I can recall one case, reported in I think Science magazine, of a PhD student whose native language was not English. He submitted a thesis in which he had copied entire passages from other works.
Somebody took offense at that, and tried to bring some kind of academic charges against him -- no lawsuit was involved.
The PhD student said that it was an honest mistake, because he wasn't familiar with the style of attribution, and besides, his supervisor had approved. Furthermore, his defenders claimed that all PhD theses in this field copied heavily from other work to give the background of the research (where else are you going to get the background?) and the only difference was the degree to which he had remained faithful to his sources. The only original work in these papers was the report of the original research.
Yeah, but where have you ever heard of a journal article composed of 1% plagiarism subject to law suits, apologies or ostracism? I can't think of any.
I used to catch Newsweek plagarizing from the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. I wrote them letters challenging it. They claimed they got the same quotes independently, which was obvious bullshit. I remember walking into a newspaper office and seeing a guy rewriting an article from the New York Times. Trade magazines use quotes from the WSJ and NYT all the time. It happens all the time. I've never heard of them being sued. Can you cite a verifiable source?
BTW, always ask who paid for the study. In this case, it's the National Institutes of Health (not the Testosterone Salesmen of America). That's why they have to post the manuscript free online.
This version published online on October 24, 2006 Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, doi:10.1210/jc.2006-1375
A population-level decline in serum testosterone levels in American men Thomas G Travison*, Andre B Araujo, Amy B O'Donnell, Varant Kupelian, and John B McKinlay
New England Research Institutes, Watertown, MA, USA
Context. Age-specific estimates of mean testosterone (T) concentrations appear to vary by year of observation and by birth cohort, and estimates of longitudinal declines in T typically outstrip cross-sectional decreases. These observations motivate a hypothesis of a population-level decrease in T over calendar time, independent of chronologic aging.
Objective. To establish the magnitude of population-level changes in serum T concentrations, and the degree to which they are explained by secular changes in relative weight and other factors.
Design. A prospective cohort study of health and endocrine functioning in randomly selected men of age 45-79 y. Three data collection waves: baseline (T1: 1987-89) and two follow-ups (T2: 1995-97, T3: 2002-04).
Setting. An observational study of randomly selected men residing in greater Boston, MA, USA.
Participants. Data obtained on 1374, 906 and 489 men at T1, T2, and T3, respectively, totaling 2769 observations taken on 1532 men.
Main outcome measures. Serum total testosterone and calculated bioavailable testosterone.
Results. We observe a substantial age-independent decline in T that does not appear to be attributable to observed changes in explanatory factors, including health and lifestyle characteristics such as smoking and obesity. The estimated population-level declines are greater in magnitude than the cross-sectional declines in T typically associated with age.
Conclusions. These results indicate that recent years have seen a substantial, and as yet unrecognized, age-independent population-level decrease in T in American men, potentially due to birth cohort differences or to health or environmental effects not captured in observed data.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm just the guy who cleans the coffee maker in the secretary's lunchroom, but until a real lawyer comes along --
There's a principle in law that if you allow someone to infringe on your rights long enough, and to depend on that infringement, you can lose those rights.
For example, if you let people cut across your lawn for 50 years, you may have given up your right to stop them from using your lawn. That's why sidewalks in front of some buildings have a brass plate saying, "Permission to cross revokable at will."
If Universal encouraged those fans to promote Firefly, using images from Firefly (and how else can you promote it), and knew that they were using those images, and permitted them to use those images, and didn't charge them fees to use those images because Universal thought they were getting enough benefit from their fans to make it worthwhile, they have a pretty weak case for demanding damages now.
This varies with the state, but the fans could reasonably argue that they had an implied contract with Universal that the fans could use the images, Universal would benefit from their use of the images, and so the fans could use the images free.
Universal signaled their agreement to this contract because they knew that the fans were using the image, they allowed it, they didn't protest promptly, and they even encouraged it.
There's a principle in law called "reasonable reliance". The Cafe Press vendor could argue that Universal indicated that activities like his would be tolerated, in return for the benefits of viral marketing, and he reasonably relied on their knowledge of his activities and their silence. (He wasn't making much money, because he said he couldn't afford a lawyer.)
I think the vendor would win this case in court (if you were on a jury, would you give Universal $9,000?) but unfortunately it would take a lot of money for legal fees to defend it. However, a lawyer might take the case and ask Universal for his legal fees after he won.
