henry copeland @hc

Creating https://t.co/yaIkIOcF20, an online toolkit the average person can use for personal (n-of-1) experiments. Way back when: Y84, bond trader, journalist.

Recent quotes:

Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

hen the first car dealership opened in 1898, in Detroit, it was seen as a convenience for cash-strapped manufacturers, who were overwhelmed just by producing the cars. They needed a means to reach customers without having to build their own sales networks. A class of middlemen sprang up. Car dealers quickly became pioneers of influence, concocting new and astonishing breakthroughs in the very American alchemy of converting riches to political sway. As the automobile industry flourished, so did the dealership model—but the American entrance into World War I threatened to interrupt that ascent. So, in 1917, a group of 30 Chicago dealers went before Congress to argue that cars shouldn’t be classified as luxuries by the tax code. The luxury distinction would have allowed car-manufacturing facilities to be converted to use for wartime production. That would have been fine for manufacturers, which would have continued making money manufacturing, but disastrous for car dealers, who couldn’t just sell tanks.
#USAUSA #cars - slate.com

Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.
#USAUSA #wealth - slate.com

Summer Travel in 2023 Means High Costs and Big Crowds - Bloomberg

United Airlines Holdings Inc. and JetBlue Airways Corp. are among carriers trimming about 10% of flying at busy airports in greater New York City and Washington at the request of federal regulators because of a shortage of air-traffic controllers.
#inflation #shortage - bloomberg.com

How AI Knows Things No One Told It - Scientific American

“Maybe we’re seeing such a huge jump because we have reached a diversity of data, which is large enough that the only underlying principle to all of it is that intelligent beings produced them,” he says. “And so the only way to explain all of this data is [for the model] to become intelligent.”
#AI - scientificamerican.com

He was treated for blood clots but still felt fatigued and breathless - The Washington Post

Porter’s history of blood clots for no apparent reason, his continued shortness of breath and chest pain, along with the results of the VQ scan and other tests strongly suggested one diagnosis: chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). This rare form of pulmonary hypertension is caused by clots that clog arteries, forming scar tissue that adheres to blood vessels in the lungs, narrowing the vessels and impeding blood flow. Experts estimate that between 2 and 5 percent of people with blood clots will develop CTEPH, which doesn’t respond to blood thinners. But unlike other forms of pulmonary hypertension, CTEPH can be cured by a pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE), a long, complex and demanding operation to remove clots. Nonsurgical treatment involves medication, but is not curative.
#health #exercise #pulmonary-embolism #oxygen #cteph - washingtonpost.com

How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst | The New Yorker

“We’re going to be using a lot of ‘when’ today. I don’t use ‘if.’ I don’t touch wood too much,” Easthope said. “It is when, when these emergencies happen.” In spite of her experiences witnessing protocols fail or be subverted, Easthope still argues strongly for disaster and recovery plans. She has no time for people (normally male uniformed commanders) who believe they are dealing with something that no one has ever suffered through before. “Don’t go out there with ‘unique.’ Don’t go out there with ‘unprecedented.’ Don’t go out there with ‘This was a terrible incident we couldn’t have foreseen,’ ” she said. “You are walking plowed, furrowed fields that other people have walked, and they are there to guide and support you.”
#prediction #history #trauma - newyorker.com

Remote Work Comes With Daytime Drug and Drinking Habits - Bloomberg

But hybrid work, Angres says, telescopes five-to-10 year downward spirals down to months, partially by removing an important social impediment to substance or other addictive tendencies: ample time around healthy people.
#addiction #alcohol - bloomberg.com

RCT-DUPLICATE findings demonstrate capabilit | EurekAlert!

