Nothing to See Here

Scientists clarify the neuronal basis of the mathematical concept of 'zero'

Sep 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-scientists-neuronal-basis-mathematical-concept.html

"Unlike other numbers such as one, two or three, which represent countable quantities, zero means the absence of something countable and at the same time still has a numerical value."

They showed neurosurgical patients, who had had hair-thin microelectrodes inserted into their temporal lobes at the UKB in preparation for surgery, numerical values from zero to nine. The numerical values were shown as Arabic numerals on the one hand and as sets of dots on the other—including an empty set.

"Meanwhile, we were able to measure the activity of individual nerve cells and actually found neurons that signaled zero. Such neurons responded to either the Arabic numeral zero or the empty set, but not to both."

"So at the neuronal level, the concept of zero is not encoded as a separate category 'nothing,' but as a numerical value integrated with other, countable numerical values at the lower end of the number line." 

"Despite this integration, the empty set is encoded differently from other numbers at the neuronal population level, especially in the case of point sets. This could explain why the recognition of the empty set also takes longer at the behavioral level than for other small numbers."

FYI - The department of epileptology is for studying epilepsy.

via the Department of Epileptology at University Hospital Bonn, the University of Bonn and the University of Tübingen: Esther F. Kutter et al, Single-neuron representation of nonsymbolic and symbolic number zero in the human medial temporal lobe, Current Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.041

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.041

Image credit: AI Art - Tunnel of Numbers - 2025

Baselines, Biases and Big Data Problems - The Secrets of Statistics and the Magic of Metrology

The paradox of big data spoils vaccination surveys

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-paradox-big-vaccination-surveys.html

Image credit: Labyrinth by Liqen, Miami 2011

So guess what -- big data is really good at minimizing sample size errors, but also at magnifying systematic biases such as nonresponse bias like how vaccinated people are more likely to respond and marginalized groups less so -- in other words, bad data. Yet because the sample size is so large, we are tricked even more into thinking it must be good data. "Biases in the data get worse with bigger sample size." -phys.org

Here's an example: "Two in 10 respondents did not have a college degree, compared with four in 10 of all U.S. adults—and race and ethnicity—the fraction of black and Asian respondents was only half of what it is in the general population."

"Worse than no survey at all" they say.

Thanks Facebook, but you can keep your invasive mass surveillance system of the entire American population to yourself. 

via Harvard: Seth Flaxman, Unrepresentative big surveys significantly overestimate US vaccine uptake, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04198-4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04198-4

On research methods and data quality:

Meng said he began thinking about the problems posed by big data during a visit to Harvard a decade ago by a U.S. Census Bureau official. The official met with a group of statisticians and asked them about the handling of data sets that were becoming available covering large percentages of the U.S. population. Using the hypothetical example of tax data collected by the IRS, he asked whether the statisticians would prefer a sample covering 5 percent of the population that they knew was representative of the larger population or IRS data that they weren't sure was representative but covered 80 percent of the population. The statisticians chose the 5 percent. "What if it was 90 percent?" the Census Bureau official asked. The statisticians still chose the 5 percent, because if they understood the data, their answer would likely be more accurate than even a much larger set with unknown biases.

-phys.org

And now for the hard stuff:

Completely unrelated image; I'm just collecting pictures from science articles of people holding vials in their fingers: Wastewater Filtration, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Andrea Starr, 2022

Drinking alcohol to stay healthy? That might not work, says new study

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-alcohol-healthy.html

This is such a great example of how statistics works (and how it doesn't). The key word is "baseline".

We've been told for years, forever?, that one glass of red wine a day is not only not-bad, it's actually good for you. In health-speak, they call that "protective".

But this study shows us that there is no group of people that we can use as a baseline, who ---doesn't--- drink and yet who also ---doesn't--- have other health issues caused by having a history of substance abuse. In other words, when the only people who don't drink are people who are recovering from being addicted to alcohol (gross exaggeration), it means you can't find a baseline for a "normal" person. And if you can't find a baseline, then you can't measure anything. 

