Group items tagged

Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile.

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research.

He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.

“I take all the researchers who visit me here, and almost every single one of them asks the tree the same question,” Ioannidis tells me, as we contemplate the tree the day after the team’s meeting. “‘Will my research grant be approved?’” He chuckles, but Ioannidis (pronounced yo-NEE-dees) tends to laugh not so much in mirth as to soften the sting of his attack. And sure enough, he goes on to suggest that an obsession with winning funding has gone a long way toward weakening the reliability of medical research.

“I assumed that everything we physicians did was basically right, but now I was going to help verify it,” he says. “All we’d have to do was systematically review the evidence, trust what it told us, and then everything would be perfect.” It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.

“I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says.

This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.

The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views.

Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. That article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up.

nd these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they don’t always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).

And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome.

Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it.

Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.

Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right).

Ioannidis initially thought the community might come out fighting. Instead, it seemed relieved, as if it had been guiltily waiting for someone to blow the whistle, and eager to hear more. David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.

The irony of his having achieved this sort of success by accusing the medical-research community of chasing after success is not lost on him, and he notes that it ought to raise the question of whether he himself might be pumping up his findings.

Tatsioni doesn’t so much fear that someone will carve out the man’s healthy appendix. Rather, she’s concerned that, like many patients, he’ll end up with prescriptions for multiple drugs that will do little to help him, and may well harm him. “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line.

patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.

Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.

being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary

Many of us simply roll our eyes and click away when yet another medical study contradicts the last study—so what else is new? Coffee’s bad for you, until it’s good for you—and so is red wine. Antioxidants are essential, or they’re useless. And so on. Contradictory studies are an essential part of the science-news stream—and, in fact, an important part of science itself. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

The fact that it didn’t, and that the two studies conflict, has unintentionally revealed a different truth about diet and aging. In both studies, the monkeys that ate less were healthier by a number of measures—and suffered far less from age-related disease. Even better, when taken together, both studies reveal a different path toward living a healthier life—one that doesn’t require self-starvation.

Over the years, various researchers have shown that caloric restriction can extend life in bats, dogs, and even spiders, and on down to nematode worms and single-celled organisms like yeast. After decades of work, it remains the only way known to increase maximum lifespan. So a lot is riding on the concept, scientifically speaking.

In the 1990s, Leonard Guarente of MIT discovered a class of longevity genes in yeast called sirtuins that appear to be activated by a lack of food. Sirtuins appeared to be “conserved” in evolution, meaning that they appear in nearly all species, on up to humans. Sirtuins are thought to have evolved as a way to enable animals to survive periods of famine. They seem to work by regulating certain metabolic pathways and reduce the amount of damage cells endure.

If researchers could somehow identify and isolate that mechanism, they’d be that much closer to some kind of longevity pill. Except for one inconvenient fact: Caloric restriction itself does not always work.

While 80 percent of the monkeys were still alive, the restricted animals had better measures of cardiovascular health, hormone levels, and blood-sugar management, an early indicator of diabetes risk. So it came as a bit of a surprise, eight years later, to find that the hungry monkeys are not actually living longer.

In fact, caloric restriction really seemed to work best in standard laboratory mice. This may be because they are predisposed to eat a lot, gain weight, and reproduce early—and thus are more sensitive to reduced food intake. (Slate’s Daniel Engber has written about how overfed lab mice have distorted scientific research.)

But in a long-awaited, well-funded monkey study like this, an “odd” result could not be ignored. Still stranger was the fact that even though the underfed monkeys were healthier than the others, they still didn’t live longer. They had lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, as well as diabetes and cancer—and when these diseases did appear, they did so later

At first, it seemed like a scientist’s nightmare: The control group is indistinguishable from the test group. In clinical trials, a result like this would kill any drug candidate. Then de Cabo took a closer look at a seemingly minor difference between the Wisconsin and NIA studies: the animals’ diets.

Furthermore, the NIA diet consisted of 4 percent sucrose—while in the Wisconsin diet, sucrose accounted for some 28 percent of the total calories.

“In physics, a calorie is a calorie,” says de Cabo. “In nutrition and animal physiology, there is more and more data coming out that says that the state of the animal is going to depend more on where the calories are coming from.”

In his study based on the two-year experience, Walford reported that the main effect of caloric restriction was to drastically lower his fellow crew members’ cholesterol levels, to 140 and below—well below the average for people in the industrialized world. Walford concluded that a calorie-restricted diet would have the same beneficial effects that he and other scientists had observed in mice.

