7 ms·
Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
- brianlash 16y agoI think Michael Williams (third comment) has the right idea when he says "I’m sure you can find plenty of physicists saying spectacularly naive things about medicine...". Of course OP's discovery is amusing - even alarming - but approaching it with an air of condescension won't do much to advance either field.
- frisco 16y agoCalculus is taught in high school and expected to be basic knowledge for any physician, even if they don't use it often, and especially so for researchers. Calculus is fair game on their admissions exam, even! On the other hand, there's never an expectation that physicists know medicine.
- brianlash 16y agoOf course. I never claimed we don't have an egregious error on our hands.
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- Leptosiphon 16y agoCalculus is not taught to everyone in high school. Many students only make it as far as precalculus and many more, even if they take calculus in high school do not learn integration. At the college level, many biology students do not take calculus. As far as calculus being a requirement for entrance into med school, in many cases I am afraid you are incorrect. http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/additional_math_reqs.pdf http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/additional_math_reqs.pdf Most pre-meds do not have the time in their undergraduate careers to take a two semester series in calculus, especially if they need to also take remedial courses such as precalculus first, and many do.
- mbreese 16y agoCalculus, per se, isn't a requirement, but physics is covered pretty heavily on the MCAT. And last I checked, you needed calculus for college level physics.
- carbocation 16y agoCalculus-based physics is not tested on the MCAT. Or, at least, no calculus is required for the physics portion of the exam.
- realitygrill 16y agoTo my utter shock - I thought it'd be one of the last bulwarks against premed memorization. When I learned otherwise, it was sad to think that those students who flocked to non-calc physics (and floundered; the classes are of course curved) really would have a good shot at medical school.
- Leptosiphon 16y agoMost universities have a physics sequence that does not require physics. A major reason this sequence exists, at least at the university that employs me, is pre-med students. Also, physics is not "covered heavily" on the MCAT.
- dannyb 16y agoThere's a big difference between "saying spectacularly naive things" and publishing in a supposedly respectable journal. Plus, the guy deserves an academic weggie for naming a method after himself...
- fluidcruft 16y agoDid someone mention Kurzweil and his army of computer science yes men?
- philelly 16y agolooking up the paper on pubmed reveals a flurry of letters to the editor published in the subsequent issue that call out the 'tai method' for what it is. i would actually bet a good number of the 70 citations that so worry 'flip tomato' are actually criticisms or commentary papers like this, as opposed to earnest citations.
- mbm 16y agoAccording to Google Scholar, it's actually been cited 137 times. Another paper published in '98, cited 499 times, reads: The integrated area under the curve (AUC) analysis for glucose and insulin was determined according to the formula of Tai et al. Damn.
- blasdel 16y agoU MAD? Seems like a great way to both pad out your citations and troll your readers!
- kenjackson 16y agoHere's another paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7677819 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7677819 "Tal's Formula is the Trapezoidal Rule" A rebuttal doesn't get much blunter than that.
- mbm 16y agoIt's intriguing that the author's two-page rebuttal is among her 'selected publications'. http://www.sph.unc.edu/nciph/jane_monaco_1990_1984.html http://www.sph.unc.edu/nciph/jane_monaco_1990_1984.html
- carbocation 16y agoThe two page rebuttal that was written by Jane Monaco is among Jane Monaco's selected publications. (You linked us to Jane Monaco's page, not Mary Tai's.)
- ehsanul 16y agoThat is what the GP thought was interesting. So do I.
- carbocation 16y agoI see; I misunderstood the intent of the link.
- pmorici 16y agoJust a guess but they only have three total so selected might mean "all" publications and even then the one you cite only has 2 authors instead of 10 and Jane's name is listed first. It's that something that is important to post graduate students?
- hugh3 16y agoCertainly in most scientific fields it would be unusual to be an assistant professor with a career stretching back to the early 90s and have a publication list that sparse, but I suppose things must be different in medicine?
