A Thousand Winds

千风之歌 - A Thousand Winds


source: http://ripple1978.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E3391D08951E33E!1377.entry
８６ 歲的李登輝首次在鏡頭前暢談生死觀，背景是一個人的教堂。他引用了日文歌曲《千風之歌》裡的一句，一言以蔽之概況了他對死亡的態度，「請別在我的墳前哭 泣，我不在那裡，我沒有沉睡在那裏，我已化為一千個風。」心內有所觸動，剛好前幾日在日本緯來台紅白大賽中截聽了此曲的後半段，旋律哀淡而清透，難得的催 人眩淚後繼爾能挺起胸膛，悲傷而不頹蘼。很震撼一曲詮釋死亡的音樂能帶給聽者這樣的感受。
新 聞報導的典故源自印弟安一對情侶，女人死後，男子欲相伴辭世循情，在清理愛侶遺物時發現她生前留下的詩篇，意勸情人好好地活下去，果然如亡者所願，男子不 再企圖自殺。但網路搜索的版本卻有更多種。真實已經不再重要。經典的東西總是在時光沉澱之後浸透出更濃郁的況味，超越人等與國度。
 
除了宗教力量，能夠告慰死亡的東西委實不多，很感激有一千個風，在「幸福後死不捨得，不幸時死不甘願；豐收後死不捨得，貧瘠時死不甘願」的生命步仗中，稍稍地卸下那份難於消彌的懼怕。
如果我的愛人先我而死，就當做他猶然活著的耳語，夜夜裏哼唱給我聽。如果我先死，這將是我的遺言，「最好你能忘記我，如果不能，那就唱這首歌。」 

评：千风之歌 李登辉生死观真情告白 凤凰视频 2008/01/08->01/05

千风之歌

请不要伫立在我坟前哭泣

我不在那里  我没有沉睡不醒 
化为千风  我已化身为千缕微风 
翱翔在无限宽广的天空里 
秋天  化身为阳光照射在田地间 
冬天  化身为白雪绽放钻石光芒 
晨曦升起时  幻化为飞鸟轻声唤醒你 
夜幕低垂时  幻化为星辰温柔守护你 
请不要伫立在我坟前哭泣 
我不在那里  我没有离开人间
化为千风  我已化身为千缕微风
翱翔在无限宽广的天空里 
化为千风  我已化身为千缕微风 
翱翔在无限宽广的天空里

化為千風 - Wikipedia
Do not stand at my grave and weep - Wikipedia

英文版──Do not stand at my grave and weep
by Mary Elizabeth Frye



I am not there, I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.


日文版──千の風になって
 私のお墓の前で 泣かないでください
そこに私はいません 眠ってなんかいません
千の風に千の風になって
あの大きな空を吹き渡っています

秋には光になって
畑にふりそそぐ
冬はダイヤのように きらめく雪になる
朝は鳥になって あなたを

目覚めさせる
夜は星になって あなたを見守る私のお墓の前で
泣かないでください
そこに私はいません 死んでなんかいません
中文版──千風之歌
請不要佇立在我的墓前哭泣
因為我並不在那裡
我並沒有沉睡不醒
而是化為千風
我已化身為千縷微風
翱翔在無限寬廣的天空裡

秋天
我化身為陽光
照射在田野間
冬天
我化身為白雪
綻放鑽石般的閃耀光芒

晨曦升起之際
我幻化為飛鳥
輕聲地喚醒你
夜幕低垂之時
我幻化成星辰
溫柔地守護你

請不要佇立在我的墓前哭泣
因為我並不在那裡
我並沒有沉睡不醒
而是化為千風
我已化身為千縷微風
翱翔在無限寬廣的天空裡

I Am A Thousand Winds:

Don't stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep
I am the sunlight on the ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain


I am a thousand winds
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glint on snow
I am a thousand winds that blow


Don't stand at my grave and cry
I am not there, I did not die
I am the swift rush of birds in flight
Soft stars that shine at night


I am a thousand winds
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glint on snow
I am a thousand winds that blow


Don't stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep
I am the sunlight on the ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain


I am a thousand winds
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glint on snow
I am a thousand winds that blow


I am the diamond glint on snow
I am a thousand winds that blow


  



Other version of wind s

不要站在我的墳前哭泣

我不在那，我未沉眠

我化為千風吹送著

我化為雪中閃耀的鑽石

我化為陽光灑落在成熟稻穀上

我化為綿綿的秋雨

當你在早晨的寧靜中醒來

我化為湍急的溪流

寧靜的鳥兒在上方盤旋

我化為溫柔的星星在夜晚閃耀著

不要站在我的墳前哭泣

我不在那，我還未離世

Reinventing Type 2 Diabetes: Pathogenesis, Treatment, and Prevention -- Unger 299 (10): 1185 -- JAMA

Reinventing Type 2 Diabetes: Pathogenesis, Treatment, and Prevention

JAMA has just put online the article by Professor Unger about the
lipocentric model of diabetes. Below is the direct link to the PDF.

http://elib.cdc.gov:2056/cgi/reprint/299/10/1185

Tips - Stata: -suest- for comparing regression coefficients between models

Tips - Stata: -suest- for  comparing regression coefficients between models

 

I found that 'suest' of Stata is a very useful command for comparing regression coefficients between different (separated) regression models EASILY. The most important, it can deal with complex survey data.

