A food science scam

Where’s the data on this sign’s effect on spelling?

Brian Wansink has a problem. First, he’s been jiggering his data until he gets a statistically significant result, which to me means that none of his conclusions are to be trusted. Then, he was reworking these thinly significant results into multiple papers, taking watery gruel and sliming the literature with more noise. And now he’s accumulating more retractions as his shoddy research practices are exposed.

I’m just increasingly appalled at the crap that is earning him tens of millions of dollars of research funds. It’s cartoonishly superficial. Let’s put goofy names on the food in school lunchrooms!

The most recent retraction — a rare move typically seen as a black mark on a scientist’s reputation — happened last Thursday, when JAMA Pediatrics pulled a similar study, also from 2012, titled “Can branding improve school lunches?”

Both studies claimed that children are more likely to choose fruits and vegetables when they’re jazzed up, such as when carrots are called “X-Ray Vision Carrots” and when apples have Sesame Street stickers. The underlying theory is that fun, descriptive branding will not only make an eater more aware of the food, but will “also raise one’s taste expectations,” as the scientists explained in one of the papers.

You know, I believe this actually does work — I have no doubt that creative labeling can draw the attention of kids (and adults!). But would it make a significant difference in kids’ eating habits? Don’t you suspect that there would be a bit of a backlash? Kids aren’t stupid. They’re going to see right through this game fairly quickly, and a trivial relabeling is going to have only a transient effect. And they’re paying 30,000 schools up to $2000 each to try out these labeling strategies! Is it worth it? I don’t know. And you still can’t trust Wansink’s work.

People are finding inconsistencies in the papers, statistical errors, and outright statistical abuse. What can you say about a paper that decides p=0.06 meets the criterion for signifcance, and further, miscalculated the p value in the first place?

In a blog post, Brown expressed concern about how the data had been crunched, and confusion about how exactly the experiment had worked. He noted that a bar graph looked much different in an earlier version. And, he pointed out, the scientists had said their findings could help “preliterate” children — which seemed odd, since the children in the study were ages 8 to 11.

In yet more scathing blog posts, Anaya and data scientist James Heathers pointed out mistakes and inconsistencies in the Preventive Medicine study, “Attractive names sustain increased vegetable intake in schools,” which claimed that elementary school students ate more carrots when the vegetables were dubbed “X-ray Vision Carrots.”

Worse…when those mistakes were pointed out, Wansink discovers that all the original data for those papers is ‘missing’. How convenient.

Wansink runs something called the “Food and Brand” lab. You can guess from just the name that he’s encouraging corporate support, and I suspect that’s a big part of the problem — this lab isn’t about science, it’s about reinforcing economic values for the benefit of their corporate collaborators.

Well alrighty then

The latest from Mythicist Milwaukee: they will bring Amos Yee up on stage as a “special guest” (which is just weird…to give credibility to their con, they’re flying people in who won’t be speaking, they’ll just be there. Why has no one ever flown me to a con to just stand and look pretty? They reek of desperation.) Yee has some notoriety for being jailed in the autocratic state of Singapore for his criticisms of the state and religion. So yeah, sounds good.

Except…he has lately been banned from Twitter for something else, his endorsement of child pornography. His heated, angry, vocal support of child porn. Why, if you don’t agree with him on child porn, you’re a fascist.

Lately, it’s clear that Yee is aiming for nothing more than shock value. Last week, in a series of tweets, Yee defended the practise of child pornography. Sex with children, so Yee claims, is acceptable if a key condition is met: The child demonstrated consent. He also said that to deny the child sexual pleasure that he or she sought for amounts to fascism.
…

As anybody with even an IQ of minus-200 will know, a child’s consent to anything (let alone sex) is not the be-all and end-all for deciding if s/he should have the thing.

Ask any responsible parent. Children can “consent” to anything from eating two tons of ice cream to setting off firebombs in the kitchen to using their siblings as trampolines. Doesn’t at all mean we should let them.

Yee knows this, of course, but his love for attention won’t stop him from declaring that if I stop my child from hurling toys from the apartment balcony down to the road, I’m really no different from Saddam Hussein. I must be a bad fascist father.

Mythcon is this weekend. It’s hard to believe, but some people are actually going to attend the shitshow.

Wait, so social justice is not supposed to be part of the atheist agenda — which is only a denial of the existence of gods — but advocacy of child pornography is?

