Search Content

Displaying results 83101 - 83150 of 87950

Lancet data released

The Lancet authors have released the data to other researchers: Six months have passed since the publication of the study and we feel the time is now right to make the data set available to academic and other scientific groups whom we judge have the technical capacity to objectively analyze the data. It is our desire that the data be used in a way that will advance the understanding of how to best assess mortality during conflicts and to improve the protection of those caught in conflict. Although conflict is inextricably intertwined with national and international politics, it is our very…

Welcome to the Fascist States of America!

Just read Leiter. So the record had been mixed, even before Bush & his bestiary of madmen, but describing the U.S. as a nominally democratic society seemed to make some sense.  Yet even that status officially ended last week.  The legislation known as "the Military Commissions Act of 2006" (usefully described by Professor Balkin here)--approved by what might be called, euphemistically, "the supine Congress" and which is sure to be signed by the alleged President (on orders from the actual President, Dick Cheney)--is the stuff of totalitarian societies, pure and simple.  (As Stephen…

Monckton's vision of the future: an IPCC boot stamping on a human face forever

Hey, remember how Monckton got published in a UFO magazine? Well, now he's in a Larouche publication, Executive Intelligence Review (see cover to right), being interviewed about the IPCC plan to RULE THE WORLD. However, they are not concerned with whether there is a problem or not. They merely wish to pretend that there is a problem, and try to do so with a straight face, for long enough to persuade, not the population, because we have no say in this, but the governing class in the various memberstates of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: That they should hand over…

Loftin's study on Washington DC handgun ban

Jim Lindgren believes that a post by Carl Bogus on the DC handgun ban is uninformed. Bogus wrote: A careful study that compared the nine year period before the ban was enacted with the nine years following enactment, and then compared what happened in D.C. with the immediately surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia, found that the handgun ban reduced gun-related homicides by 25% and gun-related suicides by 23 percent. Colin Loftin, Ph.D., et al., "Effects of Restrictive Licensing of Handguns of Homicide and Suicide in the District of Columbia," 325 New Eng. J. Med. 1615 (Dec. 5, 1991).…

Blaming Haggard's wife for his going gay

OK, I wasn't planning on writing on the whole Haggard imbroglio again. (Famous last words, eh?) Then, via Andrew Sullivan, I came across this little post by a blogging evangelical pastor from Seattle named Mark Driscoll: Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is…

Even their engineers don't get it

ID advocates are prone to brag about their self-professed expertise, which all too often relies on some respectable knowledge of engineering or other fields irrelevant to biology. DaveScot, the raving mad anti-scientist at Uncommon Descent, is a perfect example…but even in their own domains of knowledge they too often prove to be incompetent. Case in point: their blog has somehow become delisted from Google, and now DaveScot is flailing about, trying to find someone to blame. His answer? Wesley Elsberry did it. It's all because other sites mirror their content, which he thinks Google finds…

Greg Hunt thinking outside the square

The recent blunders of Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop have helped draw attention to the coalition's own policy, which to achieve exactly the same reduction in emissions as Labor via "direct action". Greg Hunt, Opposition spokesman on climate action and environment explained how they are going to do it with soil carbon sequestration: "We are talking about a land mass, if you are achieving the 150 million tonnes [of CO2 per annum], of an area of roughly 100 square kilometres. Not tens of thousands, but 100 square kilometres of intensive agriculture would make an extraordinary achievement on many…

The Australian's War on Science 58: Quote Mining

The Australian has a daily column called Cut and Paste which should more properly be titled Quote Mining. Consider this recent effort: Heed the bureau. John Quiggin in The Australian Financial Review yesterday: Tragically, while only a few people have been silly enough to ignore the Bureau [of Meteorology]'s warnings about this cyclone, a great many have ignored equally dire warnings about the long-term impact of climate change, including more extreme weather events. Climate models that have predicted the warming of the past two or three decades are dismissed as spurious. Worse still, the…