The majority of the alcohol abstainers at baseline were former alcohol consumers and had risk factors that increased the likelihood of early death. Former alcohol use disorders, risky alcohol drinking, ever having smoked tobacco daily, and fair to poor health were associated with early death among alcohol abstainers. Those without an obvious history of these risk factors had a life expectancy similar to that of low to moderate alcohol consumers. The findings speak against recommendations to drink alcohol for health reasons.

-https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003819

I tell my friends this story, and they ask the first question, a good question -- what about people like Seventh Day Adventists, or Muslims, they don't drink, why can't we use them? And the answer is the reason why health science is hard.

The reason you can't use groups of people who don't drink, is because that group would likely not represent the much larger group of, let's say, all the people in America. It doesn't even matter if it's a small group; making it bigger won't help. It doesn't work because it doesn't match. You can't compare the two groups because the people aren't the same. 

Another way we see this, and one which is becoming more evident to those who can fix it, is how certain groups of people (like undocumented immigrants) are under-represented in the data. If the majority of the datapoints are White, Christian and middle class, and you're none of those, then it's possible that the data is not relevant to you. Your baseline isn't represented, so whatever health effects you're trying to measure, they aren't being compared to someone like you. 

via Public Library of Science: John U, Rumpf H-J, Hanke M, Meyer C (2021) Alcohol abstinence and mortality in a general population sample of adults in Germany: A cohort study. PLoS Med 18(11): e1003819. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003819

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003819

Partially Related:

This is also a correlate to the story of how lead was discovered in the air -- a geochemist was trying to do such sensitive work (to measure the age of the Earth!) that he kept picking up extra lead in his results, and could not figure out where it was coming from. But it turns out that it was in the air, having been vaporized in the internal combustion engines in our cars. And that story implies that until then, all other experiments being done were "wrong" because they didn't exclude the excess lead from the otherwise "normal" background. 

Last One -- Palmar Sweating:

During a nuclear war scare (1950's), all experiments into palmar sweating at a research institute had to be abandoned because the base level of the response had become so abnormal that the tests would have been meaningless.  (p188)

-The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris, 1967

Measure This

I studied sustainable design in graduate school. By the end of my courses, before I even graduated, I was already disillusioned. The moment came during my last final exam. I was asked to run a carbon footprint calculator, inputting variables as close as possible to my living conditions, get the verdict on my contribution to the climate apocalypse (I think we were still calling it global warming at that time), and then give a critical opinion on the utility of such a thing as a carbon calculator. 

Image credit: Calculator, Encyclopedia Britannica

The purpose of the carbon calculator is to give you an idea about how "sustainable" your life is, and as a by-product, to give you some insight into how you can reduce your footprint. (And as I have now come to understand, the real reason for such a thing, by our own deception of course, is to deflect and divert the blame and the responsibility for this mess from consolidated corporate entities to private individuals, like me and you.)

They ask you questions about the square footage of your dwelling, number of windows, wall thickness and insulation values, and a million other things. I ran my numbers, got my expected dose of existential guilt, and proceeded to bash the buttons out of this carbon calculator with my recently-acquired knowledge of building performance, environmental control systems, and life cycle assessments of building materials. 

The calculator had good intentions, but I was just finishing a graduate program -- 7 years of studying how buildings use energy -- and I was not impressed.

For one, the calculator was asking the thickness of my walls and the insulation value (these are the number one variable in your energy usage*), but I was living in a basement at the time, so my walls were half buried in the ground, surrounded by the most insulating thing there is -- year-round 55-degree earth. They asked about square footage, but my ceiling was 12 inches lower than usual, because I was in a basement, which makes the volume of the room that needs to be heated/cooled substantially smaller; no metrics for ceiling height in the calculator. But that was just the beginning. They were asking questions about appliances and Energy Star ratings; I didn't even have a full-sized refrigerator, or a freezer, as a single adult, which is unusual to say the least. There was no option for "no freezer".

