The better half and I were trying to decide this morning whether there was a way to follow the progress of “health care reform” in the U.S. Senate without getting really mad or really sad. (Conclusion: It seems logically possible that such a way exists, but we haven’t found it yet.)
The one player that seems likely to get much of what it wants in all this seems to be the insurance industry. Given that the folks working out who gets what are politicians, this does not surprise me.
So it occurred to me that maybe we shouldn’t be trusting politicians to achieve health care reform.
Instead maybe we need to mobilize a generation of new college graduates to get jobs with the health insurance industry and take ’em down from the inside.
Surely our young people are up to the challenge!
Category Archives: Current events
Overheard during the budgetpocalypse.
Uttered by an administrator:
“It’s not a curricular decision. It’s a resources decision.”
Some thoughts on ClimateGate.
It’s quite likely, if you’re reading anything else on the internets besides this blog for the past few weeks, that you’ve already gotten your fill of ClimateGate. But maybe you’ve been stuck in your Cave of Grading and missed the news that a bunch of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers (or leaked by an insider, depending on who’s telling the story) and widely distributed. Or maybe you’re still sorting out what you think about the email messages in question and what they mean for their authors, the soundness of scientific consensus on climate change, or the responsible conduct of science more broadly.
Honestly, I’m still sorting out what I think, but here’s where I am at the moment:
Dismal, yes, but is it science?
As I was driving home from work today, I was listening to Marketplace on public radio. In the middle of a story, reported by Nancy Marshall Genzer, about opponents of health care reform, there was an interesting comment that bears on the nature of economics as a scientific discipline. From the transcript of the story:
The Chamber of Commerce is taking a bulldozer to the [health care reform] bill. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported the Chamber is hiring an economist to study the legislation. The goal: more ammunition to sink the bill.
Ewe Reinhardt teaches economics at Princeton. He says, if the Chamber does its study, it will probably get the result it wants.
EWE REINHARDT: You can always get an economist with a PhD from a reputable university to give a scientific report that makes your case. So, yes, there will be such a study.
Grades for sale?
Steinn apparently knows how to get me riled about wrong-headed middle school fundraising initiatives, since he nearly derailed my efforts to push through my stack of grading with his recent post about one such initiative. He quotes from a Raleigh News & Observer story:
Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro… will sell 20 test points to students in exchange for a $20-dollar donation.
Students can add 10 extra points to each of two tests of their choosing. The extra points could take a student from a “B” to an “A” on a test or from a failing grade to a passing grade.
Rosewood’s principal Susie Shepherd rejected the idea that extra points on two tests could make a difference in a final grade.
Shepherd said she approved the idea when a parent advisory council presented it. “Last year they did chocolates and it didn’t generate anything,” Shepherd said.
However, this cash-for-points fundraiser didn’t last long:
Wayne County school administrators stopped the fundraiser, issuing a statement this morning.
“Yesterday afternoon, the district administration met with [Rosewood Middle School principal] Mrs. Shepherd and directed the the following actions be taken: (1) the fundraiser will be immediately stopped; (2) no extra grade credit will be issued that may have resulted from donations; and (3) beginning Novermber 12, all donations will be returned.”
Steinn despairs at this whole situation. I’m not liking it so much either.
How to eliminate ‘any possible conflicts of interest’.
There is a story posted at ProPublica (and co-published with the Chicago Tribune) that examines a particular psychiatrist who was paid by a pharmaceutical company to travel around the U.S. to promote one of that company’s antipsychotic drugs. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist was writing thousands of prescriptions for that same antipsychotic drug for his patients on Medicaid.
You might think that there would be at least the appearance of a conflict of interest here. However, the psychiatrist in question seems certain that there is not:
Sex toys and human subjects at Duke University.
At Terra Sigillata, Abel notes that the Director of Duke University’s Catholic Center is butting in to researchers’ attempts to recruit participants for their research. As it happens, that research involves human sexuality and attitudes toward sex toys.
Here’s how Abel lays it out:
Father Joe Vetter, director of Duke University’s Catholic Center, is protesting trial participant accrual for a study being conducted on campus directed by Dr Dan Ariely, the James B Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Fuqua School of Business (story and video). …
Ariely and his postdoctoral fellow, Dr Janet Schwartz, received IRB approval to recruit female study participants from the Duke campus community to examine the influence of Tupperware-like sex toy parties on sexual attitudes. A recruitment advert had been posted on the university website, as is commonly done for any clinical or social science study, but was pulled yesterday following the objection of Rev Vetter.
If I understand his quotes correctly, Vetter believes that studying sex toys somehow condones behavior that threatens relationships:“It’s not fostering relationships, and it seems to me that one of the things that we want young people to do is to figure out how to have deep, intimate friendships and relationships,” he said. “I would draw the line at a different place. I don’t think that it’s a good idea.”
I’m not privy to the hypothesis being tested but I suspect that the team is investigating how social norms toward adult products are influenced by groupthink. Ariely has not commented publicly on this story other than to say, rightfully so, that he won’t comment so as to not contaminate the results. However, I suspect that it may now be too late.
Legal and scientific burdens of proof, and scientific discourse as public controversy: more thoughts on Chandok v. Klessig.
