Notorious Paedophile Reads Neuroskeptic

There's been controversy in the UK over an article published in the Guardian that's regarded as being pro-child abuse.

In particular, the newspaper has taken flak for quoting Tom O'Carroll, a self-confessed paedophile and advocate for the right of people to be one. Amongst other things he's written a book about Michael Jackson. At least this week, until the next one comes along, he is Britain's most notorious paedophile.

Now oddly enough, I recently had an encounter with O'Carroll, although I didn't know who he was at the time. Here's the tale...

A few weeks ago, I got an out-of-the-blue email from a Neuroskeptic reader (as happens often), from someone saying he'd tried to leave a comment on this post but it was rejected for being too long.

O'Carroll (for it was he) wanted to know whether I agreed with his reservations about some research on "Cerebral white matter deficiencies in pedophilic men", and specifically on this statement by the paper's author:

One must consider carefully whether the brain differences we detected [i.e. reduced white matter volume in particular areas] cause pedophilia or whether some aspect of being pedophilic caused the brain differences...

Although it is now known that certain brain structures respond to environmental stimulation, such as the motor cortex, there is no evidence that such stimulation causes any changes in the superior fronto-occipital fasciculus or right arcuate fasciculus (the brain regions in which pedophiles and nonpedophiles differ).

Moreover, the brain regions we identified are extremely large, and no previous research has ever found changes in such large regions of the brain. As an analogy, physical exercise will generally stimulate one’s muscle tissue to grow, but one would not grow an extra arm; neurological changes occur only in a very specific manner.

O'Carroll thought that this is a misleading analogy, because the brain could be plastic in ways we don't yet understand. I agreed. We just don't know enough about the brain, yet, to say that the observed white matter changes can't possibly be responses to experiences.

Several recent studies found that experience and learning can change adult human white matter structure. The changes observed were fairly small, but then these studies were fairly short, so they don't define the upper limit of what's possible over time.

These results are not without critics of their own, and I'm on the fence about whether white matter is plastic at all, but my point is, it's an open question. So comparing the idea of white matter plasticity to 'growing an extra arm' is overstatement - and it would be, whether the topic was paedophilia or anything else.

Now, as I said, I hadn't heard of Tom O'Carroll at the time, and I assumed he had a purely academic interest in the matter, as an piece of oversold neuroscience. But now, thanks to the Guardian drama, I realize that...

Britain's most notorious paedophile reads Neuroskeptic.

Hmm.

On that macabre note, I've often wondered whether James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado Batman shooter, ever visited this blog. It's possible: he was a neuroscience undergraduate and later PhD student over the time Neuroskeptic's been going.

There have been 574 visits from Aurora, Colorado, where Holmes was doing his PhD, since 2008. I'll never know whether he was one of them, but the idea that he might have been is pretty creepy.

Mental Illness and Crime, Yet Again

As if on cue, a major study about the relationship (if any) between mental disorder and crime has appeared just when everyone's talking about that.

Although having said that, people seem to be interested in that issue most of the time nowadays, in the UK at any rate, with schizophrenia topping the list of supposedly scary syndromes.

So - should we be worried?

The new research, from Australian team Morgan et al, surveyed everyone born in the state of Western Australia between 1955 and 1969. About 1.6 million people lived there over the course of the study so this was a big project.

By linking local records of arrests over the period 1985 to 1996 to the database of psychiatric diagnosis, the researchers were able to examine disorder-crime correlations in the entire population - meaning that there was no possibility of bias.

So what happened? Here's some highlights:

• 32% of psychiatric patients had been arrested at least once. Unfortunately, it's not clear what the rate was in the general population, but that falls into the range of overall arrest rates in most countries.
• 11% of those arrested had a psychiatric diagnosis. This rose to 20% of arrests for violent offences.
• 0.8% of suspects had schizophrenia, rising to 1.7% for violent offences.
• The number of arrests in people without a disorder fell over the period 1985-1996, reflecting the well-known fact that people commit fewer crimes as they get older. However, in psychiatric patients, there was no change over time.
• For murder, 30% of suspects had a psychiatric history while 3% had a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
• Both substance abuse and personality disorders were associated with higher arrest rates than schizophrenia, but schizophrenia in turn was higher than depression, anxiety, and other miscellaneous disorders.
• Although only 1.7% of violent offenders had schizophrenia, those with the disorder were somewhat more likely to involve strangers, and to take place in public places, and less likely to target family and partners.

Overall this confirms that the great majority of crimes, including violent ones, are not committed by people with mental illness, and that your chance of getting 'murdered by a lunatic' is incredibly low. This strikes me as the only statistic that matters to most people.

There's a long-standing debate over whether people with various disorders are more likely to commit crimes than they would be if they didn't have one, the relative risk. While interesting, this is a purely academic question. What the rest of us need to know is the absolute risk, and this is low.

Morgan VA, Morgan F, Valuri G, Ferrante A, Castle D, and Jablensky A (2012). A whole-of-population study of the prevalence and patterns of criminal offending in people with schizophrenia and other mental illness. Psychological medicine, 1-12 PMID: 23234722

Ritalin, The Ultimate Crimefighter?

There's been lots of interest in the idea that ADHD meds reduce crime rates.

No doubt that, even as we speak, worried pundits are writing of how this is a worrying Orwellian scenario and yadda yadda. But what's really going on?

The research is from Sweden and published in the New England Journal of Medicine: Medication for Attention Deficit–Hyperactivity Disorder and Criminality. The first thing to note is that the study is not about giving medication in order to prevent crime; it was purely looking at what happened to people given ADHD treatment for their ADHD.

In a nutshell, the authors found that people diagnosed with ADHD were about 10% less likely to be convicted of a crime during periods when they were on medication for the disorder. This was true of both men and women, and the effect was greater for the more serious offences.

It was a huge study with over 25,000 ADHD patients and the data comprise pretty much everyone in Sweden over the relevant period so in that respect it's a very good study - although speaking of Orwellian, these studies are only possible because of the Scandinavian tendency to make national registers of everything.

Now the big criticism here is that it's just a correlation, it doesn't prove that the meds were what prevented crime. It might be that ADHD meds have no effect on crime, but that people are less likely to commit crimes at periods when they have their lives sorted out (when they're 'on the rails'), one marker of which is that they're seeking treatment for their ADHD.

