Science in Anarchy! Participate in the world's first science experiment on steemit and get paid!

in #steemit8 years ago (edited)

Let's use steemit to advance science!

Knowledge, not bullets is what you need to stock up on if you really believe in a society based on the value of each individual.

Unfortunately, the current state of science is disappointing. While it isn't the case for "non-corporate" research such as particle physics. In many cases, especially where the results could have obvious immediate benefits for humanity; it has instead become distorted into little more than a corporate welfare system. Instead of using public resources to further the public good, the primary goal seems to be to remove knowledge and resources from the public domain at tax payer expense and place this knowledge under lock and key for a generation or more.

These companies do science that we are paying for, then they keep the raw data under wraps only to charge a fee to access it. While this situation appears to be improving in Europe; in the USA and in fact the rest of the world, the situation appears to be getting worse.

As I said in my previous posting they patent the resulting technology, forcing us to pay over and over again for access to the fruits of science we already paid for!

Then @luminousvisions blew my mind with his response.
"yes, you should dig deeper into this...
maybe next time they come to steemit to fund the research!"

It was like gasoline and a match went off in my mind!

I love doing science!
I want the quality of steemit content to increase.
I would very much like to see more real science on steemit.

The number one problem that researchers encounter is sourcing good data.
The number two problem that they encounter is funding.

The "Science in Anarchy" movement is about performing rigorous science using the power of the blockchain to collect and store data. Have a theory, want to test it? Want some help? This is your answer!

Here is a hypothesis I would like to test!
There is recent research indicating our microbiome, our immune system, and our psychological state all form a feedback loop.

The theory is that the immune system detects certain proteins entering the digestive tract as a threat and thus begins the immune cascade. Part of the immune cascade is the initiation of the inflammatory cycle. The inflammatory cycle is interpreted by the brain as general malaise, which then triggers the body to enter a state in which activity is greatly reduced. This state is similar to hibernation and it slows down the metabolism, prolonging the length of time that these proteins are active in the bloodstream. This reduced activity means that the subject will feel less motivated to prepare meals and will instead consume more processed foods, thus continuing the cycle.

If my hypothesis is correct, then taking an over the counter anti-inflammatory such as Tylenol, Ibuprofen or Naproxen Sodium at the onset of depression and/or switching up the diet to eliminate fatty and processed foods all together, should reduce the time spent in a state of malaise. All other things being equal, theoretically it ought to interrupt this cycle.

Here is how we test it.

Select a group you would like to be in. Each group is actually testing different things.
Now start a habit of keeping a daily journal here on steemit.

In your initial journal posting, please disclose age, weight, height, gender (for gender please use the nomenclature of genetic and identified, as in "XX Female", "XY Female" etc).

Regardless of which group you choose to be in...

You are to create a single blog posting about your day each and every day before bedtime.
This will be a daily introspective journal. Discuss the various social interactions you had throughout the day and most importantly how you felt about them as well as yourself. Imagine you are talking to friends, because that's what you are doing.

Detail everything you ate that day to the best of your abilities.
If you eat anything that came in a package, please take photographs of the wrapper and upload it along with your daily blog posting. This helps to gauge portion sizes and it also might shock you to find out how many empty wrappers you're photographing each day.

Except for group #2 this is not a diet, so it doesn't matter at all if you eat anything you want, just document it.

To help with the data filtering process we will be introducing the SAEGM tag system. SA for Science in Anarchy, E is the experiment number or name, G for group M for the group number. This experiment is designated SA1 and you will be in G0..G3

If you are in the control group, just do whatever you normally do, eat what you normally eat and don't change anything about your routine. Don't add anything, don't take anything away.
Please tag your post with SA1G0

If you are in test group #1, do what you normally do, eat what you normally eat. However if you feel any sort of ache or pain or just feel depressed, take an adult strength OTC anti-inflammatory according to the directions on the label. All that we ask is you use the same medicine and same dose each time and that you document it each time. Also let us know if you feel better or worse the following day.
Please tag your post with SA1G1

If you are in test group #2, do what you normally do activity wise, but change your diet. You need to remove any and all processed foods including sugary sweets and snacks as well as carbonated drinks like soda and avoid sugar replacements. If it comes in a package that nature didn't put it in, you aren't allowed to eat it. To the extent possible you should avoid caffeine as well. If you feel any symptoms of malaise, depression, aches or pains you need to ride it out, but increasing your water intake has been shown to help flush lactic acid from your muscle tissues so consider drinking extra water. Especially during the first two weeks.
Please tag your post with SA1G2

If you are in test group #3, same dietary advice as #2 but if you feel any sort of symptoms take an OTC anti-inflammatory as per group #1.
Please tag your post with SA1G3

This next part is critical for all groups.