The results show that in about half of the cases where researchers were able to closely mimic the design of the corresponding RCT using RWD, the RWE study came to a similar conclusion as the analogous RCT. In many cases where RWE and RCTs did not come to a similar conclusion, the RCT design itself did not align with real-world clinical practice, creating a challenge for emulation of the trial using RWD. In these instances, RWE and RCTs may both be reaching meaningful conclusions, but to subtly different research questions.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #n-of-1 #whichworksbest - eurekalert.org

Bodily Rhythm Affects Behavior - Neuroscience News

o explore multi-day rhythms in healthy human behavior our analysis includes over 300 million smartphone touchscreen interactions logging up to 2 years of day-to-day activities (N401 subjects). At the level of each individual, we find a complex expression of multi-day rhythms where the rhythms occur scattered across diverse smartphone behaviors. With non-negative matrix factorization, we extract the scattered rhythms to reveal periods ranging from 7 to 52 days – cutting across age and gender. The rhythms are likely free-running – instead of being ubiquitously driven by the moon – as they did not show broad population-level synchronization even though the sampled population lived in northern Europe.
#synchronize #psychiatry #mobile - neurosciencenews.com

Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions - PMC

After accounting for all explanatory variables, logistic regressions found that for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun at home. After also accounting for having a gun in the home, there was still a 28% increase in support for permits to carry concealed handguns, for each one point increase in symbolic racism. The relationship between symbolic racism and opposition to banning handguns in the home (OR1.27 CI 1.03,1.58) was reduced to non-significant after accounting for having a gun in the home (OR1.17 CI.94,1.46), which likely represents self-interest in retaining property (guns).
#racism #guns - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

High Protein Diet Reduces Depression Symptoms - Neuroscience News

The results showed higher protein intake was associated with a reduction in symptoms of depression during the follow-up period.
#depression #paleopsychiatry #keto - neurosciencenews.com

Exercise Is Even More Effective Than Counselling or Medication for Depression - Neuroscience News

When comparing the size of the benefits of exercise to other common treatments for mental health conditions from previous systematic reviews, our findings suggest exercise is around 1.5 times more effective than either medication or cognitive behaviour therapy.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #exercise #psychiatry - neurosciencenews.com

A break from Covid waves and a breakthrough for preventing Long Covid

But a new randomized, placebo-controlled trial of metformin has yielded exciting results—the first drug to be shown to help prevent Long Covid. Over a thousand people with mild-to-moderate Covid were randomly assigned to 2 weeks of metformin (500 mg pills, 1 on day 1, twice a day for 4 days, then 500 mg in AM and 1000 mg in PM for 9 days) or placebo. There was a 42% reduction of subsequent Long Covid as you can see by the event curve below, which corresponds to an absolute decrease of 4.3%, from 10.6% reduced to 6.3%. Of note, the participants in the trial were fairly representative of the people who most often go on to manifest Long Covid, outpatients with a median age of 45 years and 56% were female. The low risk subgroups of people age <30 years or with a normal BMI were excluded. There were no treatment by subgroup interactions—that is there were overlapping 95% confidence intervals for the direction of benefit for metformin for all subgroups; no clear evidence that metformin worked better or worse for each.
#coronavirus #metformin #long-covid - erictopol.substack.com

Placebo and Nocebo in Cardiovascular Health: Implications for Healthcare, Research, and the Doctor-Patient Relationship - ScienceDirect

From the Framingham data, women, with similar risk factors, were 4 times more likely to die if they believed they were prone to heart disease (42). Recent evidence suggests a link between emotions (such as fear or depression), cardiomyopathy, and even death. Tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy, especially prevalent in women, appears related to an adverse intense emotional stressor (43, 44, 45). Nocebo and placebo responses remain confounders that explain much of any therapy’s true benefits and risks. Active therapies could have additional placebo and/or nocebo effects.
#placebo #nocebo - sciencedirect.com

Placebo and Nocebo in Cardiovascular Health: Implications for Healthcare, Research, and the Doctor-Patient Relationship - ScienceDirect

A nocebo effect represents harm perceived by a patient or identified by a practitioner arising solely from the appearance that treatment has been delivered. Healthy individuals have adverse effects to a blinded sham 15% to 27% of the time (36). Adverse events have been reported spontaneously with a placebo in 109 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of 1,228 volunteers. Repeat dosing increases nocebo effects to 28%; old age is associated with a 26% nocebo response (37, 38). If patients are specifically asked about adverse effects, the percent can rise to 71% (37, 39). The nocebo effect might lead to secondary gain, disability, or even death (38, 39). Women report nocebo responses to therapy more than men do, but any impact of practitioner gender, culture, or other perceived biases on the nocebo response is unclear.
#placebo #nocebo - sciencedirect.com