However, the authors found that periods of use of SSRI antidepressants were not associated with changes in conviction rates. This is quite good evidence against the 'on the rails' critique, assuming that being prescribed SSRIs is as much a marker of being on the rails as being prescribed Ritalin is.

So, in my view, this is pretty good work, as good as any observational non-randomized study. However, remember: this is just about treating ADHD. Not drugging criminals to stop crime.

Lichtenstein P, Halldner L, Zetterqvist J, Sjölander A, Serlachius E, Fazel S, Långström N, and Larsson H (2012). Medication for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and criminality. The New England journal of medicine, 367 (21), 2006-14 PMID: 23171097

The Two Problems With Science

There's lots of concern at the moment over mistakes, misconduct and misbehaviour in science.

This concern is a good thing. There are serious, systemic problems with modern science as I and many others have long argued.

However, I worry that much of the recent discussion has failed to distinguish between two fundamentally distinct problems. On the one hand, we have outright fraud - i.e. making up data, or otherwise lying, breaking the basic rules of science.

On the other hand we have questionable practices such as: publication bias, p-value fishing, the File Drawer, sample size peeking, post-hoc storytelling, and all of the other dark arts that can lead to false positive science. These are permissible, even encouraged, by the current rules of doing and publishing science.

These two problems are similar in some ways - they're both "bad science", they both lead to failures to replicate, etc. - but in underlying essence they're very different, so much so that I'm not sure they can be usefully discussed in the same breath.

Fraud and questionable practices are different in terms of their harms. Fraud is a more serious act and it causes local harm, introducing major errors into the record. But in terms of its overall effects, I believe questionable practices are worse, as they systematically distort science: ensuring that, in some cases, it is difficult to publish anything but errors.

Fraud and questionable practices call for different solutions. Broadly speaking, fraudsters break the rules, so to stop them we need to enforce those rules, via deterrence, detection, and punishment - like with any criminal act. With questionable practices, it's the opposite: here the problem is the rules (or the lack of them), and the solution is to reform the system.

It's been suggested that fraud and questionable practices share a common cause in the "pressure to publish", the "publishing environment", the "culture" of modern science etc. But while this is a good explanation for questionable practices, I don't think this can explain fraud, any more than, say, the desire for money can explain theft.

Yes, thieves desire money, and yes they steal in order to get money, but everyone else wants money as well, yet most of us don't steal, so that's not an explanation. Frauds fake data to produce publications. But all scientists are under pressure to produce good publications and they always have been - which is why fraud is not new - what's changed recently is the criteria for a 'good' publication.

Now in retrospect, I blurred these distinctions somewhat with my own 9 Circles of Scientific Hell, in which I placed 6 questionable practices and 2 forms of misconduct on the same scale of "sinfulness". In fact there are two distinct hierarchies. In my defence though, that was a cartoon.

I think finance offers a great analogy here.

In finance, you have some people who break the rules. Bernie Madoff is the current poster boy for this. Such people harm others by outright criminal acts. But then we have the people who play by the rules, and still cause harm. The global financial crisis was in essence caused by all of the major American banks going all-in on a bet, and losing. Yet no-one broke the rules: the regulations allowed banks to gamble. The problem was not rule-breaking, but the rules (or lack thereof).

Here's the curious thing: the financial crisis did more harm than Madoff's scam, even though what Madoff did - theft by fraud - was more immoral than what the bankers did - gambling unwisely.

That's confusing to our ethical sense and our emotions (who should we feel more angry at? Who's 'worse'?) but it's really no surprise: precisely because what the banks did was above board, everyone did it so the damage was huge. If it had been illegal for banks to gamble all their money at once, individual banks might still have broken that rule, locally, but it's unlikely that the system would have been threatened.

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this: everyone following bad rules is often worse than individuals breaking good rules.

Science has its share of fraud. Hauser, Smeesters, Fujii - they broke good rules against such deceit. They are the Bernie Madoffs of science. But then there's 'questionable practices' like publication bias, p-value fishing, the File Drawer, and all the rest, which are allowed, but which are universally acknowledged to be bad for science. Scientists using these dark arts (and I don't know any who never do) may be the Lehman Brothers of science.

A Bloody Mess: Pharma, Legal Threats, and Fraud

Over at ScienceInsider, we read that a German pharma company, Fresenius Kabi, threatened a scientist with legal action over a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The paper asked, in effect: what's the best way to boost blood volume after bleeding? The old-fashioned - and cheap - approach is to give water with various salts, called Ringer's solution. However, it has been proposed that it might be more effective to add a form of starch to the mix, specifically hydroxyethyl starch (HES).

In essence, just as you can use starch to thicken a soup, HES helps to bulk out the blood, increasing the volume, to better compensate for fluid loss. However, HES carries the risk of side effects, including severe kidney damage.

Do the benefits outweigh the risks? That was the question asked by a team of researchers led by Danish Dr Anders Perner. In a double blind, randomized controlled trial, Perner and colleagues compared a particular kind of HES (6% HES 130/0.42) to Ringer's solution, in patients with severe sepsis (blood poisoning) treated in intensive care.

The results showed that HES was actively harmful. It raised the risk of death in these severely ill patients. 51% died, compared to 43% in the control group:

Phew! Glad we know that. If you ever end up in intensive care with sepsis, this paper could well have improved your chances of survival.

Here's where the legal threats came in. When Perner et al published their work, they described it as a trial of 6% HES 130/0.4. It was in fact a trial of 6% HES 130/0.42. Spot the difference? Fresenius Kabi did, and they weren't happy, because they sell the 130/0.4 product. The trial was, incorrectly, billed as being about their product. It was in fact about a very similar product.

And they really are very similar. The 0.4/0.42 refers to the average hydroxylethyl ratio of the starch. But this is only an average - it varies from molecule to molecule. At ScienceInsider, Perner points out that the ratio varies between 0.40 to 0.44 in the "0.42" brand, and 0.38 to 0.45 in Fresenius Kabi's "0.4".

That's a lot of overlap... 100% overlap actually. Still, a mistake is a mistake, so Perner was right to correct it, but why couldn't they just have asked nicely?

Well... maybe because it's not the first controversy involving Fresenius Kabi and their starchy solutions. In fact, they're linked to one of the biggest scientific scandals in recent years: the case of Dr Joachim Boldt. Boldt was one of the leading researchers in his field, until last year when it was revealed that much of his work was fraudulent, unethical, or both. He's since been made to retract over 90 of his papers - which at one time made him the most-retracted scientist ever.

