The Times tells us.

But James McQuivey, senior analyst at Forrester Research, sees significant implications in the choice of leadership.  “In the magazine world, they have been allowed to live with the illusion that it is the printed word that creates value,” he said. “But the value actually comes from the attention of the reader. She is exactly what they need. The question is whether they are willing to follow where she is ready to lead.”

This quote from Mr. McQuivey observes the new hire at Time, Inc. those past masters of the print magazine, struggling now in the digital age along with all the other print mavens whether at other magazines, newspapers, or books.  To run its business, Time has hired as CEO, of all people, Laura Lang . . .

. . . who was the chief executive of the digital advertising agency Digitas. Talk about your loud and clear knock on the door. That digital future we are always talking about is here.

Ms. Lang bought ads for clients from sources like Time.  Now, she will try to sell ads to those same clients.  Nowhere in the description of the able Lang do you read any background as an ink-stained wretch as a writer, editor, or publisher.  She buys and sells with persuasion not journalism.  Why?  Think again about that quote from McQuivey.

Word mavens thought their words possessed an inherent value when they just owned a printing press and a monopoly over distribution.  They made their money not on speaking truth to power or with stylish voices, but simply because no one else could afford or acquire their own printing presses.  The world wide web destroyed that monopoly and exposed the myth of the printed word.

Now persuasion rules the word and its successful distribution.  Truth, beauty, and justice with voice and style cannot compete for eyes and ears the way Peithos can.  Consider just one observation about Lang.

What magazines have not been able to do is to provide reliable measures of effectiveness . . . It isn’t a reach to bet that Ms. Lang will help magazine publishers be a part of a media age built on metrics.

By the Rules of Persuasion that last sentence means:

If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It.

P.S.  I’m waxing more than poetic now, but bear with me.  Vico identifies three stages all civilizations cycle:  Gods, Heroes, and Men.  We live in the age of democracy, the age of people with an emphasis upon the lower case “p” and all that implies.  You cannot persuade gods and heroes – they motivate themselves.  With people persuasion is paramount.

At last we know!
 

Whatever the long-term effects of the Occupy movement, protesters have succeeded in implanting “We are the 99 percent,” referring to the vast majority of Americans (and its implied opposite, “You are the one percent,” the tiny proportion who, some estimates say, control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth), into the cultural and political lexicon.

Oh.  So that was the TACT!

Stop the sticks!

CBS News reports an amazing breakthrough with stem cell therapy for heart disease. Read all about it or better still tolerate the 30 second ad and watch it.  Scott Pelley practically fell over himself in the report and the gorgeous Dr. John LaPook provided the depth, nuance, and insight only an MD can offer on experimental clinical trials.

Are we in sweeps week?

You could take LaPook’s word for it. Consider his credential.

He has done extensive work in the field of medical computing, including helping to develop an electronic textbook of medicine and writing a medical practice management software package that he sold in 1999 to a company that was later acquired by Emdeon Corporation, the parent company of WebMD.

Or you can chase down the science and read it for yourself. Here’s the description of the clinical trial. And here’s what appears to be the presentation slides (pdf) the lead researcher used at the American Heart Association meeting. Noticeably absent is any peer review publication on the trial.

Here’s the only data on the trial I can find and its from the CBS News report.

Milles was one of 25 volunteers in this small study. Seventeen got stem cells and eight control subjects got standard heart care. All the stem cell recipients had their heart attack scars reduced most dramatically — on average almost 50 percent — damaged muscle replaced by new healthy heart tissue. The eight control subjects saw no improvement. Ken Milles had better than 50 percent improvement.

I speculate that “50 percent improvement” may be a ratio, in other words a relative improvement compared to something else. If true (and I cannot be sure), that is a Small Windowpane effect size. While this is an experimental design with participants randomly assigned to treatment or control, the small sample size of 25 people would make this difference not even statistically significant. I appreciate the randomization and the difficulty of the intervention, but if this is truly a RR of 150% with 25 cases, the results fail. If the results, however, mean an absolute 50 percentage point improvement, that’s a Large Windowpane effect – wow – but still probably not SSD and the results still fail. In this case, the tests of statistical significance are important because sampling error is truly a rival explanation and it appears even a Large Windowpane is still within sampling error.