I think the reaction on Slashdot indicates that most people (and jurors) think Universal's actions are unfair.
do your really want the surgeon who might operate on YOU someday, to have learned his basic science from possibly-vandalized articles in wikipedia?
Do you want the surgeon who might operate on you someday to have learned basic science from any single source that he has been taught to accept uncritically, without checking with other sources to make sure it's true? I read the New England Journal of Medicine and a couple of other journals, and by their own admission they've published a lot of stuff that turned out to be b.s. a couple of years later (Vioxx anyone?)
People are making the mistake of holding Wikipedia to the standard of, "A reference book has to be true because people will accept it as true."
That's the wrong standard. You shouldn't teach kids that books are true, you should teach them critical thinking. The purpose of an American education (as distinct from a trade school) is to teach people how to collect often-imperfect information and figure out what's true and false about it.
What's true? The Encyclopedia Brittannica? The Bible? Your freshman physics textbook? The President's State of the Union Address?
Wikipedia has about as good a collection of truth and error as you're likely to find in most places, and a random page of Wikipedia is a little more likely to be true (or at least give all sides) than a random page on the Internet as a whole. That's enough of an edge for me.
If some kid wants to educate himself, he just has to go through the hard work of separating truth from falsehood on Wikipedia as he does anywhere else.
If I use a wikipedia article in a research paper's footnotes or bibliography, the article is likely to change before anyone goes back to check the references.
Handle it the way you handle any other web source. I have before me a copy of the NEJM with an article with web pages in the bibliography. The format is "Accessed September 28, 2006 at http://foo.gov/" That's the standard citation format, with the date accessed, which I think is in the Chicago Style Manual, AMA Style Manual, and every other style manual. All web pages are likely to change (when for example on government web sites the Bush Administration makes science conform to Republican science) so you're supposed to give the date accessed.
BTW, don't forget the way encyclopedias are supposed to be used. In scholarly work, you don't cite an encyclopedia as a source (not after high school, anyway). You use an encyclopedia to get an introductory background, and to help you find other more authoritative primary sources that you do cite.
Don't you mean "due to the basic law of copyright that the US has had for over 200 years and is embedded into the Constitution"?
He means "due to the basic law of copyright that the US has had for over 200 years and is embedded into the Constitution, and allowed 26-year copyright terms and fair use, until the media companies contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to political parties and started hiring former congressmen and their aides as lobbyists."
For 200 years, American newspapers were copying from other newspapers. (And American inventors were copying steam engines and everything else from Europe.) The main difference now is that the Internet has unleashed corporate lawyers to find them and persecute them.
Yes, but I donated it to the public domain for non-commercial purposes.
this is the Excalibur in the shower mirror range - I have no connection with this outfit.
http://www.shop-com.co.uk/op/~The_first_truly_dedi cated_shaving_mirror_that_won't_fog_up_-prod-31820 485-41490276?sourceid=309
Let me add here my great contribution to science and simple living:
You don't need shaving cream to shave.
I once read an interview in the Wall Street Journal with a scientist from Gillette. He said that a razor blade can cut a wet beard much more easily than a dry beard. It takes a minute or two for your beard to be soaked through. The only purpose of shaving cream is to hold the water to wet your beard for a minute or two while the hairs gets saturated.
I thought, "When I step out of the shower in the morning, my beard is soaked. I should be able to shave without any shaving cream."
I tried it next morning, and I got the smoothest, cleanest shave I ever got in my life.
I haven't used shaving cream for 30 years.
(Conversely, if you just spread shaving cream on your face and don't give it a minute or two to wet your beard, you'll get a rough shave.)
Actually it's telephone harassment in some states to call people repeatedly. My crazy neghbor kept calling me all night, among other harassments, so I had him busted. It was nice to see the cops take him away in handcuffs after all his threats. He finally moved.
In New York State, it's harassment to call somebody 2 or more times between the hours of (I think) 11pm and 8am.
>Part of me wants to dismiss his entire argument as nonsensical luddite ramblings. Another part of me wonders if he might have at least a small point. But it's where those two parts of me meet and ask "where's the proof?" that I finall come to the conclusion there is nothing to see here, move along.
You've hit on the central issue here -- they don't provide any evidence to support their claims.