Now Boldt's main research interest was... hydroxyethyl starch. Much of his work - including many of the retracted papers - seemed to show that HES was both safe and effective, and he received funding from Fresenius Kabi.


So, the fall of Boldt must have deal FresKab a bit of a blow. They developed HES, back in the 1970s, and now the star cheerleader for their invention has been revealed as one of the biggest medical fraud in history. It's not hard to see why they might be feeling especially sensitive right now.

Sure, Boldt received funding from other companies too, and FresKab funded plenty of other researchers too. There's no reason to believe that they were aware of Boldt's misconduct, or that they encouraged it. But indirectly they almost certainly did benefit from it.

Anyway, following the legal threats, the NEJM has now corrected the Perner study. It was not a study of Fresenius Kabi's product. Rather, it was a study of a very similar product, and it showed that this very similar product kills people. So spread the word!

Perner A, & et al (2012). Hydroxyethyl starch 130/0.42 versus Ringer's acetate in severe sepsis. The New England journal of medicine, 367 (2), 124-34 PMID: 22738085

Love Truth? Wait.

Britain may be hosting the Olympics, but that hasn't stopped us indulging in our own national sport of complaining. Many of the complaints in the past 24 hours or so have been about this chap:

Rileyy_69 attacked a celebrity on Twitter, who called him out on it, rileyy_69 attacked him more, thousands of fans of said celebrity attacked him, he attacked some of them back, then he apologized, but then attacked again, and eventually someone reported him to the police, and he was arrested on Tuesday morning for malicious communications or something.

All very exciting, but so what?

Should we pity this guy, or did it he bring it on himself? Were the thousands who attacked him jumping on the bandwagon, or justifiably outraged? Should he have been arrested, and if not, why? Because the law in question ought to be repealed, or because it's a fine law but was wrongly applied in this case?

Good questions. We don't know enough yet to answer them. We don't know this person, his life story, his mental health situation, etc. Some details have now started to emerge, but generally the early, fragmentary reports in cases like this only add to the confusion.

It's too early to tell. I don't think anyone can dispute this. Unless you i) know Rileyy69 in real life and ii) are an expert in the relevant areas of law and iii) have read all his Tweets, not just the ones that made it into the newspapers, you are probably not in a position to judge.

It's too early to say, but that's never stopped anyone.

Newspapers and blogs are full of definitive, final judgements on these questions. Both those broadly in favor of the arrest of Rileyy_69, and those opposed, are equally premature. If there is a difference, it's that the latter group also include hypocrites, who swiftly took to Twitter to criticize the knee jerk mob mentality of the Twitterati.

One who really cared about Rileyy_69, the law, the media, or whatever else they claimed to, would above all want to establish the facts before commenting. The truth will out; we can but wait, or try to help it along. But we should not try to outrun it.

The truth is slow.

And that's fine. There's rarely, and certainly not in this case, a need to form your opinions within minutes and to nail your theses to the door of the cathedral within a day of the event. Just wait! You'll be in good company; few of the great minds of history measured time in hours.

"Ah", you might say, "but those who attacked Rileyy_69 on Twitter were, themselves, doing what you're criticizing!". They were, actually, but that's what Twitter is for. Tweets are about speed and in its place, that's fine. The human brain responds to stimuli within about 100 milliseconds; you give people the chance to type that response, and they will. To criticize that is to criticize human nature.

No, the problem is not those who use an avowedly instant communication service as intended. It's those who try to export that mode of thought into the ancient and higher medium of prose longer than 140 characters.

For everything there is a time, a time to Tweet and a time to think. Just don't mix them up.

The Coming Age of Fetal Genomics

It's 2020. A young woman and her partner have just found out that she's pregnant with her first child. and they're going to be parents.

They're overjoyed, of course. But they're also worried. They've seen the adverts warning parents-to-be about the risk of de novo mutations - genetic mistakes that occur inside sperm or egg cells, and affect the child. These mutations, the ads say, are much more common than previously believed and they can cause all kinds of problems: intellectual disabilities, autism, infertility, mental illness, heart malformations - pretty much anything.

The scariest part? Because these are new mutations, out of the blue, they can affect any family. A clear family history is no protection. They don't discriminate by race or lifestyle. It's just the luck of the draw - except that older parents are at much higher risk, especially older fathers. In the case of our couple, she's 28 and he's 32. Perfectly normal for this day and age - but very old in biological terms. Humans evolved to be grandparents by 32, not parents. "The stakes couldn't be higher. Why leave it to chance?"

So they don't. Instead, they buy a $100 test kit, they each provide a small blood sample and send it off to one of the companies offering fetal genome testing. At the testing lab, they can separate out the mother's DNA from that of the fetus, both of which are present in the mother's blood. By comparing the fetal genome to the mother's and father's, it's easy to spot de novo mutations. If a certain gene doesn't match either the mother or the father's sequence, it's mutated.

A few days later the results are back. There are several mismatches detected. Most are benign - they're not predicted to have any biological effects. But there's one, a deletion of a few thousand bases in a gene involved in brain development. This deletion is predicted to raise the risk of epilepsy and autism from 1% to 10% apiece.

The parents now have a decision to make. The mutation is a one off, it's not inherited. If they conceive again... roll the dice again... and it'll be gone. Do they terminate?

Like the adverts say, "Some people disagree with this, but we say there's only one person who really matters: your baby."

*

This is likely to become possible in the next few years.

A paper just published in Nature reports on the Non-invasive prenatal measurement of the fetal genome. The technique relies on the fact that the blood of a pregnant woman contains DNA: hers, obviously, but also that of the unborn child. This cell-free DNA can be extracted and genotyped.

This has been possible for a few years, but until now, only fairly crude genetic information could be detected. An extra chromosome, such as in Down syndrome, is pretty easy to spot. This technique is already used to diagnose Down's syndrome and a few other disorders prenatally.

But those diseases are just the low-hanging fruit at the tip of the iceberg, if you see what I mean. To gather the kind of detailed genomic information that could diagnose thousands of disorders is harder: the fetal and maternal genomes are mixed up, and the challenge is to tease them apart. But according to the Stanford geneticists behind the Nature paper, and other teams, it's now possible as early as the first trimester.