- alphaoverlord 16y agoJust to be clear, and this might be tangential, but she is not a physician - I think she is a dietitian. I think its a fallacy to assume that only physicians publish in medical journals and there is a negligible link between over-the-top premeds and this article. Mary M. Tai www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/54/5/783.pdf http://journals.lww.com/topicsinclinicalnutrition/Citation/1992/09000/Renal_dietitians__responses_to_selected_job.8.aspx http://journals.lww.com/topicsinclinicalnutrition/Citation/1... I can't access the article, so I can't make any comment on the actual methods, but I think it seems a little presumptuous to flippantly make broad strokes about a paper from a different field solely by looking at the abstract. He does make a good point about overeager premeds (and for good reason), but this post seems to be more airing out grievences and stereotypes than an argument about education or differences between diciplines.
- mbreese 16y agoWe found the same link... and you're correct, she isn't a physician. In the Topics in Clinical Nutrition 1992 paper, she is listed as having an MS and an EdD. So, it's safe to say that she probably didn't realize that she was describing integration. The entire post had a "I'm smarter than you" chip on your shoulder type of vibe. It should also be noted that this paper had a number of letters to the editor about it, so in this case, I'd say that the process works (even if it got by the editors). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8137688 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8137688
- andolanra 16y agoI agree that it seemed to have this "I'm smarter than you" vibe, but the only reason I half-agreed is that I feel like it takes some nerve to try to name your discovery after yourself. It wouldn't be so bad if she called it the "curve-approximation method" or something like that; but coming up with something and deciding to name it after yourself feels kind of presumptuous and not exceptionally helpful to boot. (As far as I know, most concepts and ideas named after people weren't self-named; Dijkstra, arrogant as he was, published "A note on two problems in connexion with graphs," and never mentioned "Dijkstra's algorithm.")
- carbocation 16y agoFor my next New England Journal paper, I'm going to use a random number generator to simulate whether conditional, probabilistic health outcomes occurred or not. I'll cycle through this thousands of times to obtain stable estimates, and then call this the Monte Carbocation method.
- hrq 16y agogood luck with that.
- jrockway 16y agoIncidentally, you'll also be able to use this technique to determine the area under a curve! Let's patent it together and get rich!
- carbocation 16y agoLet's trademark it and copyright it, too! Now we just need to find a coder to implement our great idea.
- gclaramunt 16y agoNo, it should be the "Las Vegas method"
- eru 16y agoThat name is already taken.
- sciboy 16y agoI often help (good) researchers with experimental design and statistical analysis of quasi-experimental data, and it's shocking how little they understand. It pains me to think how much waste there is in science at the moment because the researchers do not have the statistical or numerical background to even know what questions are possible.
- noonespecial 16y agoI'd laugh a lot harder when people struggle for days and then reach a half-assed piece of some algorithm that's completely well know if I hadn't been there a dozen times myself. Programmers are especially vulnerable to this. Who hasn't made a 4 page case statement when 3 lines of recursion would have done it, especially when starting out? Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself. No matter how brilliant one is, its ridiculously hard to know what you don't know. In fact, sometimes being very advanced in one field makes it doubly hard to think of in one you're poor in.
- kwantam 16y agoSure, it's completely fair. We all reinvent the wheel sometimes. That hilarious part is that this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal---and none of the reviewers realized that he'd rediscovered some 17th century math.
- crocowhile 16y ago"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." — James D. Watson
- hugh3 16y agoTo be fair, James D. Watson is a bit of a jerk who delights in calling other people stupid. Usually winning a Nobel Prize tends to make people more charitable, since they no longer need to prove themselves to anybody... apparently it didn't work for Watson. I wouldn't recommend following Watson's advice on the correct attitude to your fellow man. For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson and scroll down to "Controversies".
- btilly 16y agoI would speculate that the reason it didn't work for Watson is the unacknowledged use of Rosalind Franklin's data, with the resulting belief by many that Watson couldn't have done it on his own. The fact that Rosalind died in part due to radiation absorbed during collecting that data adds to the controversy. Here is a piece of interesting trivia about that. Rosalind Franklin was a true expert on x-ray diffraction. However there are 230 possible space groups. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_group for more on that.) The x-ray diffraction pattern you see depends on the space group, and so one of the first step is to go through all of the possibilities and identify which one you have, and only then can you really start figuring out what you have. Rosalind Franklin knew about all of them. But by luck Watson's PhD thesis had been on a protein with the exact same set of symmetries that DNA has. As a result he was in a much better position than she to interpret her data.