That's not surprising if you look at the signatures of the letter http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2006/09/12/njunk112.xml While they may have good hearts, these are people who don't understand academic evidence. They're teachers and consultants, and even a couple of psychoanalysts. There are also a couple of Waldorf teachers, and this letter is consistent with the Waldorf philosophy. Love it or hate it, where's the evidence? They also display a lack of specific suggestions, which makes me wonder what their specific program really is.
The letter says:
>We therefore propose as a matter of urgency that public debate be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century this issue should be central to public policy-making in coming decades.
"Initiated"? Where have they been for the last 100 years?
Here's the news story in Science magazine, which you can get without being a subscriber. It's not the actual peer-reviewed article, but it's written by somebody who understands this research.
What Rosenberg did, BTW, is to find a patient who was cured, and therefore had T cells that could kill the cancer. Then he found a patient who wsn't cured, and therefore had T cells that couldn't kill cancer. He took a receptor from the T cell that could kill cancer, and inserted the receptor into a T cell that couldn't kill cancer, therefore giving the T cell what it needed to kill the cancer. (In 2 of the 17 patients, anyway.)
One problem with this study is that they only followed the 2 successful patients for 18 months. There are lots of treatments that looked good after 18 months, and then tanked. You have to kill every cancer cell, or else they'll come back. And this is just for melanoma, and might not work for another cancer. But it might work out.
Building a Better Tumor Killer
By Jocelyn Kaiser ScienceNOW Daily News 31 August 2006
In a first for gene therapy, researchers have successfully treated cancer patients by genetically modifying their immune cells to attack tumors. Although the treatment worked in only two of 17 patients, the researchers say this proof of concept, reported online today in Science, should pave the way for more gene-therapy cancer cures.
A Nobel Economist Analyzes the Strategies Of the Deadly Serious Games Nations Play, Jon E. Hilsenrath.
Interview with Thomas C. Schelling, 2005 Nobel Laureate in economics.
[snip]
Schelling: "With the exception of the Twin Towers in New York, terrorism is an almost minuscule problem. [John] Mueller, at Ohio State University, estimates that the number of people who die from terrorist attacks is smaller than the number of people who die in their bathtubs. If you take the Trade Towers, we lost about 3,000 people. Three thousand people is about 3 1/2 weeks of automobile fatalities in the U.S. If you rank all of the causes of death in the U.S. or around the world, different kinds of accidents, drowning, falling down stairs, automobile accidents, struck by lightning, heart attacks, infections acquired during hospital surgery, terrorism is way down at the bottom."
[snip]
"It's perfectly clear that [the Bush administration] had no success in Iran, and it's had no success in North Korea.... We really ought to give North Korea some kind of nonaggression assurance." It's rational for countries to get nuclear power for deterrence, but not to use it.
[snip]
Global warming is a problem; if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts, sea level could rise by 20 feet.
Yeah, I stopped off in Atlanta too and I was watching the baggage handlers through the picture window in the passenger lounge -- in horror.
They had these big wheeled carts to carry the baggage to the planes, and the baggage was stacked on 2 levels of the cart. I saw the baggage handler stand on top of the cart, and throw a bag down to the concrete tarmack, a drop that I estimated at 10 feet (physics majors, get out your slide rules).
Of course I wouldn't check my laptop, but I had gotten these really neat plastic carrying cases in Singapore that all the high school kids use to carry their books. They were just right for carrying my laptop accessories. They were pretty sturdy but no match for the baggage handler. When I unpacked they were broken, and I couldn't even fix them with duct tape. And I couldn't find them in the U.S.
My friend stopped traveling by air because they were hassling her about her flute (she likes to play in her hotel at night). You've seen Mozart's Zauberflute -- they just start playing their magic flute, and silver bells, and take over the plane.
However, to put this all in perspective...the CS Monitor has its shortcomings. Since they don't rely on wire services, if you want to find out about breaking news you can't just read them like you can several other mega-papers. Their articles tend to come out later (it's the flip-side of doing careful research) and are longer - yes, that can be a downside if you're trying to skim. They don't have local, daily delivery in many places, so their stories come even later if you don't read the online site[3].
I agree with my fellow CSM fan, and I will add a historical footnote.
This policy of ignoring the latest news in favor of long, analytical feature stories, is a necessity that they turned into a virture. In the old days the CSM was distributed by mail. They continued that policy in the Internet age, since it's even more valuable now -- when I hit Google News, I don't need 3,000 versions of the same wire service story. I'd rather click on CSM and get the whole thoughtful story from somebody who took the time to talk to people from all sides and figure out what's really going on.