Enjoy!

 

http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?suest
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/code/suest.htm

 

suest is a postestimation command; see estcom and postest.

suest combines the estimation results -- parameter estimates and associated (co)variance matrices -- stored under namelist into one parameter vector and simultaneous (co)variance matrix of the sandwich/robust type. This (co)variance matrix is appropriate even if the estimates were obtained on the same or on overlapping data.

Typical applications of suest are tests for intramodel and cross-model hypotheses using test or testnl, for example, a generalized Hausman specification test. lincom and nlcom may be used after suest to estimate linear combinations and nonlinear functions of coefficients. suest may also be used to adjust a standard VCE for clustering or survey design effects.

Different estimators are allowed, for example, a regress model and a probit model; the only requirement is that predict produce equation-level scores with the score option after an estimation command. The models may be estimated on different samples, due either to explicit if or in selection or to missing values. If weights are applied, the same weights (type and values) should be applied to all models in namelist. The estimators should be estimated without vce(robust) or vce(cluster clustvar) options. suest returns the robust VCE, allows the vce(cluster clustvar) option, and automatically works with results from the svy prefix command (only for vce(linearized)).

Since suest posts its results like a proper estimation command, its results can be stored via estimates store. Moreover, like other estimation commands, suest typed without arguments replays the results.

The Missing Semicolon!

 

New edition of The Missing Semicolon

www.sys-seminar.com/publications_tms.php.

SAS technical newsletter put together by our expert SAS consultants and trainers

 

 

 

Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Vol. 6, No. 1, Mar 2008 is now available online

 

Liebert Online Table of Contents Alert
Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders
Volume: 6, Number: 1 Mar 2008

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	Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis and the Metabolic Syndrome
	Joy Jiang and Natalie Torok
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 1-7. Abstract | PDF (63 KB) | PDF Plus(102 KB)

	Metabolic Syndrome Status Changes with Fitness Level Change: A Retrospective Analysis
	Mark S. Maxwell, Brian R. Goslin, Ronald L. Gellish, Kenneth R. Hightower, Ronald E. Olson, Virinder K. Moudgil, and Gary D. Russi
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 8-14. Abstract | PDF (72 KB) | PDF Plus(82 KB)

	Prediabetes and its Relationship with Obesity in Mexican Adults: The Mexican Diabetes Prevention (MexDiab) Study
	Fernando Guerrero-Romero, Martha Rodríguez-Morán, Ricardo Pérez-Fuentes, María C. Sánchez-Guillén, Manuel González-Ortiz, Esperanza Martínez-Abundis, Olga Brito-Zurita, Agustín Madero, Benigno Figueroa, Cristina Revilla-Monsalve, Silvia E. Flores-Martínez, Sergio Islas-Andrade, Ramón A. Rascón-Pacheco, Miguel Cruz, and José Sánchez-Corona
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 15-23. Abstract | PDF (147 KB) | PDF Plus(126 KB)

	Genetic Variations at the CCAAT/Enhancer-binding Protein are Associated with Metabolic Phenotypes in the Japanese Population
	Hidesuke Kaji, Chika Fukano, Yukari Kimura, Etsuko Takiguchi, and Keiko Tanida
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 24-31. Abstract | PDF (76 KB) | PDF Plus(85 KB)

	Unlimited Energy, Restricted Carbohydrate Diet Improves Lipid Parameters in Obese Children
	Brian S. Dunlap and James R. Bailes, Jr.
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 32-36. Abstract | PDF (59 KB) | PDF Plus(67 KB)

	Comparisons of Metabolic Syndrome Definitions in Four Populations of the Asia-Pacific Region
	Crystal Man Ying Lee, Rachel R. Huxley, Mark Woodward, Paul Zimmet, Jonathan Shaw, Nam H. Cho, Hyung Rae Kim, Satu Viali, Makoto Tominaga, Dorte Vistisen, Knut Borch-Johnsen, and Stephen Colagiuri
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 37-46. Abstract | PDF (326 KB) | PDF Plus(145 KB)

	Serum Uric Acid and Components of the Metabolic Syndrome in Non-Diabetic Populations in Mauritian Indians and Creoles and in Chinese in Qingdao, China
	Hairong Nan, Qing Qiao, Stefan Söderberg, Weiguo Gao, Paul Zimmet, Jonathan Shaw, George Alberti, Yanhu Dong, Ulla Uusitalo, Vassen Pauvaday, Pierrot Chitson, and Jaakko Tuomilehto
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 47-57. Abstract | PDF (142 KB) | PDF Plus(123 KB)