What makes the new method so revolutionary is that it is, as the title of the paper says, non-invasive. It's already possible to sequence a fetal genome, but it takes a surgical procedure involving inserting a needle into the womb, and a degree of risk. It's not something you can just sit down and do - but blood samples are. So cell-free DNA will make fetal genomics a personal choice, a commercial product.

The resolution's still not 100%, but inevitably, it will become cheaper, faster and more accurate as technology advances. This year we're expected to see the cost of reading a whole human genome falling below $1000. Fetal genomes will be more expensive, but not enormously so. In 5 or 10 years, it's likely to be affordable.

*

What will happen? I think there'll be demand for such services. Most parents won't do it, but enough people will that it will be a major issue. Just look at countries where boys are more valued than girls: a lot of sex-selective abortion happens. Today, it's limited to gender, because it's easier to determine a fetus's sex than its genome. In 5 or 10 years, they'll both be easy.

With demand will come companies to supply these services and, inevitably, advertizing. I doubt these adverts will be on TV, because there will be opposition to the whole idea and boycotts of broadcasters who run them. But we'll be getting spam emails about it. People will worry even over the harmless mutations: a variant won't need to be really associated with a disease, just believed to be, to make people panic.

Socially, it's likely to be divisive. The anti-abortion types will obviously not approve. But it will drive a wedge between those who support abortion but oppose "discriminatory" abortion against the disabled, and those who support the right to terminations 'for any reason, or none'.

Politically, there will be pressure to regulate this, but legally, it'll be tricky. I can't see how you'd prove that any given abortion is motivated by genetic concerns, so unless you ban abortion outright, that won't work. Banning fetal (or all) genomics except under medical supervision might be possible, but people could always go (or send a few drops of blood) abroad to get around that.

I'm not sure where I'll stand on this, but it looks very likely that we'll each have to make a decision in the coming years.

Fan HC, Gu W, Wang J, Blumenfeld YJ, El-Sayed YY, and Quake SR (2012). Non-invasive prenatal measurement of the fetal genome. Nature PMID: 22763444

Plagiarism In Translation - A Dilemma

Last week I caught a plagiarist.

In a research paper published recently in a minor journal, I realized that the authors had directly copied several sentences from the Introduction to an earlier paper that I'd been reading recently. Even the references from the original were cloned. Given the context, it's extremely unlikely that they had permission.

This is an open and shut case of plagiarism. There's no dispute that plagiarism is bad. So I was about to write to the editor of the journal and the original authors when I looked up who the culprits were Polish.

This has happened before. A while back I detected plagiarism on a similar scale, again a very clear cut case, from some Brazilian authors.

I haven't reported either case. That's what this post is about.

Why not? It's nothing to do with the idea that in "other cultures", copying is regarded differently, so we need to make allowances for foreigners. That doesn't convince me. No, my concern is that as a native English speaker I have an unfair advantage over scientists from other parts of the world.

500 years ago Latin was the international language of science; a hundred years ago it was German, in many fields. Today, most scientific journals and all of the high-impact ones require papers to be written in English. That's the way it is, and there's no changing it, but I don't think it's fair.

Worse, many journals don't just demand English, they expect perfect English. Many editors and peer reviewers will throw out papers with clumsy phrasing or grammatical errors, regardless of where the authors are from, because "It's not my job to teach you English". In my own reviews I don't do this - if a paper is scientifically sound but the English is poor then I'll rewrite it. But I think I'm in a minority.

So you can see why non-Anglophones are tempted to copy and paste. Who knows exactly how common it is, but given that I've found two examples without specifically looking for it, it must be widespread.

Suppose you need a  "boilerplate" summary of some well-worn but complicated issue for your Introduction. And you do, nowadays, although they add little to most papers. You could write it yourself and the English might be bad, or you could copy it from a similar paper in a good journal and be sure...

Is that plagiarism? Yes. Is it illegal? Quite possibly, depending on the jurisdiction. But is it morally wrong? I don't think so.

You might say that it's stealing, and hence wrong. But is it so different to copying someone's paragraph, changing a few words and swapping some around, until it's "different" enough to pass a plagiarism check? All you've added in that case is your own linguistic coat of paint; you've still stolen the car. Yet even English speakers do that and get away with that all the time. Indeed, the banal, boilerplate "original" plagiarized text in my two examples could have started out that way.

I'd stress than I would have been writing to the journal in a flash if I thought there was any question of plagiarism of data, or of novel ideas, but there isn't.

I'm absolutely not encouraging this solution to the language problem. It really is a bad idea, because you'll probably get caught. The best scenario for you would be that the journal's plagiarism checker spots it and your paper won't get published. If you're unlucky, it will get through, and then one day down the line you'll end up on Retraction Watch. Don't do it, however tempting it may be.

But I can't feel any indignation at those who do it. It's hardly classy, but it's not malicious, selfish or damaging to science, and as such I struggle to accept that it's wrong. Which is why I have not reported my two cases.

I expect some people will disagree, so please feel free to comment. I may change my mind.

Free Will: A Dangerous Idea?

The British Journal of Social Psychology has published a fiery rebuke to psychologists who argue that belief in free will makes people more ethical.

Recent much-publicized studies have claimed that scepticism about free will makes people behave less morally. "Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness" as the title of one of hese papers puts it.

In his article (free pdf), British 'independent researcher' James B. Miles says that these experiments are flawed, because they didn't distinguish between determinism (lack of free choice) and fatalism (lack of the ability to change events).

More fundamentally, though, Miles says that free will is used to justify things, such as punishment and poverty, that would otherwise be seen as scandalous -

Western law recognizes that the penal system is so harmful to the existing life and future opportunities of persons that to convict requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet libertarians provide no objective evidence whatsoever for the existence of free will, and therefore no apparent justification for the mass poverty and brutal punishments that belief in libertarian free will often brings with it. The leading legal theorist Stephen J. Morse freely admits that harsh prison conditions and execution are only morally tolerable where the presumption of free choice exists...

...In June 2009, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published research showing that up to 83% of Britons think that ‘virtually everyone’ remains in poverty in Britain not as the result of social
misfortune or biological handicap but through choice (Bamfield & Horton, 2009, p. 23; 69% of those surveyed agreed with the statement and an additional 14% were unsure but did not disagree.) Because of their belief in the fairness of ‘deserved inequalities’, such respondents were discovered to have become almost completely unconcerned with the idea of promoting greater equality while at the same time asserting that Britain was a beacon of fairness that offered opportunities for all...

