revere
Posts by this author
February 5, 2010
We still don't know if we are experiencing a lull in flu or the virus has burned itself out for the season, but it's as good a time as any to reflect a bit on where we've been and where we still need to go. Being otherwise occupied (I'm sure you are sick of hearing about my grant writing obsession…
February 4, 2010
Writing a big grant proposal can be an all consuming affair. At least it's consuming all of me. And it's not because it's my first time. I wish. In fact it's the fourth time I'm doing this particular competitive renewal for a mega research program I've managed to keep continuously funded for 16…
February 3, 2010
The Nature blog, The Great Beyond, has an interesting although not surprising report of accusations on BBC that a cabal of researchers has been impeding publication of important stem cell research to help themselves or help their friends:
Truly innovative stem cell research is being suppressed by a…
February 2, 2010
Grant writing makes you crazy and also forces bloggers to stoop to ever lower levels. Hence this from the Discover Magazine blog via Boingboing.
While trawling for gold in the medical case literature they struck it rich with the story of the 15 year old girl with no vagina who got pregnant by…
February 1, 2010
If you want to know why I despise every Republican Senator and Democratic Senators Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Max Baucus, "Independent (of morals)" Joe Lieberman and probably a bunch more whose names I am repressing, it's because they enable and support and help entrench as the bedrock…
January 31, 2010
I'm coming up for air during my grant writing (so far this weekend I've spent in excess of ten hours yesterday and today just writing; all the rest of the time I spent obsessing about what I wrote and what I still needed to write), but you know I'm desperate when I start posting stuff like this:…
January 31, 2010
Pat Robertson said something impolitic about Haiti (like the earthquake was because they made a pact with the devil) and as result he gets a lot of hate mail. I wouldn't ordinarily reprint any of it, but it seems like the devil (aka Satan) was pretty pissed and sent him a letter (hat tip readers J…
January 30, 2010
Howard Zinn is gone, now, but he left us plenty. Here is a short piece he wrote a little over ten years ago in Z Magazine (hat tip, SR). It's typical of his style: inspiring, humble, practical, especially in these times:
On Getting Along
Howard Zinn, March, 07 1999
You ask how I manage to stay…
January 29, 2010
Howard Zinn died on Wednesday. He was a colleague and more than an acquaintance but a friend, although not a close friend. I knew him for 40 years, although hadn't seen him recently, the last time was a few years ago when we shared a platform together. The auditorium was packed, not to see me but…
January 28, 2010
The Reveres have written many posts about the World Health Organization in five years. Some just reported on their activities, others, as seemed appropriate, were critical or praised them. WHO operates in a difficult landscape under rules of engagement not well suited to fighting an enemy that…
January 27, 2010
Carl "Dan" Fish worked at Dupont's Belle plant for 32 years until last Saturday. That's the day he was sprayed in the face by phosgene gas. Sunday he was dead:
On Saturday, Fish was hit with a small cloud of phosgene that leaked from a line used to transfer phosgene from storage cylinders to a crop…
January 26, 2010
[Previous installments: here, here, here, here, here, here]
Last installment was the first examination of what "randomized" means in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). We finish up here by calling attention to what randomization does and doesn't do and under what circumstances. The notion of…
January 25, 2010
While I work on my monster grant proposal -- I and my colleagues have been working on it for 9 months, but with the deadline only 3 months away it is time to turn the volume up to 11 -- blogging may be light or brief. But posting something is an excuse to take a break and surf the web a bit, so…
January 24, 2010
It used to be my job to teach the environmental health survey course for public health students and air pollution was a topic I spent a lot of time on because it interested me and intersected some of my research work. One of the things I taught my students was that some air pollutants were very…
January 24, 2010
Some readers seem to think I should be commenting on the election of Scott Brown to the US Senate in Massachusetts. I don't have much to say. Senate Democrats brought it on themselves, although it's too bad they also brought it on the rest of us, but that's the way the system works. So Welcome to…
January 23, 2010
I'm fully immersed in writing a big grant proposal so I have even less time for blogging and reading blogs than usual, but that doesn't mean I have no time. Along with my colleagues I've been working on this beast for 9 months, but now with only 3 months to go before the deadline it's crunch time (…
January 22, 2010
It was some time after the pandemics of 1957 and 1968 that we were able to judge their severity and it will likely be some time after this one has finally burned itself out, most likely to become "just another" seasonal flu, that we will be able to gauge the 2009 swine flu pandemic. A lot of data…
January 21, 2010
In my regular science trawling I noticed a fascinating paper in Nature (epub ahead of print) that I haven't seen anything about in the news. It seems to me it's worth a discussion, if for no other reason than it uses a relatively new approach, small interfering RNA (siRNA), to dissect the functions…
January 20, 2010
Every two years the US National Science Board does an analysis of how the country is doing on research and development (R&D). While an important measure of the ability to innovate and compete in a highly competitive and globalized world, I have a hard time getting excited about how this is…
January 19, 2010
An interesting sounding paper just appeared in the December 2009 issue of the journal American Sociological Review but we don't have time to read it. So I'll just tell you what the press release says:
As many as 50 per cent of people bring their work home with them regularly, according to new…
January 18, 2010
Martin Luther King's birthday is an official holiday in the US, but King's example of non-violent resistance is not a US idea. So once again we have decided this non-traditional version of We Shall Overcome is appropriate. I've heard and sung this in churches, union halls, in the streets and in…
January 18, 2010
Many years ago we had a terrific carpenter build stairs in our old house using a technique called housed stringer construction. This guy was fairly young but a skilled wood worker. He was also missing several fingers on his right hand. Table saw.
I used to have a table saw, too, but its spinning…
January 17, 2010
There is an old vaudeville joke where a man goes to the doctor complaining about pain in his arm:
Doctor: Have you ever had it before?
Man: Yes, once before.
Doctor: Well, you have it again.
CDC reported on their weekly FluView website on Friday that the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH)…
January 17, 2010
Alas, poor Edward. I knew him well:
January 16, 2010
[Previous installments: here, here, here, here, here]
After a detour through the meaning of causation and the need to find a substitute for what can't, in principle, be observed (the counterfactual), we are now ready to consider what many of you might have thought would be the starting point,…
January 15, 2010
Yet another cell phone and disease story, and while this one is on the "good news" side, it doesn't reassure me:
The millions of people who spend hours every day on a cell phone, may have a new excuse for yakking. A surprising new study in mice provides the first evidence that long-term exposure to…
January 14, 2010
It's been over a year since we discussed the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article on bisphenol-A (BPA), a high volume chemical used in plastic components of food and drinks packaging and found in 90% of all Americans screened for the chemical. It is also a chemical that…
January 13, 2010
The finger pointing and the told-you-so-ers are out in force these days and WHO seems to be one of their targets. In the face of wealthy European countries cutting their swine flu vaccine orders because of limited demand, critics are claiming that WHO exaggerated the threat in league with or under…
January 12, 2010
[Previous installments: here, here, here, here]
We'd like to continue this series on randomized versus observational studies by discussing randomization, but upon reviewing comments and our previous post we decided to come at it from a slightly different direction. So we want to circle back and…
January 11, 2010
Illinois is not a state I know well, despite having spent five terrifying days and nights in 1968 being chased around its major city by its (then) rabid constabulary and almost losing my life in the process. It was decades before I could bring myself to return there, but when I did I found a…