Last fall, Google’s philanthropic division released Flu Trends, a tool that purportedly predicts regional influenza outbreaks 7-10 days faster than traditional methods. The bio-surveillance tool relies on the fact that people use Google to search flu-related terms well before calling their physicians.

Now, a study of similar methodologies appears to show that the Mountain View-based company’s omnipotence extends to the prediction of economic trends as well.

Hal Varian, an economics professor at UC Berkeley who moonlights as Google’s chief economist, and  Hyunyoung Choi, a Google employee tested the hypothesis that variations in search frequency for certain phrases improves the accuracy of econometric models used to forecast retail and home sales, among other things.

Such data are available to the public through Google Trends, which enables interested parties to access reports on search volumes for particular categories and terms. The reports are updated daily.

The scientists found that addition of such information improves the predictive value of the standard models used to forecast car and truck sales by 18%.

Similarly, search volume on terms like Hong Kong and other ports of call carried out in Australia, India, the UK and the US can foretell bumps in tourist volume to these locations.

The tool still needs refining, however. The scientists showed for example that searches for real estate agents are better predictors of future home sales than those for home financing.

Virtually every nation on Earth struggles with endemic poverty.

Children of the poor are at greater risk for underachieving as adults regardless of the system of government where they live and the quantity and quality of both social services and educational systems available to them.

The problem has been poorly understood until, perhaps, now.

Three years ago, Martha Farah at the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated that the working memories of kids raised in poverty are smaller than those of middle-class children.

Working memory is the capacity to hang on to bits of information for current use; the items on a small shopping list, for example. It is required for solving problems and understanding language, and serves as a gateway to permanent memory.

Now, Cornell University’s Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg have reported that Farah’s findings are almost certainly caused by the adverse effects of stress on brain development in children.

The scientists examined results from a longitudinal study of 195 participants of both sexes.

They assessed stress using a measure known as the allostatic load which combines the values of 6 parameters: systolic and diastolic blood pressure, serum levels of 3 stress-related hormones, and the BMI.

In all cases, higher values indicate more a more stressful life, and indeed poor kids had higher values than those in the middle class for all 6. (more…)

From a Filipino marimba prodigy to a hyper-precise British carpenter to Kim Peek, the person with an eidetic memory whose character was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, stories of gifted people who have developmental disabilities have created buzz for decades.

Now scientists are beginning to understand the link, and have begun to speculate how the new information might apply to “neurotypicals.”

King’s College scientist Patricia Howlin for example, will soon post a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society suggesting that up to 30% of autistic people possess some kind of savant-like ability in areas like computation and music.

And Francesca Happe will contribute a piece suggesting that the genius may derive from RBBIs, restrictive and repetitive behaviors that are a sine qua non of the autistic spectrum.

Obsessive interests and behaviors, Happe speculates, enable afflicted individuals to practice, even if inadvertently, the skill they have become obsessed with.

Malcolm Gladwell wouldn’t disagree.

In his new book, “Outliers,” the popular author cites research suggesting that many people can achieve greatness at something if they’re willing to practice it for oh, say, 10,000 hours.

According to the line of reasoning, this would be cake for many autistic individuals, whereas their neurotypical counterparts would long since have given up due to boredom.

To build her case, Happé refers to a twin study that found childhood talent in art and music to be associated with RRBIs, even in people that do not meet classical criteria for autism.

As Happe explained to the Economist, “the child with autism who would happily spend hours spinning coins, or watching drops of water fall from his fingers, might be considered a connoisseur, seeing minute differences between events that others regard as pure repetition.”

When scientists showed that images of nearly nude females triggered alterations in cerebral blood flow and certain behaviors that were not entirely under the conscious control of males, some just shrugged.

What could be more obvious?

But the link between conscious and unconscious thought remains a hot topic among neurobiologists, even when sexual desire is not involved.

Joydeep Bhattacharya of Goldsmiths’ College in London and Bhavin Sheth of the University of Houston recently demonstrated that insight itself, the eureka moment when one reaches a breakthrough solution to a problem, is generated unconsciously before one becomes aware she’s solved it.  

The remarkable findings appear in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The scientists affixed electroencephalographs to 18 adults and then challenged them with a brain-teaser that required just such a flash of insight to solve.

The problem was that there are 3 light switches on the ground-floor of a house, 2 of which do nothing while the third controls a light bulb on the second floor. The bulb is off at the start. Determine which switch is operational while making only one trip to the second floor.

Each EEG-wired subject was given 90 seconds to solve the puzzle, at which point a hint was provided. The hint was to turn one switch on for a good while before turning it off.