...Free will may just be the primary excuse many use to legitimize a contempt for the poor that would exist independent of their professed belief in free will, but free will assertion nonetheless provides the ethical fig leaf for such contempt that would be far harder to rationalize (and therefore tolerate) without the myth of free will.

This is a polemical piece (remarkably so, for an academic journal), and clearly this is only one side of the story, but it's hard to deny that he has a point: there's a dark side to the belief in free will. If you doubt free will, and yet praise the myth of it, as some scientists seem to be doing, you need to accept that you're condemning some people (prisoners, most obviously) to suffer as a result "through no fault of their own".

Personally, I think the great majority of people do believe in free will and always will - the arguments against it have been around for millenia, they're as convincing as they'll ever be, and they haven't convinced most people, however irrational that might make most people. So I think the debate over belief in free will is academic; it's not going away.

 Miles JB (2011). 'Irresponsible and a Disservice': The integrity of social psychology turns on the free will dilemma. The British journal of social psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 22074173

Do Brain Scans Sway Juries?

Does seeing a criminal's brain affect jury decisions?

Edith Greene and Brian Cahill ask this question in a new study which put volunteers in the position of jurors in a murder trial. The 'defendant' was guilty, but the question was: should they get life in prison, or death?

It turned out that seeing brain scans didn't have much of an effect - but it's not clear how far the results would generalize.

208 mock-jurors were randomly assigned to get different kinds of mitigation information about the accused. Sometimes, all they were told was that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression and a substance misuse disorder. Others were also given neuropsychological test scores showing that he did poorly on various tests of reasoning and cognition. Finally, some were shown brain scans on top of all that, scans which were described as showing left frontal lobe damage.

All these materials were based on a real 2007 court case.

What happened? When the defendent was said to have been assessed as probably "dangerous" in future, people who were only told his diagnosis of schizophrenia usually sent him to the chair. But when they were given his psychological test scores - showing that he suffered from cognitive impairments - they were far more lenient. Seeing the neuroimages had no effect on top of that.

If the guy was described as posing a low risk of future violence, the verdicts were lenient, no matter what else they were told about him. In the real case, by the way, he got life.

This suggests that brain scans don't exert a seductive allure on jury decisions, at least not over-and-above psych test scores. But I'm not sure how representative the results are. The 'jurors' were all psychology undergrads. Most were Hispanic (63%) females (67%). Are psychology students especially resistant to the allure of brain scans - and/or especially vulnerable to the allure of psychological test scores? No-one knows, but it's surely plausible.

On some level, neuroimaging evidence clearly can influence people's decisions, like any other evidence; lawyers wouldn't bother presenting it otherwise. The question is how much of an impact it has, but that is surely going to depend on the details of the case as well as the juror's background; I'm not sure how much a study like this one, focussing on one example, will be able to tell us.


Greene E, and Cahill BS (2011). Effects of Neuroimaging Evidence on Mock Juror Decision Making. Behavioral Sciences and the Law PMID: 22213023

Do You Have Free Will?

I mean you, specifically.

I'm not asking whether people have free will. I think they do - except you. You're the one person on earth who doesn't have it.

If you disagree - how would you convince me that you do have it?

Alternatively, if you're one of the people who doesn't believe in free will - I agree with you, people don't have it... except me. I'm special.

-

This might seem like one of those thought experiments that only philosophers could care about, but it's of more everyday importance than the general question of 'whether we have free will'. That's an interesting debate, but really it doesn't change anything. If we have it, we always have, and if we don't, we never will. Either way, here we are, and we'd better get on with our lives.

On the other hand, the question of whether an individual has free will has real consequences. It can even be a matter of life or death. It comes up in court cases. Lawyers and psychiatrists don't use the words "free will", they'll talk about responsibility or capacity or sound minds, but what they mean, in essence, is what the rest of us mean by the term free will.

In some of these cases, free will is what you want - if, say, psychiatrists want to confine you to a hospital, and you say you don't want to be there. Other times it's the reverse - if you've committed a crime, and your defense is that some kind of mental or neurological illness made you do it, then you're arguing that you don't have it (or didn't, at the crucial moment.)

But while lots of people have opinions on the abstract "Free Will" question, I don't think many people pay attention to the issue of their own free will or lack of it - until they end up in court. We just assume that if everyone else has it, so do we, and vice versa.

Yet how can we be so sure? Everyone accepts that people differ in regards to how much free will they have. Wwhen people say "I believe people have free will", they don't really mean all people - they surely make an exception for babies, people in a coma, people having a seizure, and probably children, people with dementia, people with severe mental illness... Likewise, people who don't believe in free will recognize that there's a difference between a normal adult and one of those people.

But where do we draw the line, and how do you know which side you're on? This seems to me the most important questions to be asking about free will.

Potential Personal Genomics

A while ago I wrote about how new findings in genetics could herald a new kind of "eugenics", based not around selective breeding to ensure that "bad" genes aren't passed on, but rather based on using fetal genetic testing to choose which variants enter the gene pool in the first place.

I said-

In the near future, we might be able to routinely sequence the genome of any unborn child shortly after conception

But I didn't realize that this may be really very near indeed. Two recent reports have shown that it's possible to sequence fetal DNA from a maternal blood sample. In one case it was used to diagnose a 35 week fetus with a genetic deletion on chromosome 12 seemingly associated with autism, developmental delay and shortness.

In this case it was inherited from the father (which is why they decided to test for it), but this approach could equally be used to screen for the de novo mutations that account for much disease, as I discussed in the last post.

This is big. Currently, the main way to get fetal DNA is through amniocentesis, i.e. inserting a needle into the womb. It's a substantial and not entirely safe medical procedure. A blood sample would be an order of magnitude cheaper and safer, but most of all it would be something you could do at home.

No longer would you need to go to a hospital and discuss everything with a doctor. You could take some blood, send it off anonymously to a sequencing company, and get the results in an email. It would take it out of the hands of professionals and open up a space for individual choice.

The cost of whole-genome sequencing has been falling exponentially and many think it will fall below the $1000 mark within a few years. Combine that with fetal DNA testing and we might see moderately well-off parents able to sequence fetal DNA within the next decade.


