Effect Measure

"Breaking news": all bullshit, all the time

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 06:38:03 -0500

My lede was going to be, "I rarely watch local TV news anymore," until I realized that was false. Because I never look at local TV news. Why should I? I won't learn anything. I can get the weather faster on the internet and I'm not that interested in sports. What about the "local news," the news of my city, town or even state? I'm missing that, right? After all, a legal condition for the use of the public airways -- airways (frequencies) used by a TV station are therefore not available to others -- is that they operate in the public interest by providing "programming that is responsive to the needs and problems of its local community." They even have to keep records substantiating they do this, documentation that can be challenged and might be an issue when it is time to renew their licenses. Except of course they could care less about this requirement:

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CDC today

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:22:58 -0500

When Thomas Frieden took over as CDC Director less than a year ago, I didn't know what to think. A smart, frenetic and intense former CDC epidemiologist who was most recently head of the New York City Health Department, he hadn't made his reputation as a "people person." He was reputed to being a quick study who sized up the science and once convinced, implemented science-based policy with a vengeance. His occasional appearances as the public face of CDC during the swine flu pandemic last fall were not auspicious. He appeared arrogant and blew off reporters' questions if he didn't know the answer (and like all people in that position, he got asked a lot of questions which no one knew the answers to). But his predecessor, Julie Gerberding, wasn't a hard act to follow. Widely disliked by CDC veterans, she had tried to transform the agency from within into her personal vision of managerial valhalla and before long the agency began to lose its intellectual capital and institutional memory. We wrote about it quite a lot here. Lately, not so much, because CDC has been quieter and less roiled by controversy. Is this a good sign? We aren't sure. But Frieden has gotten himself a nice profile in the New York Times which sounds good. Puff pieces in The Times aren't unusual, unfortunately, so we'll reserve judgment. But at least we weren't dismayed by what we read, something that happened too frequently in the Gerberding era.

And some things seemed to hit just the right note as far as we were concerned:

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WalMartian Chronicles: stupidity on the cheap and cruel

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:23:18 -0500

If there's one thing I have a zero tolerance policy for, it's zero tolerance policies. We see too many incredibly stupid implementations of rigid and mandatory policies (including mandatory sentencing), no matter how reasonable they sound when first advocated, to believe there should ever be policies that provide absolutely no flexibility. The world is a messy place and not everything fits into pre-envisioned boxes.

The latest miscarriage of common sense and humane behavior comes to us from those good people at WalMart, who fired a long time, loyal and effective employee because he failed a drug screening test for marijuana:

WalMart says it can, so it did. "I was terminated because I failed a drug screening," says former WalMart employee Joseph Casias.
In 2008, Casias was the Associate Of The Year at the WalMart store in Battle Creek, despite suffering from sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor.

At his doctor's recommendation, Casias says he legally uses medical marijuana to ease his pain.

"It helps tremendously," he says. "I only use it to stop the pain. To make me feel more comfortable and active as a person."

During his five years at WalMart, Casias says he went to work every day, determined to be the best.

"I gave them everything," he says. "110 percent every day. Anything they asked me to do I did. More than they asked me to do. 12 to 14 hours a day." (Phil Dawson and Christa Graban, WZZM13 News)

Apparently WalMart acted legally. But stupidly. The cruelty and inhumanity doesn't end with the firing. Casias has been on unemployment since November but now WalMart is contesting his eligibility for benefits. Meanwhile he has a serious medical condition and a family he can no longer provide for and all the rest of us will wind up paying for WalMart's decision to lose a good employee, harvest a shithouse full of bad publicity, and stick the rest of us with the bill for their stupidity.

WalMart. The kind of company I have zero tolerance for.

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The headline you didn't see: "Roche-owned Genentech's drug Avastin flunks prostate cancer test"

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:14:31 -0500

I've had occasion to remark a number of times how much of what is reported as "science news" is just warmed over press releases from university media departments or company flacks. I read them anyway, often sucked in my a headline that turns out to oversell the case. Now I'm becoming aware headlines can also (deliberately) undersell the case. Consider two press releases that came out on virtually the same day, one from Big Pharma Pfizer, the other from biotech player, Genentech, owned by Big Pharma's Roche (maker of Tamiflu). Pfizer, first.

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Albert Einstein: birthday greetings

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:27:05 -0500

Today is Einstein's birthday. If he were still alive he'd be 131. Those of you who have been reading here for a long time know that Einstein was (and is) one of my "culture heroes." When I was a kid I sent him birthday cards (yes, I'm that old) and when he died made a scrap book filled with news clippings. One of the great loves of my younger life gave me an Einstein bust as a present and it still sits on my desk, more than 40 years later (she reads the blog from across the ocean, so I hope she sees this! Mrs. R. knows and likes her so this isn't a guilty secret). I also have first editions of his second and third published works and a fairly large library of books by and about him. Unlike quantum mechanics, relativity theory is essentially the achievement of a single person, Albert Einstein. Both are beautiful theories and quantum theory may be the most successful theory in the history of science. But relativity is no slouch, either, having been confirmed again as recently as this week. Not bad.

Given all this, it seems fitting to commemorate the occasion on the blog. Enjoy:

Happy birthday, Albert, hero of my youth. Still a hero.