Placebo and Nocebo in Cardiovascular Health: Implications for Healthcare, Research, and the Doctor-Patient Relationship - ScienceDirect

The magnitude of the placebo effect is difficult to quantitate due to its diverse nature (a pill, physician’s advice, surgical intervention, patient beliefs, and outcome analyses) and due to the wide variety of conditions that seem to respond. An apparent effect can be immeasurable or exceed 80% of a treatment effect. A placebo can even appear to reduce the risk of death. For most situations and conditions, placebo contributes 30% to 40% to the benefit of an intervention. Likely, 35% to 50%, if not more, of a response to an analgesic or opiate can be attributed to placebo (31, 32, 33, 34).
#placebo - sciencedirect.com

Placebo and Nocebo in Cardiovascular Health: Implications for Healthcare, Research, and the Doctor-Patient Relationship - ScienceDirect

Pacemaker studies provide striking insight regarding the placebo response in neurocardiogenic syncope. Comparing pacemaker to no pacemaker implantation for resistant neurocardiogenic syncope, the VPS-I (Vasovagal Pacemaker Study) was stopped prematurely due to an apparent marked reduction in syncope from the pacemaker (19). Considering the possibility that the implant itself had an important placebo effect, a controlled trial (VPS-II) of a similar population involved pacemaker implantation in all patients, but the devices were programmed off or programmed on in a double-blinded fashion (15). No significant benefit was derived from active pacing. The rate of syncope was similar to the pacing arm of the VPS-I trial.
#placebo - sciencedirect.com

A Smartphone Intervention to Promote a Sustainable Healthy Diet: Protocol for a Pilot Study - PubMed

We will run a series of ABA n-of-1 trials over a year, with the first A phase corresponding to a 2-week baseline evaluation, the B phase to a 22-week intervention, and the second A phase to a 24-week postintervention follow-up. We plan to enroll 21 participants from low, middle, and high socioeconomic statuses, with 7 from each socioeconomic group. The intervention will involve sending text messages and providing brief individualized web-based feedback sessions based on regular app-based assessments of eating behavior. The text messages will contain brief educational messages on human health and the environmental and socioeconomic effects of dietary choices; motivational messages to encourage the adoption of sustainable healthy diets by participants, providing tips to achieve their own behavioral goals; or links to recipes. Both quantitative and qualitative data will be collected. Quantitative data (eg, on eating behaviors and motivation) will be collected through self-reported questionnaires on several weekly bursts spread through the study. Qualitative data will be collected through 3 individual semistructured interviews before the intervention period, at the end of the intervention period, and at the end of the study. Analyses will be performed at both the individual and group levels depending on the outcome and objective.
#n-of-1 #self-experimentation - pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The Hallucinatory Walk Through Paris That Inspired Deleuze and Guattari | The New Yorker

One doesn’t need to be schizophrenic or have a degree in French theory or urban studies to understand that cities are made up of various complex, interrelated flows: people, traffic, information, goods, sewage, refuse. City agencies exist to manage these flows and seek ways to impose their vision of order on them. In recent decades, American cities have actively encouraged design and zoning that seek to channel the movement and sway of individuals toward officially sanctioned ends. Far beyond neglecting design that includes space for the homeless, particularly those among them suffering from schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, cities keep trying to eliminate or restrict their presence. In New York City, for instance, these “monotopic” or “monocultural” directives can be glimpsed even in supposedly open spaces, like parks. At the smallest and subtlest level, there are those cunning triangular tips on fences and ledges and planters insuring that no one can rest on them. Benches now have blunt metal dividers that make it impossible to lie down. Parks and streets are lit with aggressive floodlighting, and carefully timed sprinklers make sure that anyone sleeping on the grass will wake up soaked. And then there’s the greater presence of police officers, in addition to security cameras, and surveillance. Despite these countermeasures, the city’s homeless population endures, and the bowels of the metropolitan transportation system are as much an incubator of schizophrenic reverie as Besse’s Luxembourg Gardens or the Gare d’Austerlitz, even if less romantic. And still nothing has stopped the occasional schizophrenic from conducting the music of the spheres by stepping out into traffic or climbing down to the subway tracks.
#cities #schizophrenia #poetry #paris - newyorker.com