When this happens I think the personal genomics industry will suddenly become extremely "hot". At the moment you can sequence your own DNA for a few thousand $ if you want. The results may be interesting but they're of little obvious use. Whatever your genes are, you're stuck with them.

But as soon as we're talking about potential human genomes, it'll kick things up a notch. Media interest and political controversy is sure to follow. Personally I think it'll the debate will begin in earnest when we start seeing selective abortions on the basis of genes for "normal" variants rather than "disease" genes.

It's one thing to not want a child with blindness, or a high risk of leukaemia. But as a society I don't think we're ready for not wanting a child because they're predicted to be a B student rather than an A student, or brunette rather than blonde. At some point soon, though, we'll have to decide what we think about that.

Peters D, Chu T, Yatsenko SA, Hendrix N, Hogge WA, Surti U, Bunce K, Dunkel M, Shaw P & Rajkovic A (2011). Noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of a fetal microdeletion syndrome. The New England journal of medicine, 365 (19), 1847-8 PMID: 22070496

Srebniak M, Boter M, Oudesluijs G, Joosten M, Govaerts L, Van Opstal D, & Galjaard RJ (2011). Application of SNP array for rapid prenatal diagnosis: implementation, genetic counselling and diagnostic flow. European journal of human genetics : EJHG, 19 (12), 1230-7 PMID: 21694736

To Catch A Predator... With A Brain Scanner?

With the help of an MRI scanner and some child pornography, a new study claims to be able to tell whether someone is a paedophile: Assessment of Pedophilia Using Hemodynamic Brain Response to Sexual Stimuli.

It was an fMRI study of 24 self-identified paedophiles (recruited through a clinic offering anonymous treatment) and 32 male controls. Everyone was shown a series of images of naked men, women, boys and girls. The neural response to child vs. adult images was the main outcome measure.

Respect to the authors for getting that past the ethics committee.

The blob-o-grams above show that the paedophile's brains reacted differently to the control brains, when shown images of naked children, which is not surprising because the brain is what makes you a paedophile (and everything else.)

However, what's more interesting is that by comparing each individual's brain activity to the average activity of the paedophile group and the control group, it was possible to diagnose people as paedophiles or not with high accuracy (90+%).

Plotting the "typical paedophile"-ness of the neural response to girls vs women and boys vs men, the paedophiles (triangles) form a clear cluster. There were also some differences between homosexual and heterosexuals in both groups.

The statistics seem kosher: they used leave-one-out cross-validation to avoid the error of double dipping.

What's not clear is whether this was measuring sexual attraction as such. All it's measuring is how much each person's activity correlated with the paedophile group average. Maybe it's picking up on the shame paedophiles feel over being reminded of what they've done. Maybe the controls were just averting their eyes when the child porn came on.

However, you could say that if you're just interested in the practical business of catching paedophiles, that's academic. More concerning is the question of whether it would be possible to fool the technique. A recent study showed that it's easy to fool a brain scan designed to detect lying.

But let's suppose it does work out. Would that be a good thing? What is "a paedophile", anyway? Is it someone's who's attracted to children, or someone who acts on that attraction?

For example, there are people who are caught with child porn, and who admit they downloaded it, but who deny being attracted to children. The Who shredder Pete Townsend and comedian Chris Langham being two British examples. Both admit downloading illegal images, but say it was for 'research purposes'.

Now it might be possible, using fMRI, to find out if they're telling the truth. Let's suppose it was doable.

So what? Downloading child pornography is a crime - whatever your motivation. Being attracted to children is legal, in itself. So from a legal perspective it should make no difference at all in cases like this.

Of course, we don't in fact go around seeing things from a purely legal perspective. We care whether someone is attracted to children or not. But should we care? Is that fair? You don't choose your sexual orientation. What you choose is whether to break the law by commiting the crime.

There are surely people out there - no-one knows how many - who are attracted the children, and never act on it. Do we want to be able to "catch" them?

Edit: The original version of this post linked to the wrong paper, an older paper by the same authors. This has been fixed now.

Ponseti, J., Granert, O., Jansen, O., Wolff, S., Beier, K., Neutze, J., Deuschl, G., Mehdorn, H., Siebner, H., & Bosinski, H. (2011). Assessment of Pedophilia Using Hemodynamic Brain Response to Sexual Stimuli Archives of General Psychiatry DOI: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.130

New Mutations - New Eugenics?

True or false: you inherit your genes from your parents.


Mostly true, but not quite. In theory, you do indeed get half of your DNA from your mother and half from your father; but in practice, there's sometimes a third parent as well, random chance. Genes don't always get transmitted as they should: mutations occur.

As a result, it's not true that "genetic" always implies "inherited". A disease, for example, could be entirely genetic, and almost never inherited. Down's syndrome is the textbook example, but it's something of a special case and until recently, it was widely assumed that most disease risk genes were inherited.

Yet recent evidence suggests that many cases of neurological and psychiatric disorders are caused by uninherited, de novo mutation events. Here are two papers from the last few weeks about schizophrenia(1,2) - but the story looks similar for autism, intellectual disabilities, some forms of epilepsy, ADHD, and others. Indeed they're often the same mutations.

Biologically, a given mutation is what it is, whether it's de novo or inherited. But on a social and a psychological level, I think there are crucial differences, and in particular I think that if it turns out that de novo mutations are important in disease, we're going to see attempts to take these variants out of circulation - far more so than in the case of the very same genes, were they inherited.

The old eugenics movement was based on the idea that if we stop people with bad genes from breeding - by sterilization, voluntary or otherwise, say - we'll be able to eliminate diseases and other undesirable traits. This idea is now generally regarded as extremely unethical, but many of its opponents have shared with the eugenicists the belief that it could work.

But if de novo mutations are what cause the majority of disease, then this approach would be pointless. Sterilizing certain people, or encouraging the healthy ones to have more children, would never be able to eliminate the 'bad genes' because new ones are being created every generation, pretty much at random.

So the de novo paradigm ought to be welcomed by opponents of eugenics. It wasn't just morally wrong - it was biologically misguided too.

But hang on. This is the 21st century. We have in vitro fertilization (IVF), and you can analyze the genes of an IVF embryo before you decide to make it into a child. In the near future, we might be able to routinely sequence the genome of any unborn child shortly after conception.