- abhikshah 16y agoPeer-review failed here. It might be forgivable that a medical researcher doesn't know Calculus (maybe..), but if an article is making a mathematical claim, the journal should find appropriate reviewers. And this is not even remotely advanced math.
- dmlorenzetti 16y agoThe author calls out med students for approaching physics through rote memorization. It reminds me of an experience my older brother and I had with a doctor friend. Our friend, an OB/GYN, mentioned how hard her work is, because "the average baby is born at 3am." We laughed, but then my brother asked, "What does 'average' mean when you have a 24-hour clock? It must mean the modal time or something like that." I contributed that this is an issue in defining average wind directions, as well. The basic problem is that if you record times on a 0-24 hour scale, or wind directions on a 0-360 degree scale, and then naively average the numbers, you get meaningless results (for example, 180 degrees if the wind steadily rotates through every point of the compass). A quick glance at our doctor friend showed she had checked out of the conversation entirely. Possibly she just felt slighted that we were not bowing down in awe at the terrible hours she keeps. But my main impression was that she lives in a world where one receives a piece of information, notes it, and stores it away. And when repeating that received information, one's listeners duly note and store it away. Chasing down the source of the information, calling it into question, relating it to other things in the world-- these just weren't things she seemed to find pleasurable.
- nostrademons 16y agoUnless you're House, apparently. I've always wondered how accurate that show really is...
- jamesbritt 16y agohttp://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html
- kes 16y agoNow you will know: http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html
- carbocation 16y agoThe charitable interpretation (for your OB friend) is that she was not speaking literally, and got bored when you started perseverating on her hyperbole. The more likely explanation is that your analysis is indeed correct.
- manicbovine 16y agoAs a mathematician, I see this as a sign that my field needs an evangelist.
- whatwhat 16y agoCan I ask you a question? Why is rote memorization frowned upon in math? I'm a second year math student about to enter his third year. I enter a lot of the definitions, theorems, etc. into a flash card software (Anki) for memorization. I combine this with doing tons of proofs and problems from various textbooks depending upon the course I'm studying. I would say from personal experience that rote memorization has definitely helped me: (1) understand the math better; (2) excel in exams, and; (3) able to solve extra and harder problems from books. So I'm struggling to see why rote memorization is bad. Is not memory useful for justifying knowledge? I'm not saying memorization is the only thing. Just that it seems to build the foundation for everything else, as per Bloom's cognitive taxonomy: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy#Cognitive https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bloom%27s_Tax...
- enneff 16y agoEverything I remember about maths I remember because I understood the "why" of it. The stuff I learned rote - just to pass the exams - I have long since forgotten. I'm now frustrated that I was expected to learn anything by rote, as it's all lost to the sands of time now. Rote memorization might help you with exams and book problems, but it won't help you develop long-term mathematical problem-solving skills. If you can't explain it from first principles, you don't truly understand it.
- whatwhat 16y agoI'm not saying that problem solving and understanding aren't important (see Bloom's taxonomy). I'm saying that you still need memory to justify whatever domain your knowledge is in, and that memory seems to be the bedrock of further knowledge (understanding, creativity, problem solving etc.). Am I missing something here? Do you not need some element of memory to explain things from first principles, and to have an understanding of something? edit: I've just realized from reading wtallis' comment that I might be confusing two different forms of knowledge: memory and reasoning, insofar as reasoning can produce further truths. Is that what you are getting at?
- niels_olson 16y agoI'm a doctor who majored in physics, and I agree with this post. Watching these folks come up with formulas in physiology was excruciating. People get their names on things that physicists wouldn't even bother noticing as something other than a single step in a derivation. Hacker News and Python have been come my group therapy and secret addiction, respectively.
- silverlake 16y agoMy brother is a medical researcher. Much of his work involves statistics, but he's never taken a statistics course nor read an intro book. So a lot of his results are just basic high school stats and pretty graphs, nothing deeper. It would be funny if it weren't medicine.
- gilesc 16y agoI'm a biochemistry grad student, and my school is just now considering offering a (bio)statistics course for the first time... But parent poster is right, chi-squared is usually as complex as it gets.
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- nickolai 16y agoTo be fair, this letter followed soon afterwards : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7677819 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7677819 Tai's formula is the trapezoidal rule. Monaco JH, Anderson RL. Comment on: * Diabetes Care. 1994 Feb;17(2):152-4.
