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Stocks, Bonds, Boneheaded Headlines

I have a friend who is also in the science business on the outreach/educational side of things. Last night he and some other friends and I were out on the town (is that what the kids call it these days?), and he mentioned that he liked this site as it's been while I'm on break from school. Less math. Which kind of surprised me, I didn't realize I had been doing it. Maybe I do tend to be less rigorous when I'm not actively doing work. In either case it's about to come to an end, as in about a week I'll be back at school teaching and getting some research done. There will be math. (But it…

Puttin' on the Ritz Variation

Continuing from yesterday's post on approximation methods in quantum mechanics, here's another common method worth a close look. It's one of my favorites, because it's a rare technique in which you can just make something completely up from thin air and it will very probably work well nonetheless. Let's say you have a particle floating around in some potential. Maybe it's a perturbed square well, an anharmonic oscillator, or just about any weird potential you can think of. You have no idea what the actual wavefunctions are for the potential. After all, even simple solvable potentials…

Should Congress pass Waxman-Markey?

I've been agonizing over this for weeks. My initial stance was yes, because if Waxman-Markey (a.k.a. the American Clean Energy and Security Act) doesn't make it, I doubt we can afford to wait for Congress to take another stab at it. But the lobbying over the past few days has been fierce. I get emails from both sides, and by both I mean both sides of the environmental community. The argument against ACESA is compelling. For example, the Climate Crisis Coalitions' latest email enumerate the weakness of the bill thusly: 1) Weak cap. ACESA's cap on greenhouse gas emissions represents reductions…

Climate and the 'taboo' subject of overpopulation

Fred Pearce, whose byline is most commonly seen in New Scientist over feature stories about climate change, has done a little bit of thinking about whether we should be worried about the virtual certainty that the world's population will hit 9 billion before it starts to fall in the second half of this century. His verdict? While still a serious problem when it comes to the evils of poverty, overpopulation will have little bearing on our efforts to deal with global warming. The title of his piece in Yale's e360 pretty much says it all: "Consumption Dwarfs Population As Main Environmental…

The importance of actually reading what you cite

George F. Will has once again waded, some might argue over his head, into the hazardous waters of climatology. His latest Washington Post column restates long-discredited arguments against anthropogenic global warming. Rather than waste an entire afternoon examining the flaws in Will's case -- if you're interested, Joe Romm has already performed that service -- I'm just going to draw your attention to one small reference in the column. For anyone who has followed the efforts of climate change pseudoskeptics to keep alive the false claim that climatologists were once of the shared opinion that…

"Filming" an Electron

On the intertubes today I'm seeing a lot of references to "Electron filmed for the first time" (digg, msnbc, Live Science.) For a decent explanation that doesn't involve radically distorting quantum theory, I recommend this Physical Review Focus article (and, of course, nothing compares to the original PRL...although it must be said, as always, that four pages is not enough, damnit!) Note that, if I understand correctly, the movie "filmed" above is a movie in "momentum space" and, of course, we're not really talking about the observation of a single electron, but of the momentum…

A Central Non-premise of Quantum Theory

His Squidiness points to a real whopper of a silly article titled "Was Einstein Wrong About Special Relativity?" by Darrell Williams who is listed as a "Mathematician" and a "graduate of Arizona State University." You know you're in for a "good" article when it begins Many notable scientists such as the French mathematician, Henri Poincaré rejected Einstein's Theory of Relativity due to it's lack of sound mathematical procedures, absence of clearness of vision or rigorous arguments. If by "many" he means "very few, and old guys who died in 1912" then this is a perfectly cromulent sentence…

Amy Goodman On Torture

style="display: inline;"> Amy Goodman, the lead journalist for Democracy Now!, has been traveling around the country, giving talks, and promoting her book href="http://www.democracynow.org/store/product/5/BKSUTMHC">Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times. This (standing up to the madness) is inherently difficult.   The photo shows her discussing a video of href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2008/09/protests_in_minneapolis.php">her arrest in St. Paul, while covering the Republican convention in 2008. Ms. Goodman happens to be one of our…

A Puzzle for the Autumnal Equinox

Every now and then you come across a scientific hypothesis that is so elegant and powerful in its ability to explain that it just feels right. Yet that doesn't automatically make it right. Even when an elegant hypothesis gets support from experiments, it's not time to declare victory. This is especially true in biology, where causes and effects are all gloriously tangled up with one another. It can take a long time to undo the tangle, and hacking away at it, Gordian-style, won't help get to the answer any faster. I was reminded of this while reading Andrew Brown's review of A Reason For…

UnPolitical America: A Crisis of Political Illiteracy?