Several studies have shown that excessive leanness—seen often in calorie-restricting humans—can be as risky as obesity. Taken together, these studies suggest that the optimal body-mass index is about 25, which is on the verge of being overweight.

But if it’s OK to be almost overweight, it might not pay to go beyond that. Another key difference between the two monkey studies has to do with the definition of “ad libitum.” While the Wisconsin control-group monkeys were allowed to stuff themselves, with the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet for several hours at feeding times, the NIA monkeys were given a fixed amount of food. “You could view it as the Wisconsin monkeys were overindulging, like the rest of the American population,” says Rozalyn Anderson, a member of the Wisconsin team. Compared with           their Wisconsin brothers, then, the NIA monkeys in the non-calorie-restricted control group were arguably practicing a mild form of calorie restriction—and that, Anderson suggests, might have made a difference.

Large organic farms are typically monoculture fields just like large conventional farms, though more crop rotation is required. Industrial organic poultry and beef farms also look oddly similar to conventional industrial feedlots, even if the animals are eating organic feed. In fact, both organic and conventional industrial farms are often owned by the same mega-corporations, and share the same bottom line of profit. There’s no reason to suspect that these industrial organic foods would be markedly more nutritious than conventionally grown foods.

Interestingly, despite the wide range in the quality of foods that qualify as organic, the Stanford study did find some significant differences. Organic produce contained significantly more phenols, the cancer fighting chemicals found in red wine, green tea, chocolate and many fruits and vegetables. However, this finding was glossed over in favor of the non-significant differences found between vitamin C, betacarotene and vitamin E levels in organic versus conventional foods.

Soil quality and weather (the raw ingredients) are by far the biggest factors in the nutrient levels of produce, with freshness and storage methods being next in line.

The Stanford study confirms organic agriculture has substantially fewer pesticide contaminations, but for some reason this finding was also glossed over since the conventional produce levels “didn’t exceed maximum allowed limits.” Logically, however, if limiting pesticide exposure is important to you (as it should be) organic produce is the better option.

The animal studies were even more encouraging. Small but significant improvements in fatty acid profiles were found for organic milk and chickens, which contained more healthy omega-3 fatty acids. More importantly, antibiotic resistant bacteria, the kind that are becoming more common (and deadly) in our own hospitals, were 33% more likely to be found on conventional meat products than on organic meat.

“We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.” “We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan. “Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”

The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.

Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.

Despite these assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.

THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.

The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.

This new approach suggests the possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now open for study.

“I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”

If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.

almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.

At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!); it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.

Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.

People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.

That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically.

Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression).

These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.

it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages than is the case today.

Over the last decade, Cordain has become the most prominent promoter of the so-called “Paleo diet,” having written The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat and multiple other books advocating a paleolithic-mimetic diet as the cure for what ails modern humans.

But how does one determine what the prevalence of cardiovascular disease was in the ancient past?

there have been indications that the idea that ancient humans didn’t suffer from atherosclerosis is a comforting myth, the most recent of which is a study published a week ago online in The Lancet by Prof. Randall C. Thompson of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute and an international team of investigators entitled Atherosclerosis across 4000 years of human history: the Horus study of four ancient populations.

So, although there was a fair amount of evidence from studies of Egyptian mummies that atherosclerosis was not uncommon, in Egypt it was mainly the wealthy and powerful who were mummified after their deaths. Conceivably, they could have lived a very different lifestyle and consumed a very different diet than the average Egyptian living around that time.

So the authors obtained whole-body CT scans of the 137 mummies, either pre-existing scans or scans prospectively done, and analyzed them for calcifications.

Figure 2 summarizes the findings nicely: There’s also this video featured in a Nature report on the study showing the reconstructed scan of one of the mummies with atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries.

As expected, more atherosclerosis correlates with advanced age, and the amount of atherosclerosis in the young and middle-aged (although the times in which the people who became these mummies after death lived age 50 was old) was less.

As is noted in Thompson’s article, ancient Egyptians and Peruvians were agricultural cultures with farms and domesticated animals, Ancestral Puebloans were forager-farmers, and the Unangans were hunter-gatherers without agriculture. Indeed, the Peruvians and Ancestral Puebloans predated the written word and were thus prehistoric cultures.

One notes that no one, including the authors of this study, is saying that lifestyle and diet are not important factors for the development of atherosclerotic heart disease.