- jasonkester 16y agoOr, as your Engineering professors used to say: "A week in the lab will save you an hour in the library every time."
- praptak 16y agoTai's model? Naming things after oneself is +20 points in The Crackpot Index.
- SeanDav 16y agoWow, I just dicovered gravity :) In all seriousness though this does highlight a problem with modern research - the sheer volume of information out there.
- roel_v 16y agoSlightly off topic, but the other day someone asked how to do well in academia. Well, interdisciplinary work like this is a great way to get many well-cited papers - be well-versed in two or three fields (a lot of work, but not very hard) and apply things from one to the other(s). Don't call it '<your name>'s Method' but just present it as something groundbreaking (which it even may be, in that new field). You can generate a paper mill out of this after 10 or 15 years of studying the various fields (including undergrad and grad school) - it doesn't require much hard thinking, just a lot of work.
- finton 16y agoMy outsider's opinion is that I think that a lot of cited articles are not always thoroughly examined, or of they are examined they are used to confirm the biases of a particular researcher. I recently became interested in the idea of possible anesthetic neurotoxicity in infants and looked at a number of papers. The basic research seems solid, but the conclusions drawn are strangely inconsistent. Neonatal rat, mouse and pregnant guinea pig models are used, and recent studies have been done on monkeys. It appears that there is a high incidence of cell death after exposure to anesthesia, but there is a relatively narrow window of vulnerability, which apparently peaks at 7 days postnatal in rats and rapidly diminishes. 5 day old monkeys were affected by prolonged exposure to ketamine, and 35 day old monkeys were not. Similar results were seen in guinea pigs. What strikes me, is that this window of vulnerability is differently equated to human development by researchers, despite years of research into ethanol neurotoxicity (anesthetic studies seem to be more recent). Estimates for 7 to 14 day old rat-human equivalents range from pre-term infants to full-term newborns, to mid-gestation human fetuses and to children up to 3 years old. Two monkey papers, one using ketamine, and another using isoflurane also came up with different vulnerability periods based on similar data by using different sources of information on neurodevelopment, one published in the 1970's and one more recent. I cannot understand how so many studies could have statements about possible windows of human neurotoxicity, without any certainty about what phase in neurodevelopment they were dealing with. And, oddly enough, the paper describing the model that is used to claim a mid-gestation vulnerability (based on a "bioinformatics approach") clearly states that it cannot be used to predict the "coordinated surge in synaptogenesis just prior to birth in primates", which is hypothesized to be the peak period of vulnerability to anesthetic-induced cell death. So why is it used as a source?
- finton 16y agoTo extend my comment, there are dozens of citations for the 1970's era paper that assert that the "brain growth spurt" extends from the third trimester to the first few years of life. It is then equated with synaptogenesis or "peak synaptogenesis", even though this association may be unclear. The papers then further equate peak synaptogenesis with the period of vulnerability to anesthesia. Many then postulate mechanisms for anesthesia-related neurotoxicity in infants related to mechanisms of synaptogenesis. Not being an expert in the field, I can't refute this argument, but I do find the links between these phenomena to be rather shaky, especially when based on a throwaway reference to a decades old paper.
- rue 16y agoCome on now, many of you proudly tout how you were taught integration in secondary education. Big deal. This person discovered it for themselves, and that is an achievement to be celebrated.
- mhartl 16y agoRediscovering integration is wonderful. Managing to get it published in a peer-reviewed medical journal is not.
- Shorel 16y agoGiven that this is Obesity research, I'm just a little more inclined to believe all the claims of the NIH syndrome and biased analysis as described in Good Calories, Bad Calories.
- pge 16y agoThe lack of interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the major flaws of the US university system (I can't speak to other countries). The grad students I knew each had a specific toolkit that they had learned in their field but there was little or no sharing of those toolkits from domain to domain. That is unfortunate. Of particular importance in today's world are a toolkit of mathematical techniques (calculus, statistics, differential equations are probably the top three categories) and a category of basic programming skills (the ability to automate routine number crunching in particular, maybe "scripting" is a more appropriate word than "programming" - even recording and writing macros in Excel VB would go a long way).