Some subjects solved it, some did not. What was interesting though was data from the EEG could be used to differentiate the insightful few from the rest of us.

Only the former exhibited increased gamma wave activity in the right frontal cortex.

And the knock-your-socks off corollary was that the gamma wave activity was observed up to eight seconds before the subject had the “aha!” moment.  (more…)

Hillarycare was already on the ropes in ’93 when Big Insurance landed a haymaker in the form of Harry and Louise, a TV commercial series featuring 2 everyday Americans scared sleepless that health reform meant government meddling and bloated bureaucracy. 

Now, the Big O claims we can’t tame deficits without a health care do-over and HHS nominee Kathleen Sebelius adds that 40% of recent home foreclosures are related to financial stress caused by uninsured health expenses, so it would be vexing indeed if Big insurance scuppered reform yet again.

At first it seemed to be on board, floating constructive proposals and even manning up for the Big O’s morning teas.

But recently, things have turned frosty.

Big Insurance has warned it will oppose any plan involving a government-sponsored insurer that competes against the privates, a cornerstone of several reform proposals, including those of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sebelius herself.

And don’t look now but Big Insurance may secure providers as allies on the matter.

Mayo Clinic boss Denis Cortese is on record for example, with concerns that a public insurer would underpay providers, as Medicare has done to Mayo, according to Cortese, to the tune of $840 million in the last year alone.

Meanwhile, Harvard health economist Regina Herzlinger has pointed out that the apparent cost advantages of a government run program are in part an artifact of accounting trickery.

The Feds don’t have to set aside funds to meet future obligations like Big Insurance does, she told the Economist. “The government does not have the $36 trillion needed to finance the services it has promised to those who pay for Medicare.”

Last year, JAMA editor Catherine DeAngelis received the Catcher in the Rye humanitarian prize “because of her leadership on discussions of conflicts of interest in medicine.”

This year she’s knee-deep in shmutz regarding JAMA’s questionable handling of just such a matter.

The dust-up began last spring when JAMA published a study of methods to prevent depression in stroke patients. In the study, Robert Robinson and a team from the University of Iowa compared counseling, antidepressant therapy with Lexapro, and a placebo.

Robinson heaped praise on the pharmaceutical intervention following publication of his study.

 “Every stroke patient who can tolerate an antidepressant should be given one,” he told USA Today.

The study had shown that both counseling and Lexapro outperformed placebo, but there wasn’t a whit of difference between the 2 treatment groups.

Robinson acknowledged that in a letter to JAMA last fall.

Robinson’s letter prompted Lincoln Memorial University professor Jonathan Leo to sleuth around a bit.

He discovered that Robinson had accepted speaker’s fees from Forest Laboratories, the maker of Lexapro, and had not disclosed this.

Leo notified JAMA. The journal said it would investigate, but according to Leo, 5 months passed and nothing happened. That’s when he and a colleague published the discovery in a letter to the British Medical Journal.

Three nanoseconds later according to Leo, DeAngelis phoned Leo and his dean threatening to cut off Leo’s work from the light of JAMA’s day forever.

DeAngelis denies this.

Robinson has since admitted receiving speakers’ fees from Forest Laboratories “in 2004 and perhaps 2005.” He apologized in a letter to JAMA citing “errors of memory.”

The same day, JAMA published an accompanying erratum.

It appears that JAMA intended to publish these latter 2 items even if Leo’s letter hadn’t been posted in BMJ days before.

The AMA has asked a journal oversight committee to investigate.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has taken a page out of FDR’s playbook with weekly televised talks to his countrymen. Problem is, few of them are watching.

It seems they’ve tired of his message, which amounts to a remix of Albert King’s woeful lament, “if it wasn’t for bad news, I’d have no news at all.”

A recent poll revealed for example, that a third of Russians expected to lose their jobs in the immediate future.

February’s industrial output, including oil and minerals, was down 13.2% versus the same month last year, and manufacturing output shriveled a whopping 20%, according to the Economist.

Meanwhile wage arrears, the most visible symptom of Russia’s economic chaos in the 1990s, are creeping up again. State-approved reports suggest that more than 500,000 people had pay withheld temporarily last month, which is higher than at any point in 4 years.

Given these are state-approved reports, one can only imagine how bad the matter has actually become.

Medvedev has even taken the unusual step of appealing for help from the oligarchs. They have “a moral role” to preserve jobs, he stated while reminding them how easily they amassed wealth during different economic times.

“It’s time to repay debts, moral debts,” he said in his last chat.

“If a person really has become a businessman, he knows how to value his employees.”