This is weak science and while the persuasion may be good for CBS News ratings, it is ultimately very bad for the general public. There is nothing in this study to encourage anyone about anything except for a handful of researchers. LaPook should know the limitations of this research and he played the charade on TV providing cover for what is extremely preliminary work. I have no idea how the actual research team contributed to this CBS fantasy, but they clearly were presented as the Cure.

Don’t misunderstand. This is good basic research and is well worth pursuing. Hyping the outcomes of such small studies especially before peer review publication, however, is extremely bad science and dangerous persuasion. It encourages fantasy beliefs about health interventions that benefit only the folks with a megaphone.

Gee. I wonder why US expenditures on health are approaching 20% of GDP?

Consider this headline and first couple of paragraphs from a WSJ story.

Under the Influence: How the Group Changes What We Think
Researchers Study What Gives Social Norms Their Power

By SHIRLEY S. WANG

How is it that so many people started saying “Awesome!”, or started wearing Uggs?

These are examples of how individuals’ behavior is shaped by what people around them consider appropriate, correct or desirable. Researchers are investigating how human behavioral norms are established in groups and how they evolve over time, in hopes of learning how to exert more influence when it comes to promoting health, marketing products or reducing prejudice.

The headline details a powerful persuasion concept, social norms. Yet, the first sentence leads with an example from diffusion of innovation, how people start a new behavior in a network of people.

Norms are beliefs and attitudes that control either how we respond (descriptive) or should respond (prescriptive) in a social situation. Innovation is a new behavioral act that may diffuse through a group. Norms always carry the threat of sanction and if you break them, you may face social punishment. Diffusion is always a choice that reveals your open mindedness, but rarely sanctions you.

Norms and Diffusion are different ideas that may move together, but only because they occur within the same context – groups. People don’t innovate Norms, but new Norms may arise after an innovation. It is a confusing confusion of two different concepts. In presenting them as overlapped ideas, the writer diminishes their meaning and utility, making the differences seem to be identities.

The writer also offers this observation.

But surprisingly little is known about how attitudinal norms are established in groups. Why do some people in a group become trendsetters when it comes to ideas and objects?

Researchers have been studying, testing, and writing about norms with social science for over 80 years. Norms compose one of the largest literatures in persuasion. Very smart people can spend their entire careers focused only on this area and still encountered writings they’ve not yet read. It’s old, huge, and active. To characterize the state of the art on norms with “surprisingly little is known” reveals only the cheery ignorance and willful laziness of the writer.

And, if we drop her confusions with Norms and think only about Innovation, the writer’s claim of “surprisingly little is known” still remains wildly inaccurate.  Do your own search on Ev Rogers and the Diffusion of Innovation.  This area goes back at least 30 years.

I will credit her, however, with at least avoiding mention of Malcolm Gladwell’s equally facile and ignorant, Tipping Point. Although how the writer could weave in diffusion of innovation without automatically Ding-Donging on Gladwell surprises me. His errors are conspicuous in their absence from this writer’s errors. How can she not know about Tipping Points here?

To a certain extent, my concern here can be classified under the heading, I Found a Mistake on the Internets, so let’s keep some perspective. At the same time, as I’ve commented before, these kinds of errors and fabulations are a pop press commonplace. They create a perception in this case that something called persuasion is little more than fodder for somebody working on a deadline. As the Primer and Blog demonstrate, persuasion science does exist and when you properly deploy it, you can make more money, save the planet, or just learn about human nature. You just have to be willing to work a little harder.

Marion Nestle is a bona fide public expert on nutrition with an earned doctorate in molecular biology no less.  She’s also an academic in good standing.  She writes this review of a JAMA study in the Atlantic magazine:

The latest issue of JAMA has a paper on a “portfolio” of dietary means to reduce blood cholesterol levels.  The paper is likely to get lots of press because it concludes that consuming the “portfolio”–a combination of plant sterols, soy protein, viscous fibers, and nuts–does a better job of lowering LDL-cholesterol (the “bad” kind) than does dietary advice to reduce saturated fat.  The paper is unusually difficult to read. I interpret the study in part as a drug trial.

