Avoidance

Have a meal with families with infants these days, and you might get the impression that the planet is full of dietary allergens.

Dads and mums have been taught to winnow away culprits like egg whites, citrus, peanuts, berries and beef from the babies' menu. But be not beguiled. If such conventional wisdom or long-held dogma is a reliable guide - which, of course, it often is not - the food allergy rate should have been declining.

So it goes. There's no perfectly neat rule to keep allergy at bay.

Which brings us, somewhat uncomfortably, to the question of whether there is a genuine need to avoid the potential allergen like water leak from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. No one is more qualified to stir the cauldron of food allergen controversy than the United Kingdom scientists who published their landmark peanut allergy study in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.

Peanut allergy is no joke; you can get vomiting, itchy hives, a swollen tongue - or worse, die when the swelling occurs in the windpipe impeding your breathing - after one small scoop of peanut butter. Overwhelmed by the threat of peanut allergy, the scientists designed an elegant study and randomly assigned some 640 infants 4 to 11 months old with serious atopic dermatitis or egg allergy either to eating peanut regularly (three or more meals per week) or absolutely-no-peanut diet until age 5.

Contrary to those who expect infants with early introduction of peanut (as early as four months old) to be at high risk of developing peanut allergy, the scientists find that early peanut consumption leads to a far lower odds of peanut allergy at age 5.

That is a surprise to everyone. An accompanying editorial called the results "so compelling" and the rise of peanut allergies "so alarming" that guidelines for how to feed infants at risk of peanut allergies should be revised soon. None of this is to suggest that we should feed our babies whatever we want. But right now, we learn that avoidance isn't the answer.

Page-turner

"Gee, what's that sound?" An elephant turns his head and finds his best friend Piggie doing cartwheel. Who wouldn't read on to find out what will catapult Piggie into the elephant's life?

Piggie says, "What do you want to do today?"

"I want - aaa."

"Yes?"

"aaaaaa"

"A what?" Piggie is flummoxed. And we too.

"aaaaaaaa!!"

By then, our brain is wired to sniff out what elephant is talking about. A ball? A swim? A hat? And so, to keep us from putting down the story book, the author anchors readers in this very simple guesswork. In case you are curious, you can find the answer from the picture book Pigs Make Me Sneeze! by Mo Willems.

I learned more about the secret of grabbing readers' attention fast - from the very first sentence - after reading Lisa Cron's Wired for Story. Picture a breadcrumb trail leading kids to go deeper and deeper into the thicket before reaching the candy house: not everyone knows the ropes of putting the breadcrumbs strategically. Some of the crumbs are too small to be seen. Some are eaten by birds. And you know who is the expert in putting the breadcrumbs?

My 5-year-old daughter will tell you the answer: Mo Willems. As any Mo Willems aficionado knows, he places gold coins, and not just breadcrumbs.

Reports

R.A. Fisher's null hypothesis significance test transformed his field as few statisticians ever do. It goes like this. We run an experiment and assign half of subjects (like flipping a coin) to a wonder drug and another half to get a placebo. If we somehow show good results with our proposed drug, we have to prove that there's only one chance in twenty of getting results this good.

One out of twenty. Enter those numbers into calculator and we see that equals 0.05.

The probability threshold, or the p-value in statistician's lingo, of 0.05 is a magic number we are all obsessed with. Everybody I know, including myself, makes an anxious pilgrimage to this p-value whenever we run a statistics test on computer. To get a sense of what really happens when we execute the so-called signficance test, think about Cinderella's stepsister waiting for her shoe test. Hair on our arms stand straight up. Our hearts drop to somewhere in the bowels, waiting for the almighty p-value to pop up in the statistical package result page.

Those are the kind of moments when you wait and stare, and say, jeez, I've gotta go to the rooftops and shout hurray when the p is less than 0.05 (and you can still go there and jump if it's way more than 0.05).

Another classical example of such anxious moment comes from opening the envelope (or electronic version) of your kid's school report. I received mine this afternoon. That should have been an easy experience. But it wasn't.

I know there won't be p-value or ranking in my daughter's school report. Why, then did it take me pretty darn efforts to take a deep breath before opening the report? Admit it. It's because we are careworn parents.

One thing we know for sure: parents are anxious by definition.

As I read along the letter, the principal's disclaimer in the first few paragraphs made the report less stressful - and to good effect. To paraphrase the parenting expert Michael Grose, before you rip open the report do a little self-check to see if you are in the right frame of mind: Are your expectations for your son or daughter realistic and in line with their ability?

It doesn't take much of an imaginative leap to understand what the principal means by the tricky nature of expectation. His insight isn't new. Too much expectation can turn kids off learning. Too low and there is nothing to strive for. The curved, but not linear, relationship has played a central role in many things for centuries. It's called the Laffer curve. When we plot the child's effort on a vertical axis and the parental expectation on a horizontal axis, the curve turns out to look like a camel's hump. Definitely not a straight diagonal line.

The point is just this: the highest point on this curve is never to be on one end or the other. Usually somewhere in the middle. It's where we are aiming for.

Mathematics

Imagine taking a class in integral calculus, frustrated and puzzled. A long exhale. "What the heck is the point of studying mathematics?"

That's what Jordan Ellenberg is showing in his book How Not to Be Wrong.

Right now, I'm learning from this professor of mathematics why mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means. Soon after borrowing his book from the public library, I found mathematics everywhere.

It happened to be the numeracy week in my daughter's school; there were number games here and there.

And then our family had a weekend holiday at the Discovery Bay. My daughter pointed to the seashell spirals on the hotel elevator door, and said something I haven't heard before. A foreign and recondite name, somewhat resembling Leonardo da Vinci. A big word that left me in a quandary: Did she refer to the name of the nautilus? But is it?

Ah I think hard, trying to google a word or two, here and there, and soon the word "Fibonacci" pops up. That's what my daughter was talking about. Fibonacci Sequence, as what her teacher taught her.

Another mathematics stuff, again. Everywhere.