This is the August 2021 issue of the SubCriticalAppraisal Newsletter (archives).
The purpose of this newsletter is to be a more meaningful and summarised version of the RSS feed, complete with all my writings, site updates, interesting links, and reviews each month.
Feel free to email me with any and all suggestions or feedback.
Writings
- Is The Lead-Crime Hypothesis Real?
- Why You Should Use A Password Manager
- Book Review: The End of History and the Last Man – Part I
- Subcriticalappraisal.com: added responsive navbar on mobile; added Support page – buy me a coffee!
Links
Medicine
Therapeutics:
- Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder, Davis et al. 2020: n=24 were randomized to begin treatment (magic mushrooms 1:20 mg/70 kg and 2:30 mg/70 kg) immediately or after an 8-week delay; 71% of participants at week 1 and 4 had a clinically significant response to the intervention (≥50% reduction in GRID-HAMD score), and 58-4% at week 1 and 4 were in remission (≤7 GRID-HAMD score)
- Engineering Brain Parasites for Intracellular Delivery of Therapeutic Proteins, Bracha et al. 2018
Diagnostics:
- A clinically applicable integrative molecular classification of meningiomas, Nassiri et al. 2021
- The Rapid Rise in Cutaneous Melanoma Diagnoses, Welch et al. 2021
- Improving AI Software for Healthcare Diagnostics, Larson et al. 2021
- Feasibility and application of polygenic score analysis to the morphology of human induced pluripotent stem cells, Coleman 2020
Meta-medicine:
- COMPare: a prospective cohort study correcting and monitoring 58 misreported trials in real time, Goldacre et al. 2019: abysmal outcome reporting and extensive breaches of ethics and publishing guidelines in New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine
- Evaluating the validity of the selection measures used for the UK’s foundation medical training programme: a national cohort study, Smith et al. 2018: weighting ratio between the EPM decile and the SJT score should be 2:1, and educational achievement scores are not useful
-
UK Specialty Training Competition Ratios:
CT1/ST1 Level:
ST3 Level:
- Choosing Wisely: Things We Do For No Reason e.g. Things We Do for No Reason: Prescribing Docusate for Constipation in Hospitalized Adults, Fakheri et al. 2019
Epidemiology:
- Stop that! It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness, Müller-Vahl, et al. 2021: the first outbreak of mass social-media-induced illness – the second-most successful German YouTuber triggered mass functional “Tourette-like” symptoms
- The relationship between alcohol use and dementia: A combined analysis of prospective, individual-participant data from 15 international studies, Newton et al. 2021: in 151,574 person-years of follow-up, all-cause dementia risk was higher for current abstainers (HR: 1.29; 95% CI: 1.13, 1.48) and lower for moderate drinkers (HR: 0.79; 95% CI: 0.64, 0.98)
COVID
- Effect of Early Treatment With Fluvoxamine on Risk of Emergency Care and Hospitalization Among Patients With COVID-19: The TOGETHER Randomized Platform Clinical Trial, Reis et al. 2021: among the SSRI (n=739) vs placebo (n=733) arms, no. of patients in an emergency room for >6 hours or admitted to hospital due to COVID-19 was 77 vs 108; Relative Risk 0.71
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Airborne transmission of respiratory viruses, Wang et al. 2021: Surprisingly understudied, aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 has a half-life of ~1-3 hours
Estimated from Stokes’ law for spherical particles
- Dismantling myths on the airborne transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), Tang et al. 2021
- Revenge of the Experts: Will Covid-19 Renew or Diminish Public Trust in Science?, Eichengreen et al 2020: epidemics don’t make people aged 18-25 appreciate scientific research more, but rather trust scientists less
- Prediction models for diagnosis and prognosis of covid-19: systematic review and critical appraisal, Wynats et al. 2020
- Collider bias undermines our understanding of COVID-19 disease risk and severity, Griffith et al. 2020, and commentary
- Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19, Brauner et al. 2021
- Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy
- How a torrent of COVID science changed research publishing
Biology
Molecular Biology:
- Atomic-resolution protein structure determination by cryo-EM, Yip et al. 2020, and Single-particle cryo-EM at atomic resolution, Nakane et al. 2020
- High-throughput, low-cost and rapid DNA sequencing using surface-coating techniques, Qin et al. 2020
- Protein Imager
Genetics:
- Origins of modern human ancestry, Bergström et al. 2021