Guys like this give breast surgeons a bad name

As a surgical oncologist whose practice is made up largely of treating breast cancer, I really hate guys like this: MIAMI - A 76-year-old man claiming to be a doctor went door-to-door in a Florida neighborhood offering free breast exams and was charged with sexually assaulting two women who accepted the offer, police said Thursday. One woman became suspicious after the man asked her to remove all her clothes and began conducting a purported genital exam without donning rubber gloves, investigators said. The woman then phoned the Broward County Sheriff's Office, and the suspect fled. He was…

The Mystery of the Sleepy Teenager

I recently heard about an amazing case that seems to be filled with lessons for doctors. Not claming to be Homer, my paraphrasing will be modest, but let me tell the tale anyway. Then we'll try to decipher the moral of the story. Once upon a time a 19 year old man woke up feeling ill. He complained to his mother of nausea, fatigue, loss of appetite and dizziness, and called in sick to work. Within 48 hours his family noticed him to be withdrawn and confused. They brought him to the emergency room where he was examined by the attending physician and found to be nearly obtunded. He…

Everyone is blogging about Lott

Julian Sanchez is on the case again. This time he has a bit more detail from Mustard. The key point is that Mustard is "fairly confident" that Lott told him in 1997 that he had done a survey. This suggests that Lott didn't invent the survey in 1999 to explain his 98% figure. Well, this makes me lean more towards Lott having done a survey, but it's still not conclusive. Mustard isn't sure about being told in 1997. All this back and forth is making me dizzy. I'm not going to express another opinion on whether he did a survey until I see Lindgren's new report…

Are You Tired, Rundown, Listless? Do You Poop Out at Parties?

"Having a high sugar drink to boost energy can actually make people more sleepy, a study suggests." This is a big surprise? I suppose there are some situations where ingesting a half-cup of sugar might give one a boost, such as before starting off on a leisurely jog down the streets of Pamplona during the encierro, but what about the average worker slumped over a cluttered desk on a Tuesday afternoon? Is the response to the proverbial "energy" drink the same? Ten adults were studied to see what effect different drinks had on their wakefulness. They had all volunteered to restrict their…

Assistance Monkeys, Ducks, Parrots, Pigs and Ducks ... Should the law protect them?

Skloot interviewing Richard the Assistance MonkeyThe New York Times just posted my latest feature, "Creature Comforts." I've posted photos, videos and links below, but first, the gist of the story: When people think of service animals, they think guide dogs for the blind. But today it's monkeys for quadriplegia and agoraphobia, guide miniature horses, a goat for muscular dystrophy, parrots for psychosis and any number of animals for anxiety, including cats, ferrets, pigs, at least one iguana and a duck. They've been showing up in stores and in restaurants, which is perfectly legal because…

How to ship your brain

Do you have an extra brain sitting around you want to donate? Do you want to trade brains with someone else but they are too far away to do it in person? Is your brain malfunctioning and you need to ship it back to the factory for some repairs or in the worst case - a replacement? If your answer was yes to any of these questions then this is the tutorial for you. This is what you'll need: Two clean, dry ziploc plastic bags (about 22.0 x 30.0 cm) Plastic bucket with tightly fitting lid (about 4.0 liters) Large plastic bag (about 40.0 x 50.0 cm) Envelope for documents Thermosafe polyfoam…

Removed, observed

"How many times you poke me?" she asked. Then, in her heavily accented English, "Dr. Better never took this long for LP. Five minutes, always." I made empathetic noises, apologized a few times, and tried to focus on the needle I was moving in and out of her back. I'd done four lumbar punctures before, and felt I was good at them. Wasn't I in the exact space where I needed to be? I stopped and felt again for her spine. On my first day on the adult hematology-oncology service, she'd been described to me as an anxious, passive-aggressive woman who hated our hospital. She created traps for us,…

Post-operative complications

Since I came on the medicine service, my team has been taking care of a man who because of one of his unfortunate afflictions I will call Mr. Scrotum. Mr. Scrotum is a 70-something man who came to the hospital with an infected prosthetic knee joint. He had surgery to clean it out, then came to our service to get medically stabilized prior to beginning physical rehabilitation. Unfortunately, Mr. Scrotum had some post-operative complications, including some wacky mental status changes and a fairly reversible kind of kidney failure. Mr. Scrotum's medical course, while not ideal, is a fairly…

The Lott calling the kettle black

Posts by d-squared and John Quiggin on data mining and Lott reminded me that Lott accused his critics of data mining in a response to Webster: The Black and Nagin paper excludes Florida after they have already excluded the 86 percent of the counties with populations fewer than 100,000. Eliminating Florida as well as counties with fewer than 100,0000 does eliminate the significance in the one particular type of specification that they report for a couple of crimes, but the vast majority of estimates were unaffected from this extreme data mining and…

Saving Oiled Birds in Buras, LA

Here is the dead wildlife tally as of yesterday: As you can see, birds are hit hardest (or most often discovered). So we headed to the International Bird Rescue's Buras, LA operation, where they take many of the oiled pelicans, gulls, and terns. Most of the birds spend 2-3 weeks in recovery and they spend the first week very stressed out due to all the human handling. Because of the stress, the Bird Rescue Center often let the bird rest 5 days or so before they begin the cleaning process. Then the oiled birds get washed with Dawn dish soap, hosed with water, and treated with tender care…

Telomestatin (HeLa, flick that cancer away!)

As many estimable colleagues have noted, guanine's weird. It's not that soluble, which isn't too much of a problem when it's a part of your very soluble DNA, but from an origin-of-life perspective, that's a hassle. Envisioning a primordial-soup scenario with guanine is tricky, because of this low solubility. Further complicating the problem is guanine's prodigous tendency to associate with itself: Monomers of G will do this, forming gels in solution (which exhibit repeating units of the above structure). We knew about guanine's propensity to self-associate before we even had cracked the…

The good, the bad, and the opportunistic

I started writing a lengthy response to a reader comment on one of Heather's posts, but decided it could use a post of it's own. The question: As to being pathogenic, is it possible that many bacteria are pathogenic if given sufficient opportunity? [snip] It seems largely to me that the line between pathogenic and non-pathogenic is pretty blurry. Totally. Let's get some definitions out of the way first - a pathogen is an organism that causes disease. That seems simple enough, but when you examine the real world more carefully, things turn complicated pretty fast. What do I call the cold I was…

Average vs. Extreme Consumers

Back in 2005, I interviewed fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly for a small article on seafood consumer campaigns. This would evolve into the work we do today. I was not able to publish large chunks of the transcripts then, but I am now. I think what Daniel said about average vs. extreme consumers was relevant, particularly in light of the studies on the preference for rare commodities and the recent chow-down on the megamouth shark caught in the Philippines (the 41st megamouth ever found, ever; pictured here). Here is what Daniel had to say: The reason why we have giraffes is not because we…

Missing the Point

It's not every day that you read about measuring skulls in the contemporary scientific literature. It's kind of a quaintly old-timey, quaintly racist kind of thing to do. But here we are, with a brand new paper about skull measuring in PLoS Biology. Already quite a few blog-words have been written in support of this new paper, which disproves Stephen Jay Gould's assertion in The Mismeasure of Man that George Morton's 1839 skull measurements were fudged intentionally or unintentionally by his racist bias. I haven't read a lot of Gould, and I'm pretty convinced by the numbers in the paper…

Attitudes to genetic testing: effects of religion, politics and ignorance

Razib has crunched the numbers from the General Social Survey (a massive longitudinal study of societal trends) to explore the variables associated with response to this question: Some people say that genetic testing may cause trouble. Others think it is a wonderful medical advance. Based on what you know, do you think genetic testing will do more harm than good or more good than harm? [my emphasis] The major finding: by far the strongest correlation is with attitude towards the Bible (those who regard it as the Word of God are more skeptical of testing), with position on the political…

23andMe sample failures: can they blame your genes?

I received an email a while back from a reader wondering why his friend has had to submit multiple saliva samples to personal genomics company 23andMe without getting a result back. Customers in a similar position may be reassured by a lengthy explanation posted yesterday on 23andMe's blog about their sample processing protocol, penned by the company's Director of Operations. (Other potential customers may also be reassured to hear that this type of failure is apparently "quite rare", although 23andMe haven't responded yet to my queries regarding the frequency of sample failures; and that…

AMA Advocates Change in Marijuana Classification

Yesterday, the influential AMA (American Medical Association) announced that it would cease its opposition to the concept of medical marijuana and instead advocate for a change in federal classification of the drug. From the LA Times: The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research. The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997…

Slowing the Pace of Change: Bush Appointees Fast-Tracked into Career Government Jobs

Clearly, I owe my readers some true post-election analysis--something that has been slowed down by the insanely busy schedule I've been keeping in the lab and the totally overwhelming implications of the fantastic and historic recent election of Barack Obama. In the meantime, though, I'd like to point out a particularly insidious aspect of the Bush legacy that has so far gone underreported, although it has been publicized by AAAS president James McCarthy and was recently reported in The Washington Post: The president of the nation's largest general science organization yesterday sharply…

R.I.P. the John Edwards Campaign

Today John Edwards officially dropped out of the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. However inevitable this was, it was still sad to see it finally happen. Edwards fought a clean, issues-driven campaign, but it wasn't enough to compete against the wild but justified excitement of the prospect of a formative Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton presidency. It's unfortunate to see Edwards leave, but I'm sure many more good things from him are still to come. The obvious question--one that remains to be answered--is who will his supporters turn to now? The two overriding themes…

Getting Along to Get Ahead

This article was co-authored with Felice Vazquez, Esq., Special Counsel to the President, Kean University. What, really, do our children learn in school? While standardized tests and teacher accountability are the buzzwords of the day, our schools may be missing one of the most important lessons our children must master in order to reach their highest potential: how to get along. After all, the playground and cafeteria can be more challenging -- and interesting -- than the traditional classroom. These are places where children learn how to understand each other's emotions and motivations,…

I Wanted A Trollinator Nanobot for Christmas...

Jennifer Daniel and Sandi Daniel, The New York Times image THERE you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-intentioned opinions, is a troll. "Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt", Julie Zhou, product design manager at Facebook, The New York Times Op-Ed. Many families are awakening today to the joy of sharing gifts for Christmas. A thought occurred to me: I wanted a Trollinator Nanobot for Christmas. But I…

How My Website Was Eaten By The Big Nothing

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will probably remember that around the time Scienceblogs shifted to a new format, I was busy doing a final piece of development on my old website, SciencePunk.com. I felt it had sat in stasis for too long, and I’d outgrown a lot of the views and content on there. I wanted to paint something fresh onto it, but that required a blank canvas. Rather than delete everything (which seemed like quite a blunt act), I thought it would be more fun to visualise the neglect that it was suffering. So, with the help of  Steve Moss, I had a plugin that would gradually…

Best Google n-gram yet: how thinking about death changed in 1767

I'm sure Google Ngrams needs no introduction, but in case I'm wrong: it's a nifty (if crude and much-misused) tool for investigating the frequency of written terms in Google's vast databank of digitised books - some trillion or so words. As I was editing my forthcoming zombies book, I fiddled about with Google NGrams to visualise the emergence of certain technologies (such as the sharp rise and fall of galvanism). One of the central questions in my book is the notion of death, and how it is better understood as a process than a state - i.e. whether you are 'dead' or not depends largely on…

Psyched for Upcoming Departmental Seminars

I am housed in a biology department. Wow, that came out a lot more impersonal than I intended. Let me try that again: My advisor's appointment is to the Biology Department at my university (not much better...eh). Being in a biology department means the faculty interests are very diverse (compared to, say, a biochemistry department, ecology and evolution department, or a neurobiology and behavior department), and so are the departmental seminars. This may seem like a bonus at first, but, in reality, it means that any given seminar will be fairly inaccessible to most people in the department.…

So Many Badges, So Little Time

Those kooky Canucks at the Science Creative Quarterly have started a new club: the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique. Anyone is free to join, provided they're not a teetotaling, lying, world-dominating, badge-hater, 'cause they're really into badges. To profess their love of badges, the Science Scouts have produced quite a collection, some of which I feel qualified to wear on my Science Scout Sash. You see, these badges aren't handed out by some higher authority; you simply claim all the badges that apply to you and post them on your website, like so…

Of Genes and Species

I straddle the line between being a population biologist and a molecular geneticist. That's a self-congratulatory way of saying that I am an expert in neither field. But existing in the state I do allows me to observe commonalities shared by both. For example, both fields have terminology (or what the uninitiated would call jargon) that lack sufficient definitions. Amongst my minimal postings from last week were included a couple of riffs on species and speciation (the first, the second) getting at the lack of a coherent definition of species. My conclusion is that there is not, nor will…

What would analog genetics look like?

