New guidelines for Alzheimer’s diagnoses could double cases reported

HealthDay News, via MSN, reports:

The first new guidelines in 27 years for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease could double the number of Americans defined as having the brain-robbing illness.

The guidelines, issued Tuesday by the Alzheimer’s Association and the U.S. National Institute of Aging, differ in two important ways from the last recommendations, which have been in use since 1984.

First, Alzheimer’s is now being recognized as a continuum of stages: Alzheimer’s itself with clear symptoms; mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with mild symptoms; and also the “preclinical” stage, when there are no symptoms but when recognizable brain changes may already be occurring.

Second, the new guidelines incorporate the use of so-called “biomarkers” — such as the levels of certain proteins in blood or spinal fluid — to diagnose the disease and assess its progress, but almost exclusively for research purposes only.

Allen Institute completes map of human brain

Wired.com reports that the Paul Allen Institute for Brain Science has completed a multi-year project to map the human brain – and make that map (actually a kind of virtual atlas) publicly available.

When asked why the Allen Institute undertook such an endeavor, CEO Allan Jones told Wired:

The Allen Institute operates on a different model than most research institutes, with a focus on creating catalytic resources for those other researchers around the world.  Our mouse brain atlas, which was completed in 2006, has really proved to be an extraordinary resource for scientists and is used by approximately 10,000 unique users from around the globe every month. It represents for researchers a reference for new discovery, hypothesis generation and confirmation of their own data, and often saves them from having to do an experiment themselves in the lab, which it turn saves time and money.

Classic article: Garey & Arendell on “mother blame”

In 1999, sociologists Anita Garey (now at U. of Connecticut) and Teresa Arendell (now at Colby College) wrote a white paper for U. of California at Berkeley’s Center for Working Families entitled “Children, work, and family: Some thoughts on ‘mother blame’.” This paper subsequently became the basis for a chapter in a volume entitled Working families: The transformation of the American home.

In ‘Mother blame,’ Garey and Arendell review the literature on motherhood and trace the tendency of society to blame mothers for various conditions, illnesses, and behavior patterns that contemporary science suggests are the result of other factors (such as genetics), not the ‘fault’ of mothers. Examples include blaming mothers for their children’s autism, schizophrenia, substance abuse, and sexual behavior.

Bibliographic information: Garey, A. I., & Arendell, T. (2001). Children, work, and family: Some thoughts on ‘mother blame’ In R. Hertz and N. Marshall, eds., Working families: The transformation of the American home.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Read the 1999 white paper version of “Mother blame” here (PDF).

Hunch.com survey reveals “what your email domain says about you”

Hunch.com, a self-described ‘Internet personalization service,’ recently blogged about a survey they conducted that correlated respondents’ email domains (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) with various characteristics and behaviors. The findings were interesting, but for me, the more powerful finding was the phrasing of their survey items.

I know from personal experience that getting an accurate understanding of individuals’ technology use via survey can be quite challenging. Hunch.com’s approach needs validation but even as a pilot study it offers some interesting ideas about how to ask people about their attitudes and behaviors vis-a-vis technology.

Hunch.com has provided a number of very well-done visualizations of their findings – see them on their blog post – but I will highlight a few of the more salient data reported by survey respondents:

• Almost three-quarters of Gmail users were under age 34, while about half of AOL users were older than age 35.
• 14% of Gmail users first began to use email after the year 2000, while 22% of Hotmail users did not begin to use email until after 2000.
• Hotmail users are more likely to be women aged 18 to 34 while Gmail users are more likely to be men aged 18 to 34.

Machine analysis of textual materials leading to a decreased need for some professionals

The New York Times reports:

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost [relative to human analysis]…

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents…

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions.

A (geeky) tour of SRI International

SRI International, based in Menlo Park, Califorinia, is a non-profit contract research institute founded in 1946 by Stanford University and spun off to become an independent entity in 1970. SRI has done pioneering work in various fields, including artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.

In this article for TechCrunch.com, Robert Scoble shares video footage of a recent visit he made to SRI, where he had an opportunity to see SRI researchers’ work on ‘augmented reality,’ including new haptic feedback interfaces and speech translation systems. It’s a fascinating look at some cutting-edge research of interest to cognitive scientists.

Machine-graded essay technology brings both promise and controversy

Note: This is cross-posted with my Education Blog

USA Today reports:

At the Fourth International Conference on Writing Research, the Educational Testing Service presented evidence that a pilot test of automated grading of freshman writing placement tests at the New Jersey Institute of Technology showed that computer programs can be trusted with the job…

But a writing scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented research questioning the ETS findings, and arguing that the testing service’s formula for automated essay grading favors verbosity over originality. Further, the critique suggested that ETS was able to get good results only because it tested short answer essays with limited time for students…

Scientists find monkeys show self-doubt behavior similar to humans

The BBC reports:

Monkeys trained to play computer games have helped to show that it is not just humans that feel self-doubt and uncertainty, a study says.

US-based scientists found that macaques will “pass” rather than risk choosing the wrong answer in a brainteaser task.

Awareness of our own thinking was believed to be a uniquely human trait.

But the study, presented at the AAAS meeting in Washington DC, suggests that our more primitive primate relatives are capable of such self-awareness.

The New York Times on the “wonders and fears” of artificial intelligence

The NY Times reports:

In 1963 the mathematician-turned-computer scientist John McCarthy started the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The researchers believed that it would take only a decade to create a thinking machine.

Also that year the computer scientist Douglas Engelbart formed what would become the Augmentation Research Center to pursue a radically different goal — designing a computing system that would instead “bootstrap” the human intelligence of small groups of scientists and engineers.

For the past four decades that basic tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation — A.I. versus I.A. — has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies that are transforming the world.

Now, as the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, it has become increasingly possible to design computing systems that enhance the human experience, or now — in a growing number of cases — completely dispense with it.

Andres Gelman rebuts Bem’s ESP paper

Thanks to my friend and fellow Ph.D. candidate Lee Becker, I have an update on my earlier post regarding Daryl Bem’s ESP paper.

On his blog, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman writes:

All the statistical sophistication in the world won’t help you if you’re studying a null effect. This is not to say that the actual effect is zero–who am I to say?–just that the comments about the high-quality statistics in the article don’t say much to me…

As David Weakiem and I have discussed, classical statistical methods that work reasonably well when studying moderate or large effects (see the work of Fisher, Snedecor, Cochran, etc.) fall apart in the presence of small effects.

I think it’s naive when people implicitly assume that the study’s claims are correct, or the study’s statistical methods are weak. Generally, the smaller the effects you’re studying, the better the statistics you need. ESP is a field of small effects and so ESP researchers use high-quality statistics.

To put it another way: whatever methodological errors happen to be in the paper in question, probably occur in lots of researcher papers in “legitimate” psychology research. The difference is that when you’re studying a large, robust phenomenon, little statistical errors won’t be so damaging as in a study of a fragile, possibly zero effect.