	Metaboli Syndrome in Railway Employees and its Relation to Lifestyle Factors
	G.P. Parale, V.C. Patil, S.P. Patil, S.V. Sabale, C.V. Pethe, G.S. Manjunath, P.M. Kulkarni, V.N. Dhadke, and N.S. Deshpande
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 58-63. Abstract | PDF (64 KB) | PDF Plus(70 KB)

	Insulin, hs-CRP, Leptin, and Adiponectin. An Analysis of their Relationship to the Metabolic Syndrome in an Obese Population with an Elevated Waist Circumference
	Eric Yan, Steve Chen, Kurt Hong, Woo Sung Kim, Anita Bajpai, Leo Treyzon, Luigi Gratton, Robert Elashoff, He-Jing Wang, Zhaoping Li, and David Heber
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 64-73. Abstract | PDF (185 KB) | PDF Plus(134 KB)

	Dissertations
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 74-78. Citation | PDF (57 KB) | PDF Plus(57 KB)

	Abstracts
	Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Mar 2008, Vol. 6, No. 1: 79-83. Citation | PDF (58 KB) | PDF Plus(58 KB)

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©2008 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Technology Partner - Atypon Systems, Inc.

Screening for COPD

Screening for COPD (Ann Intern Med)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Clinical Guidelines
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Screening for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Using Spirometry: Summary of the Evidence for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Kenneth Lin, Bradley Watkins, Tamara Johnson, Joy Anne Rodriguez, and Mary B. Barton

Screening for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Using Spirometry: U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommendation Statement  U.S. Preventive Services Task Force    

Screening for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: US Preventive Services Task Force Recommendations

Cluster trial: Effectiveness of the diabetes education and self management

Thank you Bob for highlighting the 'cluster trial'. Seems they are on the right track of the design of a community interventional trial, aren't they?

_____________________________________________
From:  
Effectiveness of the diabetes education and self management for ongoing and newly diagnosed (DESMOND) programme for people with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes: cluster randomised controlled trial

M J Davies, S Heller, T C Skinner, M J Campbell, M E Carey, S Cradock, H M Dallosso, H Daly, Y Doherty, S Eaton, C Fox, L Oliver, K Rantell, G Rayman, K Khunti on behalf of the Diabetes Education and Self Management for Ongoing and Newly Diagnosed Collaborative

 << File: davies.pdf >>

Interesting article on behaviorial economics

What was I thinking? The latest reasoning about our irrational ways.
by Elizabeth Kolbert
 
A couple of months ago, I went on-line to order a book. The book had a list price of twenty-four dollars; Amazon was offering it for eighteen. I clicked to add it to my "shopping cart" and a message popped up on the screen. "Wait!" it admonished me. "Add $7.00 to your order to qualify for FREE Super Saver Shipping!" I was ordering the book for work; still, I hesitated. I thought about whether there were other books that I might need, or want. I couldn't think of any, so I got up from my desk, went into the living room, and asked my nine-year-old twins. They wanted a Tintin book. Since they already own a large stack of Tintins, it was hard to find one that they didn't have. They scrolled through the possibilities. After much discussion, they picked a three-in-one volume containing two adventures they had previously read. I clicked it into the shopping cart and checked out. By the time I was done, I had saved The New Yorker $3.99 in shipping charges. Meanwhile, I had cost myself $12.91.


Why do people do things like this? From the perspective of neoclassical economics, self-punishing decisions are difficult to explain. Rational calculators are supposed to consider their options, then pick the one that maximizes the benefit to them. Yet actual economic life, as opposed to the theoretical version, is full of miscalculations, from the gallon jar of mayonnaise purchased at spectacular savings to the billions of dollars Americans will spend this year to service their credit-card debt. The real mystery, it could be argued, isn't why we make so many poor economic choices but why we persist in accepting economic theory.
In "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" (Harper; $25.95), Dan Ariely, a professor at M.I.T., offers a taxonomy of financial folly. His approach is empirical rather than historical or theoretical. In pursuit of his research, Ariely has served beer laced with vinegar, left plates full of dollar bills in dorm refrigerators, and asked undergraduates to fill out surveys while masturbating. He claims that his experiments, and others like them, reveal the underlying logic to our illogic. "Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic," he writes. "We all make the same types of mistakes over and over." So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, he contends, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors. Offered FREE shipping, we take it, even when it costs us.


As an academic discipline, Ariely's field—behavioral economics—is roughly twenty-five years old. It emerged largely in response to work done in the nineteen-seventies by the Israeli-American psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. (Ariely, too, grew up in Israel.) When they examined how people deal with uncertainty, Tversky and Kahneman found that there were consistent biases to the responses, and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts, or what they called "heuristics." Some of these heuristics were pretty obvious—people tend to make inferences from their own experiences, so if they've recently seen a traffic accident they will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash—but others were more surprising, even downright wacky. For instance, Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects to estimate what proportion of African nations were members of the United Nations. They discovered that they could influence the subjects' responses by spinning a wheel of fortune in front of them to generate a random number: when a big number turned up, the estimates suddenly swelled.