We have to be able to rule out any sort of drug interactions.
This includes home recipes and herbal remedies. Nature is the world's most prolific drug dealer. You would be absolutely shocked to know the kinds of chemicals in even "pure herbs" you grew yourself at home. For our purposes, marijuana and tobacco are drugs. If you use them, please disclose as much detail as you can in your journal each day.

No matter which group you are in, please document alcohol use.

To be clear, if you are currently being treated for serious mental illness or other health conditions, no one is asking you to change anything and most certainly not asking you to stop taking your meds. In fact it would be best if you seek the advice of whoever is treating you before participating at all. We would love to know about the minutia of your diet and your day though, so you could still participate by choosing to be in the control group since the control group is just blogging about their day in depth with a detailed focus on what they eat and drink.

Additionally, no matter what group you are in, you can change at any time. If you happen to feel more depressed on one regime or another, please hop to a different group. The most important part is actually rigorous data collection, the more data points we can gather, the more inferences we can draw near the end. Thus if you decide to "group hop", then please make it clear you have hopped so we can collate and compile this data at the end of the study. The easiest way to indicate a hop is to change your hashtag to the correct group.
Initial collation will be handled by volunteers running Apache CTakes
Final results will be posted to Arxiv.org and an anonymized dataset will be made available on Freenet

To anyone participating, please comment below.
Make sure to state the group you are choosing to be in.
It is vital that you state this upfront even if your decision changes later.
Available Groups are
SA1G0 : Control
SA1G1 : Testgroup #1
SA1G2 : Testgroup #2
SA1G3 : Testgroup #3

The study will run for 30 days after the initial 24hr welcome period for this post.
SBD earned from this posting will be distributed to study participants.
Rewards will be per capita, per day, and paid at the end of the study, only to those who participate each and every day, from beginning until the end.

Final Note: Most people reading this are probably not going to feel comfortable with this level of disclosure for whatever reason. That's perfectly understandable.
If you want to support the project, please make sure to upvote this project so we can properly fund good data collection. Also regularly visit the journals of each participant, giving them your upvotes. You can also add the scienceinanarchy tag to your own experiments if you have a good idea for an experiment!

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Unfortunately, the current state of science is disappointing. It has become a corporate welfare system, where the primary goal is to take knowledge and resources from the public domain. They do science that we are paying for, then they keep the raw data under wraps only to charge a fee to access it.

I find this exaggerated. Take fundamental research. All results are public, most publications are written in freely available journals and most technologies developed to build the experiments are not patented (and there is thus a free transfer of knowledge to the society).

Although I can admit that what you say is true in some fields, you should not generalize this in this way, where you almost say that scientists form like a sect, keeping knowledge for themselves.

PS: I like your idea of a scientific experiment to be run on steemit, but I strongly disagree with the above paragraph.

@lemouth
I think it depends on the field and the applicability to immediate problems. Here is the deal.
You are an educator, you have direct access to anything published immediately because the school you work for is covering the costs.
However even you cannot deny that publish or perish is a real problem for serious researchers.
The problem here is not the researchers but the companies involved.
Research such as particle physics is published immediately and widely and publicly.
But things with immediate practicality are only published in locked down journals that frankly you need to pay a fortune to access. This is not a problem at all if the company benefiting from licensing the data and resulting tech is also shouldering the cost.

The problem arises when tax dollars fund research that is not made wholly public. When tax payer paid research results in raw data you cannot access and when tax dollars are used to develop technologies that are then locked down for 20 years or more under intellectual property laws.

That is theft from the public domain and it's not even the researchers themselves that are the problem. If this was going to two guys in a garage it wouldn't be as bad. But the reality is much different. These are multimillion dollar companies getting these dollars and using them to fund the development of technology that is subsequently unavailable unless we pay for the privilege to use it.

That is what I am speaking to. Not career researchers, but corporate theft from the public domain.

If you are using public dollars to do research the public should own the results of that research. That's really all I'm saying.

This Science in Anarchy proposal is an alternative method of research though and if it works out it may well revolutionize how we do these kinds of things. :)
Hope something like that is on my tombstone anyways.

All scientific research should be available free of charge to anyone who wants it. Openness and sharing of information is the basis of science and scientific progress. The current situation is ridiculous and unsustainable.

I agree. Note that no one is saying the opposite!

What I was saying is that the comment of @williambanks was not applicable to all research fields. In our case, everything is freely accessible and not patented for a long time.

Any research done by DARPA is not publicly available

I agree, it depends on the field and what you say for corporate companies is also true. But reading again the paragraph I was chocked with, this is not what was mentioned in there. This paragraph sounds very general and you seem to say it applies to all branches of science.