The "Christian" part is mostly reflected in their touching belief that, people are basically intelligent and if you give them the information they need, they will make the right decisions. I get discouraged about this myself sometimes but maybe they're right to keep trying.
(Actually you're giving a dying patient the best available treatment plus a randomization to either a new treatment or a placebo.)
Basically Angell says that if we knew these treatments were effective, we wouldn't have to do a clinical trial. The reason we're doing a trial is that we have no idea whether they're effective -- we're in equipoise. The beneficiaries of clinical trials are the future patients, not the ones who are in the trial. In order to join a clinical trial, you have to accept that deal. If we treated everybody with every drug that seemed to work (and most of them turn out not to work), we'd never have effective treatments.
Having said that, I once made this argument and somebody told me that she had cancer and her life was saved because she got into a clinical trial and the treatment worked. The classic example of that is Steve Dunn
Angell as you may know is former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (some of which is unfortunately available only to subscribers). They've had lots of interesting debates about this, if you want a good place to look it up.
But remember that there's a big difference between Phase II reports and Phase III.
This work is scientifically very interesting but it's a long way from curing cancer.
On the Oncolytics web site, they only list Phase I and Phase II trials. That's just to evaluate safety and dosing. In Phase III, they finally get around to testing for effectiveness, and they haven't done that yet.
I've seen lots of drugs that did this well in Phase II trials but flunked Phase III. I remember seeing Fortune magazine with the headline on the cover, "Cure for Cancer!" 20 years ago. Unfortunately not. (They got over-enthusiastic about cancer vaccines.)
Phase III is a randomized controlled trial. They randomly assign half the patients to the drug, and half the patients to a placebo. If it really works, you should see the difference. A lot of times it doesn't work and you know the drug is useless. Until the RCT you don't know anything for sure.
Another distinction you have to make is the end point. It's one thing to shrink a tumor, but the main thing most cancer patients are interested in is whether they're going to die. There are a lot of drugs that shrink tumors, but have no effect on how long they live.
I hope this will encourage investors to throw lots of money at basic research and give us a better understanding of why cells become cancerous. It makes the New England Journal of Medicine more fun to read. Who knows? Maybe they'll come up with something useful some day. But not today.
I'm a medical writer so I can comment on the medical content of the sites in the Consumer Webwatch reports. I don't think they're good enough.
(Since I write for the web, I found the programmer comments very useful. OK, I'll change that code in my site RSN).
I agree completely that (my) content doesn't matter if you can't find it, and without good graphic design, backed up by good programming (thanks guys), you can't find anything on those web sites (which have thousands of pages). Everything you want to know about medicine is on the Internet many times over, but the problem is (1) finding it (2) in a form that you can understand and (3)evaluating its accuracy and validity.
Here's a good example: I went to a doctor for a checkup, and he didn't perform a digital rectal examination, although he did give me a guiac test. A DRE is a way of screening for prostate cancer and rectal cancer, and the American Cancer Society among other well-known organizations recommends it for everyone above 50, like me. A guiac test samples the stool for blood, which is often a symptom of colon cancer. Various organizations also recommend sigmoidoscopy (a fiber optic scope that goes through the rectum and up the colon about a foot) and colonoscopy (which goes up the colon even farther) as screening for colon cancer. My medical textbooks were either out of date or ambiguous on these issues.
So, here's my question for the medical web sites:
Should my doctor have performed a DRE on a 50-year-old man in a routine physical?
My first stop was the web site rated No. 1 by the experts National Institutes of Health. Once I got there, I realized that I had to refine the question. What I really wanted to know is,
would a DRE have lowered my chances of dying of cancer?
As it turned out, there are scientific studies with control groups that found that there was no good evidence that patients who had screening DRE, sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy lived longer than patients who did not. However, patients screened with guiac tests did live longer (endpoint of death, they call it). I found this on the professional side of the site, not the consumer side, couched in technical language. Not easily accessible or understandable -- for something that your life depends on.