If you follow the link (pdf) Nestle provides, you can read this unusually difficult drug trial for yourself.  The paper reports the outcomes from a randomized controlled trial where volunteers were assigned into one of three diet advice programs, followed for 6 months, then measured on a wide variety of indicators, but most particularly on LDL cholesterol.  The main finding was that dietary recommendations to eat plant sterols, nuts, and soy proteins led to healthier LDL scores at a Small Windowpane effect size.  Thus, making a change to one’s diet makes changes in LDL scores.  That diet affects LDL is not news; the news here is that plant sterols, nuts, and soy proteins accomplish this and at about the same effect size as taking a pill.  Some people have high LDL, but react badly to medication; some just don’t like pills, but want to lower LDL.  Here’s a pill-free method that appears to work in the short term about as well as the pill.

The more interesting element of this rather commonplace event is Nestle’s description of the research as “unusually difficult” and as a “kind of drug trial.”  If you are in good standing in the peer review literature there’s no way this report is Unusually Difficult or even Usually Difficult.  The researchers do an excellent job describing both the methods and the results and I feel pretty confident that workers in this area could replicate this study without much difficulty.  It’s all there.  It actually over-reports by the usual JAMA standards, making it both easier to replicate, but also more detailed.  Certainly, there’s a lot of stuff in there, but each piece is quite simple and straightforward.

And a “kind of drug trial?”  Why would anyone, but most particularly a nutritionist with a doctorate in molecular biology call a food study a drug trial?  There’s a huge scientific and legal difference between a Food and a Drug and to see them as similar is to note they are both 4 letter words.  The active ingredient in this drug trial was dietary advice – what an expert told a volunteer participant to eat.   Even the JAMA editors and reviewers saw this as a communication intervention for dietary change.

We can understand why Nestle might see this paper as an unusually difficult drug study when we note that she notes,

One look at the Abstract and I immediately suspected that this study must have been sponsored by a maker of plant sterol margarines.  Bingo!

Another way to say, Bingo, is Ding-Dong!  Either term denotes the process.  Automatic.  Thoughtless.  When a for-profit group funds the science, you get a food study that is actually an unusually difficult kinda drug trial.  Those lying liars at Big Food bought a team of scientists, then bought the reviewers and editors at JAMA, and snuck this unusually difficult, kinda drug trial in the peer review literature.  Those biased, greedy, but effective bastards.  (As we’ve studied before on “ghostwriting” scientific reports.)

You see the problem here.  JAMA is a peer review research journal that for all its flaws is one of the stronger examples of this form of scientific communication.  The scientific community has decided that full disclosure from authors is the best way to handle scientific and ethical challenges.  The scientific community does not automatically Ding-Dong and exclude research submissions because of these concerns.  Disclosure of bias, real or potential, is how science proceeds.

But, not the NonProfit Science of Nestle.  She spots the raccoon in the Abstract.  Thank goodness, we have NonProfit science to save us.  Real scientists who don’t have financial incentives that bias their work . . . like writing for the Atlantic magazine.  Nestle doesn’t get paid through those ads on her Atlantic page?  And, writing in the Atlantic doesn’t have any other benefits, does it?

And because my book on calories is coming out next March, I must point out that the study groups reported losing small amounts of weight, which means they must also have reduced their calorie intake. Weight loss alone should help with blood cholesterol.

Hey, scientists, if you want the Truth, don’t read those biased peer review reports with Full Disclosure in JAMA, just wait until March for Nestle’s pop press book!  You read about it in the Atlantic magazine!  With all that advertising and self promotion.  That affects no one’s judgment!

And, yes, as her last quote carefully observes, the research did report that all three groups ate less and lost weight.  But only the diet advice for sterols, soy, and nuts led to weight loss and the lower LDL.  I guess that’s what makes this report unusually difficult.  When the lying liars who are Big Food lackeys say only one group lost weight and lowered LDL, that’s not what it really means.  You can see that if you are reading the lines between the lines and not the lines themselves.

Nonprofit science.  No bias.  Bingo!