Now, I strongly believe that every field should develop free journals (if particle physics can do it, why can't everybody do it?) and release data to public. Especially if the initial money comes from taxes. I would like just to point out that the arxiv that was developed initially for physics (I think) is now more and more spread within other fields. In this way, publications are available even if published in costly journals (that should be boycotted IMO).

Concerning the 'publish or perish', in my field, this is less and less true in Europe. Quality matters more and more over quantity. Which is a good thing. But again, particle physics may be an exception...

@lemouth I can reword it if you really feel it's too generalized.
Do keep in mind though that particle physics has a much richer history of disclosure than the so called "applied sciences". Example what would the world wide web be without CERN?

That's true. We have always at least two experiments, everything is public, nothing is kept secret, etc... Btw, I wrote on the benefits of the CERN LHC to the society a couple of weeks ago here, in the case you are interested.

Coming back to the point, I would be grateful if you could slightly modify this paragraph and define exactly which kind of research you are focusing on :) Thanks in advance!

@lemouth
Ok I fixed it.
Also upvoted your awesome post on CERN.
You particle physicists really do need to check up on that 5th force as soon as possible and you should check to see if there is a 6th force too. I'm probably insane, but I do expect one to come to light soonish and when it does it will do a better job of explaining the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment and a bunch of other appearantly retro-causal phenomenon. The answer is, I hope also going to explain the error correcting codes that S James Gates found in SUSY a few years back. If so I'd like to propose you call it the Gates force. Just sayin :D

I have to travel today. I will try to write a detailed article on this fifth force. For the moment, I think that it is too early to claim anything :)

Concerning the 'publish or perish', in my field, this is less and less true in Europe. Quality matters more and more over quantity. Which is a good thing. But again, particle physics may be an exception...

This is more and more true in Asia, unfortunately....

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I'm going to try this. I'll be in the control group. It's definitely an interesting approach to science. I will try to post a journal entry for today, but it will likely be incomplete. I will start being thorough tomorrow.

Just to make sure I understand Steemit correctly... you can edit a post right up until the time you get paid for it, right? That means that I could start my post in the morning and end it before I go to bed at night? Being able to keep up on it all day might be easier for me than writing one epic diary post at the end of each day.

I'm going to update a google doc throughout the experiment. I will make a post every 3 days to a week. The post itself I would like to make it more readable and fun than notes

With the first post I will post the view-only shareable link to the google doc. Then that will have just the required info.

I just finished my first post, and yes, I've had no problem editing it as often as I've needed to. I'll start a new one tomorrow.

Here's my first post. I will edit it as I eat more. Please let me know if it's what you have in mind, or if you need more detail. I don't always have the packaging available on food because in my family we pre-make and freeze a fair amount but I can usually link to a picture and description of the product somewhere and did. https://steemit.com/sa1g0/@wiser/wiser-participates-in-science-in-anarchy-s-first-experiment

Then @luminousvisions blew my mind with his response.
"yes, you should dig deeper into this...
maybe next time they come to steemit to fund the research!"

I got dibs on the Gravitation Research Department, which I have named #ascensionteam. But first I am going to build the administrative infrastructure for organising working groups, my so-called 'SteemHordes' project, which is in the pipeline after I get #steemportal up and running :)

I'm excited to see that people are starting to realise that in fact, Steem is a platform for freeform, ad-hoc business development. Making research and publishing under public domain, on the blockchain, is totally something I can see votes flooding in for.

This is interesting. I've heard a few people say they take tylenol and advil when depressed. Mostly for the psychological connection between physical and mental pain, and a sort of placebo effect it gives them (at the very least)

I take painkillers quite often. I have clinical depression so maybe it's a habit for me in the same way they say chocolate cravings are symptomatic of depression.

I wouldn't be helpful in the study even in control group for various reasons. My meds give me major sugar cravings and I often don't have much appetitie.

You have reminded me that I should pay more attention to what I eat. So thank you for that. I think I will experiment with the advil, in the sense I will pay more attention to any effects.

And one question I have...is if the advil is suppose to help at the onset of depression-type symptoms, how can people really know if the timing is right? That can take months to really realize day to day, if being honest with oneself (or a few years)

Or maybe since I already take advil a lot I might be a good person to do that. So long as in the usual diet group. And I know coming up is time when I get depressed/tired a bit.

Yes you would be perfect in the normal diet + painkller group.
Purpose of the study is to test the null hypothesis, i.e. placebo effect.
Just keep doing what you're doing, but blog about it and add #AS1G1 to your daily journal.

ok I can start soon. So I just take advil when I feel 'crappy', not necessarily everyday?

@radioactivities
Yes exactly. In fact we want you to limit it specifically to when you feel crappy. Since it's not the drug we're testing, but the cycle.