I actually think that the authors probably went too far with that last statement in that, while they might be correct that atherosclerosis is an inherent component of human aging, it is quite well established that this inherent component of aging can at least be worsened by sedentary lifestyle and probably certain diets.

One notes that, although the Paleo Diet is not, strictly speaking, always sold as CAM/IM, the ideas behind it are popular among CAM advocates, and the diet is frequently included as part of “integrative medicine,” for example, here at the University of Connecticut website, where it’s under integrative nutrition.

In particular, the appeal to ancient wisdom and ancient civilizations as yet untouched by the evil of modernity is the same sort of arguments that are made in favor of various CAM modalities ranging from herbalism to vegan diets rebranded as being somehow CAM to the appeal to “natural” cures.

The book is by Marlene Zuk and entitled Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. Zuk is an evolutionary biologist, and in particular she points out how the evolutionary arguments favored by advocates of the Paleo diet don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The interview begins with Zuk confronting Cordain at a conference on evolution and diseases of modern environments. At his lecture, Cordain pronounced several foods to be the cause of fatal conditions in people carrying certain genes.

Blue eyes arose 6,000 to 10,000 years ago

Rapid selection for the CCR5-D gene variant that makes some people immune to HIV

Lactase persistence (production past the age of weening of the lactase enzyme that digests lactose in milk) probably dates back only around 7,500 to 10,000 years, around the time that cattle were domesticated

Zuk detects an unspoken, barely formed assumption that humanity essentially stopped evolving in the Stone Age and that our bodies are “stuck” in a state that was perfectly adapted to survive in the paleolithic environment. Sometimes you hear that the intervention of “culture” has halted the process of natural selection. This, “Paleofantasy” points out, flies in the face of facts. Living things are always and continuously in the process of adapting to the changing conditions of their environment, and the emergence of lactase persistence indicates that culture (in this case, the practice of keeping livestock for meat and hides) simply becomes another one of those conditions.

For this reason, generalizations about the typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle are spurious; it doesn’t exist. With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live. Recently, researchers discovered evidence that people in Europe were grinding and cooking grain (a paleo-diet bugaboo) as far back as 30,000 years ago, even if they weren’t actually cultivating it. “A strong body of evidence,” Zuk writes, “points to many changes in our genome since humans spread across the planet and developed agriculture, making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”

Oh, and, as Zuk tells us, paleolithic people got cancer, too.

we humans have long been known to abuse and despoil our environment, even back in those “paleo” days. Indeed, when I took a prehistoric archeology course, which was largely dedicated to the period of time of the hunter-gatherers, one thing I remember my professor pointing out, and that was that what he did was largely the study of prehistoric garbage and that humans have always produced a lot of it.

A country with significant amounts of arable land and easily traversed territory has an automatic advantage over other states.

changes in access to arable land can have profound effects on a country's ability to take care of its domestic population and to participate in global markets.

Brazil is a good example of this. Its coastal geography makes building roads and railways from the interior to the coast quite difficult, but its climate is perfectly suited to sugar cane growth, which has allowed the country to develop an impressive ethanol industry that has made Brazil's energy sources among the most diversified in the world.

China, which faces extreme population pressures and increasingly relies on foreign sources of many commodities, is using agricultural land in the Northeast -- specifically in Heilongjiang province -- to develop a state-controlled agricultural heartland to supplement the rest of the country's agriculture, which is for the most part family-run. China's population exceeds 1.3 billion, which makes food security a critical issue of state stability.

Russia's massive grain belt, which has in centuries past allowed the country to support outsized domestic armies, lacks adequate infrastructure, complicating the process of moving grain across the country's expanse.

With increasing temperatures, we could very well see a shift in the location of the temperate zones in which agricultural development flourishes. As tropical zones expand to both the north and the south, the temperate zones shift north toward the Artic and south toward the Antarctic.

Across the board, the napping pilots had significantly fewer microevents, or were much more alert, than the non-napping pilots. A statistical analysis done by the team showed that the non-napping pilots were roughly twice as likely to register a microevent, or were ~100% sleepier than their napping colleagues.

The NASA team concluded that naps provided a 34% increase in pilot performance and 100% increase in physiological alertness.

Violations of the USDA's organic labeling rules can earn companies civil penalties of up to $11,000. If that seems small, it should. The low penalties and the volume of organic products flooding the markets have led to skepticism that the USDA is properly enforcing the label, inspecting foods, and punishing violators. Some worry that "organic" has turned into a marketing term with little meaning. Still, when you buy organic goods at most stores and from most known brands, you can be largely sure that it meets the guidelines.