Differences in Dopamine Signals in Patients With History of Alcohol Use Disorder - Neuroscience News

“We’ve shown before that dopamine levels in humans seems to track information related to regret and relief,” Kishida said. Previous research suggests that learning from regret is impaired in patients with alcohol use disorder. “In our study, dopamine measurements, at these really fast timescales, appear altered in patients with a history of alcohol use disorder. When their choice was the best it could have been, we see dopamine levels falling when we expected it to increase like we observed in patients without alcohol use disorder,” Kishida said.
#dopamine #learning #grief - neurosciencenews.com

The Brain Works Like a Resonance Chamber - Neuroscience News

“If we could find that the spatial patterns oscillate, this would provide evidence supporting the resonance hypothesis” says Joana Cabral, first author of the study, from the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute of the University of Minho and a visiting scientist in Shemesh’s lab since 2019. So what the team did was to speed up image acquisition, and they discovered that the signals in distant brain regions actually oscillate together in time. “These oscillatory patterns look like a higher-dimensional analogue of resonance modes in musical instruments; they are akin to reverberations, to echoes inside the brain”, says Cabral. “Our data show that the complex spatial patterns are a result of transiently and independently oscillating underlying modes, just like individual instruments participate in creating a more complex piece in an orchestra”, says Shemesh.
#synchronize #brain #music #fMRI - neurosciencenews.com

The Future of Strength Training - Outside Online

The bigger and clearer the signal your brain sends to your muscles, the more force you’ll produce. And that signal-sending capability is trainable. Back in 2021, I wrote about a fascinating study in which locked-down pro basketball players gained strength by doing six weeks of completely imagined strength workouts three times a week. Similarly, lifting a light weight while imagining that you’re lifting a heavier one—i.e. trying as hard as you can, even if you don’t need to—produces greater strength gains.
#exercise #focus #mind-body #mindfulness - outsideonline.com

Yandex scrapes Google and other SEO learnings from the source code leak

Combing through those, we find that there are actually 17,854 ranking factors in total. Included in those ranking factors are a variety of metrics related to: Clicks. Dwell time. Leveraging Yandex’s Google Analytics equivalent, Metrika.
#goog #SEO - searchengineland.com

Networks, Percolation, and Consumer Demand

In particular, we showed that small-world networks, which exhibit short path lengths and high clustering (Watts & Strogatz 1998), lead to fast but often only limited diffusion compared to fully random networks, which exhibit short path lengths and low clustering. The reason for limited diffusion in small-world networks is the redundancy in information spreading due to clustering. Accordingly, consumer welfare is much lower in small-world networks than in random networks for a wide ranges of prices.
#twiangulate #diffusion - jasss.org

The State of the Industry: 2022 RaceTrends Report is Here! – RunSignup Blog

Largest races were the hardest hit, with races of more than 5,000 participants averaging 19% fewer participants than in 2019 while races with fewer than 500 participants actually grew 3.4% […]20% of 2019 events did not take place in 2022, including 14% that did not take place in either 2021 or 2022 […]Just 14% of participants from 2021 repeated the same event in 2022 (down from 19% in 2018)
#racery #virtual - runsignup.blog

Steve Schallenkamp: Race entries down sharply from pre-pandemic levels – Daily Freeman

Runsignup, the largest race registration company in the United States, used data from 68,000 races to highlight running trends in 2022. Its data shows that race entries were down anywhere from 10% to 24% from the pre-pandemic year of 2019. The data also highlighted that there are now more running events than previously, but the average attendance or size of races in 2022 was smaller than in 2019.
#racery #postpandemic - dailyfreeman.com