Friday Foolery #29: The European Rats' Underpants

First, a bad joke I heard in Fairbanks, Alaska:

Question: How is going to the bathroom an international experience?

Answer: You Russian to the American, then European!
(say it out loud & slow down the nationalities if you don't get it)

As a librarian, I was slightly miffed that our online staff newsletter that brought us this gem (If you're brave you can order this or the penguin poo T-shirt) did not give us the author's name, journal title, or even a date for the actual scientific research conducted by a urologist that involved real rats wearing real rat underpants. The squirrels are so behind.

...um yeah, so why did you have to torture us with that lame joke?

Thanks to the ubiquity of 'rat underpants', I found the research citation and my beloved husband (who was present during the bad Alaskan joke) exploded with laughter for it is

Shafik, A. "Effect of different types of textiles on sexual activity. Experimental study." European Urology 1993;24(3):375-80. (PubMed ID) PMID 8262106 if you don't believe me.

The abstract begins:

The effect of wearing different types of textiles on sexual activity was studied in 75 rats which were divided into five equal groups: four test groups and one control. Each of the four test groups were dressed in one type of textile pants made of either 100% polyester, 50/50% polyester/cotton mix, 100% cotton or 100% wool. Sexual behaviour was assessed before and after 6 and 12 months of wearing the pants and 6 months after their removal.

Bottom line: Nobody performed well with polyester. Duh.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, you were listening to All Things Considered on National Public Radio just over a year ago on April 9, 2008.

It is a good thing with my current part-time schedule that I'm not on the reference desk because I would be hard pressed to keep a straight face if someone asked me for European Urology in the near future.

University of Washington Library Research Award for Undergraduates

Are (or were) you a University of Washington student with an awesome research project between the Spring 2008-2009 quarters who knows and shows the significant resources of the UW Library system in your work? Perhaps you're a faculty member who has a student or otherwise know of a UW student who does?



I encourage students to apply for the Library Research Award for Undergraduates with faculty support if so. The deadline is May 18, 2009 and the project doesn't have to be 100% complete right now in order to begin the application process.

Even if you're not in the UW community check out the great Faculty Toolkit on how to design effective research assignments that include strategies for lifelong best practices for research. I certainly fell in the 'trial and error' undergraduate research category and it was only by chance I received some helpful advice along the way from my professors.

By the time they are ready to graduate, many students have learned new research strategies through trial and error in several different courses. They learned that the research process is recursive---looking forward to analysis, back to the research questions, then returning to the data/readings. But students tell us that this learning could have occurred more smoothly, and earlier, if they'd gotten experienced researchers' help with three challenges posed by the research task:

• constructing an inquiry's focus;
• making sense of the chaos of data or readings; and
• composing the report of findings or the argument.

Full disclosure: I had heard of but not known the details about this award until I received an email from the award's co-chairs that included "Librarians who teach, write blogs or newsletters, or meet with faculty and students have been key to encouraging students to apply and faculty to get involved, too." How cool is that acknowledgment of the value of librarian bloggers?

More journalism news: A cup of Google tea with your Brazilian Second Life avatar?

I first learned via Wired Campus that Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard, supposedly claimed that conducting two Google searches produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as bringing a kettle of water to a full boil. Since this was published in the United Kingdom's The Sunday Times (not to be confused with high quality journalism if you're unfamiliar with the UK), I guess they went with the tea aspect to appeal to their audience despite the fact that Harvard's up the road from the Boston Tea Party. Has anyone done an environmental impact study on that one?

I digress. I'll do that a lot with this particular entry, but it's to make a point about the authenticity of journalism when it comes to scientific research. Google replied via their blog that this wasn't the case, a single Google search only generates .2 grams of carbon dioxide.

According to Technology News, Mr. Wissner-Gross spent the majority of Monday trying to state the facts about his research study and how it was reported in The Sunday Times, among them these

One problem: the study's author, Harvard University physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, says he never mentions Google in the study. "For some reason, in their story on the study, the Times had an ax to grind with Google," Wissner-Gross told TechNewsWorld. "Our work has nothing to do with Google. Our focus was exclusively on the Web overall, and we found that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a Web site."

And the example involving tea kettles? "They did that. I have no idea where they got those statistics," Wissner-Gross said.

Why Google in particular? I think Mr. Wissner-Gross nailed it on the head:

The short answer is, it's a really easy way to sell papers. Google is a very successful company and it's a very easy way to get readership by making grandiose claims about them.

A closer look at the Sunday Times article brings up a familiar hodgepodge journalism style I've had issues with before at Pew Internet: citing research from a respected authority source, then bringing in components of a completely different story and blending it all together as one. The Sunday Times' additional claims:

Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.

“It’s not an unreasonable comparison,” said Liam Newcombe, an expert on data centres at the British Computer Society. “It tells us how much energy westerners use on entertainment versus the energy poverty in some countries.”

Though energy consumption by computers is growing - and the rate of growth is increasing - Newcombe argues that what matters most is the type of usage.

If your internet use is in place of more energy-intensive activities, such as driving your car to the shops, that’s good. But if it is adding activities and energy consumption that would not otherwise happen, that may pose problems.

Newcombe cites Second Life and Twitter, a rapidly growing website whose 3m users post millions of messages a month.

Personally, I'm surprised they didn't go after the #1 online bandwidth, energy and productivity-sucker there is according to my completely unscientific research and observation of my colleagues: checking out a suggested YouTube video then nonchalantly surfing the Related Videos that pop up after it.

My apologies if YouTube is blocked at your particular location due to those who have gone before you; and my suggestion on a quick way to make donuts per the embedded video below:



Where did you end up after that, if not at Krispy Kreme or trying not to sing 'b0rk b0rk b0rk' aloud while flinging pens at your colleagues?

Bottom line: Study the original research study publication whenever possible, especially if the soundbite you're picking up via a retweet on Twitter or an RSS headline news blurb is too catchy to be true, and question the credibility of all parties involved.

My soft spot: Healthcare journalism

With all the current discussion regarding Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, as the nominee for Surgeon General under President-elect Barack Obama, I thought I'd offer a glimpse into my own history for the perspective I'm coming from regarding healthcare and journalism.

In the fall of 1995, I was a young and idealistic student at Sonoma State University and part of Project Censored. Each week we received a stack of paper news media reports to review and match against selection criteria, then discussed them the following week to see if further research (mostly on the Nexis database in the library which contained records of news stories for journalists, quite different from what LexisNexis is now) would be justified to forward it to the much smaller batch of articles a national panel of journalism experts would review & vote to be one of the top 25 underreported stories of the year. The exact criteria and methodology of review have since changed, although so has the news media and the accessibility of information in ways I don't think we could even comprehend over 13 years ago. I was the last class with founder Carl Jensen & am no longer too familiar with the direction Project Censored (now under the Sociology department instead of Communication Studies) has gone since then.

The often-cited 2000 To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System report about medical errors being the 3rd highest killer in the United States? Old news to me by 5 years at that point. Two articles that ended up being combined into one and voted #12 for the spring 1996 book (1995 news stories) were in my article stacks: 180,000 Patients Die Annually From Treatment in Hospitals, based in part on a July 1995 JAMA adverse drug events (ADE) study. I apologize for the typos/funky wording in that HTML copy which may be from an optical character resolution (OCR) scan that wasn't post-edited well. I guarantee I used proper grammar in all text I wrote above my name. Can you see my writing style there? I still can. I used way too many commas in my youth and now I only use slightly too many... right? I remember balking at the emphasis on the names and careers of individuals in Chicago but being overridden by higher ups who wanted the personal touch in there.

Investigative journalism and librarianship are not all that far removed in the ability to research with ruthless efficiency under tight deadlines. Where there is a drastic difference between the fields is the pressure in journalism to not have your corporate owners, board members and advertisers look bad and lose revenue as a result of your research. For medical librarians (or any specialization), think about the amount of time you have personally invested in learning the medical and health care field, the information needs in it, and the specialized tools of the trade to be an effective researcher there. Journalists, even those with an MD or focused on health issues, do not usually have such background training nor much time or comprehensive access to the information sources we librarians do. Industry deregulation and the rate of media mergers that was a concern in the 1990s is eclipsed by the extent of the corporate media empires today.

