Probiotics is going Yuckily mainstream

I've been seeing 'Probiotics' mentioned various places for years. But this result is going to thrust it into the mainstream.

This way of looking at disease posits that there are not only microbial "germs" but a human biome that is largely protective of human health even when these normally pathological "germs" are present.

Broad-spectrum antibiotics kill not only the germ targeted but other helpful bacteria that are normally on "our side," the probiotics advocates claim.

It looks like they're right!

Clostoridium Difficle is a bacterium that causes severe intestinal disease ... but mostly among people who have been using antibiotics, often in hospitals.

A study just published trying the ancient remedy of fecal transplant: that's transferring fecal matter from a healthy person to one suffering from C. Difficle. The study group showed this technique to be so effective (15 of 16 patients helped) versus the control groups using standard antibiotic therapy (3 of 14 and 4 of 14) that the study was halted. It was thought to be unethical to continue when the study group was getting such profoundly better results.

The transplant apparently restores a full suite of helpful bacteria to the suffering patient, restoring C. Difficile to its rightful place in the background, causing no further harm.

Have some yogurt!

References:

The New York Times article
"Germs are Us" from the New Yorker
The Wild Life of Our Bodies

LED flashlights: Lessons learn from an early adopter

I've been buying LED flashlights for a couple of years now. I made a mistake or two along the way and thought you might be able to benefit by my experience.

First: it doesn't make any difference how many lumens you have if you can't afford the batteries to generate them. I bought my lovely wife a Frontgate "500 lumen" model that came with free imprinting of one's name ("Kate!") Maybe it really was putting out 500 lumens (one of our neighbors said that they thought it was a motorcycle coming down the street), but the original 4 CR123A photo lithium lasted probably 10 days or two weeks, used probably 30-40 minutes per day.

The price to replace them: $6.49 each, retail, and it takes 4 to run the thing. You can get them for $1 each or so, online, but, I thought, why not use rechargeable ones?

I tried this, but the only 'RCR123A' batteries I could find are made by Tenergy, and they have some unfortunate characteristics for use in flashlights. They go out without warning. I found this out being 40 minutes away from home on a walk one night, and the flashlight just went dark with 2 seconds warning.

It turns out that 131 lumens is plenty. I ordered a Maglite rated at this that uses 3 D cells and it's fine for our dark nights. The instructions say "don't use rechargeable batteries" and to that I say "bah!"

I tried our eneloops, which are AA batteries that come with a D-sized shell. This didn't work to start with, but I looked at the cap end of the flashlight that connects to the bottom of the battery. It was too wide for the little AA eneloop, so I stuck in a square of aluminum foil and voila! These batteries work fine in this flashlight, and get dim slowly rather than cutting off quickly and leaving you in the dark.

Evidence cited in support of open offices ... but is it true?

I just today read a University of Michigan Study from 2000 that concludes that "radical collocation" type open offices show significant productivity benefits over more private workspaces.

Maybe, but I have some questions about this study that may require another look at the results:

1. There was no control group. There were six groups studied, but none of the study groups were using "closed" offices. The study groups' results were scored against an existing corporate baseline of productivity.
2. The productivity gain, while impressive, is within range of the 10 to 1 difference that's been measured in the literature repeatedly. This means that the 4x improvement could easily have been due to the particular programmers chosen rather than the office environment's effects as cited.
3. Finally, there's the Hawthorne effect! All groups knew they were being studied, which has been shown repeatedly to increase productivity no matter what details of changes in the environment are made!

Does anyone know of a controlled study of both kinds of offices compared against each other with no change other than the office space styles between groups? Or of a similar study of 'closed' offices against baseline data collected from 'open' offices?

Maybe 'radical collaboration' does work better, but the Michigan study does not prove the point to my satisfaction. 

You thought your interview schedule was a challenge?

A couple of coworkers have been doing enough interviews of prospective candidates to be getting a bit burned out on the process. Here's one that might put their challenges in perspective:

I, uh, LOLed at this one. This is, of course, Pearls Before Swine. It's even available in daily newspapers for us Old People. :-)

Why do we allow a storm to bring the market down?