They never even got into food or food miles; 75% of my food at the time was coming from the bakery in town and the farm a half mile from my house. You eat a lot of food, which takes lots of energy, but the outsized bulk of that energy comes from moving it from the ground where it's grown to your mouth. I'm writing this from the New York metropolitan area; think how far that is from California, and how many miles per gallon, per pound of food you eat from Trader Joe's, and put that in your carbon calculator.

We had chickens; we fed them grain and they gave us eggs (and eventually chicken soup). Because so much of my food did not come from a supermarket, I had little garbage, and whatever garbage I had was composted or recycled; I didn't use the municipal garbage truck for 7 years. That wasn't measured in the calculator either. I rode my bike to get around as much as I could, and when I couldn't, I was driving a Honda Civic, one of the most fuel-efficient vehicles at the time. When I went on vacation, I took the bus instead of an airplane across the country. No vacation plans in the carbon calculator.  

I was into the challenge. I had joined together the nature-worshipping simplicity of Bodhi Thoreau with the science-based carbon accounting of the 21st century environmentalist movement. This wasn't just about buying an Energy Star refrigerator, this was about a way of life. I had rearranged in intricate detail myriad aspects of my life to lower my carbon impact, and yet my score on this calculator was pretty average.

I was pissed. And then I graduated. And then the American housing market collapsed, taking the world's economy with it, so I never did get a job as a sustainable architect. I survived nonetheless, and over the following decade, my unusual, low-impact, transcendental lifestyle changed by shades until I was putting ice cubes in my water (BTU points) and buying furniture from a store and not a garage sale (embodied energy points). I even had to start using an air conditioner because I moved out of the basement, and it got too hot sometimes, because you know, the climate apocalypse. 

I didn't give up on sustainability, but I did come to a realization about the individual approach to saving the planet -- it all evens out, and you're not making much of a difference. I'm not saying what you do has no effect, but I'll bet you don't realize that for just about every energy-saving task you commit yourself to, there's an energy-wasting by-product attached to that task on the other end that you don't even realize is there. You can't escape it; it's physics. The carbon calculator in the front of your mind is balanced by the calorie calculator in the back.

Just like the planet, we have limits too. And although we often ignore those limits, it doesn't make them go away. Keep filling that Solo cup at the backyard bbq, you know what I mean. Everything has to even out in the end. This report from the University of Geneva agrees:

Mental accounting is impacting sustainable behavior

Oct 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-mental-accounting-impacting-sustainable-behavior.html

"Human beings tend to create separate mental budget compartments where specific acts of consumption and payments are linked."

Hanging your clothes out to dry means you might be less likely to separate your recycling; your "sustainability budget" has been all used up. You just bought a brand new super-efficient air conditioner, so you're leaving all the windows open in the house, thinking you can afford a bit more waste now, with all that Energy Star bling.

They call it mental accounting in this report, but it's actually your subliminal physiological calorie counter that's running in the background of your front-end carbon calculator. "Being sustainable" takes energy, both mental and physical. Where do you think single-serving silverware came from?

The point here is to take it easy. I mean, the planet it is going to kill us for sure, but you're not going to stop it on your own by becoming a low-impact warrior. An electric car might help, maybe a weekday vegetarian? But to sacrifice your way of life at the altar of sustainability is not going to do what you think it's going to do. Carbon in, carbon out.

*Solar geometry is actually the most important of all, but it's too unlikely that you won't be able to do anything about. If you can, put the long side facing the south, with awnings angled to block the sun in the summer but allow it in the winter, i.e., solar geometry. 

Just the Gulf of Mexico, on fire. July 2021.

Notes:

via University of Geneva: Ulf J. J. Hahnel et al. Mental accounting mechanisms in energy decision-making and behaviour, Nature Energy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-020-00704-6

Post Script, on equilibrium and sociothermodynamics:

If you change the order of the questions on a survey, respondents will change their answer, BUT when compiling all the answers, they will always cancel out; ALWAYS, an absolute measure that is almost never seen in social science research: Quantum Question Equality, Network Address, 2014.

Mostly unrelated post script:

Lots of people think astrology and astronomy are the same thing: Astronomological, Network Address, 2014.