Politics
oracknows | June 14, 2015Over the years, I've written a lot about the intersection between the law and science in medicine. Sometimes, I support a particular bill, such as SB 277. Sometimes I oppose a bill, such as right-to-try or laws licensing naturopaths. The case I will discuss here is unusual in that it is a case of the law getting ahead of what the science says in a manner that will likely do little, if any, good for patients, cause a lot of confusion until the science is worked out better, and end up costing patients money for little or no benefit. I am referring to laws mandating the reporting of high-breast-…
gregladen | June 14, 2015As planned, I interviewed Sheril this morning on MN Atheist Talk Radio about the Science Debate Dot Org project. Mike Haubrich was host. I think it was a great interview, please give it a listen.
The interview is available here.
I also interviewed Sheril about this important topic on paper here.
oracknows | June 10, 2015I bet antivaccinationists would be annoyed if they knew what I was up to yesterday. This week, our department had a visiting professor for Grand Rounds, and that professor was a Nobel laureate. Of course, it's not every day that we have a Nobel laureate visiting us (actually, it's rare). This time around the Nobel laureat visiting us was Harald zur Hausen. He won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008 for a discovery he made decades ago, namely his discovery of the role of papilloma viruses in causing human cervical cancer. Yes, antivaxers, not only did I meet the man whose science…
drorzel | June 7, 2015Engaging in a bit of tab clearance before I head off to DAMOP tomorrow afternoon, I noticed that I still had How to Teach an Ancient Rape Joke open. This is because while I found it kind of fascinating, it's not all that directly relevant to what I do, and I didn't have anything all that concrete to say beyond "Huh. That's interesting." So it languished in one of the many, many open tabs cluttering up Chrome, too interesting to just close but not anything I could see a clear angle to comment on. And eventually it was sort of forgotten until I set about paring down open tabs before an out-of-…
oracknows | June 1, 2015I've been following Mike Adams a long time, going back to 2007 and even before. It's difficult to find anyone who can pack more pseudoscience, conspiracy mongering, and outright hateful bile into an article when he has a mind to do so. I've documented this tendency many times, so many times that, each time I write about one of his rants, I tell myself it'll be the last time. But it never is, because Adams is so vile and I cannot abide the way he spits on the grave of people who died of cancer, people like Tony Snow, Patrick Swayze, Elizabeth Edwards, and Farrah Fawcett. Every time, his MO is…
gregladen | June 1, 2015Bernie Sanders' famous essay is below. I will reserve comment but I'd like your opinion on it. I will say that the press is handling this rather badly, at least at present, taking quotes with zero context, not addressing the meaning of the essay as a whole. Sanders says it was poorly written. Is it?
Man and Woman
by Bernie Sanders
Mid-February, 1972
A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.
A woman enjoys intercourse with her man – as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously.
The man and woman get dressed up on…
oracknows | May 25, 2015When I wrote yesterday about the cruel sham that is "right-to-try," , one criticism (among many) that I made of these misguided, profoundly patient-unfriendly laws was that I have as yet been unable to find a single example of a patient who has managed to obtain access to an experimental therapeutic through such a law, much less been helped by it. So-called "right-to-try" laws, of course, claim to provide a mechanism by which patients with terminal illnesses can obtain access to experimental therapeutics not yet approved by the FDA but still in clinical trials. They are, as I've pointed out,…
oracknows | May 25, 2015Last year, I did several posts on what I consider to be a profoundly misguided and potentially harmful type of law known as "right-to-try." Beginning about a year and a half ago, promoted by the libertarian think tank known as the Goldwater Institute, right-to-try laws began popping up in state legislatures. I wrote about how these laws are far more likely to do harm than good, and that is a position that I maintain today. The idea behind these laws is to give terminally ill patients access to experimental drugs—in some cases drugs that have only passed phase I testing—that might help them.…
oracknows | May 22, 2015Antivaccine activism endangers children. Of that there is no longer any doubt. As vaccination rates fall, the risk of outbreaks of dangerous vaccine-preventable infectious diseases among children rise. In the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak earlier this year, several states introduced measures to restrict nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine requirements. The record in passing such measures has been mixed, at best, but California went one better in an act that was completely unexpected to me. Basically Senator Richard Pan, who also happens to be a pediatrician, introduced SB 277, a…
drorzel | May 15, 2015A few things about the academic job market have caught my eye recently, but don't really add up to a big coherent argument. I'll note them here, though, to marginally increase the chance that I'll be able to find them later.
-- First, this piece at the Guardian got a lot of play, thanks in part to the dramatic headline Science careers: doomed at the outset but even more thanks to the subhead "Has it become harder for graduate students to thrive, and are our best potential scientists giving up on academia?" Most of the people I saw re-sharing it used basically just that last clause, often…
gregladen | May 6, 2015The Canadian Province of Alberta has been likened to the American State of Texas. Energy and cattle, energy barons and cowboys. But with mountains.