Since the rise of electronic trading, the stock and related markets seem to me to be nearly identical to other network services. Amazon.com and Google do not allow a single weather event or earthquake or whatever to disrupt normal operations.

The standard way of doing this is to set up distributed data centers in geographically stable but widely separated places. Why can't we have this for our markets as well?

 I speculate that it may be the illusion that the fading market makers have that their personal involvement is required for the functioning of the markets. One official was quoted "we could have opened the electronic trading markets but didn't want to endanger our employees who have to be present to run it." Clearly if you have one data center in New Jersey, one in Chicago, one in Seattle and one in Hawaii this won't happen.

Yes, you will lose the femtosecond response you're getting from being right next to the New York data center, but so will everyone else. Until power is restored, anyway. (I enjoyed Scott Patterson's book Dark Pools on the rise of electronic trading, which got me thinking about this.)

Comments please!

Tamiflu apparently doesn't work after all ...

Here's a disturbing video on selection bias in the publication of medical results. The economic incentive to publish only positive results has clearly overwhelmed the regulatory and public outrage response up to this point, but clearly we're better off as a society if we cease to fool ourselves about drugs or anything else. Comments?

Favorite Recent Fiction: Charles Stross

I promised a while ago now to add recommended fiction in the wake of the nonfiction list I posted. I couldn't bring myself to mash all my favorites together so I am going to take them author by author.

First up is Charles Stross, who's produced three of my favorite recent titles:

Singularity Sky: This one is a space opera with an unusual blend: a clashing of cultures (libertarian from Earth vs. neo-Soviet style New Republic), a clash of nature vs humans, nature having produced the Eschaton, which has distributed humans across the cosmos and left an obelisk on each world warning humans not to mess with the timeline ... and of course a love story. This one just floored me, even my second time through it. But some people I've recommended it to put it down, probably too soon. If you have trouble with the early sections please do hang with it until Rachel appears and you'll be rewarded.

Iron Sunrise is the sequel to Singularity Sky and enjoyable, but didn't grab me as intensely as the others I mention here.

Halting State: since I'm an (often) contract computer programmer, the prologue captured me. It's a fake email to 'Nigel McDonald' about a job offer for him and purports to be from an AI that knows "you'll never be promoted because your slimy boss is boffing that cute colleague of yours" etc., etc.

After that it tells the story of a very strange crime that occurs inside a computer game. Somebody at the game company calls the local (Edinburgh) cops and Sue, the local 'heterosexually challenged' sergeant responds. Elaine is a fraud investigator for the insurance company, Jack a ... contract computer programmer hired by Elaine's company for technical assistance in getting to the bottom of things.

The story is told in second person from the point of these three characters, and I found it just riveting! It's a mystery/thriller with extra plot elements (a game called Spooks that turns out to be not really just a game, backstories for all three characters that resonate ..) ... I "couldn't put it down" (though I experienced it as an audiobook, described elsewhere in this blog ...)

Rule 34: This is the sequel to Halting State, bringing back Sue and her boss Liz and some other minor characters from that book. Also added is Anwar, a petty criminal and schemer whose schemes go consistently awry, and the Toymaker, a psychopathic employee of a global shadowy corporation who has discovered ... that psychopaths make good operatives. This one is darker, more violent, sick in places ... and I just loved it! Not for the squeamish, though.

I have read one other of Stross's books, Accelerando, which tells me that I should stick with the audiobook format for fiction. I first read this book, since there was no audiobook yet ... and it didn't much grab me. In fact I didn't really remember much of it after a year. But recently the audiobook was released and I tried it and wow! It's still not quite as compelling for me as the three favorites liste above, but I just skim so much in reading and get to / have to sit and pay attention to the audiobook that I got so much more out of in this format!

Once again, audible.com is the place for audiobooks!

Next up: Lois McMaster Bujold (and Miles Vorkosigan!)