Month: July 2012

The truth about lying and NLP

As a follow up to that item on eye movements and lying, here’s a quote from the Skeptics’ Dictionary about Neuro Linguistic Programming, NLP:

“It seems that NLP develops models which can’t be verified, from which it develops techniques which may have nothing to do with either the models or the sources of the models. NLP makes claims about thinking and perception which do not seem to be supported by neuroscience.”

“NLP itself proclaims that it is pragmatic in its approach: what matters is whether it works. However, how do you measure the claim “NLP works”?…Anecdotes and testimonials seem to be the main measuring devices. Unfortunately, such a measurement may reveal only how well the trainers teach their clients to persuade others to enrol in more training sessions.”

Norcross, J.C., Koocher, G.P. & Garofalo, A. (2006). Discredited psychological treatments and tests: A Delphi poll., Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 37 (5) 522. DOI: 10.1037/0735-7028.37.5.515

Liar, liar, pants on fire

There’s a weird piece of Deceived Wisdom that emerged from so-called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that suggested that one could somehow tell whether a person was lying by looking at their eye movements. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that it’s nonsense. All that guff about looking up to their right when you’re fabricating a tale and down to the left when they’re recalling a truth? It’s nonsense.

Research published by Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire and colleagues in the journal PLoS ONE today lays the deceived wisdom bare. “The results of the first study revealed no relationship between lying and eye movements, and the second showed that telling people about the claims made by NLP practitioners did not improve their lie detection skills,” noted Wiseman.

“A large percentage of the public believes that certain eye movements are a sign of lying, and this idea is even taught in organisational training courses,” team member Caroline Watt of the University of Edinburgh says. “Our research provides no support for the idea and so suggests that it is time to abandon this approach to detecting deceit. The researchers are now calling on the public, the media and organisations who claim credence for NLP and eye-movement lie detection to abandon this nonsense.

No need to hide your lyin; eyes, after all Glenn.

(2012). The Eyes Don’t Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040259.t003

Vocal cords and asthma

A diagnosis of exercise-induced bronchospasm – asthma – is commonly given to patients who present with cough, breathlessness and wheeziness after exertion despite being otherwise physically fit. An alternative explanation to bronchial (airways) constriction was discussed on BBC Radio 4’s Inside Health this week on which they suggested that vocal cord dysfunction might be to blame as the vocal folds close over the airway in susceptible individuals.

Thus, physiotherapy and breathing exercises rather than asthma medication might be a better intervention for many sufferers (unless they also have underlying asthma). It does rather suggest that asthma might be being over-diagnosed. It also hints that yoga, singing and other techniques that teach better posture and breathing may actually have a genuine mode of action if they can control the constriction of one’s vocal folds.

Intriguingly, a quick PubMed search turned up a paper from 1996 on seven elite athletes with psychogenic vocal cord dysfunction who presented with apparent exercise-induced asthma that was nothing of the sort. The study’s conclusion is that “The mere association of exercise and airway obstruction is not sufficient to establish the diagnosis of asthma.”

That was 1996…why are we only now [six years later at the time of writing] learning about this issue and the potential differential diagnosis for exercise-induced breathing difficulties. If you or your child’s physician offers asthma meds for those after-sport symptoms ask whether vocal cord dysfunction might be to blame.

There is actually no real, definitive test for asthma, peak flow meter before and after inhaled salbutamol seems to be the usual way. However, there is a way to diagnose exercise-induced vocal cord dysfunction using trans-nasal endoscopy.

Vocal cord dysfunction masqueradin… [Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 1996] – PubMed – NCBI.

Run without thinking

Over on Facebook, a friend is currently bemoaning her iPhone and more specifically the NikePlus app that allows you to track your walking and running. I used to run, dodgy leg precludes that now, can barely run for a bus these days…I also used to swim (not great for electronic gadgets) and I did used to keep track of lengths I swam and the time it took me and the pace I set myself and all that stuff…

But, then I read an article in my wife’s yoga teachers’ journal about the benefits of being a bit more zen, as it were, about swimming. Swimming can, after all give you the chance to switch off from the everyday world, especially in an outdoor pool (which we sadly no longer have in the village) or in the sea (preferably somewhere hot). Anyway, I took heart and stopped counting lengths…

The same school of thought can apply to running. You don’t need to plot and track, you don’t need to digitise this ancient experience, this primordial urge to beat out time beneath one’s feet. You can simply run for the sake of running. Distance is relative. You cannot outpace time, so it’s best ignored. Just run. Don’t use the running time to think nor to plan, if thoughts come to you as your legs move, then fine, listen to them, file them, ignore them. Don’t run to listen to music, to catch up on podcasts, to read audiobooks or anything else. Just run to feel the ground move beneath your feet.