From there, it would be a small step to allowing parents to decide not to have children with de novo mutations.

This would be, in its effects, a form of eugenics - in the sense that it would produce the effect that the old eugenicists wanted. No more 'bad' variants, or not nearly as many. Opinions will differ as to whether it's morally different. But I would have said that politically, it's a lot more likely to happen.

I can't see forced sterilization returning any time soon. But if you were expecting a baby and you knew that it was not just carrying your and your partner's DNA, but had also suffered a mutation - might you not want to avoid that?

Psychologically, it matters that it did not inherit the variants. It would be a big step to decide that your child should not inherit part of your own DNA. Of course, some variants are obviously harmful, like one that raises the risk of cancer, and I can't see how anyone would want to pass those on. But think about the grey areas - a variant for social anxiety, mild autistic symptoms, obesity, a personality trait.

You might well feel that carrying that variant is what makes you, you; and so it would be natural for your child to have it. You might decide that if it was good enough for you (and all your ancestors), it's good enough for your children. You might well resent the very idea that it's a 'bad gene' at all, as an attack on your own self-worth.

But none of that applies if it's a de novo mutation. Indeed, quite the opposite - all those same considerations would probably lead you to want your children to carry as close as possible to a carbon copy of your DNA, with no random changes. It was good enough for you.

My point is that I think there will be much more support for the idea of genetic screening or other action against de novo variants than against inherited ones. More people will want it, it will be more socially acceptable, and used more widely. I'm not saying this would be a good or a bad thing, just making a prediction. In the future, diseases and traits that are primarily caused by de novo mutations will increasingly selected against.

Pharmaceutical Company Threatens Blogger

Boiron, a multinational pharmaceutical company, have threatened an Italian blogger with legal action, the BMJ reports.

Many people are concerned when big pharmaceutical companies do this kind of thing. So I don't think we should make any exception merely because Boiron's pharmaceuticals happen to be homeopathic ones.

Samuel Riva, who blogs (in Italian) at blogzero.it, put up some articles critical of homeopathy

which included pictures of Boiron’s blockbuster homoeopathic product Oscillococcinum, marketed as a remedy against flu symptoms. The pictures were accompanied by captions, which joked about the total absence of any active molecules in homoeopathic preparations

Boiron wrote to Riva's internet provider threatening legal action, if the offending references to Boiron weren't taken down. They also wanted them to lock Riva out of his blog, the BMJ says. In response Riva removed the references to Boiron, including the pictures and captions, but kept the posts on homeopathy in general.

Hmmm.

Above you can see a new picture I made of a Boiron product, with some captions you may find interesting. I've made sure to limit these to quotes from Wikipedia, and from Boiron USA's own website, and some simple mathematical calculations.

Beyond that, I make no comment whatsoever.

Turone F (2011). Homoeopathy multinational Boiron threatens amateur Italian blogger. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 343 PMID: 21840920

Ban These Sick Ape-Man Frankensteins

According to a new report, urgent action is required to stop scientists creating a monstrous race of apes with fully functional human brains (just as Christine O'Donnell warned us about those mice), thus causing Planet Of The Apes to come true.

OK, that's not quite what the Academy of Medical Sciences said. But judging from most of the media coverage, you might think it was.

The report is actually about "Animals containing human material" and it notes that under British law, experiments of this kind are covered by generic animal research rules, but there are no special animal-human regulations.

Should there be?

I think there should be. We as a society allow experiments on animals or animal embryos that we don't allow on humans, even on human embyros. Clearly, we need to decide what we're going to do about organisms that have both human and animal DNA, or whatever. This doesn't mean restricting it - to clear up the rules could also facilitate such research, by making it explicit what is allowed.

However, we should tread carefully here. This is an area where our intuitions can lead us astray.

Although we have absolutely no idea how to make an animal-human "hybrid", or even whether it's possible at all, the very idea of it has many people worried. It's probably a case of the uncanny valley and lots of cultural baggage (Planet of the Apes et al).

So, for whatever reason, we have a hang-up about making monstrous ape-men. Fair enough. So long as we remember that this is entirely hypothetical, and that it might, for all we know, be literally impossible.

Yet other things in this debate are very real. Over-zealous regulation of research could easily end up delaying, say, a cure for Alzheimer's for, say, 10 years. That would be dooming tens of millions of people to suffering and death.

The problem is, that's hard to picture. It's hard to imagine how bad Alzheimer's is unless you have personal experience. Even if you do, it's hard to multiply that badness by ten million anonymous, hypothetical people. "One ape-man is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic".

Delaying science is easy to do (for politicians), and hard to picture why it's bad. Whereas "a monstrous ape-man" is the exact opposite. Easy to imagine - just look at the media interest in this story - yet nowhere close to being reality.

This is a problem. The human mind and the way we think about these issues is a problem. Even when that mind is safely inside a nice normal human skull.

Violent Brains In The Supreme Court

Back in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Californian law banning the sale of violent videogames to children was unconstitutional because it violated the right to free speech.

However, the ruling wasn't unanimous. Justice Stephen Breyer filed a dissenting opinion. Unfortunately, it contains a whopping misuse of neuroscience. The ruling is here. Thanks to the Law & Neuroscience Blog for noticing this.

Breyer says (on page 13 of his bit)

Cutting-edge neuroscience has shown that “virtual violence in video game playing results in those neural patterns that are considered characteristic for aggressive cognition and behavior.”

He then cites this fMRI study from 2006. It's from the same group as this one I wrote about recently.

Breyer quotes this study as part of a discussion of the evidence linking violent video game use to violence. I have nothing to say about this, but I will point out than the fact that violent crime fell heavily in America after 1990, which is when the Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive were invented.

Anyway, does this study show that playing violent games causes aggressive brain activity? Not exactly. By which I mean "no".

They scanned 13 young men playing a shooter game. The main finding was that during "violent" moments of the game, activity in the rostral ACC and the amygdala activity falls. At least this is the interpretation the authors give.

OK, but even if this neural response is "characteristic for aggressive cognition and behavior", it only lasted a few seconds. There's no evidence at all that this causes any lasting effects on brain function, or behaviour.

The real problem though is that the whole thing is based on the theory that violence is associated with reduced amygdala (and rACC) activity.

