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A paper on antidepressants by Kirsch and co-authors published last month in PLoS Medicine has received a lot of attention. The antidepressants studied are the six most widely prescribed approved between 1987 and 1999: Prozac, Paxil, Effexor, Serzone, Zoloft, and Celexa. The Editors' Summary explains: The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the FDA ... They then used meta-analytic techniques to investigate whether the initial severity of depression affected the HRSD [Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression] improvement scores for the drug and placebo groups in these trials. They confirmed first that the overall effect of these new generation of antidepressants was below the recommended criteria for clinical significance. Then they showed that there was virtually no difference in the improvement scores for drug and placebo in patients with moderate depression and only a small and clinically insignificant difference among patients with very severe depressio...

I've been tagged by Zeno at Halfway There , with the following blog meme: The rules are as follows: 1) Link to the person who tagged you. 2) List 5 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure. 3) Tag 5 more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs. 4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog. I don't usually buy into this stuff, but why not? So my selection is ... Charles S. Peirce (1839 — 1914) I've chosen him even though I don't really believe in the idea of a "favorite historical figure". But he is really interesting. Peirce was an American philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and humanist. He has been extremely influential, yet he remains somewhat obscure. 1. Peirce's name is pronounced "purse". (The family name was originally spelled Pers.) 2. My choice of Peirce was entirely pragmatic . 3. Peirce invented a conformal map projection : the quincuncial projection. It also turns ou...

As if the huge success of An Inconvenient Truth followed by winning the Nobel Peace Prize wasn't enough, now Al Gore is defying the laws of probability! At least in terms of probable outcomes of the U.S. Democratic nomination and the presidential election itself. Intrade , the leading commercial prediction market lets you bet on political outcomes. For example, "Barack Obama to win 2008 US Presidential Election" is currently trading at 47.5, meaning the market believes there's a 47.5% chance Obama will be the next president. What's the probability that Al Gore will win the Democratic nomination? As I write this, the market believes it's 1.7%. Seems fair enough ... ... until you look at the probability that Al Gore will be the next president. Curiously, the market believes that's 2.1%. How could that be? Don't you have to win the nomination before you have a chance of becoming the president? (My 13-year-old daughter points out that perhaps Gore coul...

The quilt on the left is a Broken Star Variation. As Escher knew so well, there's no such thing as plain geometry. However it's possible to take this too far (ok, I don't really mean that!) Here are some amazing mathematical quilts by Diana Venters and Elaine Ellison, who have written a book, Mathematical Quilts: No Sewing Required . Well, now it's time for me to quilt while I'm ahead. (I'll let you know how it turns out...)

As I pointed out in my recent post , democracy is not so easy to measure. The sine qua non of democracy is generally felt to be "free and fair elections". But that begs quite a few questions: Can you have "free and fair" elections without freedom of the press? How was the list of candidates assembled? Is wealth a precondition for running? Have there been any implicit or explicit threats conditional on the outcome? But there's a lot more to democracy that elections ("free and fair" or otherwise). Elected representatives should be responsive to their constituents' concerns. When those concerns are consistently ignored, there is clearly a problem. This has been just the case with Canadian public opinion on the war in Afghanistan. According to public opinion polling conducted by The Strategic Counsel for The Globe and Mail and CTV News, since the summer of 2006, a majority of Canadians have opposed sending troops to Afghanistan. In the poll of Janu...

Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science there's a very interesting post and follow-up comments on whether researchers should share data . It's based on a recent New York Times article by biostatistician Andrew Vickers ( Cancer Data? Sorry, can't have it ).

The map on the left labels countries as free (green), partly free (peach), and not free (red) for the year 2006. The classification is from Freedom House , a primarily US-government-funded organization. Each country is scored on political liberty and civil liberty; the combined average of these scores determines how the country is classified. Cuba, for example, receives the poorest rating on both political and civil liberties, and is thus categorized as "not free". The Wikipedia entry for democracy lists two other measures of democracy, one from the Polity IV project and the Democracy Index from The Economist. Each measure has its own scheme for measuring and weighting different characteristics felt to characterize democracies. Since the different measures assess many of the same things, it is not surprising that they show some agreement. But democracy is not a simple thing and it is far from clear which characteristics matter and how best to weight them. For example, doe...