Running. Swimming. Life. There may be an app for that. But, you really, really don’t need it…

Rolls-Royce Lego jet engine

Rolls-Royce today unveiled the world’s first jet engine to be made entirely of Lego at the opening of Farnborough International Airshow. The engine, which is one of the most complex Lego structures ever built, is a half size replica of the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 which powers the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft.

via Rolls-Royce reveals world's only Lego jet engine – Rolls-Royce.

Blog plugin KCite excites research papers

I just discovered the KCite WordPress plugin from a team at my alma mater which lets you improve reference citations in your blog

Install and activate the plugin and surround any DOI or PMID number with the following tags: [cite][/cite] and the link becomes automagically active. A mouseover brings up the full citation instantly and a click or two takes you to the reference.

From the developers’ page: “The KCite plugin provides a means for referencing scholarly works in WordPress posts. The author includes a unique identifier for a publication in their post, and the plugin queries a web service to retrieve metadata about that publication. This metadata is then used to build a bibliography at the foot of the post, with in-place citations in the text referring to it.”

The team explains that their plugin uses the CrossRef API to retrieve metadata for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and NCBI eUtils to retrieve metadata for PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs).

If you cite research papers in your WordPress blog, you might like to check it out at http://knowledgeblog.org/kcite-plugin

Alchemical chemistry news

The Alchemist gets down and dirty with the geckos this week, or not, as the case may be. Meanwhile learns how to make multi-layered graphene flakes with ultrasound and finds caffeine, cocaine and more in ultratrace quantities in the water supply. In ancient news, we hear that Libyans have been dairy farming for at least 7000 years. The newest bond on the block is the halogen bond. Finally, PhD recognition in the form of this year’s Reaxys PhD Prize.

The Alchemist. Apols for late update this week.

Peter Higgs and the chocolate cookie

Back in 1993, the then UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave (remember him?) launched a competition for the best lay explanation of the Higgs boson and how it might theoretically endow other particles with mass. The prize-winning Higgs analogy came from Professor David Miller of University College London and used the movements of a scientist in a room to explain how particles get mass.

I’ve taken huge liberties with Miller’s concept to bring it up to date for this week’s Higgs boson news from the LHC at CERN:

Picture the scene: Geordie boy Prof Peter Higgs steps out of the lecture theatre into the refreshments area, hoping to get to the coffee and those delicious chocolate cookies. Unfortunately, he is besieged by a throng of clamouring scientists, hacks and hangers-on. He keeps his eye on the biscuit tray but nods and chats to his peers as he proceeds slowly, attracting a bigger and bigger crowd, signing autographs, fielding questions as he goes. The “field” of hangers-on – the Higgs bosons – slows Prof Higgs in his quest to move from lecture theatre door to the refreshments it’s as if he is now so massive he can barely move, there are so many Higgs bosons surrounding the Prof.

Then, from the door comes CERN’s Professor Incandela, he’s famous, of course, well-respected, but not quite the heavyweight as the eminent Professor Higgs. Nevertheless, he attracts some hangers-on and interacts with the field too, but he has not gained so much mass and is eyeing up the rapidly dwindliny supply of chocolate cookies worriedly but moving steadily towards it.

Meanwhile, fast as light a lowly post-doc emerges from the lecture theatre having been released at the flick of a switch. Needless to say none of the bosons notice her despite her PhD and electromagnetic personality. There is no interaction with the field, it is as if she is the ultimate size-zero. With no mass to slow her she speeds through the field photonically heading straight for the last remaining chocolate cookie grabbing it in a flash, and it’s gone, photolysed into oblivion.

With apologies to the Profs and that lowly post-doc, who really took the biscuit!

You can read Prof Miller’s original prize-winning analogy from 1993 here.

The Demi God Particle

The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN today presented their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

Confidence level is 99.9999% certain, within 4.9 standard deviations, but they have not said for certain that it’s Higgs, as Incandela said in the leaked video posted on Sciencebase yesterday, it’s Higgs-like but they now need to refine the data before publication at the end of July and then start probing properties to see whether it’s Higgs, Higgs-ish, or the Demi God Particle…

CERN.

We’ve observed a new particle #Higgs

We had the leaked CERN Higgs video yesterday, thanks to Kate Travis who unearthed it first, I do believe, well ahead of the rest of the media. It was playable for a while, then CERN cut it off. I hadn’t been quick enough to save the movie file from their server and couldn’t resurrect it from my cache. However, MSNBC had grabbed the file:

CERN claims that this is just one of several videos it made (really?). You know what I think, they swung themselves a curve, it’s 4th July, the Aussie conference starts tomorrow, they wanted to get ahead of the press and create an even bigger buzz. My hunch is that they haven’t got Higgs just yet, not the God Particle, but something like it, the Demi-god particle, perhaps…

They’re recalibrating right now and will have better data by the time they “publish” at the end of July 2012.