Yesterday a relatively liberal party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), won a surprise victory in the provincial election, ousting the 44 year long reign of the Progressive Conservatives. From an American point of view, this is all very confusing because the Canadian political system is very different. Alberta has a Premier, and the premier will step down because of this election. The NDP formerly never held very many seats in the legislature,…
jdupuis | April 30, 2015This roundup includes reviews of a bunch of recent and not-so-recent reading about Canadian politics, in particular the Harper government and how it controls information. Some of the books are pretty directly related to science policy and some, not so much. These are all worth reading, some kind of overlap while others present fairly unique approaches. All were useful to me in my long term interest and work around Canadian science policy and in understanding the current Canadian Conservative government's anti-science attitudes. All are solid additions to the growing body of work on the…
gregladen | April 28, 2015I have a few partly formed, preliminary thoughts about some people's reaction to Baltimore (originally posted on my friend Miles Kurland's page as a comment, then on my facebook page, edited.)
What I'm mainly reacting to is the constant drone of people saying that rioting and anti-state violence in Baltimore is fully 100% wrong and will have 0% positive effect. That may or may not be true, but I have the impression that most of these reactions (mainly seen by me on Twitter, which does tend to lack nuance and detail) are of the knee-jerk sort and not well thought out. More importantly,…
oracknows | April 28, 2015I've written on multiple occasions of what I like to refer to as "antivaccine dog whistles." In politics, the term "dog whistle" refers to things politicians can say to certain groups, usually groups with odious views, that they are with them without actually echoing the views for which the group at which the dog whistle is aimed. The intended target audience gets the message, while those not familiar with the issues either don't get the message or see what is being said as something unobjectionable, even admirable. Think "states' rights" versus civil rights, for example.
It turns out that…
drorzel | April 27, 2015Over the last month or so, it's been kind of hard to avoid this book, even before it hit stores. Big excerpts in the New York Times and The Guardian generated a good deal of buzz, and arguments on social media. Unsurprisingly, as one of the main elements of the book is a look at the phenomenon of social-media shaming, so anybody who had participated in or even watched one of these unfold had an opinion.
I've enjoyed Ronson's previous books a great deal, because he brings a real empathy to all the interviews and profiles he does. Even when he's profiling really problematic people, like some of…
oracknows | April 27, 2015Over the years I've written about a lot of topics. After all, I've been at this for more than a decade now, and I still grind out four or five posts per week, with only occasional breaks for vacations or medical or scientific meetings. Topics have included science-based medicine, antivaccine nonsense, topics of general skepticism, and of course medical quackery, among others. There's one type of recurrent story I've been commenting on periodically since 2005, when I began by discussing the case of Katie Wernecke, and these include stories of children with cancer who do not receive the therapy…
oracknows | April 16, 2015Once again, repeat after me: Homeopathy is quackery. In fact, it's what I like to refer to as The One Quackery To Rule Them All. You would think that, in a modern world and given the incredible advancements in our scientific understanding of biology, physiology, chemistry, and physics over the course of the over 200 years since Samuel Hahnemann pulled the concepts behind homeopathy out of his nether regions, it never ceases to depress me that there are large numbers of people who think that homeopathy could ever work. But they do.
A couple of weeks ago, I took notice of a, well, notice from…
oracknows | April 15, 2015It never ceases to amaze me how very smart people can miss some very obvious points. Now, as most of my readers know, I was at NECSS over the weekend. Because I was busy giving a talk, doing panels, and then enjoying other speakers' talks, I wasn't paying much attention to some of the issues that had consumed my blogging in the couple of weeks before NECSS. Also, as I mentioned here yesterday, science communication was a big issue as well, which is why I appreciated Julia Belluz's suggestions for how the media should cover pseudoscience and quackery.
There was, however, one point where I didn…
drorzel | April 14, 2015I continue to struggle to avoid saying anything more about the Hugo mess, so let's turn instead to something totally non-controversial: gender bias in academic hiring. Specifically, this new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science titled "National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track" with this calm, measured abstract that won't raise any hackles at all:
National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at…
drorzel | March 31, 2015Everybody and their extended families has been sharing around the Fareed Zakaria piece on liberal education. This, as you might imagine, is relevant to my interests. So I wrote up a response over at Forbes.
The basic argument of the response is the same thing I've been relentlessly flogging around here for a few years: that while I'm all for a broad education, the notion that studying a STEM subject and studying "the human condition" are in opposition or even cleanly separable is just foolish. But it's a great excuse to start that argument at Forbes, so...