Nice work?

Some people make a lot of money signing up to be guinea pigs for science. Some of them get a really good clinical trial, like the author of an article for Wired magazine who went on the Paleolithic diet for a study. For three weeks, he got free food (mostly pork and pineapple), he was paid $200, he lost 16 pounds and his cholesterol went down 70 points.

Then there were guinea pigs like these:

In March 2006, eight male volunteers checked into London's Northwick Park Hospital for a weeklong study of TGN1412, an experimental treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and leukemia to be manufactured by Boehringer-Ingelheim. Within minutes of receiving the first dose, six of them began to writhe in pain, vomit, and lose consciousness, according to news reports. Nurses rushed them to the hospital's trauma unit, where doctors treated them for multiple organ failure. The test subjects lived, but all suffered permanent damage to their immune systems and internal organs. One lost fingers and toes. Another developed signs of cancer possibly triggered by the drug.

Read the fascinating article here.

I Know, Rob...Portion Control

Late last year, a little book called “Mindless Eating” started appearing in bookstores. It was written by Brian Wansink, a Cornell professor who has spent his career doing brilliantly mischievous experiments about the psychology of eating.

In one of my favorites, Mr. Wansink gave away five-day-old popcorn — “stale enough to squeak when it was eaten,” he wrote — to moviegoers one day at a theater in the Chicago suburbs. The crux of the experiment lay in the size of the buckets that held the popcorn. Some people got merely big buckets, while others received truly enormous ones. Both sizes held more popcorn than a typical person could finish.

Yet when the Wansink research team weighed the buckets after the movie, there was a huge difference in the amounts the two groups ate. Those with the bigger buckets inhaled 53 percent more on average, suggesting that a lot of stale popcorn is somehow more appealing than a little stale popcorn.

Over the years, Mr. Wansink has done similar experiments with everything from different-size dinner plates to bottomless bowls of tomato soup that are secretly connected to a tube underneath a restaurant table. His overarching conclusion is that our decisions about eating often have little to do with how hungry we are. Instead, we rely on cues like the size of a popcorn bucket — or the way we organize our refrigerator — to tell us how much to eat. These cues can add 200 calories a day to our diet, but the only way we’ll notice we are overeating is that our pants will eventually get too tight.

Over the last couple of decades, a new field of economics, behavioral economics, has emerged to explain why people so often act in ways that are contrary to their own interests. They overeat, smoke, forget to take their medicine and don’t save enough for retirement, saying all the while that they wish they could change. Figuring out how to turn these wishes into action could put a dent in some big social problems.

This study, though, is related to more than just eating. It's related to the commonsense idea that the context in which a choice is presented might be the most important factor used to make decisions. We see this in manufacturing, too. I've heard stories of appliance makers who create two models: one really expensive one that they don't expect to sell many of, and one less expensive model that looks like a bargain in comparison. Check it out the next time you're shopping. It's pretty bizarre.

Though lessons learned from behavioral economics can be used to manipulate us to go against our own better judgment, they can also be used to trick us into doing ourselves a favor.

Last year, President Bush signed a new pension law that was based in part on this idea. It gave companies an incentive to sign up workers automatically for 401(k) plans. The workers can still opt out; in fact, they have the same range of choices they have always had. But if they do nothing, a small part of their salary is set aside for retirement.

The pension bill sprang directly from academic research showing that automatic plans vastly increased the amount of money that people saved. “It’s the success of behavioral economics, by far,” Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who helped found the field, recently told me.

Whether it’s 401(k)’s or food, the way choices are presented to people — what the economist Richard Thaler calls “choice architecture” — has a huge effect on the decisions they make.

Read the entire article here.

Simplify

Every year when I teach Walden, I begin asking myself some deep questions: Am I doing what I want to do with my life? Am I living deliberately or robotically? Am I spending my life pursuing "stuff," forgetting the truly valuable things in life?

Thoreau was a crank, a jerk, a hypocrite, but that does not change the fact that almost everything he said was true. When many think of Thoreau and Walden, they think he suggested we all drop out of society and go live in the woods as a hermit. The fact is, Thoreau was not a hermit--he walked to town almost every day. Rather, he decided to simplify his life, so he could determine truly what his life should be--that is, once you strip away all the unnecessaries of life, you will, by definition, be left with only what is necessary.

And, what is necessary for you must, of course, be different that what is necessary for me. Thus, Walden was simply a call for every one of us to simplify our life, determine what our goals are, and advance confidently in their direction.

Perhaps my favorite quotation from Walden is this:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Every year I learn something from reading Walden. Reading it also puts me on the lookout for modern day Thoreaus, like this guy.

Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer, who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and magazines -- many featuring his house on the cover. And from the old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting: an apple orchard in full bloom.

But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better, calling Shafer's home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron. Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square feet -- smaller than many people's bathrooms. But Jay Shafer's dream isn't of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then writ tiny.

Read the entire article (and see pictures of the house) here.

Paradox

A new survey of 1,502 adults released Sunday by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that despite the mass appeal of the Internet and cable news since a previous poll in 1989, Americans' knowledge of national affairs has slipped a little. For example, only 69% know that Dick Cheney is vice president, while 74% could identify Dan Quayle in that post in 1989.

Other details are equally eye-opening. Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot -- with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.
...
Democrats and Republicans were about equally represented in the most knowledgeable group but there were more Democrats in the least aware group.

Read the entire article here.