Much calamity has been made in popular books and by liberal commentators about the public's scores on quiz like survey questions tapping basic knowledge of scientific facts or the public's recognition of prominent figures in science. Yet as social scientists have shown in various studies and have argued, we really shouldn't be surprised by the survey results on science literacy. Nor do studies find that these scores on literacy quizzes account for much of the variance in public opinion and perceptions about science-related debates, especially in comparison to other more influential factors…

Two Articles on Predictions & Hype in Science

Earlier this year, in an article at Nature Biotechnology, I joined with several colleagues in warning that the biggest risk to public trust in science is not the usual culprits of religious fundamentalism or "politicization" but rather the increasing tendency towards the stretching of scientific claims and predictions by scientists, university press offices, scientific journals, industry, and journalists. As I detail with Dietram Scheufele in a separate article at the America Journal of Botany,(PDF) each time a scientific prediction or claim goes beyond the available evidence and proves to…

Does the name Dr. Krisana Kraisintu ring a bell? (If it doesn't, then it's a shame it doesn't)

A review of Cocktail: A Play about the Life and HIV Drug Development Work of Dr. Krisana Kraisintu by Vince LiCata and Ping Chong Truth be told, I don't read plays very often, if at all. In fact, I'm ashamed to admit that I think the last one I read was back in high school long ago, and if I remember correctly had something to do with vampires - ironic in that vampires at the time were not so popular. But this play was about something I am interested in - medicine and social responsibility - and it was referred to by a friend, who also happened to be one of the authors. Coincidentally,…

Science mortification: how have you been humiliated in the name of science?

Right now, I'm reading a gem of a book called Mortification, writers' stories of their public shame. It essentially has 70 or so mini-pieces from a wide variety of writers, at various stages of their careers. These pieces share humiliating anecdotes as it relates to the life of a writer: Here, the liner notes encapsulates it nicely: Mortification is a collection of writers' tales of ignominy, a grimly compelling anthology of shame... Anyone who has ever fancied an author's life would find this book an eye-opener... Just to give you a sense of the flavour, here is one of the stories from…

Guns vs. Butter

Guns vs. Butterby Audley Z Darkheart Since the Libyan protests began, the debate over the US led NATO enforcement of a "no-fly zone" has raged nearly everywhere-- news outlets, op-ed pages, blogs, even facebook. It all boils down to one fundamental question: Should the United States be dropping bombs on yet another sovereign nation? My answer is a simple and passionate "no". I have no interest in discussing whether or not Operation Odyssey Dawn is a truly humanitarian effort, nor do I want to be dragged into another argument over the justification of killing Gadhafi's forces. Instead I…

McCain cites "strong evidence" that thiomerosal causes autism

I nearly aerosolized Diet Pepsi all over my computer screen when I read this: It a town hall meeting Friday in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that "there's strong evidence" that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. -- a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical establishment. McCain was responding to a question from the mother of a boy with autism, who asked about a recent story that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and the National Vaccine Injury…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (1/14/08)

Ronald Bailey at Reason also argues that whether a Presidential candidate believes in evolution matters: Does it matter what presidential candidates believe about biological evolution? After all, they are running for commander-in-chief, not scientist-in-chief. For example, why not practice educational federalism as many Republican candidates suggest and let local school boards and individual states decide what should be taught in science classes? This may seem like an initially appealing option until one considers that schooling is mandatory. The problem is that creationism and its latest…

0.5% increase in the NIH budget next year!

.5%. Woohoo! High fives all around! It is going to be another year of suck for NIH spending. The omnibus spending bill that has been passed by the House and Senate and is expected to be ratified by the President has the following in the matter of NIH funding: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) would receive a 0.5% increase after high hopes for a slice that would at least keep up with inflation. ... After Bush vetoed legislation that would have given NIH a $1 billion increase, Congress gave it $329 million more, or a 1% raise, to $29.2 billion. Some $300 million is designated for the…

'Tis better to give than to receive...

...but how you give matters quite a lot, it would seem. Just in time for the season of giving (and, of course, drinking oneself silly on eggnog), I'd like to share my holiday reading list, which is coincidentally heavy on that subject (giving, not eggnog). Fortunately for me, it's a loooong plane ride back and forth across the Atlantic. 1. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier Collier is an Oxford professor stepping into the Sachs-Easterly fray with this recent analysis of why it's been so hard to achieve anything close to…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (9/24/07)

Encephalon 32 is up at Living the Scientific Life. The Chernobyl reactor will be encased in a huge steel arch. This business sounds suspiciously similar to the Simpsons movie. Larry Summers is not allowed to talk at UC-Davis: What's more, academic freedom depends on reactions like the response to Summers's 2005 comments. Knowledgeable scholars including the sociologist (and my colleague) Kim Shauman explained that there was actually a great deal more research into, and knowledge of, the ways women founder in scientific careers than Summers had originally suggested. Summers, Shauman said, was…

Stress precedes volume reductions in the hippocampus in PTSD

There was a debate in the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for some time about whether the shrinkage observed in the hippocampus -- a structure involved in learning and memory -- was the result of the stress or was a vulnerability factor for the disease. We know that high levels of cortisol -- a stress hormone -- can kill neurons. So you could argue that the stress and stress hormones that cause PTSD could also result in the reduction in hippocampal volume. This is the so-called neurotoxicity hypothesis. On the other hand, individuals who get PTSD could have some underlying genetic or…

Gordon on Brooks on the shy face of ID

Bruce Gordon is expectorating on Dan Brooks’ post on the ID conference (see here). Remember that Brooks received an email after the meeting "stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting,and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it. They said they had no intention of posting anything from the conference on the Discovery Institute’s web site (the entire proceedings were recorded). They claimed they would have some announcement at the time of the publication of the edited volume of presentations, in about a year, and wanted all of us…

Detroit, London, Paris, Montpellier....Oh My.......

What a journey! Three flights, four airports, a 2 hour bus ride through London, my luggage lost (not my poster though!), but at midnight Sept 16th I have finally made it to Montpellier, France. First, my flight out of Detroit was delayed over 2 hours, although I received some nice vouchers from Northwest in the form of free airport food and $50 off my next ticket. Not so bad. However, the delay made me miss my British Airways connection in Gatwick Airport in London by about 20 minutes. After being shuffled through several different "queues" (lines, none of which were short) and a different…

The Rightful Place Project: Science has a Privileged, Not a Rightful, Place

In President Obama's inaugural speech, he announced his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." In response to Seed Magazine has initiated to The Rightful Place Project whose goal is to recruit scientists and engineers to answer the question: What is science's rightful place? Available on their website is a form where you can enter your responses to this important question. Here is mine: Science is a process by which fact is distinguished from non-fact. I emphasize the word process for just as we live in a nation of laws, not men, science is more than scientists: it is…

The Psychology of Evil

I am in blood Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er. Strange things I have in head that will to hand, Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd. -- MacBeth Act III, Scene 4, Lines 162-166 I have a book to put on the reading list. Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo has a new book on the psychology of evil and how previously "good" people can do bad things. The book is called The Lucifer Effect. If you remember, Zimbardo was the author of the famous Stanford Prison experiment. The Stanford Prison experiment cast students as prison guards…

I get email

This one is from Bad Pitt. Read it while keeping in mind that we atheists are the ones called militant extremists…while good Judeo-Christian lunatics have these sick, psychopathic, violent fantasies of murder and execution. GLORIOUS BASTERDS Inglorious Basterds is a Jewish psycho-fantasy based on the delusional notion of retroactive vengeance against Nazi forces in France at the end of World War II. It is an artful, but ultimately pointless, exercise in orgiastic gratuitous violence. The only redeeming value of this film is: (1) The not so subtle encouragement of the viewing audience not…

We're all getting older

Honestly, I don't feel a day over 12. I remember leaning on an old fence near the rhubarb on a fine fall day in 1969, looking out over the mucky little stream that ran near our house and listening to the frogs creak, and thinking that this was a very fine life I've got, and I think I'll hang on to it for as long as I could, and maybe in a little bit I'll get on my bike and pedal into town to see if there any new model airplanes at the five and dime, and browse the comic book rack at Stewart's Drug, and then maybe say hello to Grandma and fuel up on cookies and kool-aid. That was me then, and…

Squid in space, again

Since I previously expressed my disappointment in the "squid in space" experiment that will be going up on the space shuttle, I've received a rebuttal from the lead investigator of the project. Fair's fair; here it is. Dear Dr. Myers, I am the lead investigator on the Squid in Space project and an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. I have read your description of the project in your blog and I feel that it is incomplete and missing the major point of the experiment. As you can imagine one doesn't like to have their work labeled as "Bad Science" so I wanted to take this…

Homicide rates in canada and the u.s.

Dean Payne said: Centerwall made his comparisons with and without the major (pop. > 1M) metropolitan areas. With these areas, I get the same numbers you list. Without, I get 3.1 for Canadian provinces, and 3.7 for the US states. I get the same numbers. Here are the homicide rates, inside and outside major metropolitan areas. homicide handgun % with rate homicide rate handgun Canada 2.8 0.3 11 <1M 3.1 0.2 6 1M 2.2 0.4 18 US 8.5…

PDE-5 Inhibitor Sildenafil Improves Cognition, or Viagra's Good for the Big Head Too

Inspired by Rush Limbaugh's apparent erectile dysfunction, I decided that today's Evil Journal Club should address the "other" potential uses of PDE-5 inhibitors, the most (in)famous of which is Viagra. Phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE-5) is an enzyme that breaks down cyclic GMP. We've known for a while that cGMP is important for signal transduction and ultimately for learning and memory processes, and that nitric oxide (NO) can stimulate production of cGMP. Interestingly, changes in this NO-cGMP signaling pathway have been implicated in aging, providing a potential link to deteriorating…

A Donation Challenge for Education!!!!

The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon! Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way. A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school -- teachers who made science intriguing, exciting, maybe a little bit dangerous. But tightening budgets are making it harder and harder for public school teachers to provide the books, equipment, and field trips to make science come alive for kids. Efforts are further…

Why The N2 Indexes Conflict Monitoring, Not Response Inhibition

Sometimes, ground-breaking studies don't get the attention they deserve - even from experts in the field. One great example of this is an elegant study by Nieuwenhuis et al. from CABN in 2003; in it, they conclusively demonstrate why a particular event-related potential - the negative-going frontocentral deflection at around 200ms following stimulus onset, aka the "N2" - reflects the detection of response conflict, and not the demand to inhibit a response. This would seem to be a tough distinction to demonstrate - after all, the demand to inhibit something would be expected to strongly…

A Backseat Driver in The Brain? dPFC helps you find your way; vlPFC may just say "wrong turn!"

Decisions can be hard: the conflict you face in any decision can be increased if option A is not that much better than option B, or if option A is newly worse than option B. And then there are are just bad decisions, maybe hard only in retrospect. As illustrated by a 2009 J Neurosci article from Mitchell, Luo, Avny et al it seems that dorsal areas of the prefrontal cortex might help guide us in making tough decisions, whereas a ventrolateral prefrontal area might just alert us only after a bad decision was made. To show this, they administered a reinforcement learning task to subjects…

The Visual Word Form Area of the Left Fusiform Gyrus

The claim that language processing can be carried out by purely "general purpose" information processing mechanisms in the brain - rather than relying on language-specific module(s) - may seem contradicted by a slew of recent neuroimaging studies demonstrating what appears to be a visual "word form" area in the left fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe. By all appearances, this region is highly specialized for word processing. But this evidence causes a predicament for more than just domain-generalists; those who advocate an evolved language module may also be challenged by these results,…

Temporal Cascades in PFC: Review and Evidence

Though anatomically heterogenous, the human prefrontal cortex seems to perform a rather general function: it actively maintains context representations to guide and control behavior. What, then, is the reason for the anatomical diversity within this region of the brain? Some theories suggest that prefrontal cortex (PFC) is organized to represent increasingly protracted contexts. According to this "temporal cascade" model, the most posterior regions of PFC are responsible for maintaining only the most current contextual information (e.g., "the doorbell rang") whereas progressively more…

Imagination, Memory and Context in the Directed Forgetting Paradigm

Imagine you are invisible. Congratulations, you are now actually less likely to remember what you were doing a few minutes ago, and possibly a lot longer ago than that. At least, this is the basic finding from a 2002 article by Sahakyan & Kelley, who showed that when people are asked to forget something they'd learned, they may actually do this by rapidly changing their internal context in a way that is similar to what happens if, say, you're asked to imagine that you're invisible. In the laboratory, this is usually studied in the "directed forgetting paradigm," in which subjects learn…

Opium, Rape and the Bravest Woman in Afghanistan

Chris Hedges, the American war correspondent who has authored such books as War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, has a new article entitled "Opium, Rape and the American Way" published on the website of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan). The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting…

A simple bump on the head can kill you

How can a seemingly trivial head injury kill you? To answer this, you need a little anatomy. Your brain is a pretty important organ, and is well protected. It sits inside a thick armor (the skull) and floats cushioned in a bath of cerebral-spinal fluid. It's surrounded by several layers of tissue, and its blood supply is kept relatively separate from the rest of the body (the "blood-brain barrier"). This separation helps keep out toxins and micro-organisms (but is imperfect). Just beneath the skull is a tough, leathery layer called the dura mater. This picture shows the skull cut…

Now I know how climate scientists feel

Ken Brown has a reply to the heavy criticism of his paper claiming that Linus Torvalds did not write Linux. ADTI introduce his reply like this: Experts from Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds agree: a. they are much smarter than AdTI's Kenneth Brown, b. IBM is good, Microsoft is evil, and c. Brown's theory of how Linux was probably written is dead wrong. (Dog bites man.) Brown says their accounts are hopelessly shifting and contradictory -- not only against the historical record, but in recent weeks. (Man bites back.) Unfortunately, Brown's reply…

Five Coolest Moments in the History of the Shuttle Program

As NASA's Space Shuttle program winds down -- Endeavour's final mission is slated for later this year, then that's it -- let us take a moment and remember the Shuttles. Sure, they had a tendency to explode into balls of fire. Sure, they were expensive, risky, and besieged by problems. But now is not the time for criticism: 25 years of American engineering, 132 missions, and over 20,000 orbits of this planet are nothing to shake a stick at. It is in this spirit of recognition that Universe presents a very subjective chronology of the Shuttle's greatest moments. Onward! Gene Roddenberry, Star…

Computers are Interesting, Part Two

If we take at least as hypothetical truth my previous assumption that the Internet bears uncanny parallels to the Universe, it is in interesting to begin a discourse on the translation of both the conceptual and physical properties of the Universe onto its microcosm -- the man-made web of chaos and information that is the Internet. After all, the guiding laws of the world are physical ones -- properties of physics. Are graphical web browsers, designed to aid people in their navigation through an otherwise conceptually baffling system, analogous to natural structures? After all, they must have…

Using Placebo Laws to Test "More Guns, Less Crime"

Helland and Tabarrok's paper 'Using Placebo Laws to Test "More Guns, Less Crime"' has been published in Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy. Their objective was to correct for serial correlations in the crime data. I explained earlier how, if crimes rates in adjacent counties tend to behave in the same way, results could wrongly appear to be statistically significant. There is a similar problem with crime rates in the same county in two successive years tending to be the same. Helland and Tabarrok use a technique (placebo laws) that deals with serial…

Could the Ways in Which Animals Regenerate Hair and Feathers Lead to Clues for Restoring Human Fingers and Toes?

On a recent visit to The American Physiological Society's website, I found this amazing story on regeneration that I thought you might enjoy: This summer’s action film, “The Amazing Spider-Man™,” is another match-up between the superhero and his nemesis the Lizard. Moviegoers and comic book fans alike will recall that the villain, AKA  Dr. Curt Connors, was a surgeon who, after losing an arm, experimented with cell generation and reptilian DNA and was eventually able to grow back his missing limb. The latest issue of the journal Physiology contains a review article that looks at possible…

Sustainability

Unconnected incidents are making me ponder questions of sustainability. I don't have any answers, but I can at least unburden myself of some frustrations! I learned from a colleague that arXiv is looking for a new funding model, as Cornell is wearying of picking up the entire tab. Various options are on the table, and I'm not competent to opine on their feasibility. I'm more interested in the larger question: how are we, we libraries and we researchers, organizing to shoulder the burden of electronic archives, especially open-access ones? Historically, the answer has been "not effectively." I…

The Vegetarian Hundred

I saw this meme over at Adventures in Ethics and Science: The Vegetarian's Hundred, a veggie-flavored response to the recent Omnivore's Hundred meme. I'm going to play by Janet's rules, which are: [original] If you want to play along, here's how you do it: copy the list, including my instructions, and bold any items you have eaten and strike out any you would never eat, and then post it to your blog. [janet's addendum] I'm going to add the following rule: italicize items you have made (or grown) yourself. (Presumably, you've eaten those as well.) My list is below the fold. The Vegetarian…

Life with a toddler

It's been a while since I've done an official Baby Jane update. In fact, I don't think I've done a proper one since I migrated over from the old site! Time flies. So, what is Baby Jane (now Toddler Jane, I guess) up to these days? Basically, it can be summed up in three areas: Movement, Language Acquisition, and Playtime. Movement: Baby Jane's been walking for a while now, and has definitely perfected the art. She is a very physical kid. She walks, tries to run, twirls, dances, tiptoes, and climbs. Oh, does she climb. So far, the climbing has been mostly limited to chairs, stairs,…

Exploration of an Extraterrestrial Ocean

By Dr. Cynthia Phillips Planetary geologist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute Jupiter's moon Europa could be the best place beyond the Earth to search for life. This small moon, about the size of Earth's Moon, is one of the Galilean moons first discovered 400 years ago by Galileo. The Galilean moons were the first objects observed to orbit another planet, and they revolutionized the way our solar system was understood. Today, the moons of Jupiter are known to be a scientifically rich part of our solar system, and they are yielding a new revolution…

W H Auden

Tommy did as his mother told him Till his soul had split: One half thought of angels And the other half of shit. One of his short poems from 'As I walked Out One Evening'. Beautifully rhymed, talking of shit and uplifting all the same. Another poem I'd like to share: Miss Gee. Deftly written, it startled me with it's brutal honesty. Miss Gee Let me tell you a little story About Miss Edith Gee; She lived in Clevedon Terrace At number 83. She'd a slight squint in her left eye, Her lips they were thin and small, She had narrow sloping shoulders And she had no bust at all. She'…

Correlations between gun ownership, suicide and homicide

R Bryner said: Changing what is continuous data(numbers) to ranks to do an analysis on them is throwing information away. Why is it done, I will tell you why, someone did not like the information and decided to remove it. The funny thing is it even has a legitimate sounding name. Yeah, "non-parametric statistics". Why don't you at least try to learn a tiny amount about it before you post nonsense again? Brandon Ray writes: Since you mention it, may I point out that non-parametric statistics are rather weaker than parametric statistics? Since Pim (or the original author of the study, if…

How much pain will buy you a meal?

My illustrious coblogger points out that by taking part in research studies, a graduate student can actually afford to do things like, well, eat. Normally relegated to scraping the crumbs off the post-seminar cookie tray, or sneaking into a urology luncheon and being forced to sit through an hour talk on ureter infections only to have the opportunity to pick through the dregs of the boxed sandwich choices (ultimately finding the pimiento cheese spread/sprout pita to be the sole viable option), graduate students eke out a meager existence where we're pitted against each other to fight for the…

Pharma objects to empiricism, part xxx

What's wrong -- but horribly expected -- in this picture? One week the CEO of Lilly attacks the idea of a public health insurance plan because it might reduce consumers' "ability to choose, in an informed way, from all the available alternatives." The next week, PhRMA, the trade group this CEO's company is a part of, launches a campaign to undermine comparative effectiveness studies -- which would produce the data necessary for informed consumer choice. If that's not enough, this campaign against collecting actual empirical effectiveness data, spearheaded under the astroturf group…