So when I read the Consumer WebWatch report, I decided to see how the expert's No. 2, MayoClinic.com handled it. To my surprise and dismay, the Mayo Clinic web site, in its extensive discussion of screening for colon cancer, did not make the point that only guiac testing had been shown to save lives. There is criticism in the medical literature that doctors don't provide enough hard information to their patients to enable patients to make an intelligent decision. I think the fact that the life-saving ability of 3 of those 4 screening tests is not supported by evidence-based medicine is an important fact for patients that the Mayo clinic should have provided for patients who are trying to decide whether to take an uncomfortable and (for the scopes) expensive test with a risk of perforating the bowel.
Evidence-based medicine, BTW, is a term of the art, and a good Google search. It means practicing medicine on the basis of scientific evidence, when it exists (the catch: you wind up saying, "science doesn't know" too much of the time).
EBM started when 2 doctors in Canada were having trouble keeping up with all their reading, and said, "Hey, let's just read the stuff that's supported by scientific evidence." That cut down the pile significantly.
A good explanation is on the Bandolier web site, from Oxford, UK. This will reduce medicine to the rationality that engineers and other geeks are used to thinking in.
Forms of evidence Evidence is presented in many forms, and it is important to understand the basis on which it is stated. The value of evidence can be ranked according to the following classification in descending order of credibility:
I. Strong evidence from at least one systematic review of multiple well-designed randomised controlled trials.
II. Strong evidence from at least one properly designed randomised controlled trial of appropriate size.
III. Evidence from well-designed trials such as non-randomised trials, cohort studies, time series or matched case-controlled studies.
IV. Evidence from well-designed non-experimental studies from more than one centre or research group.
V. Opinions of respected authorities, based on clinical evidence, descriptive studies or reports of expert committees.
But you can't do it on the Internet alone without professional guidance -- medical librarians explained to me how to search the medical literature. And very often what you want to know is only available on paper.
I went into this in more detail when I taught a class in medical journalism. I interviewed a medical librarian and posted her explanation in an article on my web site. That's why brick libraries are so valuable -- they don't just have paper, they have librarians.
Slashdot Mirror
I can recall one case, reported in I think Science magazine, of a PhD student whose native language was not English. He submitted a thesis in which he had copied entire passages from other works. Somebody took offense at that, and tried to bring some kind of academic charges against him -- no lawsuit was involved. The PhD student said that it was an honest mistake, because he wasn't familiar with the style of attribution, and besides, his supervisor had approved. Furthermore, his defenders claimed that all PhD theses in this field copied heavily from other work to give the background of the research (where else are you going to get the background?) and the only difference was the degree to which he had remained faithful to his sources. The only original work in these papers was the report of the original research.
Yeah, but where have you ever heard of a journal article composed of 1% plagiarism subject to law suits, apologies or ostracism? I can't think of any.
I used to catch Newsweek plagarizing from the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. I wrote them letters challenging it. They claimed they got the same quotes independently, which was obvious bullshit. I remember walking into a newspaper office and seeing a guy rewriting an article from the New York Times. Trade magazines use quotes from the WSJ and NYT all the time. It happens all the time. I've never heard of them being sued. Can you cite a verifiable source?
>Any Journal article comprised of 1% plagiarism would be subject to law suits, apologies and the journal would face ostracism.
Am I correct in assuming that you pulled that 1% number out of the air? If not, could you give me a source?
Remember, 60% of all statistics are wrong.
Chicks dig it when you read the primary sources.
/ jc.2006-1375v1
BTW, always ask who paid for the study. In this case, it's the National Institutes of Health (not the Testosterone Salesmen of America). That's why they have to post the manuscript free online.
http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract
This version published online on October 24, 2006
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, doi:10.1210/jc.2006-1375
A population-level decline in serum testosterone levels in American men
Thomas G Travison*, Andre B Araujo, Amy B O'Donnell, Varant Kupelian, and John B McKinlay
New England Research Institutes, Watertown, MA, USA
Context. Age-specific estimates of mean testosterone (T) concentrations appear to vary by year of observation and by birth cohort, and estimates of longitudinal declines in T typically outstrip cross-sectional decreases. These observations motivate a hypothesis of a population-level decrease in T over calendar time, independent of chronologic aging.
Objective. To establish the magnitude of population-level changes in serum T concentrations, and the degree to which they are explained by secular changes in relative weight and other factors.
Design. A prospective cohort study of health and endocrine functioning in randomly selected men of age 45-79 y. Three data collection waves: baseline (T1: 1987-89) and two follow-ups (T2: 1995-97, T3: 2002-04).
