Don’t waste your time or time will waste you ♪♫ …

All organized bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself.

– John Stuart Mill (1872). A System of Logic (Bk III, Ch. 6, Sec. 1, 8th edn), Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer

Worth living: Open Access Week at University of Michigan.

Dear Faculty and Grad Students,

In honor of international Open Access Week (Oct. 24-30), I’m writing to encourage you to think about access and copyright when you submit your work to journals for publication.

Open Access (OA) literature is peer-reviewed, scholarly work that is available online for free, immediate, and permanent access. Anyone who has access to the Internet may read, download, store, print, use, and data-mine the digital content of Open Access works. (UM Copyright Office website) This allows knowledge to be more available to users around the world who may not have access to expensive journal subscriptions. Of course, authors still retain copyright to any works they create, unless they explicitly sign away those rights.

Here are some ways you can support the principles of Open Access:
Read the rest of this entry »

Luft kühl, Sonne warm, Bäume bunt, Menschen schön.
Alles gut.

“Man sollte nur noch schöne Dinge tun.” (22.05.2010)

Danke.

Definitely one of the best teas I’ve ever tasted – thank you Frances (and Rachel).

For 4 glasses:

• 1/2 to 1/1 ginger root
• Cardamom (uh, a reasonable amount)
• Black peppercorn (1/2 to 1/1 handful)
• Cinnamon stick (2)
• Cloves (15?)
• Cook for 20 minutes until about 50% of the water is vaporized
• Add honey afterwards (plenty)

I’m quite excited, so please forgive me if this sounds a bit excited

So, I met a guy who is running a company. They are making smartphones apps. Smartphones apps that increase your physical and mental health significantly.

They’re pretty new. They have several 100.000 people using their apps. They made a couple of apps, which are mainly for meditation (breathing), and consuming healthy food. The guy I met is running this thing, and he’s a medical doctor. He has very good knowledge about the human stress response system (I take a course about stress response at the moment, and read 3-5 very recent papers per week, some of them in press, for a couple of weeks now – he knew most of them), psychiatric disorders (and the massive problems to treat them properly), and some knowledge of mindfulness and meditation.

Their idea is to provide people with very simple meditation techniques, on smartphones. They are a business, and care about money, market share. But they also have the idea that the basic things should be for free (“we didn’t invent meditation, right? So we’re not gonna charge people for it”), so the normal version of their apps doesn’t cost you anything. The advanced levels (which are not required really, you can be totally fine with the normal thing) cost something.

How does meditation help? I personally don’t know much about meditation, but I know people who’re into that research (hard sciency stuff, neuroimaging with buddhist monks etc.), and it does work. Slowing down breathing, focussing on your body. Not only in everyday life, getting up your concentration, enabling you to sleep a bit less (if you want to), sleep deeper and more relaxed. It also helps in anxiety disorders, against panic attacks. In phobias. I am not able to give the big picture here (but there are certainly some review papers out there), but simple breathing techniques work, and some techniques do work above placebo level. Another good thing: no side-effects. And I do know some behavioral-therapy studies (e.g. for phobias) were internet based stuff works pretty well.

They’re not trying to replace psychotherapists. There are also people with brain diseases they cannot help. But I guess for 9 out of 10 people with problems, this will significantly increase their quality of life. it might not be sufficient, but it will definitely be a good support (and for some to many, it might be enough).

And in my opinion mental disorders are heavily overdiagnosed (this is what my PhD is all about, basically). So getting people to use meditation apps is pretty neat, but when you take into account that this might actually stop them from getting medicated when they don’t need medication, this is even cooler.

The first thing I thought was: data! The apps are connected to a database, real time. They know how many people are using the apps; in which frequency; what apps are people’s favourites. They can manipulate apps, get them out there, and after a couple of hours they’ll know which version will be received the best. They try to avoid text, using colours, and use the apps trans-culturally. Apps tell you what to do. He told me that they removed choice as much as possible: the more choice, the lower the compliance rates. Talking about compliance rates: 30% (after one year) for free apps, 60% for payed apps. You might not know this, but even 30% compliance rate is incredibly high, compared to a one year treatment of any sort.

I’m going to meet the guy tomorrow again. Maybe I can take a glimpse at the database …

Now the vision: the company wants to spend 20% of the money they make into projects the users like. There’s a network of users, and they’ll get to make suggestions, and good ideas will rise, and people will vote for them. And the company will support these ideas.

The interesting thing about this: who are the people making these decisions? People who are doing mindfulness training. People who have apps for healthy food. People who do meditation every other day.

Keep thinking in this direction. Where does this lead us?

Also, this is a true story. And it does give some hope, right?

Worth living today: “heretofore”

“Because the context of rugby is similar to that of sports used in many studies of male competition, it provides a, heretofore, unique opportunity to compare the role of hormones in women’s and men’s competition.”

