Mail 506 February 18 - 24, 2008 (original) (raw)
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Fred on Peer Review:
Peer review works, it seems to me, if you believe that people credentialed as scholars are not subject to political correctness, fear of their peers, concerns about tenure, and the heavy pressure to stay within the accepted paradigm. Is this the case?
Who would write the more insightful and accurate paper on race in America�Jared Taylor (who I believe not to have any sort of high academic credentials), or the head of the sociology department at the U. of Maryland? Whose paper would be more likely to pass peer review?
If I stole a prepublication copy of a high-grade-paper from a major figure in one of the semi- or pseudo-sciences�psychology, sociology, anthropology�and submitted it under my name, as plain Fred Reed, would it pass peer review? If not, then the function of peer review as an assurance of quality would seem dubious. Indeed, I would have to conclude that the journal didn�t even recognize quality in its own field, and that peer review was chiefly a form of exclusionary unionism.
I may be wrong, but I have the impression that people who pass peer review, such as Jay Gould (was he peer-reviewed?) have been regarded by the list as incompetent if not dishonest.
I believe I have read that someone wrote a deliberately nonsensical paper in sociology or some such, and this parody was duly published in a respected journal. I don�t know whether it was peer-reviewed.
Maybe journals ought to reserve a slot per issue for things interesting but unconventional, and let the reader decide.
Fred Reed
This came up in another conversation, and I got Fred's permission to post it. See alsomy essay on The Voodoo Sciences.
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A lot about steroids:
Jerry,
Three or four years ago, I thought I was having a heart attack. Sudden *intense* chest pain. So intense that I cannot describe it. BAD pain.
Took a nitro immediately. No effect (other than migraine which is de rigeuer with those things). Waited five minutes, took another. Another five minutes, and popped a third nitro under my tongue. Still having intense chest pains, not reduced in the least. I am scared at this point. I was told that if I am still having chest pains after the 3-in-5 regime, to go to the hospital post haste.
My wife rushes us to the ER. I am a wreck from the pain. They slap me down on a table, hook up an E.K.G., and draw blood. They can see that I am in a lot of pain.
The tests come back in a few minutes -- no enzymes in my blood that would indicate a coronary, and the E.K.G. looks good. But I am still having intense chest pains.
They keep me there for a while scratching their chins, and finally draw a blank. They have no idea why I'm hurting like that. Maybe "something" with my throat, or "a virus" -- but basically, no clue as to what was causing the pain.
So, they shrug, tell me to roll over, and jab me with a shot of steroids. They then give me an rx for a week's worth of steroid pills (take yay many on day one, then reduce the number each day until they're gone). They tell me to check with my G.P. as soon as I can, and wish me well.
We go to drive to the closest pharmacy, which due to it being late on a holiday weekend, is a forty mile drive.
Before we get there, I'm feeling like a new man. About 20 minutes after that steroid shot, the pain is completely gone, and it's as if nothing had ever happened. Amazing stuff!
It gradually wore off, and the pain returned, but not as bad, so a few days later, I went to "see a doctor" (had to use one of those walk-in clinic deals since my G.P. was away for the holiday).
Same thing -- no clue as to why I was hurting.
When my G.P. is back, she sends me in for an MRI. Turns out that I blew out a disc -- it happened quite suddenly, and it caused pain in the same region as would have been caused by a heart attack. What a surreal coincidence!
You don't have to worry about turning into Ahnold (thick neck, "steroid voice," etc.) The kind of steroids they use to counter inflammation are completely different from the kind of steroids used for "body building" and do not cause those problems. At least, that's what they told me, and I've read it in other places, so I believe it.
(For certain ca treatments, there *will* be a transient effect manifesting in overall edema of the face and other locations, but it's temporary, and goes away when the treatment stops. I've seen it with a friend's son -- it was not trivial -- but it was not permanent either.)
Ron
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Reply to Duffin On Big Pharma
Jerry,
I was mainly referring to things like the review boards (the name escapes me at the moment -- rough few weeks under this !#$%#$% flu that's making the rounds). Case in point -- several years ago, we owned some shares in CLPA, which was developing a fairly impressive ca drug ("Aptosyn"). It had remarkable results when used to treat FAP ("familial" colon polyps).
