Lecture | Duke Research Blog

The Phishing Market Beyond the Internet

April 29th, 2013

By Ashley Mooney

Most people have heard of phishing scams on Internet, in which a person is tricked into giving up their money or identity by a clever ruse.

Temptations like this are found throughout all of capitalist society, says George Akerlof, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences. He discussed ideas from his upcoming book, “Phishing for Phools” wth a Duke audience on April 25 to kick off “Decision Making Across the Disciplines,” a two-day symposium sponsored by the Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences.

Akerloff studies connections between individual’s decision biases and larger economic phenomena.

George Akerlof won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for his research on economic decision making. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“Standard economics assumes that the people are smart, they may not know everything but they can be smart,” he said. “But there may be only one way in which you can be smart, but there are many, many ways in which you can be stupid.”

Akerlof, who is also Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, developed his idea of phishing for phools from his paper, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” which secured his Nobel nod.

“A fool with an f is a stupid or silly person, but it’s perfectly possible to make an error when… making a perfectly intelligent decision,” he said. “Somebody who makes a mistake is a phool with a ph.”

Although markets have the ability to maximize wealth, Akerlof said it is a double-edged sword.

“Free markets open us up to be phools. They open us up to those who seek to influence us to do what they want, but it’s not necessarily good for our sake,” he said. “We live in a world where some 5 billion adults can phish us for being a phool. We’ve intentionally opened ourselves up to such exploitation because of obvious advantages, but then we must also think about the other side.”

Markets, Akerlof noted, aim for three weak spots: emotional weaknesses, cognitive weaknesses and ignorance due to blocked channels of information.

Phishing is common on the internet, but occurs throughout the market. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

When people are aware of phishing, it has relatively little effect. But when one doesn’t know about a phish, it can have a major impact. He proposed that obesity, product misinformation and the recent economic recession were all caused by phishing for phools.

“In the United States, the goal of almost every businessman is to get you to spend your money,” he said. “Life in capitalist economy is a continual temptation.”

Akerlof said according to economics textbooks, people decide on their demand by budgeting spending and then choosing the things that will maximize their happiness. But most people, he added, are not honest with themselves and as a consequence do not engage in rational budgeting.

“A very significant fraction of consumers are worried about how they’re going to make ends meet,” Akerlof said. “Almost 50 percent of people probably could not come up with $2,000 in a month for unforeseen situations.”

The only way to prevent phishing is to know about it, and to make informed decisions with that knowledge.

“Phishing for phools… creates bad equilibrium, especially if we don’t know about phishing for phools, we think that markets are totally benign,” Akerlof said.

Everyone Makes Mistakes

April 24th, 2013

By Pranali Dalvi

Dr. Brian Goldman, Credit: nsb.com

“Every important thing that I have ever learned since the day I was born has come from a mistake,” said Dr. Brian Goldman on April 17 during the Duke Colloquium.

Goldman is a renowned thinker and leader on issues of medical ethics and medical error. He has had great success in two high-adrenaline fields: broadcasting and medicine.

Not only is he a practicing emergency physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto but he also hosts an award-winning radio show White Coat, Black Art where he discusses the Canadian healthcare system. His bold TED Talk ‘Doctors Make Mistakes: Can We Talk about That?’ has over 700,000 hits.

Goldman’s life-altering mistake happened during a 2-month elective in neurology at Johns Hopkins. By medical school, he was a veteran insomniac, often waking up early — except for the one morning he was supposed to deliver grand rounds. That morning, he woke up at 10 AM, the exact moment when he was supposed to be presenting rounds in the neurology conference room at the hospital across the street.

“This mistake was a dramatic enough gesture to make me pay attention. I don’t wish a medical error on anybody, and I don’t wish the misfortune that happens to patients and families that are directly involved. But sometimes it’s a moment like that which redirects you and gets you into thinking about what you need to do with the rest of your life,” Goldman said.

The mistake made him reconsider neurology.

Credit: thestudentceo.com

Too often people have one of two worldviews of failure. The first inspires you to do better – if you fall down seven times, get up eight. The other shows success and failure as completely different paths.

“What we need is for health professionals and the public to realize that mistakes are inevitable with humans,” Goldman said.

What does error look like in medicine?

Radiology mistakes including X-ray and CT misinterpretations, miscalculating medication dosages, and hospital-acquired infections due to poor hand washing practices are human errors in medicine. All potentially catastrophic yet hard to detect.

Why do these errors happen?

