancellor pulled his gown around himself and refused to allow any such interference in the ancient privileges of the University.  The two sides gathered up allies and the fight spread through the town.  Eventually, 63 scholars and clerks were dead and 30 townsmen.

King Edward III took the University's side entirely and imposed a sort of legal penance on the Mayor and Corporation: requiring them to walk to the University bareheaded bearing a purse containing 5/3d [five shillings and thruppence = 63 old pennies; one for each dead scholar] . . . in perpetuity! This charade carried on every St Scholastica's Day for the next 500 years.  In 1825, the then Mayor quietly refused to put himself and the citizenry through the indignity; the sky didn't fall and Oxford began to enter the modern era.

In the frame

I was slagging off The Edge at the beginning of the year for launching a rather tired question for 2016.  But since long-time, I've been on their e-list and they send me links to essays and symposia on an irregular basis - most of them seem not as interesting as the participants think they are. This week I was hooked by an interview The Crusade Against Multiple Regression Analysis because MultRegr was the cornerstone of my multivariate statistical analysis module in graduate school 30+ years ago. It's not really about Multiple Regression but is a welcome tirade about the poorly designed nonsense that passes for much of the work published under cognitive psychology.  No better man to talk about it than Richard E Nesbitt, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of Social Psychology at U Mich, Ann Arbor. A number of issues are exposed here which come under the heading "studies that seemed interesting and important but failed to replicate".  I've aired this sort of stuff on The Blob before: Brian Nosek on reproducibility -  underpowered studies - pathetic levels of evidence - underpowered = waste of money - stem cells not all they're cracked up to be - and Prof Nesbitt exposes some of the nonsense that has aggravated him from his own field.

One of the points Nesbitt makes is that, in any field, interest in particular aspects is a bit tidal: such a topic is all hot-and-heavy for a decade and then it goes off the boil and another angle is deemed to be sexy. In cognitive psychology, it used to be that the personality dictated outcomes - extroverts would behave such-a-way. Hans "IQ Test" Eysenck was famous for simplifying the complexity of human personality on two axes (at right angles to each other because they were supposed to be independent): introvert vs extrovert and neurotic vs stable.  Sounds like it might be informative because we all know people who are ebullient and bouncy but a tower of strength as well as the cliché 'strong silent man'; and others who are quiet and wash their hands rather more often than strictly necessary.  Nowadays behaviour is all about context and framing: no matter where you are on the neurosis spectrum you'll react differently according to slight changes in the form of words. Even life-and-death decisions can be swayed by how questions are asked.

One of the hazards of the scientific method, as normally framed, is that we carry out reductionist experiments: holding all variables except one steady so we can document the effect of one thing at a time. Nice in the lab, often irrelevant in the real world; where lots of variables impinge on the system and interact in unexpected ways. Nesbitt takes prostate cancer [again?!], for example: if you conduct controlled experiments on very large samples, it turns out that vitamin-E slightly increases the onset and progression of prostate cancer. But if you approach the problem with an epidemiological survey the opposite effect becomes statistically significant. Drilling down in the data reveals that men who pop vit-E [a minority, surely?] tend to be fitter, richer, healthier, drink less and have way better diets than 'normal' blokes.  These general good health correlates reduce all morbidities, including prostate problems: it's called healthy user bias.

Similarly, in the USA, the death-rate per million driver-miles is far higher for pick-up trucks than for Volvo estates. Which is great propaganda for selling Volvos but little to do with any real or supposed intrinsic safety features.  Because it fits the standard safety picture, we are sorely tempted to accept the finding: critically evaluating data is just so tiring. The confounding variable is The Driver. Very few hopped-up young men act the tear-away in Volvo estates; very few middle-aged middle-class mothers pick up their kids from school in a truck.  Obvious with hindsight, of course, but we could all do with training our minds so that they work better in foresight.

You should really read the Nesbitt piece, he describes some very nice studies showing that we contribute a lot more if we think we are playing than if we are paid to do it. If we get money for doing something (teaching in an Instititute of Technology, hmmmmm?) we deliver less. What happens is that our intrinsic motivation gets undermined by reward - the external motivation.  That's all very sad and shows that monetising everything, as happens in the West, makes work and life seem like shit because our intrinsic reward system has been eviscerated.  It also drives all the fun out of contributing as part of the Voluntariat.

Lay off the prostrate

I've mentioned the prostate before . . . far too often if you're younger than me and/or don't have one: "he would say that" the youthy/lady constituency cries, "he's an ould feller, so he would be concerned". But I'm not, of all the things that keep me awake at night, the prospect of prostate failure/cancer is definitely not on the list. Prostate cancer is the second largest cancer-killer of men after lung-cancer but it's peculiarly slow growing and so many more men die with prostate cancer than of prostate cancer. Only 3% of US men die of it: two terminal cases I've Blobbed are Linus "Vit C" Pauling and Sherwin "End-of-Life" Nuland. The images [even two anecdotes aren't data!!] of those two elderly chaps will sway our decision more than the actual probabilities because most of us are crap at thinking rationally. There was also a briefly supposed epidemiological association with vasectomy which paused my pal from getting snipped; although his subliminal fear of the vasectomy doctor from Kilcock played a part in his hesitation as well.  The take home is that as men get older, control of cell-division down there gets to be a little less tightly regulated; but doing something about that is not necessarily the best response.