Introduction
Berlin finished voting. Let’s look at some of the interesting facts which have not been excessively talked about in the media. All the data displayed here, even if I talk about them without giving precise numbers, are based upon demographic data that have been published within the last two days, and not on my personal speculation. I have my opinion about politics, but will try to keep it to a minimum and focus on facts.

Sources
Sources are mostly Wahlen-Berlin.de, sueddeutsche.de, spiegel.de and tagesschau.de. A good summary of numbers can be found in this pdf.

Overview

• SPD: 28.3% (-2.5)
• CDU: 23.4% (+2.1)
• GREEN: 17.6% (+4.5)
• LEFT: 11.7% (-1.7)
• PIRATES: 8.9% (+8.9)
• FDP: 1.8% (-5.8)
• OTHERS: 8.3% (-5.4) (among them NDP with 2.1%)
• Voter participation: 60.2% (+2.2)

Interesting details

• SPD: Wowereit (the current mayor) declared himself the winner of the elections. He is not (I will not discuss this in detail here), but he will be able to govern the city for another four years, either with CDU, or with the GREEN party. One third of the SPD voters said they voted because of Wowereit. The SPD lost more than 10% of their voters among young people (18-25).
• CDU: they won votes. Most of them from FDP voters (n=30.000). Many people voted them because of their “economical expertise”, only few people (especially compared to the SPD) because of their “frontman”. CDU voters are older and more religious than other voters, and live in Berlin for quite some time. Obviously, few immigrants vote for the CDU. The correlation-coefficient between young voters (18-30) and the CDU is -0.64. (East) and -0.83 (West). The coefficient for people over 60 is 0.26 (East) and 0.83 (West).
• GREEN: they won less votes than they expected to. Compared to the other recent elections in Germany, they didn’t do remarkably well – then again, +4.5% is nothing to be ashamed of. Main topics for the voters: energy, education, environment, social justice. The correlation-coefficient between middle-aged voters (30-60) and the GREEN party is 0.72 (East) and 0.75 (West), and turns highly negative for voters above 60.
• LEFT: they do not have the majority of votes together with the SPD anymore – they will not be part of the next government. They lost the majority of voters among young people (18-25), and were mostly elected by unemployed people or workers. The correlation-coefficient between old voters (60+) and the LEFT party is 0.83 (East) and -0.85 (West) (wow, that’s interesting). Very few voters are religious. There are many more interesting numbers actually, big differences in voter profile between East and West. Check out the summary-link listed at the top of the post.
• PIRATES: surprise surprise, from zero to nearly 9%. I will comment on that in detail below.
• FDP: project 2% failed. Too bad … not. 30.000 of their 2006 voters voted CDU, 8.000 voted SPD, 16.000 didn’t vote at all. The FDP didn’t get more than 5% in any demographic group whatsoever (job, age, gender). This is the 5th out of 7 elections this year in which they failed to re-enter parliament.
• OTHERS: I didn’t realize that 2006, OTHER parties together had 13.7%. That is, for German standards, remarkably high. Usually the numbers are between 2 and 5%.

Differences between East and West Berlin
The biggest differences are

• LEFT: East 22.6% (-5.5), West 4.3%
• GREEN: East 13.5%, West 20.4%
• CDU: East 14.2%, West 29.5%
• SPD had 28.x in both East and West

Overview of districts:

The German election system is a bit complicated, to summarize: many small districts were won by the GREEN party, but on a large scale, there are 12 districts in Berlin. 11 will be governed by a CDU or SPD, and 1 by a GREEN mayor (Friedrichshain/Kreuzberg).

Pirates
Apart from the fact that the Pirate Party went up to 8.9% from zero, let’s talk about some details:

• Lowest result in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf (considered to be rich and conversative) with 6.9%, highest result in Friedrichhain/Kreuzberg (considered to be hip, cool, square and groovy) with 14.7%. And in case you didn’t get that, let me state this clearly: the Pirates will be in all the district governments, since they reached 5% in every single district. I would have never expected that.
• 8.9% equals 130.000 people.
• The Pirates were able to steal away voters from all parties. Most of the voters came from the GREEN party, (17.000), the SPD (14.000), and the LEFT party (13.000). The majority of their voters, however, are people who voted OTHER parties (22.000) before, or didn’t vote at all (23.000). Especially the last point is something that makes this election special: getting people to vote who didn’t vote before (most probably because they did not feel represented by any party) is a pretty good thing, I guess. This is open to discussion, obviously, and highly speculative. But it is one of the most interesting facts about this election.
• About 50% of the Pirate voters decided within the last week before the elections.
• The Pirates themselves were overwhelmed by their success, and it looks like they do not have enough “politicians” (they didn’t have a single person who was on a salary before the elections) to fill in all the positions that they hold now.
• The correlation-coefficients between both young (18-30) and middle-aged (30-60) voters and the Pirate party are both above 0.50, and only negative for people above 60. Most people expected the Pirate party only to raise votes among very young people.