- Reconstruction of the human peopling of Europe: a genetic insight, Caramelli et al. 2021: our current best paleogenomics understanding of European genetic make-up through time
- DNA Evidence of a Croatian and Sephardic Jewish Settlement on the North Carolina Coast Dating from the Mid to Late 1500s, Hirschman et al. 2019: Jews were absorbed into the ancestral population of the Lumbee Native American tribe
- Improved Estimation of Phenotypic Correlations Using Summary Association Statistics, Li et al. 2021: Low minor allele frequencies (MAF) estimator with a low enough MAF cutoff is able to overcome the bias of the Z-cut estimator
Neuroscience:
- The cellular basis of distinct thirst modalities, Pool et al. 2020
- Connectomes across development reveal principles of brain maturation, Witvliet et al. 2021
Longevity:
- Hyperbaric oxygen therapy increases telomere length and decreases immunosenescence in isolated blood cells: a prospective trial, Hachmo et al. 2020
- In vivo base editing rescues Hutchinson–Gilford progeria syndrome in mice, Koblan et al. 2021
- Hyperactivation of sympathetic nerves drives depletion of melanocyte stem cells, Zhang et al. 2020
- When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak? The Asynchronous Rise and Fall of Different Cognitive Abilities Across the Life Span, Hartshorne et al. 2015
Miscellaneous:
-
Harnessing vision for computation Changizi 2021: your vision system can be harnessed as logic gates in a general purpose computer; to do it, you move your eyes from top to bottom through a series of optical illusions & depending on the inputs, you see a different tilt to an image ->
- Related: Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate, Gunji et al. 2012:
- Evolutionary Dynamics Do Not Motivate a Single-Mutant Theory of Human Language, de Boer et al. 2020: Chomsky is wrong
- Cellular extrusion bioprinting improves kidney organoid reproducibility and conformation, Lawlor et al. 2020
- Dual film-like organelles enable spatial separation of orthogonal eukaryotic translation, Reinkemeier et al. 2021
- Reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells, Gershman et al. 2021: maybe single cell learning is real after all
- AlphaFold 2 & Equivariance
- Natural Wonders by Edwin Tenney Brewster
Physics/Computer Science
- Constraint on the matter–antimatter symmetry-violating phase in neutrino oscillations, The T2K Collaboration 2020 Gvollinian
- Riemann zeros from Floquet engineering a trapped-ion qubit, He et al. 2021
- Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning, D’Amour et al. 2020
- The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life is Rare, Sbyder-Beattie et al. 2021
- New Horizons Observations of the Cosmic Optical Background, Lauer et al. 2020: space has twice as much light as existing catalogs of observed galaxies can account for
- Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse, Jyothi 2021
- Our Moon: Curated resources
Statistics/Meta-Science
- A manifesto for reproducible science, Munafò et al. 2017
- What are the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years? Gelman et al, 2020
- Table 2 Fallacy: Presenting and Interpreting Confounder and Modifier Coefficients, Westreich et al. 2020
- Causal and Associational Linking Language From Observational Research and Health Evaluation Literature in Practice: A systematic language evaluation, Haber et al. 2021: many researchers still fail to internalise correlation ≠ causation
- Replication value as a function of citation impact and sample size, Isager et al. 2021: Any strategy for replication study selection must be able to demonstrate usefulness
- The Significance Filter, the Winner’s Curse and the Need to Shrink, van Zwet et al. 2020
- Generation of Greatness: The Idea of a University in an Age of Science, Land 1957: the speech that lead to the development of MIT’s UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program)
- Research Culture: A survey-based analysis of the academic job market, Fernandes et al. 2020
- How a field fixes itself: the applied turn in economics
- Ronin Institute
- Math Students’ FAQ, How to Read a Math Book
Psychology
- Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes, Watts et al. 2018: You guessed it – the Marshmallow Test is at best overstated 3X, at worst statistically insignificant, and Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability, Kidd et al. 2013: maybe kids who don’t wait are rational when their bad parents can’t reliably keep their promises
- Mind-Body Practices and Self-Enhancement: Direct Replications of Gebauer et al.’s (2018) Experiments 1 and 2: Vaughan-Johnston et al. 2021: n=97 and n=300 replicates the finding that mind-body practices (e.g. yoga, meditation) make practitioners more self-centred