About science being public or not : I often try to go directly to the sources, to check various claims based on poplular science,from mainstream media,or alternative or fringe media. I very often hit a brick wall then,all I get is an abstract. So what does available to the public mean? THere is an open science movement,but it is just getting started. We are being held back in terms of technological innovation by patents and proprietary sofwtware and hardware as well.
Making science open on all fronts would greatly accelerate innovation,and help us solve many problems that humanity is facing,like global warming,and bring us to a post-scarcity society.

@kooshikoo
THANK YOU!
You have my vote for comment of the year! I'm following you now.

Aww,thank you! Following you as well!

Very good idea! I hope you can get it working.

I actually think that the domination of funding for science by governments is a much bigger problem than individuals, and companies (which are just organised groups of individuals) acting with a profit motive. Patents are a government-imposed system, which companies and individuals exploit, just as they otherwise get politicians and bureaucrats to give out special favours, usually in exchange for money. Anyhow, I think that much money and effort is wasted because politicians and bureaucrats decide what research gets funded. Such centralised decision making cannot serve the desires of the diversity of human beings very well.

@lanimal
Thanks! I agree, the current "Imaginary Property" (IP) laws are killing off creativity in all forms.
While I don't know if we can take back patents. Those are after all actually IN the US Constitution, not even as an amendment, but a fundamental element. Nevertheless, there is no reason we have to use them.

Knowledge and information need to be free and we are all so much better off when they are.
That's the point of Science in Anarchy. Push back the impending dark age by incentivizing scientists to put their best work out there and make it freely available, because we are all better off when we have more educated.

I find it telling that the countries with the highest standards of living are the ones who invest the most in basic scientific research.

This sounds like a really cool idea, although due to reasons I can't participate in a group. Will be following and upvoting though.

@xanoxt
Thank you! It's just as important that we have people incentivizing good data collection by promising their upvotes to those who are actively engaged in data collection efforts and yes this "journal to detail your diet, excercise and mood" is a vital and important data set for us to prove or disprove that physical and mental well being are tied to the immune system as well.

So even though you can't participate by collecting data yourself, I applaud you for promising you upvotes to those who are.
Thank you again!

As someone who has lost 65 lbs with a low carb high fat diet (keto) I would be interested in seeing your results. This was dropping all sugary foods including fruits (natures candy) and grain foods. The hardest part was adding enough fat to my meals and not overdo it with protein. It is suggested that this type of diet keeps the inflammation down. Although I don't currently do the extreme of this diet right now it has retrained me to eat better and sustain the weight loss. Unfortunately I don't think I can participate but again would be interested in your findings.

Yes, I believe this study is starting out on pretty shaky assumptions. It seems like if you are studying inflammatory/anti-inflammatory diets there needs to be a further understanding of the fundamentals and a review of the literature out there.

A ketogenic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet is by far the most successful anti-inflammatory diet and is why it was the standard of treatment for people with neurological disorders like seizures (Inflammatory mediate disease). You mention avoid high fat greasy things, but that is way too generalized and you risk people avoiding fats that actually have a very strong anti-inflammatory action and also great for the gut; plus avoiding fats causes an increase in carbohydrate craving (especially refined sugars). One particular pure saturated fat is Medium Chain Triglycerides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-chain_triglyceride/ These little fatties have been a miracle for my patients with chronic inflammatory mediate disease to get off the refined sugars, get more energy (lactate is actually much more efficient and less taxing on the system than glucose), and help their immune systems settle down a enough to decrease their disease symptoms (HTN, DM, all autoimmune, neuropathies, CAD, hypercholesteremia, obesity).

As far as recommending NSAIDs for some people do okay, but there are many contraindications that include kidney disease, GI disease; as well as drug to drug interactions. Plus you start by including Tylenol which is not even an anti-inflammatory drug; antipyretic yes, but not what you need it to be. I would be much more interested in at a minimum adding a more holistic approach with sound dietary recommendations, proven anti-inflammatory activities like yoga, and restoring a natural balance of gut flora with broad specie probiotics.

I agree with you 100% on the problem with good science being stolen from the public reservoir of knowledge and holding scientists hostage on what they can study through total control of how they are able to earn money. The whole industry of science in due for a total overhaul with disruption and decentralized platforms are the solution, but as much as I believe your ambition I know enough to not challenge that industrial complex straight on; you will not find a more evil to the core industry then the current pharmaceutical and medical elites. You are talking about disrupting a trillion dollar industry that has no problem killing or causing significant harm on millions of people and it doesn't take long to see example where young bright minds that want to bring truth/knowledge to the world and are murdered/destroyed by these companies....I would only participate in this format if there was 100% anonymity provided for the researchers and really the study participants.

I am with you on this one. And I have a post coming up on a recent research study :)

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