The vast majority of health professionals are some of the most caring and compassionate individuals. Why do they mess up? Emphasis on quantity over quality, stress, miscommunication and messy handwriting are just a few of the many reasons.

“I spoke to a pharmacist who said that if you simply add 30 seconds of look-up time to every medicine dispensed at the hospital pharmacy, he’d have to hire 2 more full-time pharmacists. If you don’t have that kind of money, this is the sort of institutional cutting of corners that we have to go through to make ends meet,” Goldman said.

Credit: The Adventures of Pam & Frank Blog

Errors also result from the organization of the system. Residents often don’t go home despite 80-hour week regulations. They fear that no one else knows their patient as well as they do. Patient safety is also compromised as you increase the number of handovers due to duty hour regulations.

Goldman insists on the development of technologies to prevent mistakes, reducing responsibilities to allow increased productivity and fostering a loving and respectful environment for doctors to discuss their errors.

How can we aim for success in a field where failure is so effortless?

The Duke Colloquium, the brainchild of Dr. Andrew Hwang, is a university-wide initiative to pull the humanities into the professions. The event bring forward-thinking visiting scholars to Duke’s campus to inspire students, faculty, and the broader Duke community to become more socially conscious professionals.

Chocolate’s crisp crack comes from chemistry

March 28th, 2013

By Ashley Yeager

This is the final post in a four-part, monthly series that gives readers recipes to try in their kitchens and learn a little chemistry and physics along the way. Read the first post here and the second one here and the third one here.

This bunny must have been made from quality chocolate. His ears are already gone. Credit: Waponi, Flickr.

When you snap off and savor the ears of a chocolate bunny this Sunday, say a quick thanks to science.

“The essence of science is to make good chocolate,” said Patrick Charbonneau, a professor of chemistry and physics at Duke.

He explained that cocoa butter, one of the main ingredients in chocolate, can harden into six different types of crystals. All six types are made of the same molecules. But, at the microscopic level, the types have distinct molecular arrangements, which lead to differences in the crystals that form.

“The problem with chocolate is that only two of these types have good texture when eaten,” Charbonneau told students in the Chemistry and Physics of Cooking.

He teaches the freshman seminar with chef Justine de Valicourt and chemistry graduate students Mary Jane Simpson and Keely Glass.

During class, students looked at and tasted chocolate containing only the good-tasting crystal types and some that also contained the less favorable ones. The first had that signature sheen and snap of quality chocolate and melted evenly when left on the tongue. The latter pieces were dull, melted with the slightest touch and left a sandy texture on the tongue.

The demonstration showed that the different types of chocolate crystals melt at different temperatures. By carefully controlling the chocolate as it cools, chocolate-makers can create mixtures of only the favorable crystal types.

The process, called tempering, takes chocolate through a series of heating and cooling steps. The initial cooling step forms many of the chocolate crystal types, including the dull, unfavorable ones. Warming the mixture a little — to about 31°C (87°F) — melts the unfavorable crystals but not the best-tasting ones.

As the mixture cools again, the remaining, favorable crystals “seed” the chocolate so that good-tasting crystals form preferentially throughout, ensuring good chocolate structure and taste.

Students got a chance to test the science in lab later that evening, and judging by the number of mouths (and faces) covered with chocolate, it’s safe to say the science was successful.

If you’re looking to try it out — or save a poor bunny’s ears — here’s the recipe.

Tempering chocolate:

Materials:
1 small, microwave safe bowl
1 big bowl
1 spatula
2 scraper spatulas
1 chocolate mold
parchment paper
cooking thermometer

Ingredients:
250 g Dark Chocolate or 250 g Milk Chocolate (about 1 1/3 cups)

Filling:
60g white chocolate (about 1/4 cup)
60g yogurt (a little less than 1/4 cup)

Instructions:

1. Place milk or dark chocolate in the small bowl.
2. Heat the bowl in 30-second intervals in a microwave (stirring after each) until the chocolate is melted. Note: The milk chocolate should take about 1.5 minutes and the dark chocolate about 2 minutes to melt.
3. Once heated, pour half the liquid chocolate onto a clean marble or stone counter. The chocolate puddle should be the size of a medium pancake. (Note: If there is not stone or marble surface, another technique is to melt less chocolate and then add good tempered chocolate in it to lower the temperature.)
4. Spread the pancake portion out in ribbons using the scraper spatula. Bring the chocolate back together into a mound repeatedly for 5 minutes, until it starts to solidify.
5. Put the chocolate back in the original heating bowl. Adding the cooler chocolate will cool the rest of the liquid to the right temperature.
6. Mix the cold and hot chocolate.
7. Check the temperature of the chocolate. (Dark: 31-32°C/88-89.5°F; Milk: 29-30°C/84-86°F).
8. Dip the parchment paper in the mixture of the “hot” and “cold” chocolate. If it cools on the parchment paper and is uniform and shiny, then it’s ready.
9. Pour chocolate into mold.
10. To make stuffed chocolate candies, flip the mold to empty excess chocolate.
11. Turn it back, scrap the excess of chocolate off the surface. Let the thin layer of chocolate in the mold crystallize.
11. Melt white chocolate. Mix it with yogurt. Cool to room temperature.
12. Add filling to 2/3 of the mold cavities, and then pour more tempered chocolate on top.
13. Level the chocolate with a scraper and scrape off excess.
14. Let it rest for few minutes at 20°C (68°F) or put it in the fridge.
15. Pop candies from mold and enjoy.

Making sense of smells

March 18th, 2013

By Prachiti Dalvi

Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Axel, who visited Duke on March 14, 2013.

“A good scientist has to have a nose for which field to work in,” cancer researcher Bernard Weinstein once told his mentee Dr. Richard Axel.

It was a saying Axel took quite literally.

He and Linda Buck won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the cell receptors that run our sensory system for olfaction, or the sense of smell.

Axel first stepped into the research world when he took a job as a glass washer to support himself during his undergraduate years at Columbia University. After a few broken test tubes and dirty beakers, he was fired as a glass washer and, instead, rehired to do research. He went on to publish three papers as an undergraduate, including one where he was senior author.

In 1979, he earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University. He then returned to Columbia, and in 1977 he, along with Michael Wigler and Saul Silverstein, discovered a way to insert foreign DNA into a host cell to produce particular proteins.

The finding grew into to the field of molecular cloning and earned Axel a spot in the National Academy of Sciences at 37.

Axel moved on to study how the brain represents the external world. This is a central issue in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. But unlike, vision and touch, which have at least two dimensions in the external world, information about odors has no dimensionality at all.

So, how is smell represented in the various smell centers of the brain? Axel explained what scientists know about the representations during a March 14 lecture sponsored by the Ruth K. Broad Foundation and the Chancellor’s Lecture Series.

Pathway of odor perception (courtesy of nobelprize.org)

The process starts in the nose, where different kinds of smell-sensing cells line the nasal cavity. Each type of smell-sensing cell expresses only one of about 1400 odor-receptor genes. The cells expressing a given gene are randomly distributed through the nasal tissue and send projections back through the skull into the olfactory bulb.

This bulb is essentially first relay station for sensing smell in the brain. The incoming information gets consolidated in a part of the bulb called the glomerulus. There a given odor receptor activates nerve fibers called glomeruli. They send signals to higher brain regions, which then create a topographic map of incoming odors.

This topographic map is similar, or conserved, in all individuals of a species, Axel said.

His lab at Columbia is now focused on understanding how the sense of smell is established during development, how it may change over time and how certain smells can elicit specific thoughts and behaviors.

Meat Glue — True to its Name

March 8th, 2013

By Ashley Yeager

This is the third post in a four-part, monthly series that gives readers recipes to try in their kitchens and learn a little chemistry and physics along the way. Read the first post here and the second one here.

Students grab chunks of a fish “checkerboard” made from salmon and flounder cubes. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke.

Braided steak and checkerboard fish may sound exotic. But, freshmen in the Chemistry and Physics of Cooking had no fear fingering the meaty masterpieces into their mouths.

The students made this food art – one literally a braid of three steak strips and the other a combination of salmon and flounder cubes – using a molecule called transglutaminase, also known as meat glue.

In 2012, the media roasted meat glue’s reputation, branding it a dirty little secret meat vendors use to stick together cheap cuts of beef, lamb, chicken or fish and then sell as premium cuts.

“In this class, we’re not using the molecule to be dishonest. We’re using it to be creative,” said physical chemist Patrick Charbonneau, who leads the freshman seminar along with chef Justine de Valicourt and teaching fellows Mary Jane Simpson and Keely Glass.

During a lecture, Glass explained how meat glue — an enzyme that speeds chemical reactions — forms covalent bonds between some of the amino acids that make up the proteins in meat and meat substitutes. With just a sprinkle of the enzyme, which comes in a powder form, chefs can then weave together beef cuts, form game-piece patterns from fish or even bind beans, seeds and other ingredients into a veggie burger that doesn’t crumble after the first bite.

“Meat glue is like a lot of modern ingredients. It comes from industry, and you can use it to make industrial food,” like chicken nuggets, de Valicourt said. “But when you master it, you can use it in a very creative and delicious way.”

Chefs often use the fundamentals of chemistry and physics to shape other foods, such as chocolate. “We’re doing the same to shape meat,” Charbonneau said, explaining that the students used transglutaminase in lab to create beautiful, and delicious, combinations of meat far superior to chicken nuggets and other industrial food typically made with the enzyme.

To make your own meat masterpieces, try the following recipe:

Materials:

1 long sheet of plastic wrap OR a bowl
1 cutting board
1 knife
2 latex gloves for each person
1 mask for each person
1 meat grinder (optional)
1-3 gallon-sized Ziploc bags
1 scale

Ingredients:

1 portion fish, chicken, beef OR vegetarian protein (ie black beans and sunflower seeds)
10 g meat glue powder (available online here)

Instructions:

Gluing meat chucks together –

1. Choose meats
2. Place meat on plastic wrap
3. Choose meat pattern – braid or stack
4. Season meat with salt and pepper
5. Put on gloves and mask and measure 10 g of meat glue using the scale
6. Sprinkle meat glue on sides of meat you want to connect
7. Fold meat into desired pattern
8. Place meat in Ziploc bag
9. Refrigerate for 6 hours
10. Cook meat as you would any other time

Making meat patties –

1. Choose meats, grind in meat grinder, and mix in a bowl (Or, buy ground meat and mix)
2. Season meat with salt and pepper
3. Put on gloves and mask, then measure 10 g of meat glue using the scale
4. Add meat glue to meat and knead until fully mixed
5. Separate into two portions (or more for patties) and seal each in a Ziploc bag
6. Roll with rolling pin, if desired
7. Refrigerate for 6 hours
8. Cook meat as you would any other time

Finding Consciousness

February 21st, 2013

By Nonie Arora

Brain scans of various disorders of consciousness. Credit: Wiki Commons

Can we be certain whether a patient is minimally conscious or in a persistent vegetative state?

What kinds of rights do minimally conscious patients have?

How should minimally conscious patients be treated?

Scientists, ethicists, lawyers and physicians asked these questions at the Finding Consciousness workshop at Duke in January 2013.

Recently, neuroscientists have devised methods to detect consciousness in patients with severe brain injury who may not appear to be aware of themselves and others. But as the science develops so do new ethical dilemmas.

Patients with severe brain injury are often written off, despite growing scientific evidence of potential improvement, said Joseph Fins from Cornell University. Fins gave the annual Nancy Weaver Emerson Lecture sponsored by the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine as part of the workshop, and he focused on the application of neuroethics to the minimally conscious state.

Fins believes that family members of patients are often forced to make decisions about withholding or withdrawing care without complete, understandable information. They are compelled to consider organ donation, even prematurely. In his work, Fins interviews family members of brain injury patients. In one conversation, a mother of a patient described an interaction with a neurologist who called the patient “basically an organ donor now” and said, “He doesn’t have the reflexes of a frog.”

Then, the neurologist urged the mother to consider organ donation — all within 72 hours of the injury. Fins called for patients and family members to be treated with more sensitivity and respect.

Jeremy Fins. Credit: Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine

The vegetative state has been seen as medical futility, and the paradigm was “once you’re vegetative, you’re done,” Fins said. However, physicians in the field have begun to see families and patients who have looked vegetative, but then suddenly showed some level of response to stimulus.

While some patients become permanently vegetative, others can become minimally conscious, Fins said, referencing a study where about 40 percent of patients who were diagnosed as vegetative were actually minimally conscious.

“This is unconscionable, but that’s where we are,” he said, adding that much of the disparity could come from disinterest, neglect and marginalization of these patients. People would not accept this level of misdiagnosis in cancer or diabetes care, he said.

It is our obligation to give voice to minimally conscious patients as a basic civil right, Fins said, especially as better methods of identifying these patients and stimulating recovery are likely to come in the future.

Close Encounters of the Twitter Kind

January 30th, 2013

By Ashley Yeager

Astrophysicist Katie Mack and other researchers are starting to join Twitter to do better science. Image courtesy of: mediabistro.com

Before launching into dark matter’s effects on particle physics in the early universe, astrophysicist Katie Mack of the University of Melbourne in Australia took a little detour Wednesday to talk about Twitter.

The social media tool is helping her “do better science and learn about new science,” she said during her Jan. 30 seminar at Duke.

The talk materialized from a tweet she had posted a few days ago about attending ScienceOnline, an annual, Raleigh-based conference for scientists and communicators talking and writing about science on the Internet.

Duke physicist Mark Kruse, who joined Twitter in October after the 2012 Council for the Advancement of Science Writers meeting, saw Mack’s tweet about coming to the Triangle and then contacted her to see if she would like to speak about her research.

She said yes, obviously, and explained during her talk that the invitation, as well as the other networking she has done on Twitter, got her to thinking about why all physicists (and scientists) should use the site.

@AstroKatie shares her top reasons scientists should be on Twitter. Credit: Katie Mack, U. of Melbourne.

Here is a paraphrased list of her top five reasons:

1. You can see what scientific breakthroughs people are getting excited about.
2. You can keep track of science discoveries outside of your field.
3. You can share your work with a broader audience.
4. You can connect with other scientists in and outside your field, building your professional network.
5. You can connect and share your work with the public.

Clearly Mack’s invitation to speak at Duke illustrates her third point about Twitter. Now, she said, she looks forward to attending her first ScienceOnline meeting to build on those points and learn new ways of using the tool to connect with other scientists and science enthusiasts.

You can follow Mack at @astrokatie, Kruse at @markckruse and ScienceOnline at @ScienceOnline (or #scio13) if you’re already on Twitter.

And, if you’re a Duke researcher not yet on Twitter but want to be, check it out here, then contact the university’s news office if you’ve got questions.

Designing Microbial “Factories” Rationally

January 29th, 2013

By Pranali Dalvi

Using microbes to manufacture chemicals is starting to be cheaper and greener than traditional chemistry. And their feedstock is sugar, not oil.

Source: 2010 Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference

On Friday, Dr. Michael Lynch spoke to an engaged audience about how microbes have ushered in a new era in metabolic and genetic engineering. Lynch is the co-founder and CSO of OPX Biotechnologies, a Colorado-based company that makes bio-based chemicals and fuels from microbes. OPXBIO microbes produce fatty acids from hydrogen and carbon dioxide. In turn, the fatty acids are used to make cleaners, detergents, jet fuel, and diesel.

Lynch said it’s easier to understand the genetic circuits and enzymatic pathways of microbes, thanks to much cheaper DNA sequencing. What we still lack though, is an understanding of how to rationally design complex biological systems – likely because we fail to recognize the interplay among an organism’s genotype, phenotype, and environment.

It’s a complex set of factors that go into making phenotypic traits such as color, size, or shape.

“In an industrial setting [phenotypes] are equivalent to metabolism or higher production of the product of interest,” Lynch said. “In a clinical setting, [phenotypes] could be virulence or pathogenesis.”

One approach to understanding how phenotypes are controlled has been through functional genomics.

Let’s say we take a population of wildtype microorganisms and introduce genetic modifications in a controlled way. Next, we selectively screen for the phenotype of interest and compare the sequence of this phenotype to the wildtype to pinpoint the genetic mutations that made the difference.

Comparing phenotypes one at a time is inefficient, though. Lynch wanted to find a way to speed up this process.

“We wanted a process or technology or toolkit that evaluates all of your genes in parallel in a single experiment for the phenotype of interest,” Lynch explained.

Lynch found his inspiration in microbial biofilms, extracellular polysaccharide matrices that grow quickly.

OPXBIO’s Efficiency Directed Genome Engineering (EDGE) technology platform, Source: opxbio.com

Lynch’s studies revealed that microbial cultures grown in enriched media made biofilms, while those in minimal media did not. In a process known as destructional mutagenesis, Lynch and his colleagues then knocked out biofilm-making genes to identify what genes cause the biofilm phenotype in enriched medium but prevent it in minimal medium.

Lynch saw the individual microbial systems as factories that he can genetically modify to produce chemical compounds in biofilms – specifically, 3-hydroxypropionic acid – that can be chemically converted to commercially relevant compounds such as acrylic.

Scientists at OPXBIO have cracked the code for making acrylic from sugar. They give sugar feedstocks to genetically modified bacteria, whose enzymes convert the sugar into acrylic molecules. Acrylic has broad commercial applications in paints, adhesives, diapers, detergents, and even fuel – a $10 billion global market.