As promised, I’ve been thinking about the details of Chandok v. Klessig. To recap, we have a case where a postdoc (Meena Chandok) generated some exciting scientific findings. She and her supervisor (Daniel F. Klessig), along with some coworkers, published those findings. Then, in the fullness of time, after others working with Klessig tried to reproduce those findings on the way to extending the work, Klessig decided that the results were not sufficiently reproducible.
At that point, Klessig decided that the published papers reported those findings needed to be retracted. Retracting a paper, as we’ve had occasion to discuss before, communicates something about the results (namely that the authors cannot stand behind them anymore). By extension, a retraction can also communicate something to the scientific community about the researcher responsible for generating those results — perhaps that she was too quick to decide a result was robust and rush it into print, or that she made an honest mistake that was not discovered until after the paper was published, or that her coauthors no longer trust that her scientific reports are reliable.
The issue is complicated, I think, by the fact that there were coauthors on the papers in question. Coauthors share the labor of doing the scientific work, and they share the credit for the findings described in their paper. You might expect, therefore, that they would share responsibility for quality control on the scientific work, and for making sure that the findings are robust before the manuscript goes off to the journal. (In my first post on this case, I noted that “before the work was submitted to Cell, Klessig had one of his doctoral students try to verify it, and this attempt was at least good enough not to put the brakes on the manuscript submission.” However, given that further efforts to reproduce the findings seem not to have succeeded, I suspect opinions will vary on whether this pre-submission replication was enough quality control on the authors’ parts.) And, you might expect that it would be the rare case where a problem with a published manuscript would come to rest on the shoulders of a single author in the group.
If credit is shared, why isn’t blame?
Whatever you think ought to be the standard assumptions when a collaborative piece of scientific work does not hold up, in this particular case the blame seemed to fall on Chandok. She took issue with the implication of the retractions (among other communications) that she was unreliable as a scientific researcher. Probably she considered the importance of trust and accountability in the scientific community, recognizing that if she were not trusted by her fellow scientists and if her work were viewed as presumptively unreliable, she would not have much of a scientific career ahead of her. So, she sought legal remedy for this harm to her scientific reputation and career prospects by pursuing a defamation claim against Klessig.
There are separable issues at play here. One is the question of what is required in the eyes of the law to prove a claim of defamation. Another is what would constitute “best practices” for scientific work, both in terms of dealing with data and conclusions, and in terms of dealing with the scientists who generate the data and conclusions (and who are the main audience for the findings reported by other scientists). Here, I think “dealing with” encompasses more than simply classifying fellow scientists by whether or not you can trust their scientific output. It includes interactions with collaborators (and competitors) , not to mention interactions in scientific training relationships.
We might quibble about where a postdoc falls in the process of scientific training and development. Nevertheless, if the PI supervising a postdoc is supposed to be teaching her something (rather than just using her as another pair of hands, however well trained, in the lab), he may have specific responsibilities to mentor her and help her get established as a PI herself. Sorting out what those responsibilities are — and what other responsibilities could trump them — might be useful in preventing this kind of acrimonious outcome in other cases.
We’ll return to considering the broader lessons we might draw from this situation, but first let’s continue laying out the facts of Chandok v. Klessig, 5:05-cv-01076. (Again, I’m indebted to the reader who helpfully sent me the PDF of District Judge Joseph M. Hood’s ruling in this case, which is what I’m quoting below.)
Do these claims look defamatory to you?
You may remember my post from last week involving a case where a postdoc sued her former boss for defamation when he retracted a couple of papers they coauthored together. After that post went up, a reader helpfully hooked me up with a PDF of District Judge Joseph M. Hood’s ruling on the case (Chandok v. Klessig, 5:05-cv-01076). There is a lot of interesting stuff here, and I’m working on a longer examination of the judge’s reasoning in the ruling. But, in the interim, I thought you might be interested in the statements made by the defendant in the case, Dr. Daniel F. Klessig, that the plaintiff in the case, Dr. Meena Chandok, alleged were defamatory.
In the longer post I’m working on, I’ll dig in to Judge Hood’s arguments with respect to what elements a plaintiff must establish to prove defamation, and what particular features of the scientific arena were germane to his ruling in this case. For the time being, however, I’m interested to hear what you all think about whether the 23 allegedly defamatory claims quoted below tend “to expose the plaintiff to public hatred, contempt, ridicule, or disgrace.” (13) As well, given that one element of defamation is that the defamatory statements are factually false, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the evidentiary standard a scientist should have to meet before making claims like these to other scientists.
Here, quoted from the ruling, are the 23 allegedly defamatory statements:
Does a retraction constitute defamation of your coauthor?
I’m used to reading about cases of alleged scientific misconduct in science-focused publications and in major media outlets like the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I’ve had less occasion to read about them in law journals. But today, on the front page of the New York Law Journal, there’s an article titled “Scientists Defamation Claims Over Colleagues Efforts to Discredit Her Research Are Dismissed”. (The article is available to paid subscribers. This may be a good time to make a friend with access to a law library.)
The legal action the article describes was brought by a scientist who argued she was being defamed by a collaborator who no longer stands behind work they jointly published. The defendant says the published results are not reproducible; the plaintiff says, stop defaming me!
The judge says, your case doesn’t meet the burden to prove defamation.
From the article: