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Lawyers For Mining Companies Threaten Scientific Journals
An anonymous reader writes "ScienceInsider got hold of a threatening letter that lawyers for the mining industry sent to various scientific journals (PDF) concerning data from the U.S. 'Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study.' Many occupational health researchers believe the study will show a link between diesel exhaust and cancer. A handful of scientists have commented on the letter and its implications."
Interesting the link to the to "a threatening letter that lawyers for the mining industry sent to various scientific journals " is not working. Maybe the letters have had effect?
I see you're also paid by the mining company.
This is the right link: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/DEMS documents.pdf
1) put lots of (mostly) men down in holes in the ground.
2) Give them powered machinery that predominately runs on diesel power.
3) Fail to properly ventilate the hole in the ground (citation: all of the major mining disasters in the US in recent memory have cited poor ventilation and air circulation).
4) Act surprised when combustion gas fumes and particulates demonstrate being bad for said men?
5) Profit!
I guess we figured out the "???" step...
I understand the importance of mining. I understand also that the direct cost of what we purchase as finished products is based in part on extraction costs of those raw materials that go into finished products, but I have a hard time believing that minor increases in extraction costs because of safety and equipment improvements would massively increase the costs of finished products, and honestly, I'd be willing to pay a little more for something if it means I'm not at least mildly culpable in killing people in order to get it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not to stick up for the mining companies, but the letter actually seems like it's asking publishers nicely.
I wonder why we see considerably more "we need more women in science/engineering", but we don't hear much (if anything) about more women in mining.
Where's the equality police?
The lawyers aren't being egregious, they are just making people aware of ongoing litigation and court orders that might land them in the middle of something they don't want to be in the middle of if they publish. I don't think it's extortion as they don't claim they will sue if the study is published, they just warn the publication there's an ongoing issue and an injunction. Moreover, it makes it clear that it's only a 90 day restriction. Without reading the lawsuit I can't judge at all if the mining industry is being nasty and litigious to the authors or if they have a valid claim but either way warning publications to talk to counsel seems like a good idea.
Or even more infuriating.... Clean coal. Those two words should not be allowed NEAR each other in a pro-coal ad until at least 5% of the coal industry is actually clean.
It seems that this report is the subject of litigation, and there is a court order outstanding that says:
IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Defendants immediately inform all recipients including journals (emphasis mine) of the above described study draft reports, not yet published, that they are prohibited from further distribution of said drafts until at least 90 days after Defendants have complied with this Order;
The "threatening" letter, which seems to be from the Plaintiffs in the action, informs the journal that the report is the subject of litigation, draws their attention to the court order, informs the journals that the Plaintiffs don't think the Defendant has yet complied with the court order and asks them to check with their legal counsel before publishing.
This isn't a standard "publish and we'll sue" letter, it's "publish and you risk contempt of court". It looks like an advisory letter rather than a direct threat.
Because mining jobs don't look fun and "empowering" on brochures.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
People who speak English.
Honestly, I think there are plenty of people who speak English, yet are incapable of giving a fuck about spelling errors. Speaking != literate.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
If you care about that, you might also care that "myself" is a reflexive pronoun, and there's no reflexive action here. Your use is a hypercorrection.
(Of course, according to Muphry's Law, this post will have an error in it somewhere, too.)
More right-wing anti-science.
These are the same people who are paying professional shills and con artists to lie about global warming for their own private profit. Their actions speak for themselves.
There are plenty of people who are literate who don't give a fuck about spelling errors, either. Literate != pedantic.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
But that's just it - even if drastically improving the workers' health adds just a few cents per ton, and even if it saves a hundred times that in health care costs down the road, the market will still drive production to whoever does NOT do those things, because they'll be two cents cheaper.
I wonder why we see considerably more "we need more women in science/engineering", but we don't hear much (if anything) about more women in mining.
Where's the equality police?
Most concern about under-representation is for desirable jobs. I never saw people complaining that white people are underrepresented in fast food restaurant service staff in Seattle. Why? Because it's not a desirable job, and population representation is really only of significant importance with desirable jobs.
When you have 500 applicants lined up for one job, then it's more likely that you will fill job positions statistically consistent with the population, but when you have 50 slots open per single applicant, then your job population will statistically represent those people who apply, and a lack of one particular subpopulation will usually indicate less of a "we don't hire people with trait XY" and more of a "we hire everyone who applies, but people with trait XY don't apply."
This should always raise the question of "why are people with trait XY not applying?" but the answer for undesirable jobs is easy: because the jobs are undesirable. However, for desirable jobs (like software engineer, doctor, engineer, lawyer, etc), the question becomes much harder. Supposedly, these jobs are highly desirable, so why would people with trait XY not be applying?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Are they essentially claiming a copyright on a subset of reality?
If so, then wow. Just, wow.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sound stupid? But the idea that lawyers are the best judge of science is currently having more and more of a throttling effect on the USA. In fact, if you weigh in sociology and experimental psychology, it can be argued that scientists should have more part in law making than at present. Though the concept that people who make laws should have exact knowledge of something might adversely affect some politicians.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
When I read the summary, I thought it was some letter (maybe in the style of Jack Thompson) threatening anyone who published any research related to the lawsuit, thus attempting to create a chilling effect over any impartial researcher who might be studying the field.