Granted, the latest study is far from the last word on nutritional value and organic foods, but it's important to note that nutritional value is neither in the stated mission of the USDA's organic food certification program (and, from what we can tell, not in that of other countries either).

A sharp eye would note that this could be because organic yields tend to be lower and there are fewer organic farms in general.

The study had two things to say about contamination: that conventionally farmed meat and produce were more likely to be contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but both had equal risk of being contaminated overall.

To discern who's who in a group, and therefore whether an individual matters in a group, requires both intelligence and analysis to make sense of the intelligence.

Detaining an individual who lays improvised explosive devices on a road may result in short-term disruptions to the target's area of operations, but identifying and detaining a bombmaker with exclusive experience and training will have a far greater impact.

Every individual within a given human network has reasons to be tied to others within the network. Understanding what unites the individuals in an organization provides further depth of understanding. Whether it be ideology, mutual interests, familial ties or paid services, why a relationship exists will help determine the strength of such bonds, the motives of the network and the limitations to what a network can accomplish.

The U.S. government alleges that Velazquez was first recruited by the Cuban intelligence service in 1983 while a student at Johns Hopkins. She reportedly traveled from Washington to Mexico City where she met with a Cuban intelligence officer and was formally recruited as an agent. During her studies at Johns Hopkins, the government claims that Velazquez served as a spotter agent who helped the Cuban intelligence service identify, assess and recruit people who occupied sensitive national security positions or who had the potential to move into such positions in the future.

During the early 1980s, a left-wing movement developed in many American universities. The movement opposed Reagan's Central American policies, such as opposition to the Sandinistas, support for the Contra rebels and support of the regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala.

The indictment alleges that in the fall of 1984, while Montes was working as a clerk at the Department of Justice, Velazquez took her to New York to meet a friend who Velazquez said could provide Montes an opportunity to help the Nicaraguan people.

In March of 1985, Velazquez and Montes traveled to Madrid, Spain, where they were met by a Cuban intelligence officer, who provided them with false passports and other documents. They then used these documents to travel to Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia. Once in Prague they were met by another Cuban intelligence officer who provided them with yet another set of false documents, as well as new sets of clothing. The Cuban officer they met in Prague then traveled with the women to Havana.

Upon returning to Washington, Montes applied for a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency using Velazquez as a character reference. She was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst in September 1985. Montes would excel at the agency and eventually became the Defense Intelligence Agency's most senior Cuba analyst. She served at that agency until the FBI arrested her in September 2001.

The Velazquez case, when studied in conjunction with those of Montes and Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, provides a fascinating window into the scope and nature of Cuban intelligence efforts inside the United States.

The fact that there were three high-profile Cuban agents who penetrated the U.S. government and who were all associated with the School of Advanced International Studies would seem to be an incredible coincidence.

Traditionally, money has proved to be the top motivation for Americans arrested for espionage, but as seen in the Velazquez, Montes and Myers cases, the Cubans were very successful in recruiting American agents using ideology.

In addition to the Cuban preference for ideologically motivated agents, this case also shows that the Cuban intelligence service is very patient and is willing to wait years for the agents it recruits to move into sensitive positions within the U.S. government rather than just focus on immediate results.

It is also clear that Cuban espionage efforts against the United States did not end with the Cold War and continue to this day.   

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation from the Velazquez case for American counterintelligence officials, though, is the fact that Velazquez was not caught due to some operational mistake or intelligence coup.

It is not surprising that the background investigations failed to uncover Velazquez's espionage activities. Background investigations often are seen as mundane tasks, and thus are not given high priority -- especially when there are so many other "real" cases to investigate.

these investigations are most often done by contract investigators whose bureaucratic bosses emphasize speed over substance, meaning important leads are often ignored because of a case deadline.

In fact, contractors who do attempt to dig deep are sometimes accused of trying to milk the system in an effort to acquire more points (the basis upon which contract investigators are paid) by running additional leads and interviewing additional people.

Quite frankly, when it comes to background investigations, the prevalent attitude is to do the minimum work necessary to check off the prerequisite boxes and get the investigation over as quickly -- and as superficially -- as possible.

the polygraph that Velazquez and Montes received during their first trip to Cuba underscores the limitation of polygraph examinations -– they only work really well on honest people.

If a small, poor nation like Cuba can successfully recruit so many agents and place them in critical positions within the U.S. government for so long, what does this portend about the efforts and successes of larger or richer countries with aggressive intelligence agencies like China, Russia, Israel and India?