Though Tversky and Kahneman's research had no direct bearing on economics, its implications for the field were disruptive. Can you really regard people as rational calculators if their decisions are influenced by random numbers? (In 2002, Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize—Tversky had died in 1996—for having "integrated insights from psychology into economics, thereby laying the foundation for a new field of research.")
Over the years, Tversky and Kahneman's initial discoveries have been confirmed and extended in dozens of experiments. In one example, Ariely and a colleague asked students at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management to write the last two digits of their Social Security number at the top of a piece of paper. They then told the students to record, on the same paper, whether they would be willing to pay that many dollars for a fancy bottle of wine, a not-so-fancy bottle of wine, a book, or a box of chocolates. Finally, the students were told to write down the maximum figure they would be willing to spend for each item. Once they had finished, Ariely asked them whether they thought that their Social Security numbers had had any influence on their bids. The students dismissed this idea, but when Ariely tabulated the results he found that they were kidding themselves. The students whose Social Security number ended with the lowest figures—00 to 19—were the lowest bidders. For all the items combined, they were willing to offer, on average, sixty-seven dollars. The students in the second-lowest group—20 to 39—were somewhat more free-spending, offering, on average, a hundred and two dollars. The pattern continued up to the highest group—80 to 99—whose members were willing to spend an average of a hundred and ninety-eight dollars, or three times as much as those in the lowest group, for the same items.
This effect is called "anchoring," and, as Ariely points out, it punches a pretty big hole in microeconomics. When you walk into Starbucks, the prices on the board are supposed to have been determined by the supply of, say, Double Chocolaty Frappuccinos, on the one hand, and the demand for them, on the other. But what if the numbers on the board are influencing your sense of what a Double Chocolaty Frappuccino is worth? In that case, price is not being determined by the interplay of supply and demand; price is, in a sense, determining itself.


Another challenge to standard economic thinking arises from what has become known as the "endowment effect." To probe this effect, Ariely, who earned one of his two Ph.D.s at Duke, exploited the school's passion for basketball. Blue Devils fans who had just won tickets to a big game through a lottery were asked the minimum amount that they would accept in exchange for them. Fans who had failed to win tickets through the same lottery were asked the maximum amount that they would be willing to offer for them.
"From a rational perspective, both the ticket holders and the non-ticket holders should have thought of the game in exactly the same way," Ariely observes. Thus, one might have expected that there would be opportunities for some of the lucky and some of the unlucky to strike deals. But whether or not a lottery entrant had been "endowed" with a ticket turned out to powerfully affect his or her sense of its value. One of the winners Ariely contacted, identified only as Joseph, said that he wouldn't sell his ticket for any price. "Everyone has a price," Ariely claims to have told him. O.K., Joseph responded, how about three grand? On average, the amount that winners were willing to accept for their tickets was twenty-four hundred dollars. On average, the amount that losers were willing to offer was only a hundred and seventy-five dollars. Out of a hundred fans, Ariely reports, not a single ticket holder would sell for a price that a non-ticket holder would pay.


Whatever else it accomplishes, "Predictably Irrational" demonstrates that behavioral economists are willing to experiment on just about anybody. One of the more compelling studies described in the book involved trick-or-treaters. A few Halloweens ago, Ariely laid in a supply of Hershey's Kisses and two kinds of Snickers—regular two-ounce bars and one-ounce miniatures. When the first children came to his door, he handed each of them three Kisses, then offered to make a deal. If they wanted to, the kids could trade one Kiss for a mini-Snickers or two Kisses for a full-sized bar. Almost all of them took the deal and, proving their skills as sugar maximizers, opted for the two-Kiss trade. At some point, Ariely shifted the terms: kids could now trade one of their three Kisses for the larger bar or get a mini-Snickers without giving up anything. In terms of sheer chocolatiness, the trade for the larger bar was still by far the better deal. But, faced with the prospect of getting a mini-Snickers for nothing, the trick-or-treaters could no longer reckon properly. Most of them refused the trade, even though it cost them candy. Ariely speculates that behind the kids' miscalculation was anxiety. As he puts it, "There's no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE! item (it's free)." Tellingly, when Ariely performed a similar experiment on adults, they made the same mistake. "If I were to distill one main lesson from the research described in this book, it is that we are all pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend," he writes.


A few weeks ago, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its figures for 2007. They showed that Americans had collectively amassed ten trillion one hundred and eighty-four billion dollars in disposable income and spent very nearly all of it—ten trillion one hundred and thirty-two billion dollars. This rate of spending was somewhat lower than the rate in 2006, when Americans spent all but thirty-nine billion dollars of their total disposable income.