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Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: a Special Relationship

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:56:51 -0500

The US and Israel are near the top of the list in having citizens who believe in evolution -- at or near the top, that is, if you turn the list upside down. In international surveys the US ranks last and Israel 4th from last among 27 countries regarding belief in the proposition that "human beings developed from earlier species of animals" being definitely or probably true (US, 45%, Israel, 54%). There's another similarity. The US has fringe fundamentalist crazies in positions of authority (like the Texas State Board of Education) who deny evolution (and this just in: took The Enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson out of their textbooks, possibly because he was a Deist; but they put Thomas Aquinas in to make up for it!). And so does Israel. In fact Israel does the US one better, because the official is the chief scientist in Israel's ministry of education, Gavriel Avital:

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An epidemiologist and daylight savings time

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 06:30:44 -0500

If you check the blog for tomorrow's Sunday Sermonette, it will be an hour earlier, astronomically speaking. That's because in the US the clocks are shifted forward by an hour for "Day Light Savings Time," starting at 2 a.m. tomorrow morning (before the Sermonette goes up). The time shift will last until November 7, next fall. The sudden discontinuity in time keeping has uses other than energy conservation, however, and clever epidemiologists have used such circumstances for their own purposes for years. Here's one example.

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Salmonella, food safety and potato chips

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:12:22 -0500

When last we visited the US food safety system during the Bush administration it was busy serving up peanut butter with a side of Salmonella. That one caused over 4 thousand product recalls, 700 Salmonella cases and at least 9 deaths. Now it's Salmonella serovar Tennessee in hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP), a common flavor enhancer used in all sorts of food products, including, according to the FDA, soups, sauces, chilis, stews, hot dogs, gravies, seasoned snack foods, dips and dressings. An important difference -- so far -- is that there are no illnesses traced to the contaminated ingredient. Progress, I guess. But in other respects the stories sound pretty similar:

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Flu vaccines, herd immunity and randomized trials

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:22:29 -0500

The latest study on flu vaccine effectiveness in children has been well discussed in the MSM and the flu blogs, so I'll point you to those excellent pieces (Branswell, crof, Mike Coston at Avian Flu Diary) and just add some things not covered elsewhere. The full text of the article is available for free at JAMA and it's a pretty good read, so if you want to see for yourself what is involved I urge you to read it, too. First, let me back up a bit and connect this to the controversy about observational and randomized clinical trials we've been discussing here of late (before my grant writing interfered, anyway).

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Biocontrol in the UK: will they be singing, "Where have all the flowers gone"? (tagline: When will they ever learn)

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:35:05 -0500

Why do I think that this will end badly? From the UK:

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Bad facts make bad law

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:25:50 -0500

I'm not sure I completely understand the legal adage, "bad facts make bad law," but the Supreme Court may be about to give us all an object lesson in its meaning. If I do understand it, is that sometimes there are situations -- "bad facts" -- that are so unusual or so horrifying or both -- that they force jurists to make legal decisions in line with what any normal person would consider to be just but with unintended side effects that make "bad law," that is, bad legal precedent. An example is a Texas case where a drunk driver hit a car carrying a pregnant woman whose fetus was seriously damaged, was delivered alive by C-section but then died. He was charged with manslaughter in the death of the fetus, but the law required there be the death of "another," and "another" was defined by law to be "a person" and a person was defined to be "an individual," and an "individual" was defined by law as "a human being who has been born and is alive". Since the initial injury was not to something that had not yet been born, this became the basis for the defense's contention the driver could not be charged with intoxication manslaughter. This was not an abortion case but the circumstances instantly made what was a just decision -- that the drunk driver should be punished for the loss of this pregnancy and the damage it did to the family -- into one with vast consequences, once the verdict was upheld and became "settled law."

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Chilean earthquake and science

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:20:16 -0500

There is so much tragedy and sadness in the wake of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile that to bemoan the fate of research projects there seems kind of trivial. But if you are scientist your heart really goes out to your Chilean colleagues. Jocelyn Kaiser and Antonio Regalado have some details at ScienceInsider, Science Magazine's science blog:

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Mock Study Section (more than you ever wanted to know)

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:22:19 -0500

Most of you don't want to hear about my grant writing any more, but some of you are clearly interested in one of our innovations (at least I think it's an innovation; I've never heard of anyone doing it on this scale before): the Mock Study Section. So I'll take a break from writing (actually, re-writing) to describe it. First I should explain to the uninitiated what a "Study Section" is.

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Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: you think, therefore He isn't

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:51:55 -0500

From the atheists' scourge, Edward Current:

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Flu deaths in children

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 06:28:07 -0500

Two days ago I went with my daughter to the pediatrician to check out her 20 month old who had a fever and rash. Viral origin, probably. Also an ear infection. Pretty much par for the course at this time of year. But lots of little ones and their older sibs weren't so lucky this flu season. As we've had too many occasions to mention, the severity of the 2009 pandemic has yet to be gauged, but trying to compare it to seasonal flu is misleading as its epidemiology is very different. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the melancholy figures for pediatric deaths.

Since the beginning of September CDC has registered 265 flu deaths in children under the age of 18. Here's how that compares with past seasons:

Source: CDC

This is pretty dramatic, even more so when we look at the distribution within the pediatric age group. 48 deaths were in babies and toddlers (less than 2 years old), 30 in children 2 - 4 years old, 98 in the 5 - 11 year age group and 89 in pre-teens and teens (12 - 17 years old). Thus well over two-thirds of the mortality is in children over 5 years old.

For a parent or a grandparent these are chilling numbers, but they are only numbers. The late epidemiologist Irving Selikoff once referred to a statistic as "people with the tears wiped away." A friend, referring to someone who lost a child, shook his head and just said, "It's off the scale."

I look at my little grandson and I look at that graph and all I can think is: Yes. Off the scale.

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