Chance News 78
Quotations
"Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom." -- Clifford Stoll
Submitted by Steve Simon
Forsooth
Cheerful tweets in the morning
Twitter Study Tracks When We Are :) by Benedict Carey, The New York Times, September 29, 2011
If you read the mood of people on Twitter, they are happy in the morning, but then things go downhill.
However grumpy people are when they wake up, and whether they stumble to their feet in Madrid, Mexico City or Minnetonka, Minn., they tend to brighten by breakfast time and feel their moods taper gradually to a low in the late afternoon, before rallying again near bedtime, a large-scale study of posts on the social media site Twitter found.
How can you measure this? The researchers
analyzed the text of each message, using a standard computer program that associates certain words, like “awesome” and “agree,” with positive moods and others, like “annoy” and “afraid,” with negative ones. They included so-called emoticons, the face symbols like “:)” that punctuate digital missives.
It's not an accurate sample, though, as the researchers admit.
For starters, Twitter users are computer-savvy, skew young and affluent, and post for a variety of reasons.
You might think that going to work causes a decline in mood, but the same burst of enthusiasm occurs on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but two hours later than on weekdays. There is, however, no evidence for Seasonal Affective Disorder, the tendency of people to become depressed near Christmas when the days are the shortest. Here's a graph showing the daily trends.
Submitted by Steve Simon
Questions
1. What aspects of Twitter make you nervous about these findings?
2. Can sentiments like happiness be discovered adequately by text analysis? Does the 140 character limit in Twitter make this more difficult or easier?
Fool’s gold standard
“Buy low, sell high and “avoid trauma” are good aphorisms to live by. So is “never take medication or have a medical procedure performed that has been in use for less than twenty-five years.” And, that is even if said medication or procedure has been approved by the so-called gold standard, a clinical trial. In Chance News 76 one type of what might be called a “fool’s gold standard,” seeding trials, is discussed.
Another version of the fool’s gold standard is the subject of an article entitled The Other South American Drug War, by Kelly Hearn in The Nation (print version to appear 11 October 2011). Hearn describes the subverting of clinical trials by means of “offshoring” clinical trials and Independent Review Boards to South America.
Foreign clinical trials for US-bound drugs have been commonplace for decades, and ethical breaches are a frequent side effect.
A generation ago, most human testing took place in American academic institutions. Now it’s a global game dominated by corporations, called contract research organizations (CROs), that help Big Pharma bring new molecules from the lab to your medicine cabinet. More and more drug companies are turning to CROs for assistance with trial design and recruitment, regulatory compliance, marketing and branding—last year the CRO market was worth $20 billion, an estimated 100 percent jump from a decade ago. And CROs, in turn, are increasingly running trials in the developing world because doing so is cheaper and faster: regulations aren’t as onerous, patient recruitment is easier and informed consent is less clearly defined.
Peru, a nation of 30 million where few people have health insurance and one in three lives in poverty, has the highest number of volunteer patients in South America and ranks among the world’s leaders in total number of clinical trials. In 2008 more than 13,000 Peruvians took part in trials testing drugs intended for the United States. The FDA did not send a single inspector.
Discussion
- Hearn quotes someone who states, “A big fear is that reckless researchers or firms may find it easy to go far from regulatory scrutiny and conduct preliminary, early-phase research off the record to find out whether to abandon the idea or to pursue it in the licit, on-the-record procedures.” Why is this a big fear?
- How does number 1 relate to the so-called “file drawer problem of statistics”?
- According to Hearn, “the number of trials in developing countries has grown 8 percent a year since 1997. A 2010 report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notes that 40 to 65 percent of clinical trials on FDA-regulated products in 2008 took place overseas. Of nearly 6,500 foreign trial sites that year, the FDA inspected only forty-five—less than 1 percent.” If Hearn’s allegations are on the mark, why have we not heard more about them in the mainstream media?
- In the news last month has been criticism of an earlier ethically indefensible use of a clinical trial in Guatemala here.
Submitted by Paul Alper