According to standard economic theory, the U.S. savings rate also represents rational choice: Americans, having reviewed their options, have collectively resolved to spend virtually all the money that they have. According to behavioral economists, the low savings rate has a more immediate explanation: it proves—yet again—that people have trouble acting in their own best interests. It's worth noting that Americans, even as they continue to spend, say that they should be putting more money away; one study of participants in 401(k) plans found that more than two-thirds believed their savings rate to be "too low."
In the forthcoming "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" (Yale; $25), Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein follow behavioral economics out of the realm of experiment and into the realm of social policy. Thaler and Sunstein both teach at the University of Chicago, Thaler in the graduate school of business and Sunstein at the law school. They share with Ariely the belief that, faced with certain options, people will consistently make the wrong choice.Therefore, they argue, people should be offered options that work with, rather than against, their unreasoning tendencies. These foolish-proof choices they label "nudges." (A "nudge," they note with scholarly care, should not be confused with a "noodge.")


A typical "nudge" is a scheme that Thaler and Sunstein call "Save More Tomorrow." One of the reasons people have such a hard time putting money away, the authors say, is that they are loss-averse. They are pained by any reduction in their take-home pay—even when it's going toward their own retirement. Under "Save More Tomorrow," employees commit to contributing a greater proportion of their paychecks to their retirement over time, but the increases are scheduled to coincide with their annual raises, so their paychecks never shrink. (The "Save More Tomorrow" scheme was developed by Thaler and the U.C.L.A. economist Shlomo Benartzi, back in 1996, and has already been implemented by several thousand retirement plans.)


People aren't just loss-averse; they are also effort-averse. They hate having to go to the benefits office, pick up a bunch of forms, fill them out, and bring them all the way back. As a consequence, many eligible employees fail to enroll in their companies' retirement plans, or delay doing so for years. (This is the case, research has shown, even at companies where no employee contribution is required.) Thaler and Sunstein propose putting this sort of inertia to use by inverting the choice that's presented. Instead of having to make the trip to the benefits office to opt in, employees should have to make that trip only if they want to opt out. The same basic argument holds whenever a so-called default option is provided. For instance, most states in the U.S. require that those who want to become organ donors register their consent; in this way, many potential donors are lost. An alternative—used, for example, in Austria—is to make consent the default option, and put the burden of registering on those who do not wish to be donors. (It has been estimated that if every state in the U.S. simply switched from an "explicit consent" to a "presumed consent" system several thousand lives would be saved each year.)


"Nudges" could also involve disclosure requirements. To discourage credit-card debt, for instance, Thaler and Sunstein recommend that cardholders receive annual statements detailing how much they have already squandered in late fees and interest. To encourage energy conservation, they propose that new cars come with stickers showing how many dollars' worth of gasoline they are likely to burn through in five years of driving.
Many of the suggestions in "Nudge" seem like good ideas, and even, as with "Save More Tomorrow," practical ones. The whole project, though, as Thaler and Sunstein acknowledge, raises some pretty awkward questions. If the "nudgee" can't be depended on to recognize his own best interests, why stop at a nudge? Why not offer a "push," or perhaps even a "shove"? And if people can't be trusted to make the right choices for themselves how can they possibly be trusted to make the right decisions for the rest of us?
Like neoclassical economics, much democratic theory rests on the assumption that people are rational. Here, too, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Voters, it has been demonstrated, are influenced by factors ranging from how names are placed on a ballot to the jut of a politician's jaw. A 2004 study of New York City primary-election results put the advantage of being listed first on the ballot for a local office at more than three per cent—enough of a boost to turn many races. (For statewide office, the advantage was around two per cent.) A 2005 study, conducted by psychologists at Princeton, showed that it was possible to predict the results of congressional contests by using photographs. Researchers presented subjects with fleeting images of candidates' faces. Those candidates who, in the subjects' opinion, looked more "competent" won about seventy per cent of the time.


When it comes to public-policy decisions, people exhibit curious—but, once again, predictable—biases. They value a service (say, upgrading fire equipment) more when it is described in isolation than when it is presented as part of a larger good (say, improving disaster preparedness). They are keen on tax "bonuses" but dislike tax "penalties," even though the two are functionally equivalent. They are more inclined to favor a public policy when it is labelled the status quo. In assessing a policy's benefits, they tend to ignore whole orders of magnitude. In an experiment demonstrating this last effect, sometimes called "scope insensitivity," subjects were told that migrating birds were drowning in ponds of oil. They were then asked how much they would pay to prevent the deaths by erecting nets. To save two thousand birds, the subjects were willing to pay, on average, eighty dollars. To save twenty thousand birds, they were willing to pay only seventy-eight dollars, and to save two hundred thousand birds they were willing to pay eighty-eight dollars.
What is to be done with information like this? We can try to become more aware of the patterns governing our blunders, as "Predictably Irrational" urges. Or we can try to prod people toward more rational choices, as "Nudge" suggests. But if we really are wired to make certain kinds of mistakes, as Thaler and Sunstein and Ariely all argue, we will, it seems safe to predict, keep finding new ways to make them. (Ariely confesses that he recently bought a thirty-thousand-dollar car after reading an ad offering FREE oil changes for the next three years.)