- The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization, Barrett 2016
- The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation, Henrich et al. 2021
- The association between objective and subjective financial literacy: Failure to observe the Dunning-Kruger effect, Gignac et al. 2021
- Misperceptions about Others, Bursztyn et al. 2021
Politics/Religion
- Reasonable Doubt: A New Look at Whether Prison Growth Cuts Crime, Roodman 2017: tougher sentences hardly deter crime; while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their criminality after release
- The Dynamics of Distortion: How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News, Melumad et al. 2021: people think they’re more smarter than their recipient, so original facts are increasingly supplanted by opinions, and negativity is used to grab attention
- Our Grandmothers’ Legacy: Challenges Faced by Female Ancestors Leave Traces in Modern Women’s Same-Sex Relationships, Reynolds et al. 2021
Technology
- Exploring the Spatial Relationships Between Real and Virtual Experiences: What Transfers and What Doesn’t, Clemenson et al. 2020
- VR latency mitigation strategies
- You Can’t Escape Hyperparameters and Latent Variables: Machine Learning as a Software Engineering Enterprise, Isbell 2020
- Big models: What has happened, where are we going, and who gets to build them, Jack Clark 2021
- Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index: Perhaps the heavy energy cost is an indicator that it works?
- Classifying Malware Images with Convolutional Neural Network Models, Bensaoud et al. 2021: 1) get malware binary 2) turn malware binary into png 3) train Inception-v3 on it 4) ??????? 5) >99.24% accuracy
Economics/Business/Finance
- The Private and External Costs of Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out, Jarvis et al 2019: At least 80% of the lost nuclear electricity production due to the phase-out was replaced by coal-fired production and net electricity imports, resulting in social cost of $12B per year of which 70% comes from the increased mortality risk associated with exposure to air pollution when burning fossil fuels
- We are all Behavioral, More or Less: A Taxonomy of Consumer Decision Making, Stango et al. 2021
- Nudgeability: Mapping Conditions of Susceptibility to Nudge Influence, de Ridder et al. 2021: “People cannot be nudged into something they do not want”.
- Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Kahneman et al. 1979
- The ergodicity problem in economics, Peters 2019
- The biotech living and the walking dead, Godfrey et al. 2020: 87% of university technology transfer offices (TTOs) do not cover even their own operating costs; almost 90% of life science university−licensed startups (ULSs) never operated as public companies and did not report revenues, expenses, direct labor costs or direct taxes paid; total amount raised in IPOs falls short of VC invested by $2.57 billion (per-firm shortfall of $42 million, an IPO is often merely another round of funding); meanwhile acquisitions provide investors with an average return of $76.6 million
- Daniel Gross’ Pioneer comprehensive startup FAQ: Codex
- The Misguided Beliefs of Financial Advisors, Linnainmaa et al. 2020: Advisors’ net returns of −3% per year are similar to their clients’ net returns; advisors do not strategically hold expensive portfolios only to convince clients to do the same; they continue to do so after they leave the industry.
- Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered? Griffin et al. 2018
- Plain Text Accounting, a guide to Ledger and friends
- Why Tunnels in The US Cost Much More Than Anywhere Else in The World
- Solow–Swan model
Philosophy/EA
- Duhem–Quine thesis: it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test requires one or more auxiliary assumptions (altogether a bundle of hypotheses)
- On the Measure of Intelligence, Chollet et al. 2019
- Epistemic Trespassing, Ballantyne 2021: subscribe for future epistemic amphibian pincer attacks
Miscellaneous
- Orthopaedic surgeons: as strong as an ox and almost twice as clever? Multicentre prospective comparative study, Subramanian et al. 2011
- Falsehoods programmers believe in
- Marshall’s Site: Master Japanese From Scratch For Free
- IBM Quantum
- List of common misconceptions
- List of megaprojects
- Esther Vergeer: the most dominant player of all time? Won 48 Grand Slam tournaments, 23 year-end championships and 7 Paralympics titles; a winning streak of 120 tournaments, 470 matches, over 10 years
- Arithmetic Game