How about another of those non-awkward Dawkins Twitter questions? Although this one actually is kind of awkward, in a non-offensive way. I don't quite know what it means. Does evolution rely upon digital genetics? Could there be an analogue genetics? What features of life have to be true all over the universe? I don't understand what 'digital genetics' is…it sounds very Mendelian, I think. There is a reasonable but overly simplistic perspective on genetics, a very old school way of thinking, that mutations are binary -- you've either got a trait or you don't. We also use a linear sequence of…

Python: It's a snake. No, it's a programming language. No, it's a snake.

... and so on and so on people argue. But they are both right, it is a snake, and it is a programming language. I want to talk about the programming language now. We'll deal with the snake another time. (and boy, do I have snake stories....) Python is an interpreted computer language, also known as a script language (being a script language and an interpreted language are not necessarily the same thing, but Python is both). I never met a computer language I didn't like and I also never met a computer language that wasn't somehow superior to all other languages according to someone, for…

Ardea Skybreak teaches the controversy

Most books that teach the basics of evolutionary biology are fairly genteel in their treatment of creationism—they don't endorse it, of course, but they either ignore it, or more frequently now, they segregate off a chapter to deal with the major claims. There are also whole books dedicated to combating creationist myths, of course, but they're not usually the kind of book you pick up to get a tutorial in basic biology. In my hands I have an example of a book that does both, using the errors of creationism heavily to help explain and contrast the principles of evolutionary biology—it's…

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

I am annoyed with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I'm annoyed for a lot of reasons that I won't go into now, but mainly for one aspect of this problem: The idea of a mat of solid garbage extending across a portion of the Pacific Ocean that is the size of Europe (or whatever) is startling. It is the kind of thing that attracts attention, brings people to the table to discuss and consider conservation issues, and makes people want to be more aware of the environment, and to do something positive. But, when people find out that there is no Pacific Garbage Patch, that they've been lied to by…

Chelation study for autism tossed on the dustbin

Well, well, well, well. Sometimes science and ethics do win out after all: CHICAGO (AP) -- A government agency has dropped plans for a study of a controversial treatment for autism that critics had called an unethical experiment on children. The National Institute of Mental Health said in a statement Wednesday that the study of the treatment -- called chelation -- has been abandoned. The agency decided the money would be better used testing other potential therapies for autism and related disorders, the statement said. The study had been on hold because of safety concerns after another study…

Canada "thanks" antivaccinationists for the mumps

I've been sarcastically "thanking" Jenny McCarthy for bringing the U.S. the gift of measles through her tireless efforts on behalf of Generation Rescue and other antivaccine groups and will continue to do so whenever I deem it appropriate. But Jenny isn't the only one who deserves our "thanks" (no, I'm not going to thank Andrew Wakefield again). Let's not forget all those religions who, either because they think vaccines are messing with God's will or because of some interpretation of a holy book written in prescientific times, religions like this one in Canada: With the number of confirmed…

Science is irrelevant. Resistance is futile, part 2: Another domino falls

I've written extensively before about how advocates of non-science-based "medical" treatments, such as naturopathy, homeopathy, and all the woo that follows have been waging a war on all fronts against science- and evidence-based medicine in their effort to have their so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (or the newer, brighter, shinier name "integrative medicine") be perceived as co-equal with scientific medicine. They've infiltrated academia. They've insinuated their agenda into medical school curricula. They've even managed to have the teaching of woo become a mandatory part…

More antiscience from John McCain: Bear DNA

So there I was last night, in the Twilight Zone between wakefulness and sleep, Late Night With David Letterman on the television, blaring in the background. I was vaguely aware that John McCain was Letterman's guest for the evening and that they were chatting back and forth, Letterman asking the usual rather inane questions that entertainment-oriented talk show hosts often ask politicians and Presidential candidates when they have them on their shows and McCain was winding up to hit the softball questions out of the park. Then I heard it, in the middle of a commentary about how the…

