Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 10, 2019

Technology may end the need for placebo-controlled studies; Commentary on the phenomenon of time dilation during space travel; Discussing the effects of long-term sleep deprivation; Decentralized collaborative software may eliminate the need to depend upon cloud-based gatekeepers; and a Steem-based discussion on technologies that have run their course

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1. The end of placebos is in sight - In order to guage the effectiveness of a new treatment, experimental medical trials have been comparing treatment groups against placebo control groups since 1863. Starting in the 1960s, however, a new practice began to emerge where the new treatment is compared against the best treatment that is already available. This change came as a result of the Helsinki protocol, in 1964. In 2002, however, the World Medical Association clarified that placebo trials are still acceptable, when required for methodological reasons, provided that patients are not exposed to permanent harm. This article argues that digitization and sharing of doctors' records may render placebo trials to be completely unnecessary in the foreseeable future, since the experimental treatments can then be compared against real world control groups. The first such drug approval by the FDA happened in April of 2019, where "A collaboration between Pfizer and Flatiron Health allowed the FDA to use real world evidence from electronic health records to give the green light for the breast cancer drug Ibrance to also be used to treat men." David Harland is quoted to say that technology has arrived at a tipping point whereby medical records in the UK can now be curated and collated to, "a very high regulatory grade." Harland adds that the US is ahead of the UK in many ways, but US medical centers operate as data islands, whereas the UK's NHS positions the country to aggregate data into strong statistical control samples. Concerns are raised around privacy, the difficulty of collecting high-quality data, and the need to replicate The Hawthorne Effect - (or the observer effect) which is the tendency for patients to change their behavior when they are included in a study. h/t RealClear Science


2. How does time dilation affect aging during high-speed space travel? - Commenting on the common sci-fi scenario, where an astronaut goes to space and comes back to find that contemporary friends and family has aged much further than the astronaut, Neel V. Patel notes that there are two possible mechanisms whereby this might happen in the real world. First, it can happen because time passes differently at high speeds. For example, real world experiments have been conducted where two planes carrying atomic clocks fly very fast in opposite directions. The comparative difference in speeds between the planes causes the clocks to reflect the lapsed time differently. A second scenario where time changes is travel in the vicinity of a black hole, because gravity also warps space-time. In this case, the closer the astronaut gets to the black hole, the faster time would pass.


3. What If You Sleep 2 Hours Less Every Night? - The majority of research says that people need about 8 hours of sleep per night. However, somewhere around 50% of people get about 6 hours or less. This video goes through the effects of that sleep reduction. In the short-term, the body may compensate for a shortage like that with dopamine and adrenaline, but in the longer term, the brain begins to compensate by "shutting off" the areas that it uses for decision making and planning. Scientists have used psychomotor vigilance tests (reaction tests) to study the body's effectiveness, when sleep-deprived. These tests have shown cognitive declines among people who are limited to 4 or 6 hours of sleep over a two week period. In fact, participants who got 6 hours of sleep for 10 days had the same cognitive decline as people who were awake for 24 hours straight - which is the same decline as being "legally drunk". Similarly, participants who got 4 hours of sleep for 11 days showed the same decline as being awake for 48 consecutive hours. At the same time, these people were also unaware of their own cognitive deficiencies. Finally, people over 45 who get 6 hours or less of sleep are also more likely to experience heart attacks.
   
   Here is the video:
   

h/t RealClear Science Videos

You Can Have Collaborative Software That’s Wary of the Cloud - This article describes a class of technology, known as local-first software, that is intended to let users collaborate without giving control of their data to a big cloud firm who will eventually act as a gatekeeper on the users' own data. The platform is being developed by Ink & Switch, and it works by storing copies of the shared data on multiple computers that belong to the pool of collaborative users. The article says that it's similar to blockchain, with its reliance on decentralized storage, but it doesn't have the features that make blockchain a trustless platform. One of the firm's first product's is pushpin, which lets users share images and notes, in similar fashion to pinterest. As-of now, the applications have issues with scaling, and they are limited to relatively simple use-cases.

STEEM What technology(s) do you think should die? - In this post, @bozz looks over the technology landscape and questions the common refrain, "that is the way we have always done it." The author initiates a discussion of technologies which have made the transition from beneficial to burdensome, asking readers to comment with their own list of technologies that need to be retired. An example of such a technology from @bozz is the fax machine. Click through for the author's reasoning, and to join the discussion. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @bozz.)

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About this series

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