Instead, it's one group in a lawsuit against another. I have no clue which side is right, but clearly neither side is impartial. Furthermore, it is overall a rather polite letter, and doesn't threaten anyone.
Most importantly, it doesn't prevent anything from being published, merely requests a 90 day waiting period before publishing anything from the parties in the lawsuit. There could be some funny business going on here, but this letter doesn't show it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You do in Australia because the wages are crazy here ($100,000 to drive a truck) and apparently female operators are gentler on the equipment.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I am a computer science major from West Virginia. One summer I bit the bullet and took a summer job at McDonald's, and one of the guys working there quit his job in a coal mine because it was so bad he'd rather work fast food.
Every time I hear about a mining disaster, it strikes a little close to home... most of them are in my state. Virtually all the money made from it goes out of state. All of them could have been prevented, had money not been placed above improving safety or mining technology.
Greed is king.
Your so hilarious.
Of course, according to Muphry's Law, this post will have an error in it somewhere, too.)
This is either brilliant satire or the quickest response time from Murphy I've seen yet.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
So who cares?
Words and punctuation have meaning. If you use them improperly, you change the meaning of what is being said. This matters a lot in contracts as well as everyday communication.
Secondly, this is a website for technically minded people. Presumably, many of us have been programmers at some point, or at least we have some familiarity with coding. If you are not such, let me assure you that a compiler cares about spelling and punctuation. It cares a lot.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Adequete ventilation, alternatives to diesel fuels, better vehicle maintenance and so forth. The CONSTRUCTIVE part is already there. The industry is claiming that the cost of those changes is prohibitevly expensive, or at least would make their industry uncompettive in the global market. Probably so, lives are cheap in many countries...
Certainly I am concerned about the effect of commercial diesel engines, many of which seem to often be woefully under-maintained in the emissions category, but I don't think the wide open spaces above ground compare with the effect of the same engines running in a poorly ventilated mine below ground. Though these buses probably do increase the chance of cancer...
only for companies dumb enough to make such a short term decision.
See, things like health care are long term decisions involved with making your business viable. Literally spending the 2 cents a ton in healthcare costs saves them probably 200k per employee in the long run (including lawsuits, health claims, etc).
Who's equipment?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No, Annoymous and WikiLeaks should not publish this. The journal should. This, folks is how science is done:
1. Do research
2. Publish research
3. Critique research
Critique can include request for information concerning materials, methods and results. BUT you don't do that before the results are published. They diesel dudes will get their day in court and in the lab, they just have to sit on their hands for a bit. But coopting the system is a very, very bad precedent.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
I am certain this is the exact intention they had in mind when the US legal system was created and amended over the years.
Every single one of those lawyers should have to go into one of these questionably-ventilated mines to understand what is truly going on down there.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Have you not been paying attention? In the last 10 years or so, both the stock market and the way most companies has become very focused on short-term decisions. Long-term thinking seems to have gone away.
Now it's all about meeting your quarterly numbers so the executives can get their bonuses ... by the time any of this "future" stuff you talk about comes along, they'll have moved onto other companies and it won't be their problem anymore. They don't invest in infrastructure or R&D to make sure they'll be viable in 10 years ... they cut, slash, and tweak to make sure that they're profitable in the near term.
It also means they're leaving themselves a bunch of things which they'll never be able to properly fix, because by the time it becomes an issue they'll not be in a position to fix it. Kind of like having a baloon payment on your mortgage and ignoring that you don't have the money for it.
Sadly, the stock market has come to expect this ... if you're not growing 10% every year (which is impossible to sustain indefinitely) you're "underperforming". I find it completely unsurprising that companies are acting penny wise and pound foolish ... the incentive is to save the pennies now and look good on paper, and hope that down the road is someone else's problem.
In part, I blame the shift in management that happened when all of a sudden you had people who only had a business education, no actual experience, and no experience in the industry they're working in. It became a purely "cut costs/increase performance bonuses for the management team" mentality.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You assume spending money on healthcare costs saves money down the road. My take is that in practice, looking for expensive healthcare problems finds expensive healthcare problems and those who pay for such healthcare don't actually save money by being proactive. For example, if an employee suddenly drops dead of a untreated preventable illness, that's a win for the insurance company. Even if the employee doesn't pick up large expenses from a preventable illness, odds are good that they would have picked up large expenses from some illness anyway.
There are some exceptions to this. I imagine insurance companies would be relatively eager for child immunizations and prenatal care, both which are low cost ways to prevent high cost problems for the insurance company.
Spelling != Grammar
Indeed you are correct. However, this person wanted to write the word /Its/ (using X-SAMPA), which is the proper grammatical word to use in this sentence. Instead, he spelled it as "it's" rather than the correct "its", which is an orthographic (spelling) error, and not a grammatical error.