This is why I can't offer an opinion about Dr. Gupta; I never watch CNN. It is hurting greatly in this economy but we always have and will continue to subscribe to a daily & Sunday print newspaper, The Seattle Times, from the independent and family-owned Seattle Times Company. They did an excellent job of researching methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the state of Washington that led to the Department of Health announcing they would track MRSA rates as I mentioned in November. It's no longer common to see investigative journalism stories in corporate media since it takes a substantial amount of time and money to do the research for them... and you must also watch your back. This is why I hope people will continue to understand the value in and support independent media sources. They are truly better for our health!

Research talk: What is the role of informatics in cancer care?

One of the greatest delights of working in an academic environment is never knowing what fascinating research may unexpectedly cross paths with you each week. Last year I held a lunar meteorite, which will probably retain the OMG COOL award for life because how often do you get to wrap your arms around a very heavy chunk of the Moon? I will never forget how I and everyone else around me was beaming with happiness approaching rapture at being able to do so.

While not quite as exciting as a lunar meteorite, being invited to research discussions by those who are passionate about their field and how their projects can help people is equally interesting to me. On Friday I was pleased to be able to attend a research conversation with Dr. Kent Unruh, a senior fellow with the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the School of Medicine here at the University of Washington.

This was a reprise of his 2008 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) symposium presentation earlier this month of Barriers to Organizing Information during Cancer Care: I don't know how people do it, abstract of

People organize their personal information to conceptualize what they know,
enhance information retrieval in the future, and cue or remember tasks in
everyday life. However, studies also suggest that organizing is difficult and
people fail to use their information effectively for emergent tasks. In the
health-care domain, patients face grave consequences if they cannot access and
use information effectively. Arguably, patients have access to more information
about their health than at any previous point in history. However, information
access is only the first step to managing health care needs. Patients must
organize it effectively to support the underlying tasks required to manage their
health proactively. Ironically, ever-increasing access to information
exacerbates the challenges patients face in using information effectively. In
this paper, we describe five barriers patients encounter when organizing their
information for use during cancer care. We describe each barrier using rich
examples from our triangulated data set, and conclude with four recommendations
to help patients organize information more effectively during active treatment.

I'm not too sure we followed the abstract presentation to the letter, but the implications I came away with for ways to help with information organization for cancer patients were

• Provide a rich intermediate structure (embed pre-organized links to other related information on insurance, necessary customization that is highly personalized)
• Leverage assistance from others (support co-management model, enable assistance from others & organization strategies for their particular situation)
• Provide a functional view of information (integrate descriptive & procedural info (who/what/where/when/who), distinguish information for active tasks, represent patient's view of cancer care system) Discovery of time-sensitive financial info in the stack added significantly to emotional stress, sort information/bills by date due instead of date services given.
• Incorporate emotional considerations (negative feedback loop of not being able to retrieve information when needed for patient involvement in own care)
• What is the role of informatics in cancer care? Clinicians and designers can explore stress reduction techniques, embed cognitive cues & known stress reduction techniques for stress relief in managing information

For the research study background that led to these implications & a great discussion, my notes are over here. I asked about Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) & Protected Health Information (PHI) concerns and he responded that he's currently a co-primary investigator (co-PI) on a portal for patients to manage cancer care information that involves portable workstations where clinicians enter & annotate information. I want to know much more about that although it wasn't really the focus of this particular talk, and will definitely keep an eye out for more of his findings in the future.

I also see social networking (such as Facebook pages) as a way to meet the need of being able to "coordinate in common information space between disparate groups" to help out in areas of emotional support, driving to appointments, bringing meals over, helping with childcare and other related activities in a patient's cancer treatment. I'm convinced Facebook is probably already being used this way and I just haven't seen it yet. Blogs are great for sharing cancer diagnosis, treatment and other information with everyone at once and receiving messages of support from loved ones in return but not so much for group coordination from what I've seen, which is sadly way too much.