If there is any consolation to take from behavioral economics—and this impulse itself probably counts as irrational—it is that irrationality is not always altogether a bad thing. What we most value in other people, after all, has little to do with the values of economics. (Who wants a friend or a lover who is too precise a calculator?) Some of the same experiments that demonstrate people's weak-mindedness also reveal, to use a quaint term, their humanity. One study that Ariely relates explored people's willingness to perform a task for different levels of compensation. Subjects were willing to help out—moving a couch, performing a tedious exercise on a computer—when they were offered a reasonable wage. When they were offered less, they were less likely to make an effort, but when they were asked to contribute their labor for nothing they started trying again. People, it turns out, want to be generous and they want to retain their dignity—even when it doesn't really make sense.

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors

 

 The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors

By JOHN TIERNEY
The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question:

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.
He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.
He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.
Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).
The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go.. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.
You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.
Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.
In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.
As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.
Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.
They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.
Why were they so attached to those doors? The players, like the parents of that overscheduled piano student, would probably say they were just trying to keep future options open. But that’s not the real reason, according to Dr. Ariely and his collaborator in the experiments, Jiwoong Shin, an economist who is now at Yale.
They plumbed the players’ motivations by introducing yet another twist. This time, even if a door vanished from the screen, players could make it reappear whenever they wanted. But even when they knew it would not cost anything to make the door reappear, they still kept frantically trying to prevent doors from vanishing.
Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.
“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.
“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.”
Dr. Ariely, one of the most prolific authors in his field, does not pretend that he is above this problem himself. When he was trying to decide between job offers from M.I.T. and Stanford, he recalls, within a week or two it was clear that he and his family would be more or less equally happy in either place. But he dragged out the process for months because he became so obsessed with weighing the options.
“I’m just as workaholic and prone to errors as anyone else,” he says.. “I have way too many projects, and it would probably be better for me and the academic community if I focused my efforts. But every time I have an idea or someone offers me a chance to collaborate, I hate to give it up.”
So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”
Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.
If the general’s tactics seem too crude, Dr. Ariely recommends another role model, Rhett Butler, for his supreme moment of unpredictable rationality at the end of his marriage. Scarlett, like the rest of us, can’t bear the pain of giving up an option, but Rhett recognizes the marriage’s futility and closes the door with astonishing elan. Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.

Use of Alternative Thresholds Defining Insulin Resistance to Predict Incident Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and Cardiovascular Disease -- Rutter et al. 117 (8): 1003 -- Circulation

Use of Alternative Thresholds Defining Insulin Resistance to Predict Incident Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and Cardiovascular Disease
Source: Circulation

Background- The performance characteristics of surrogate insulin resistance (IR) measures, commonly defined as the top 25% of the measure's distribution, used to predict incident type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) have not been critically assessed in community samples.  Methods and Results- Baseline IR was assessed among 2720 Framingham Offspring Study subjects by use of fasting insulin, the homeostasis model assessment of IR (HOMA-IR), and the reciprocal of the Gutt insulin sensitivity index, with 7- to 11-year follow-up for incident DM (130 cases) or CVD (235). Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, sensitivity, specificity, and positive likelihood ratio were estimated at 12 diagnostic thresholds (quantiles) of IR measures. Positive likelihood ratios for DM or CVD increased in relation to IR quantiles; risk gradients were greater for DM than for CVD, with no 9th to 10th quantile (76th centile) threshold effects. IR had better discrimination for incident DM than for CVD (HOMA-IR area under the receiver operating characteristic curve: DM 0.80 versus CVD 0.63). The HOMA-IR 76th centile threshold was associated with these test-performance values: sensitivity (DM 68%, CVD 40%), specificity (DM 77%, CVD 76%), and positive likelihood ratio (DM 3.0, CVD 1.7). The HOMA-IR threshold that yielded >90% sensitivity was the 6th quantile for DM prediction and the 3rd quantile for CVD. Compared with the 76th centile threshold, these alternative thresholds yielded lower specificity (DM 43%, CVD 17%) and positive likelihood ratios (DM 1.6, CVD 1.1).  Conclusions- Surrogate IR measures have modest performance at the 76th centile, with no threshold effects. Different centile thresholds might be selected to optimize sensitivity versus specificity for DM versus CVD prediction if  surrogate IR measures are used for risk prediction.

Healthy behaviors=14 yr advantage in survival

Combined Impact of Health Behaviours and Mortality in Men and Women: The EPIC-Norfolk Prospective Population Study Background
There is overwhelming evidence that behavioural factors influence health, but their
combined impact on the general population is less well documented. We aimed to quantify the
potential combined impact of four health behaviours on mortality in men and women living in
the general community.