If he had truly intended to write "it is implications", then that would have clearly been a grammatical error. However, misspelling a word for a homophone is an orthographic error, as they pretty likely never intend to use the homophone itself instead of the correct word.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
There are plenty of people who are literate who don't give a fuck about spelling errors, either. Literate != pedantic.
Please excuse my pedantry, but I don't think that word means what you think it means.
You may not think this sort of thing merits worrying about. I think the real reason this so often rubs people the wrong way is it's so easy to avoid. "It's" is a contraction, meaning "it is." "There's" == "there is." "That's" == "that is." "Who's" == "who is."
"Its" is a possessive pronoun, as is (I believe) "whose." How many "theres" are there? None; that's not a word.
People who care to use this stuff correctly trip over these things repeatedly, falling on our faces trying to read/parse them. We have to stop and go back and read it again to see if we actually understood what the writer wrote, or what really is the cause of our incomprehension. It's very annoying. It's like we're being forced to expend the effort the lazy author couldn't ("could not") be bothered to expend.
It's also very easy to avoid, if you care to. Anytime you see an apostrophe in something you wrote, read it back to yourself expanding the contractions. Does it still make sense?
We'll ("we will") appreciate the effort you took to make yourself understood. Have a nice day. :-)
BTW, for all those whose first language isn't English, I applaud your effort. This isn't intended to belittle you. I'm sure your English far surpasses my French, Russian, Farsi, Spanish, ...
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Because mining jobs are usually located in traditional/country/conservative/backwoods places where men provide the daily vittles and the womenfolk pluck the cows or whatever they're allowed to do there.
For that to be true, mining the raw materials must represent a large portion of the final cost of a product, and filtering the exhaust of any engines used in a mine must, if done, represent a large portion of a cost of running a mine. Both of these seem pretty unlikely proposals, especially since taken together they would mean that mining companies are getting a large proportion of all money spent on industrial products yet can't afford an expense a lowly delivery service can.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If you are a mining industry PR man paid to defuse any discussion of this problem on geek sites, you could not have more successfully torpedoed budding slashdot discussions than in the way you have just done with this first post.
If so, I stand humbled. Disgusted, but humbled.
May the Maths Be with you!
There are plenty of people who are literate who don't give a fuck about spelling errors, either.
True, not everyone who knows how to read actually does so. As Twain said, the aliterate has no advantage over the illiterate. Typos are one thing, everybody makes them. but saying "loose the dog" when you mean "lose the dog" makes you look like an idiot and completely changes the meaning of what you intended to convey. Writing "noone" when you mean "no one" is just annoying. Saying "their" when you mean "they're" or using apostrophes stupidly just makes you look retarded and devalues what you're trying to say.
Errors like that when programming make your programs buggy. Same with communication.
Free Martian Whores!
I've read many scientific papers and have found that scientists are right well more than 99% of the time. Sure, errors, mistakes, and sometimes even fraud, take place. But the courts are NOT a place that is competent of scientific fact, and as such are not qualified to make scientific judgments. But, alas, there is a way that scientific publishing corrects itself. And that is by other scientists publishing opposing papers. Then the community sorts it out based on scientific facts (not on silly rules of civil procedure).
Oh, BTW, I've attended court and read judicial rulings many times and have found that lawyers are only getting it right about 50% of the time. Scientists have you beat.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And also, lawyers get it wrong about 50% of the time, on average, while the average for scientists is better than 99%
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In my experience being married to an MIT grad who's in aerospace/mechanical engineering type work, the underrepresentation of women in her workplace comes in part from conflicts of parenthood and what it can do to one's career, and in part from the field already being dominated by men, causing a corporate culture that's offputting without being outright illegal toward women. Tromping around military bases for testing in godforsaken parts of the US is probably easier for men who are encouraged to be macho and to follow the example of the military even though they're really just geeks, while women, generally not encouraged to deal with the military and generally prohibited from combat roles, don't have the same sense or kinship to macho culture.
I assume that other "macho" careers also suffer from this kind of inherent condition.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Because mining jobs don't look fun and "empowering" on brochures.
Okay? And that's a problem? Because here in Canada I can make between $22 and $43/hr in mining right now just running heavy machinery. It might not be "empowering" but damn if it doesn't pay better than most jobs in the tech sector.
Om, nomnomnom...
I was hoping to avoid any specific answers, as I've been sent to mod-hell for advancing a feminist agenda here on Slashdot. As such, I've been sticking to more generalized questions. Like, why aren't white people working in-proportion at fast food restaurants in Seattle? (In Seattle, it's almost exclusively Hispanic people working behind the counters, in New Mexico, it's almost exclusively teenagers.)
Or cleaning out sewer systems. Seriously, it's highly unlikely that any of these undesirable jobs would ever turn down someone willing to do the job... meanwhile with desirable jobs, supposedly we should presume that everyone equally wants to be a programmer/doctor/lawyer, so why is there under-representation in their employment?
Forming it as a form of the Socratic Method ensures that I'm not shoving feminist talking points down people's throats, because if the population is distinctly biased towards men, you're far more likely to get Men's Rights Activists, and anti-feminists berating me for suggesting that they have privilege.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS