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Study Finds Value in Email Spam
Ant writes "According to a LiveScience story, a steady diet of email spam can be good for you. From the article: 'Researchers split a group of more than 2,100 Canadians into two groups. One group got e-mails that promoted healthy lifestyles, the other got none. "These were informative and motivational messages sent weekly for 12 weeks," explained study leader Ron Plotnikoff of the University of Alberta. The e-mails promoted the benefits of a good diet and physical activity. Those who were effectively spammed, as a group, saw their mean body mass index (BMI) go down, meaning it improved. BMI is a measure of body fat based on height and weight. Overall BMI rose for the control group, which did not get the emails.'"
This livescience.com site looks like the Reader's Digest (disparaging comments intended for livescience, apologies to RD which is sometimes enjoyable and doesn't claim to be a science journal) of science websites. What a horrible article, on several levels. I'll say it one more time: Screw this crap.
But on to the parent post:
Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
It's been a long time (16+ years) since I read "Surely You're Joking,..." so this was an interesting re-read, especially in light of what I've read since then: Susan Blackmore's "The Adventures of a Parapsychologist," current edition titled "Searching For The Light."
Blackmore wrote of being the first to get a Master's degree in parapsychology, and what she did along the way to getting it. Her "downfall" was strict adherence to methods Feynman wrote about. She started enthusiastically enough, believing she would be the one to prove the existence of some sort of ESP phenomenon, doing many experiments designed to detect it, but all of them failing. She had colleagues that had successful experiments (showing someething statistically unlikely), but she always found problems and irregularities with their experiments. She was labeled psi-negative.
What struck me was how these people, even with their motivation to find hard evidence that they thought was "just around the corner," were unable to find it, but they kept on going, because they BELIEVED it was there, in the same sense as a religious believer.
At the time I had some spurious beliefs brought about by having been around a "good group of people" for a few years. I was already questioning some of these beliefs before I read Blackmore's book, and while reading it my (actually the group's) beliefs fell like a house of cards. I suppose I should be, uh, 'grateful' that I read Blackmore's book.
Feynman mentions Rhine (click on the parent's "Read the rest of this comment..." link), and Blackmore writes about visiting the USA and meeting him, and she and others had a seance or some such with him. Rhine was defininely the most respected person in parapsychology, making his suggestion of picking only the positive-testing students all the more outrageous.
Tag lost or not installed.
BMI is a ratio of height to weight. It is no, in any way, connected to body fat. That is what makes it pure, unadulterated bullshit. It does not take in to account age, build, or even sex. According to those who preach BMI, a man and a woman of the same height should be the same weight. According to BMI, if you are very muscular, but in such good shape you have 5% body fat, you are overweight.
That isn't just quackery, it's medically dangerous.