Here I'm going to use this topic as a springboard to open The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin again [previously]. Levitin is advising a robust defense for maintaining the status quo when your urologist/surgeon is advising you to have surgical treatment; which usually involves the excision of the whole gland, like they do for such 'useless' bits as tonsils and appendices.  This suggestion will get traction from many men because the C-word looms large in our list of boogie-men and too many of us played with Action Man  as kids: "do it Doc and have done with it".  But informed consent requires Mac the Knife to list the downsides and their probabilities:

• erectile dysfunction 80%
• shortening the penis by 25mm[!!] 50%
• urinary incontinence 35%
• fecal incontinence 25%
• hernia 17%
• severed urethra [!!] 6%
• at least one of the above = 97%

Levitin then goes on to carry out a number needed to treat NNT analysis. Because it is slow-growing, and indeed without symptoms in most men with one, a prostate tumour can be left safely untreated in most men.  In statistical fact, for every 48 prostate surgeries performed only 1 will achieve an extension of life . . . and none of them, nor their medical teams, know which one will win the prize. Surgeons are known for their ability to take decisions: you can't piffle about when an artery disintegrates before your probe. They like to be in charge and they are trained to act rather than let things slide. And the economics of litigation and insurance almost insist that surgery goes ahead.  Obviously this contributes enormously to the ballooning cost of healthcare in The West.

Here's a neat symmetry. The average life-extension brought about by prostate cancer surgery is six weeks (we have to factor in the 47/48 chaps who do not benefit at all!).  Ho hum, good medical practice advises that the recovery period after major abdominal surgery is . . . six weeks. But information is key.  If you can gather extra information about how the disease, prostate cancer or whatever, impacts on your demographic [men rarely get breast cancer and never get ovarian cancer] then you can help stack the odds in your favour. Obsessive crunching of relevant numbers in his essay The Median is not the Message, bought Stephen J Gould another 20 years after his cancer diagnosis. Read that, it's empowering and inspirational.  Relevant numbers, lads! I've written about palpating the gland and prostate-specific antigen PSA's fall from fashion as a useful diagnostic tools. What about:

Don’t just do something, stand there?

Sunday Update 070116

Last month I was on about communicating with Little Green Men.  Here's an essay which absolves Enrico Fermi from ever articulating The Fermi Paradox about the existence of intelligent life Out There.

I know you're dying to know what happened on Wednesday about the Strike. I wasn't allowed to work-work and the day was fine-sunny-winter so I had a productive day cleaning house and tidying up the brash from a fallen tree. I was rostered for picket duty between 1500-1700 and turned up in a shirt and fleecy; that was fine at 3pm but it was well chilly as the street lights came on.  Note to Self: wear funeral overcoat next time: you're not as young as you were.  There was a tiny bit of coverage on Newstalk, and some desultory and predictable comments at The Journal. Including the helpful "Oh, by the way don’t strike on a day when the election is announced."

And it's Eddie Izzard's birthday today:

• At the Death Star canteen
• Cake or Death?

The other side of the tracks

Do you really believe that middle-class kids are more talented than those from the ghetto?  We know that they will go further, faster, higher in the dreadful one-winner-only race that shags us all over impregnates the soul of Western Society . . . but for intrinsic ability? . . . . for novel solutions to the fine mess the planet is in?  What about women? Do you really believe that the sex ratio among presidents, generals, CEOs, professors is naturally  skewed from 1:1?  Because the genes for leadership are on the Y chromosome?

If you do believe any of the above, you might need an antidote; it's only an anecdote [N=1 is not data] but inspiring nonetheless. Here [L with her 2 daughters] is Lynn Ruane telling her story by talking about leadership at FemFest.  It's the same, more or less, as the Irish Times picked up.  Lynn grew up on a council estate in the depths of the West Dublin ghetto in Killinarden. She tells her story as series of incidents punctuating a life which was typical of the dispossessed: drugs, shop-lifting, vandalism, teenage pregnancy. But the force was strong with young Lynn. Her confrontations with The Man, didn't cow her; nor did they make her lose herself in rage. She rather tapped into a core of solid self-belief either acquired or delivered from god.  It might have started with the trousers, being told that only boys were allowed to wear them in school, or the skirts which only altar boys were allowed to wear in church.  Lynn wanted to have those forbidden garments and she asked for it in such a not-to-be-denied way that she changed how age-old certainties were viewed in her parish. It was uncanny, her power over weaker minds, like Obi Wan Kenobi murmuring "these are not the droids you want" when he arrives in Mos Eisley. We could have more of her - and here she is back-stage and talking direct to camera.

This year, Lynn Ruane is President of the Students Union in Trinity College Dublin, having clawed herself an education out in Tallaght. She's shown above with her two daughters beside the Pomodoro Sphere in the centre of the campus, which is an Establishment Bastion. Seemingly, the Presidency comes with a grace-and-favour apartment in College and she lives there with her family. If she seems to be absurdly young to have a teenage daughter, it's because she had an early start. I gather that the girls have been lowering the tone of the sacred lawns of TCD: now and then roaring out of the window to tell their mother not to forget the milk.  That's all to the good. The pomposity needs to be pricked occasionally. I have stake/status in Trinity because I'm now an Adjunct Lecturer there; so if I approve, it is okay [hmmmm? probably not].

Watch out for Lynn Ruane.  She is now thinking of running for the Senate - of the country, not the TCD talking shop. We've had a couple of female Presidents of Ireland in the last 25 years, but we've never had a female Taoiseach.  €5 on Lynn Ruane?  Get your bet on while the odds are still long.