… one might suppose that the acceleration of modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges – economic, political, and sexual – has propelled us to ‘escape velocity’, with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history. … A degree of slowness (that is, a certain speed, but not too much), a degree of distance, but not too much, and a degree of liberation (an energy for rupture and change), but not too much, are needed to bring about the kind of condensation or significant crystallization of events we call history, the kind of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call reality.

Once beyond this gravitational effect, which keeps bodies in orbit, all the atoms of meaning get lost in space. Each atom pursues its own trajectory to infinity and is lost in space. This is precisely what we are seeing in our present-day societies, intent as they are on accelerating all bodies, messages and processes in all directions and which, with modern media, have created for every event, story and image a simulation of an infinite trajectory.

Illusion or not, the Harvard study shows that a sense of being at the end of history has real-world consequences: underestimating how differently we’ll feel about things in the future, we sometimes make decisions we later come to regret.

On October 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove played St. Matthew’s Grammar School of Dallas in football, winning 5–0. The event was a milestone in Texas history: the first recorded football game between two high-school teams.

Until then, most American boys had played sports in the haphazard way of boys the world over: ambling onto fields and into alleys for pickup games or challenging other loosely affiliated groups of students to a match. Cheating was rampant, and games looked more like brawls than organized contests. Schools got involved to contain the madness.

The ruling elite feared that all this schooling would make Anglo-Saxon boys soft and weak, in contrast to their brawny, newly immigrated peers.

Sports, the thinking went, would both protect boys’ masculinity and distract them from vices like gambling and prostitution. “Muscular Christianity,” fashionable during the Victorian era, prescribed sports as a sort of moral vaccine against the tumult of rapid economic growth.

Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year.

“We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”

But there was an upside to the quiet. “The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks I’ve ever witnessed at a high school,” Singleton says. “It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.”

Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: “It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.”

Premont’s culture changed. “There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,” says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. “I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.”

When Marguerite Roza, the author of Educational Economics, analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader.

Even maintaining a grass field can cost more than $20,000 a year. Reconditioning helmets, a ritual that many teams pay for every year, can cost more than $1,500 for a large team.

Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents.

His argument is a familiar one: sports can be bait for students who otherwise might not care about school. “I’ve seen truancy issues completely turned around once students begin playing sports,” he says. “When students have a sense of belonging, when they feel tied to the school, they feel more part of the process.”

But only 40 percent of seniors participate in high-school athletics, and what’s harder to measure is how the overriding emphasis on sports affects everyone who doesn’t play.

Each year, Spelman was spending nearly $1 million on athletics—not for those students, but for the 4 percent of the student body that played sports.

Tatum’s signal was clear: lifelong health habits matter more than expensive, elite sporting competitions with rival schools. One priority has real and lasting benefits; the other is a fantasy.

Both approaches can be dysfunctional; both set kids up for stress and disappointment. The difference is that 93 percent of South Korean students graduate from high school, compared with just 77 percent of American students—only about 2 percent of whom receive athletic scholarships to college.

“I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis co-founder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”

You could get the same information with a week's sorting of SEC filings. But instead, you have just circumvented that laborious process by going straight to just one of the "meta-narratives" that form the superstructure of journalism.

The currency of language really is the collection of what might be called the "meta-stories."

There's nothing wrong with this. For the art of storytelling -- journalism, that is -- is essentially unchanged from the tale-telling of Neolithic shamans millennia ago up through and including today's New York Times. Cultural anthropologists will explain that our brains are wired for this. So be it.

We at Stratfor may not "sync up." Journalists certainly do.

"Meta-data," as the technologists call it, is more simply understood as "data about data."

Where the online battle for eyeballs becomes truly epic, however, (Google "the definition of epic" for yet another storyteller's meta-story) is when these series of tags are organized into a form of meta-data called a "taxonomy."

And thus we arrive at the outermost layer of the media's skin in our emerging and interconnected age. This invisible skin over it all comes in the form of a new term of art, "search engine optimization," or in the trade just "SEO."

With journalists already predisposed by centuries of convention to converge on stories knitted from a common canon, the marriage of meta-narrative and meta-data simply accelerates to the speed of light the calibration of topic and theme.

For by the doctrines of the Internet's new commercial religion, a move disrupting the click stream was -- and is -- pure heresy. But our readers still need to know about Colombia, just as they need our unique perspectives on Syria.

In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.

Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.

The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.

Along the way, I learned that it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.

Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing, we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.