Then he waded directly into the fray, calling it “unacceptable” that billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Bank was threatening to close down billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element, laying off tens of thousands in the process, if the latter didn’t repay an overdue $650m loan.

The oligarchs buried the hatchet the next day.

Pope Benedict XVI commands respect and reverence from his flock of 135 million Catholics in Africa, and that showed during his recent visit to Cameroon and Angola.

In response, he delivered a message of compassion and heartfelt recognition that the continent suffers disproportionately from poverty, famine, financial upheaval and climate change.

But he did flub one matter.

When asked to comment about the role of condoms in Africa’s war on AIDS, Pope Benedict stated, again, this time even more explicitly than usual, his belief that they are not just unhelpful in assuaging the epidemic, but that they exacerbate the scourge.

AIDS, he said, can be licked by abstaining from sex and following “correct behavior.”

He said this on a continent where 20 million have already died from AIDS and even more than that are HIV positive.

Certainly condom distribution by itself is not an answer.

Other strategies are required such as education, helping women achieve control over their sex lives, delaying onset of sexual behavior, broadening distribution of antiretroviral therapies and so forth.

But condom distribution programs work. According to the WHO, properly used condoms reduce HIV transmission by 90%. And when Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni talked openly about “ABC” habits—abstain, be faithful, use condoms, infection rates fell in his country.

Conversely, public figures that ignore the facts or get them wrong endanger the lives of many.

Harvard scientists estimated last year for example that that the callous behavior of South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki has caused 330,000 avoidable deaths due to AIDS.

In denying the facts about condoms in AIDS prevention, Pope Benedict turned a cold shoulder to the world’s weakest. That’s the group he should be working hardest to defend.

Just about everyone gestures in meaningful ways when they talk.

Heck the Big O once playfully recounted that his kneecapping chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had lost some middle finger as a teen while slicing beef at Arby’s and it “rendered him practically mute.”

But can it be that gesturing actually helps people think?

Yes, according to Susan Goldin-Meadow who reported her findings at the recent meeting of the AAAS.

Goldin-Meadow showed children a blackboard containing an equation like this: 3 + 4 + 5 = x + 5, and asked them to solve for x.

In the equation, the number immediately to the left of the equal sign is the same as the last one on the right, so x equals the sum of the first two numbers on the left.

Goldin-Meadow knew that kids just learning math don’t necessarily see things that way; they solve the problem by adding the three numbers on the left and going from there.

In previous experiments, Goldin-Meadow observed that kids use gestures when describing how they solved math problems.

To determine whether the hand movements actually helped kids think things through, she taught kids in 2 groups the short-cut way to solve these equations. She asked kids in the first group to gesture all they wanted during the lesson, and those in the second to refrain from doing so.

Kids in the first group learned more from the tutorial than those in the second. Also it seemed, kids in the first group often touched or pointed to the equation’s first two numbers on the left.

So in a follow-up experiment, Goldin-Meadow used this gesture explicitly in teaching another group of kids, call them Group A. She taught a Group B by pointing to different numbers in the equation, and a third group using no gestures.

Kids in Group A learned the most, followed by those in Group B. In last place were those who learned without the gestures.

The conclusion was that gesturing improves thinking, and even incorrect gestures have value.

Since Blue vs. Gray, America’s military has recognized that war imposes a psychological price on combatants.

In Civil War days, people called it soldier’s heart. By World War I, the phenomenon had been dubbed shell shock. For the Second World War, the moniker was battle fatigue, and now it’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

Whatever it’s called, the Pentagon estimates that 11% of veterans of the war in Iraq have it, and the number is nearly twice that among Afghan war vets.

The condition can range from minor readjustment difficulties to homicidal behavior or suicide, and the incidence of cases at the violent end of the spectrum has risen alarmingly in the last 2 years.

The US military recently opened PTSD treatment facilities in Bethesda and Fort Bliss, although there are families of affected individuals who say that’s too little, too late.

Meanwhile many still  believe that weak minds underlie the condition, and it was only months ago that the Army promised enlistees their careers would not be jeopardized if they sought help for this or other anxiety disorders. 

Last year, defense secretary Robert Gates suggested rather shockingly to some that soldiers afflicted with PTSD ought to receive the Purple Heart, which was originally created by George Washington for soldiers wounded in combat.

After much ado the Pentagon demurred, citing a 1932 standard which bestows the honor only on those who have, according to the Economist, suffered wounds “intentionally caused by the enemy from an outside force.”

Alas the Pentagon tends to move slowly on such matters. The World War II memorial remember, was completed in 2004.