Lilies Not So Peaceful

I find it ironic - okay, I find it slightly hilarious - that the house plant which results in the most calls to poison control centers is called the Peace Lily. Next on the list is Pokeweed - which people have a bad habit of mistaking for other edible wild plants - followed by two holiday favorites, poinsettias and holly plants. As the Peace Lily is popular at Easter, one could conclude that holiday plants are particularly dangerous. But there's actually a more interesting - if less amusing - background to such risks. Most of the calls, of course, aren't funny at all. They concern curious…

Object lesson: when researchers run repositories

I commented here earlier, not without frustration, about a pair of researchers who built and abandoned a disciplinary repository. I was particularly annoyed that they seemed to have done this purely for self-aggrandizement, apparently feeling no particular attachment to the resulting repository. Such as they should not open repositories. Neither they nor any service they offer is trustworthy. I hope that's uncontroversial. Unfortunately, even vastly better intentions than that don't guarantee the sustainability of the result, even in the short term. The Mana'o anthropology repository, started…

Since October is a Celebration of Many Health-Related Causes, Let's Think A Moment About This: The Development of Noninvasive Heart Care - Part II

For those of you who read the previous blog, you get the idea behind today's offering. Namely, that October is celebration/awareness month of a host of health-related causes, among them: children's health, dyslexia awareness, healthy lung, lupus awareness, national breast cancer awareness, and national spina bifida. This struck me as a good time to step back and reflect on how, only 50 or so years ago, a group of pioneers were able to bring us what is known today as noninvasive heart care. The story is detailed in an article entitled, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Dean Franklin and…

In Search of Synergy

Charlie Rose recently ran a show billed as "A discussion about the legacy of Sigmund Freud." I'd urge anyone interested in the impact of neuroscience on psychotherapeutic practice to take the time to watch it. The title is a bit misleading. It's less a discussion of Freud's contributions than it is a free wheeling conversation about how the fields of neuroscience and psychotherapy are beginning to overlap--and, perhaps more importantly, how understanding the biology of the brain promises to revolutionize the practice of psychotherapy. The participants are seriously heavy hitters: There's…

In Soviet Russia, your vote determined your job; In America...

In the Soviet Union, party membership was everything. Your job, your access to food and other consumer goods, and your apartment all depended on your standing with the party. And votes were simply a tool to provide a patina of legitimacy. No one who liked warm weather voted against the Party. One of the many advantages of the protections provided by the U.S. constitution is that we generally cannot be hired or fired based on our personal or political beliefs. We also get to elect our leaders frequently. So it should be with a great sense of irony that various teabagger groups shout and…

Doug Bremner: Odd ideas, odder behavior

I'm not a psychiatrist, and I won't guess what motivates someone like Doug Bremner. On his blog, he posted a picture showing the head of a cancer surgeon/researcher/blogger pasted onto a large beast. A little man is doing something to the beast. An armchair psychiatrist might make silly suppositions based on the image of a little man bent over toward what looks like the genitalia of a large beast, but also like a little man eviscerating the beast with a big tool (which is not part of the little man...he's just holding it). But images probably don't mean anything anyway. Bremner is a…

No, I'm not tipping over

If you look to your left, you may notice me paddling a black and white cedar-strip and canvas canoe. I am not about to dump into the water---the "lean" is proper solo canoeing posture. A few years decades back, I was the canoeing director at a Canadian summer camp and taught hundreds of kids how to paddle a canoe. Since this is a "science blog", I'll explain this awkward-seeming posture to you. The proper position for traditional Canandian-style solo paddling is half-way between the bow and the stern, leaning to the side you paddle on, preferably on your knees. The lean itself…

Confound it!

This article is going to be about sex. I promise. But first, some reflections. Well, Pepsipocalypse continues. The Management pulled the ill-conceived PepsiCo nutrition blog, which is a Good Thing. This doesn't change my misgivings about what has happened. As many other bloggers have already stated, the Pepsi fiasco is a single, highly-public event, but there are non-public problems that are important to some bloggers, including me. Removing the "advertorial" blog was the right thing for SEED to do. It removes a clear ethical conflict (remember, this isn't about PepsiCo, it's about…