The punchline: Aptosyn was sort of dropkicked to the back of the line, because the FDA approved Celebrex for that indication. (Aptosyn was getting some kind of special handling since there was no treatment for that disease -- until Celebrex was approved.)
The board that did the deed acted largely on the strength of the testimony of a certain woman who had been treated with great success. They listened to her explain how she took the medicine, had her condition turn around, and was happy to continue taking the drug. *Very* impressive! So, Celebrex was approved.
So what's the problem?
The problem was that she hadn't been taking Celebrex. She was on an Aptosyn trial. The board, however, engineered things so that she was 1) not aware that it was a *Celebrex* panel, and, 2) she wasn't allowed to mention that she was taking Aptosyn.
Cuteness times... well, I ran out of fingers (at one).
Net result: CLPA is no more, and all was well with Celebrex (until it was discovered that it had certain cardiovascular problems).
The bottom line is that however onerous the FDA trial system may be for big pharma, it is *much* moreso for *small* companies. As I said, it does not scale -- and this accrues to the benefit of big companies. Is this painless and inexpensive for big outfits? No -- but it is *less* expensive than it would be if *small* companies did not have to bear the same weight applied to big outfits.
As to my own gratitude (or what have you) for big pharma, I am currently consuming a couple of thousand dollars worth of their products each month. Make of that what you will.
Ron
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In the Year 2021...
Lake Mead and/or Lake Powell could be dry.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2008/2008-02-12-095.asp
"The Lake Mead/Lake Powell system includes the stretch of the Colorado River in northern Arizona. Aqueducts carry the water to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other communities in the Southwest. Currently the system is only at half capacity because of a recent string of dry years, and the team estimates that the system has already entered an era of deficit."
"Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system. The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region," the report concludes."
Charles Brumbelow
With energy, water recycling is trivial, and there's plenty of water. If LA were to pump the output of Hyperion into the San Gabriels, we wouldn't need a lot of the Delta water. Alas, water politics is rough and involves billions and billions for capitalists, and as usual, the worst generally get in control and use politics and cash donations to stay there. The Chandler family when they owned the LA Times set a great example of how to make money out of water. They took the Times from being a Republican paper to a Democrat paper largely because of Pat Brown's California Aqueduct, which flowed through Metler and the Onion Fields.
If there were rational policies on energy and recycling water, we wouldn't have a water problem at all.
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Subject: junk mail from CMP
Jerry,
CMP media seems to have adopted an annoying email marketing strategy. I attended Macworld, and as usual, was careful to opt out of as many email notifications as I could see on the various on line forms I had to fill out. After Macworld, I started receiving emails on every damn convention CMP handles, or at least it seemed that way.
Each individual email had an option to un-subscribe from further emails for that convention only, not all promotional emails from CMP. After spelunking through the CMP website for about 10 minutes, I found this link:
http://www.cmpadministration.com/ars/optout1.
do?mode=optout&forward=optoutpagespecial&T
=CT&F=5907&K=PVYPGE
Which is supposed to take the entered email off all lists. Note that I had to go looking, it was not offered in any of the add-mails. Great strategy CMP.
Another company seems to have adopted a similar strategy. My wife and I have subscribed to the online Wall Street Journal since it was established. Recently, WSJ has started pushing email on us whether we like it or not. I have gone to the preferences pages and un-subscribed from everything, but the emails keeps coming. It's been this way for several weeks. Not what I would have expected out of WSJ.
Phil Tharp
And you expect things to be different?
Pournelle's lesson: unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.
The difference between Libertarian and Conservative is that Conservatives understand this, and know that unregulated capitalism will eventually end with human meat sold in market places, and slavery. Alas, many Conservatives think that everything has to be regulated and controlled. Liberals, meanwhile, think everyone needs to be liberated from religion, the sight of religious symbols, and all marriage vows.
'Twas ever thus.