Methods and Findings
We examined the prospective relationship between lifestyle and mortality in a prospective
population study of 20,244 men and women aged 45–79 y with no known cardiovascular
disease or cancer at baseline survey in 1993–1997, living in the general community in the
United Kingdom, and followed up to 2006. Participants scored one point for each health
behaviour: current non-smoking, not physically inactive, moderate alcohol intake (1–14 units a
week) and plasma vitamin C .50 mmol/l indicating fruit and vegetable intake of at least five
servings a day, for a total score ranging from zero to four. After an average 11 y follow-up, the
age-, sex-, body mass–, and social class–adjusted relative risks (95% confidence intervals) for allcause
mortality(1,987 deaths) for men and women who had three, two, one, and zero
compared to four health behaviours were respectively, 1.39 (1.21–1.60), 1.95 (1.70–-2.25), 2.52
(2.13–3.00), and 4.04 (2.95–5.54) p , 0.001 trend. The relationships were consistent in
subgroups stratified by sex, age, body mass index, and social class, and after excluding deaths
within 2 y. The trends were strongest for cardiovascular causes. The mortality risk for those with
four compared to zero health behaviours was equivalent to being 14 y younger in
chronological age.
Conclusions
Four health be haviours combined predict a 4-fold difference in total mortality in men and
women, with an estimated impact equivalent to 14 y in chronological age.

Article of interest

How Much of the Recent Decline in the Incidence of
Myocardial Infarction in British Men Can Be Explained
by Changes in Cardiovascular Risk Factors?
Evidence From a Prospective Population-Based Study
Sarah L. Hardoon, MSc etc.

Background—The incidence of myocardial infarction (MI) in Britain has fallen markedly in recent years. Few studies have  investigated the extent to which this decline can be explained by concurrent changes in major cardiovascular risk factors.
Methods and Results—The British Regional Heart Study examined changes in cardiovascular risk factors and MI  incidence over 25 years from 1978 in a cohort of 7735 men. During this time, the age-adjusted hazard of MI decreased by 3.8% (95% confidence interval 2.6% to 5.0%) per annum, which corresponds to a 62% decline over the 25 years. At the same time, after adjustment for age, cigarette smoking prevalence, mean systolic blood pressure, and mean non–high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol decreased, whereas mean HDL cholesterol, mean body mass index, and
physical activity levels rose. No significant change occurred in alcohol consumption. The fall in cigarette smoking explained the greatest part of the decline in MI incidence (23%), followed by changes in blood pressure (13%), HDL cholesterol (12%), and non-HDL cholesterol (10%). In combination, 46% (approximate 95% confidence interval 23% to 164%) of the decline in MI could be explained by these risk factor changes. Physical activity and alcohol consumption had little influence, whereas the increase in body mass index would have produced a rise in MI risk.
Conclusions—Modest favorable changes in the major cardiovascular risk factors appear to have contributed to considerable reductions in MI incidence. This highlights the potential value of population-wide measures to reduce exposure to these risk factors in the prevention of coronary heart disease. (Circulation. 2008;117:598-604.)

The second study is about barker's hypothesis and the funding of the children's health study

Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?

Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good? Research suggests that, except among high-risk heart patients, the benefits of statins such as Lipitor are overstated

TEXAS Trivia

Need to be cheered up?
Happy, Texas 79042
Pep , Texas 79353
Smiley , Texas 78159
Paradise , Texas 76073
Rainbow , Texas 76077
Sweet Home , Texas 77987
Comfort , Texas 78013
Friendship, Texas 76530

Love the Sun?
Sun City , Texas 78628
Sunrise , Texas 76661
Sunset, Texas 76270
Sundown, Texas 79372
Sunray , Texas 79086
Sunny Side , Texas 77423

Want something to eat?
Bacon , Texas 76301
Noodle , Tex as 79536
Oatmeal , Texas 78605
Turkey , Texas 79261
Trout , Texas 75789
Sugar Land , Texas 77479
Salty, Texas 76567
Rice , Texas 75155
And top it off with:
Sweetwater , Texas 79556

Why travel to other cities? Texas has them all!
Detroit , Texas 75436
Colorado City , Texas 79512<
Denver City , Texas 79323
Klondike , Texas 75448
Nevada , Texas 75173
Memphis , Texas 79245
Miami , Texas 79059
Boston , Texas 75570
Santa Fe , Texas 77517
Tennessee Colony , Texas 75861
Reno , Texas 75462

Feel like traveling outside the country? Don't bother buying a plane ticket!
Athens , Texas 75751
Canadian, Texas 79014
China , Texas 77613
Egypt , Texas 77436
Ireland , Texas 76538
Turkey , Texas 79261
London , Texas 76854
New London , Texas 75682
Paris , Texas 75460

No need to travel to Washington D.C.
Whitehouse , Texas 75791

We even have a city named after our planet!
Earth , Texas 79031

And a city named after our State!
Texas City , Texas 77590

Exhausted?
Energy , Texas 76452

Cold?
Blanket , Texas 76432
Winters, Texas

Like to read a bout Histo ry?
Santa Anna , Texas
Goliad , Texas
Alamo , Texas
Gun Barrel City , Texas
Robert lee, Texas