The authors cite various studies to this effect, but they don't distinguish between reduced activity as an immediate neural response to violence, as in this study, and reduced activity in people with high exposure to violent media, in response to non-violent stimuli.

This is rather like saying that because having a haircut reduces your total hair, and because bald people have no hair, haircuts cause baldness. Short-term doesn't automatically become long-term.

Besides, the whole idea that amygdala deactivation = violence is a bit weird because they used to destroy people's amydalas to reduce violent aggression in severe mental and neurological illness:

Different surgical approaches have involved various stereotactic devices and modalities for amygdaloid nucleus destruction, such as the injection of alcohol, oil, kaolin, or wax; cryoprobe lesioning; mechanical destruction; diathermy loop; and radiofrequency lesioning...

Lovely. It even worked sometimes, apparantly. Although it killed 4% of people. You can't reduce the activity of a region much more than by destroying it, yet destroying the amygdala reduced violence, or at the very least, didn't make it worse.

The truth is that aggression isn't a single thing. Everyone knows that there are two main kinds, "in cold blood" and "in the heat of the moment". Killing someone in a spontaneous bar brawl is one thing, but carefully planning to sneak up behind them and stab them is quite another.

Just based on what we know about the rare cases of amygdala-less people, I would imagine that destroying the amygdala would reduce violence "in the heat of the moment", which is motivated by anger and fear. The kind of patients who got this surgery seem to have been that kind of violent person, not the cold calculating kind.

So, even if violent video games reduced amygdala activity long term, that would probably reduce some kinds of violence.

Weber, R., Ritterfeld, U., & Mathiak, K. (2006). Does Playing Violent Video Games Induce Aggression? Empirical Evidence of a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study Media Psychology, 8 (1), 39-60 DOI: 10.1207/S1532785XMEP0801_4

Blind Spots & Braintrust

This is a review of two recently published books about ethics: Bazerman and Tenbrunsel's Blind Spots (not to be confused with this one), and Patricia Churchland's Braintrust.

The pair may come from the same publisher (Princeton), but they couldn't be more different.


Blind Spots is a good book. It tells a story in a clear and compelling fashion, which is what a book is for.

The story is that we often act unethically, not because we're faced with ethical questions and decide to pick the "bad" option, but because we fail to see that there is an ethical issue at all.

This is not the same as saying that 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. That old phrase warns against trying to be good and, as a result, causing evil, because your plans go wrong. Blind Spots is saying, even if all of your attempts to be good work out just fine, you might still cause evil despite that.

For example, you could be a good employee, who never calls in sick unnecessarily, kind to your friends and colleagues, and a generous charity donor.

Unfortunately, you're an accountant connected to Enron, and your work - ultimately - consists of defrauding innocent people. But of course, you don't think of it like that, because we don't tend to think about things "ultimately".

Which is hard to disagree with. At worst, you could say it's obvious, although I think it's still something we ought to be reminded of. That's not all there is to the book, though: it also discusses how this happens and suggests ways to avoid it within organizations.

For example, the authors give an example of how setting up rewards and punishments to "make people be ethical", can make them less so, by encouraging people to think of the issue as a personal trade-off between gain and loss, rather than an ethical dilemma - what the authors call "ethical fading".

A day-care centre was annoyed at the fact that some parents were picking up their children late. This was antisocial because it meant staff had to work late into the evening.

So they started charging parents a late fee. Not a big one, but enough to send people a message: this is wrong, don't do. But in fact what happened was that late pickups became more common.

Previously, many people were making an effort to be on time, as a matter of principle. Once the fees were in place, it stopped being an ethical issue and just became a financial trade-off: is it worth paying the fee to get an extra hour?

Of course, you could make the fees higher to get around this, but even then, you've caused ethical fading, and you'll be relying on the sanctions from that point on.


Braintrust, by contrast, is just not a good read. The bulk of the book consists of discussions of various neurotransmitters and brain areas and how they may be related to human social behaviour. Oxytocin, for example, may make us behave all trusting and kindly, as it's involved in maternal bonding. There's a long discussion of the neurochemistry of male sexual behaviour in voles.

It's not clear how this is relevant to ethics. Whether it's oxytocin that does it, or something else, and whether voles are a useful model of human behaviour or not, clearly sometimes we trust people and sometimes we don't. That's psychology. And biology can't yet explain it.

Churchland doesn't claim that the various biological concepts that she covers can fully explain anything, and she doesn't vouch that all of these findings are rock solid. Which is good, because they can't, and they're not. So why spend well over half of the book talking about them?

Churchland's big idea seems to be that human morality emerges out of our more general capacity for sociability. Hence all the stuff about oxytocin and "the social brain". OK. But I'd have said that's a given - there's obviously some relation between sociability and morality.

I think there is an interesting idea in here, albeit not very clearly expressed, namely that morality isn't a special function of the brain, but just one of the many forms in which our social cognition can take.

In other words, I think the claim is that ethics isn't just related to sociability, it is sociability. Even asocial animals care about their own welfare, in terms of pleasure and pain; social ones become social when they extend this caring to others; intelligent social animals including humans and maybe some primates also have a system for inferring the motivations and thoughts of others.

At the end of the book, Churchland stops reviewing neuroscience, and starts talking about the implications for philosophy. This is best section of the book, but it's too short.

Churchland makes the interesting point, for example, that when we are considering philosophical "ethical dilemmas", like the famous trolley problems, we may not be applying any kind of ethical "rules" as such. Rather, she thinks that our moral reasoning is pretty much a kind of pattern recognition based on previous experience - like all our other social reasoning.

Someone who'd just read a book about the horrors of Stalinism might tend to adopt an anti-consequentialist, every-life-is-sacred approach. Whereas if you'd just watched a movie in which the hero, reluctantly but rightly, decides to sacrifice one guy to save many other people, would do the opposite. Then the ethical "rules" might be confabulated to cover it.

This is a nice idea. It's open to criticism, but it's a serious suggestion, and one that deserves a decent discussion. Sadly, there isn't one. If only there were more room in the book for this kind of stuff - but oxytocin covers so many pages.

Basically, the good parts of this book are not about the brain at all.

Reading Braintrust is like going on date but then bumping into an annoying friend who insists on coming along for dinner. Jesus, The Brain, you want to say. I like you and all, but seriously, you are getting in the way right now.

Links: Other blog reviews.