After first defending him, they have now disinvited Amos Yee.

https://twitter.com/MythicistMKE/status/913855132382715905/

Pure amateur hour.

They are also saying they did not deplatform him, because he was only invited as an attendee. I’m going to say again…what kind of conference is it that needs to invite specific people to attend, and then plugs their presence in their advertising? It’s fucking weird, man.

Half the experiment is done!

One common refrain among MRAs and such trash is that it’s the women’s fault: they’re using men, they’re money-grubbing gold-diggers, they tease and never put out. So let’s test that: in the absence of manipulative women, are men angels of probity and restraint? We can test this: use a proxy for a woman, one that doesn’t lie, has no ambitions, isn’t going to abuse men. It’s been done. A female sex robot at a tech fair was put on display, and the results were not nice.

Santos complained, ‘The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms. Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled.’

‘People can be bad. Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians.’

Strike one against men.

I did say that only half the experiment has been done, though. We need a complementary test in which a male sex doll is put into the hands of women convention attendees. The result of that experiment will tell us whether it’s just us men who suck, or whether it’s the whole human species that needs to be puked on. I have an open mind, it could go either way.

An academic disgrace

The adjunct run-around. We ought to be ashamed. The Guardian explains how bad the adjunct game has become: professors living in poverty, homelessness, and even turning to sex work to make ends meet. This is simply not right, and yet universities are openly exploiting the people who should be the most important workers in their institutions. Why do they allow it to continue? Money.

Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, don’t receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance.

This is why adjuncts have been called “the fast-food workers of the academic world”: among labor experts adjuncting is defined as “precarious employment”, a growing category that includes temping and sharing-economy gigs such as driving for Uber. An American Sociological Association taskforce focusing on precarious academic jobs, meanwhile, has suggested that “faculty employment is no longer a stable middle-class career”.

This behavior is blatant capitalistic criminality, and it has to end. I have a few suggestions.

The accreditation agencies are playing a role in allowing the exploitation to continue. They are supposed to be assessing the quality of the educational experience at a university; when half the faculty are part-time, paid on a shoestring, and are receiving no benefits for their work, that says that the teachers at that university are disrespected and are not provided the resources to do their work, and they should not be accredited. When a big name ivy league university is told their degrees will count for nothing unless they increase the percentage of full-time faculty, they will change.

Make it illegal to hire faculty for less than some high percentage of full time (with exceptions; some part-time medical leave, for instance). It is absurd that anyone has to take on 3 or 4 piddling little teaching appointments to make ends meet; that says right there that there is enough work for a full time person, but they’re artificially breaking it up to avoid paying benefits. Sometimes you do have to hire faculty purely for teaching, with no research option, and that’s OK — but do it with an integral number of teaching lines, instead of breaking it up into dribs and drabs that are not fair to the people you hire. When my wife was working as an adjunct, it meant driving all over eastern Pennsylvania to piece together enough work. She would have been thrilled with a job at one place, with an office and some acknowledgment of her existence, even if it involved just as much teaching.

My tenured and tenure track colleagues have a part to play, too. Are the contingent faculty in your department treated in the same way as everyone else? Are they asked to attend faculty meetings? Do they have a say in the curriculum and course offerings? Or are they told to come in, teach their one course, and then get out of the way and disappear? Are you telling your administration to create teaching lines, or are you simply lobbying for individual courses to be staffed? Are there part-timers in your department that you are used to seeing show up briefly and disappear? Do you talk to them?

Parents of prospective students: do you ask about how classes are staffed? How likely is it your first-year student is going to meet or be taught by tenured faculty? If their classes are all taught by a temporary faculty who is also teaching part time at a local community college, you might as well start your kid in that community college. They’re getting the same education, from the same person.

We treat too many people in this manner of prolonged cruelty. It really needs to stop.

Callie Wright vs Mythcon

Callie Wright interviews the guys who are putting on Mythcon. They’re terrible. Here’s the reason they justify inviting Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad to be a speaker there: he’s an entertainer. Atheist conferences need to bring in new, exciting speakers.

I’m just wondering what is entertaining about Carl Benjamin? They compare him to George Carlin and Sarah Silverman.

They also point out that attendance at atheist conferences is down, and we need to spark new interest, so they’re looking for novel voices in the entertainment industry. If they’re dredging the bottom of the barrel to find people, I don’t think that’s going to help stimulate interest.