Need Office Supplies?
Staples, Texas 78670

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus , Texas 76084

You guessed it..it's on the state line..
Texline , Texas 79087

For the kids...
Kermit , Texas 79745
Elmo , Texas 75118
Nemo , Texas 76070
Tarzan , Texas 79783
Winnie , Texas 77665
Sylvester , Texas 79560

Other city names in Texas , to make you smile.....
Frognot , Texas 75424
Bigfoot , Texas 78005
Hogeye , Texas 75423
Cactus , Texas 79013
Notrees , Texas 79759
Best, Texas 76932
Veribest , Texas 76886
Kickapoo , Tex as 75763
Dime Box , Texas 77853
Old Dime Box , Texas 77853
Telephone , Texas 75488
Telegraph , Texas 76883
Whiteface , Texas 79379
Twitty, Texas 79079

And last but not least, the Anti-Al Gore City
Kilgore , Texas 75662

And our favorites...
Cut n Shoot, Texas
Gun Barrell City , Texas</ SPAN>
Hoop And Holler, Texas
Ding Dong, Texas and, of co urse,
Muleshoe , Texas


Here is what Jeff Foxworthy has to say about folks from Texas ...
If someone in a Lowe's store offers you assistance and they don't work there, you may live in Texas ;
If you've worn shorts and a parka at the same time, you may live in Texas ;
If you've had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong number, you may live in Texas ;
If "Vacation" means going anywhere south of Dallas for the weekend, you may live in Texas;
If you measure distance in hours, you may live in Texas;
If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you may live in Texas ;
If you install security lights on your house and garage, but leave both unlocked, you may live in Texas ;
If you carry jumper cables in your car and your wife knows how to use them, you may live in Texas ;
If the speed limit on the highway is 55 mph -- you're going 80 and everybody's passing you, you may live in Texas ;
If you find 60 degrees "a little chilly," you may live in Texas ;
If you actually understand these jokes, and share them with all your Texas friends, you definitely live in Texas .


Here are some little known, very interesting facts about Texas .
1. Beaumont to El Paso : 742 miles
2. Beaumont to Chicago : 770 miles
3. El Paso is closer to California than to Dallas
4. World's first rodeo was in Pecos , July 4, 1883.
5. The Flagship Hotel in Galveston is the only hotel in North America built over water.
6. The Heisman Trophy w s named after John William Heisman who was the first full-time coach at Rice University in Houston .
7. Brazoria County has more species of birds than any other area in North America .
8. Arans as Wildlife Refuge is the winter home of North America 's only remaining flock of whooping cranes.
9. Jalapeno jelly originated in Lake Jackson in 1978.
10. The worst natur al disaster in U.S . history was in 1900, caused by a hurricane, in which over 8,000 lives were lost on Galveston Island .
11. The first word spoken from the moon, July 20, 1969, was " Houston .."
12. King Ranch in South Texas is larger than Rhode Island .
13. Tropical Storm Claudette brought a U.S. rainfall record of 43" in 24 hours in and around Alvin in July of 1979.
14. Texas is the only state to enter the U.S. by TREATY, (known as the Constitution of 1845 by the Republic of Texas to enter the Union ) instead of by annexation. This allows the Texas Flag to fly at the same height as the U.S. Flag, and may divide into 5 states.
15. A Live Oak tree near Fulton is estimated to be 1500 years old.
16. Caddo Lake is the only natural lake in the state.
17. Dr Pepper was invented in Waco in 1885. There is no period in Dr Pepper.
18. Texas has had six capital cities: Washington-on-the Brazos, Harrisburg , Galveston , Velasco, West Columbia and Austin .
19. The Capitol Dome in Austin is the only dome in the U.S. which is taller than the Capitol Building in Washington DC (by 7 feet).
20. The name " Texas " comes from the Hasini Indian word "tejas" meaning friends. Tejas is not Spanish for Texas .
21. The State Mascot is the Armadillo (an interesting bit of trivia about the armadillo is they always have four babies. They have one egg, which splits into four, and they either have four males or four females.).
22. The first domed stadium in the U.S. was the Astrodome in Houston .

Cowboy's Ten Commandments posted on the wall at Cross Trails Church in Fairlie , Texas :
(1) Just one God.
(2) Honor yer Ma & Pa.
(3) No telling tales or gossipin'.
(4) Git yourself to Sunday meeting.
(5) Put nothin' before God.
(6) No foolin' around with another fellow's gal.
(7) No killin'.
(8) Watch yer mouth.
(9) Don't take what ain't yers.
(10) Don't be hankerin' for yer buddy's stuff

Now that's kinda plain an' simple don't ya think?

Assessment of Child and Adolescent Overweight and Obesity
-- Krebs et al. 120 (4): S193 -- Pediatrics
Here's a 36-page review, incl 336 citations. It purports to review assessment methods, and indeed it includes skinfolds and WC. But it avoids mentioning waist-to-height so far as I can tell.
I think that's strange for such a comprehensive review article.