Jesus. Benjamin is an “entertainer” now. Gosh. Let’s bring in “entertaining” Nazis to conferences, too.

Early warning signs of bad behavior: take note and act

You may have heard that the founder of AintItCoolNews, Harry Knowles, is being accused of sexual harassment. His little entertainment empire is collapsing fast in the wake of some serious problems.

Melissa Kaercher was acquainted with him and has been attending his events for years, and she has written up an honest analysis of Knowles’ problems. It’s clear how the pattern evolved. Start with a few crude jokes — we’ve all been there. Graduate to gross-out humor. Notice that sexual abuse gets the strongest response. From there, you’re off to the races, and start thinking you can do whatever you want to people. It’s funny!

We have all been there, at least at the early stages. But most of us learn early that we can repel people easily with such behavior, and we tone it down and work to extinguish it. But if you’re famous and popular, if you have rewards, like Knowles’ special, private events, people are less likely to speak out in the early stages, and you’ll also find that other privileged, nasty people gravitate towards you — it’s asshole magnetism. And before you know it, you’re living in a little clique where the decent people try to look the other way, while the similarly bad people are egging you on, until you cross a line that no one can ignore anymore.

It’s tough to handle. People tend not to respond well to criticism. If you do catch them early, and tell someone that, for instance, you don’t appreciate their rape joke, you know what’ll happen: “It was just one little joke! I’m a good guy! Why are you so tight-assed?”, and it all comes back on you. And they don’t invite you to their super-cool party.

But it needs to be done. Don’t let your friends slide down that easy, slick path to abusiveness. Snip it off early.

Ghosts of Cuba

I’m glad some people are skeptical about the so-called “sonic attacks” on the American embassy in Cuba. It’s absurd.

It’s also easily tested. If bad guys are pumping energy into embassy rooms with some kind of mysterious device, that’s testable. We’ve got wackaloons running around claiming they can detect non-existent ghosts with simple electronic gadgets — real physicists could easily place real recording devices that are sensitive to a wide range of frequencies in these rooms and get concrete evidence of a real phenomenon, if it exists. Why haven’t they? You’d think the first thing they would do, on suspecting that they’re getting zapped by sonic rays, is call up the NSA or the signal corps, and they’d stick a few widgets around and detect any anomalous signals.

Have they? If they have, we’d know and have specific measurements to pin the fault on something. If they haven’t, it means they’ve got nothing but ghosts. And ghosts don’t exist.

Hypocrisy in Silicon Valley, again

I’m not one of the people who follows Donald Trump on Twitter — I get more than enough second hand Trump without mainlining him. I’m kind of appalled that he’s still allowed on Twitter, frankly, since he’s abusive and bullying and vile, but of course, that’s never been a reason to close a Twitter account. And now we have it straight from Twitter itself that they’re never going to ban him.

The actual statement is about Trump’s tweets being “newsworthy,” with Twitter claiming that letting him stay on the platform helps keep people “informed about what’s happening in the world.” This justification helps absolve Twitter of any responsibility for what Trump does, and it saves the company from having to take any specific stand against anything he might do or say. Also, the thread says that Twitter holds all accounts “to the same rules,” which is funny because it’s definitely not true.

That’s such a pile of bullshit. You could say exactly the same thing about Andrew Anglin, the racist who runs the Daily Stormer. Rising racism is “newsworthy”, and we should be “informed about what’s happening”. Your more mundane stalker/harasser, likewise…if he’s significant enough that you’re complaining, then he’s “newsworthy”, and hey, don’t you want to keep informed about what he’s doing?

Twitter has banned some people, at least temporarily. They slapped down Anglin, for instance. But it’s only when their behavior becomes embarrassing to the company. Apparently, two petty maniacal tyrants taunting each other into nuclear war, or the white nationalist leader of a country fomenting racial hatred in the populace, are not at all embarrassing. That’s good business. It won’t be their fault if a few million people get killed because they enabled a tantrum.

Here’s a reason to ban him anyway, though. You’ve heard of all the football fans burning their team jerseys and season tickets to protest football players who don’t exhibit sufficient worshipfulness to a flag? Imagine if Twitter banned Trump: millions of outraged Trumpkins would delete their accounts in protest; all those people with frog avatars and swastikas would vanish. It would become almost paradisial. The majority of users would be overjoyed, and be gushing over the improved quality of the communication. It would be the one simplest, easiest thing they could do to diminish their asshole problem. So it won’t happen.