Setting. An observational study of randomly selected men residing in greater Boston, MA, USA.
Participants. Data obtained on 1374, 906 and 489 men at T1, T2, and T3, respectively, totaling 2769 observations taken on 1532 men.
Main outcome measures. Serum total testosterone and calculated bioavailable testosterone.
Results. We observe a substantial age-independent decline in T that does not appear to be attributable to observed changes in explanatory factors, including health and lifestyle characteristics such as smoking and obesity. The estimated population-level declines are greater in magnitude than the cross-sectional declines in T typically associated with age.
Conclusions. These results indicate that recent years have seen a substantial, and as yet unrecognized, age-independent population-level decrease in T in American men, potentially due to birth cohort differences or to health or environmental effects not captured in observed data.
Real nerds read the meeting abstracts:
5th World Congress on the Aging Male, Salzburg, Austria, February 9-12, 2006
http://www.kenes.com/aging/aging5/index.asp
There's a principle in law that if you allow someone to infringe on your rights long enough, and to depend on that infringement, you can lose those rights.
For example, if you let people cut across your lawn for 50 years, you may have given up your right to stop them from using your lawn. That's why sidewalks in front of some buildings have a brass plate saying, "Permission to cross revokable at will."
If Universal encouraged those fans to promote Firefly, using images from Firefly (and how else can you promote it), and knew that they were using those images, and permitted them to use those images, and didn't charge them fees to use those images because Universal thought they were getting enough benefit from their fans to make it worthwhile, they have a pretty weak case for demanding damages now.
This varies with the state, but the fans could reasonably argue that they had an implied contract with Universal that the fans could use the images, Universal would benefit from their use of the images, and so the fans could use the images free.
Universal signaled their agreement to this contract because they knew that the fans were using the image, they allowed it, they didn't protest promptly, and they even encouraged it.
There's a principle in law called "reasonable reliance". The Cafe Press vendor could argue that Universal indicated that activities like his would be tolerated, in return for the benefits of viral marketing, and he reasonably relied on their knowledge of his activities and their silence. (He wasn't making much money, because he said he couldn't afford a lawyer.)
I think the vendor would win this case in court (if you were on a jury, would you give Universal $9,000?) but unfortunately it would take a lot of money for legal fees to defend it. However, a lawyer might take the case and ask Universal for his legal fees after he won.
I think the reaction on Slashdot indicates that most people (and jurors) think Universal's actions are unfair.
What does a real lawyer think of this?
Do you want the surgeon who might operate on you someday to have learned basic science from any single source that he has been taught to accept uncritically, without checking with other sources to make sure it's true? I read the New England Journal of Medicine and a couple of other journals, and by their own admission they've published a lot of stuff that turned out to be b.s. a couple of years later (Vioxx anyone?)
People are making the mistake of holding Wikipedia to the standard of, "A reference book has to be true because people will accept it as true."
That's the wrong standard. You shouldn't teach kids that books are true, you should teach them critical thinking. The purpose of an American education (as distinct from a trade school) is to teach people how to collect often-imperfect information and figure out what's true and false about it.
What's true? The Encyclopedia Brittannica? The Bible? Your freshman physics textbook? The President's State of the Union Address?
Wikipedia has about as good a collection of truth and error as you're likely to find in most places, and a random page of Wikipedia is a little more likely to be true (or at least give all sides) than a random page on the Internet as a whole. That's enough of an edge for me.
If some kid wants to educate himself, he just has to go through the hard work of separating truth from falsehood on Wikipedia as he does anywhere else.
Handle it the way you handle any other web source. I have before me a copy of the NEJM with an article with web pages in the bibliography. The format is "Accessed September 28, 2006 at http://foo.gov/" That's the standard citation format, with the date accessed, which I think is in the Chicago Style Manual, AMA Style Manual, and every other style manual. All web pages are likely to change (when for example on government web sites the Bush Administration makes science conform to Republican science) so you're supposed to give the date accessed.BTW, don't forget the way encyclopedias are supposed to be used. In scholarly work, you don't cite an encyclopedia as a source (not after high school, anyway). You use an encyclopedia to get an introductory background, and to help you find other more authoritative primary sources that you do cite.
He means "due to the basic law of copyright that the US has had for over 200 years and is embedded into the Constitution, and allowed 26-year copyright terms and fair use, until the media companies contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to political parties and started hiring former congressmen and their aides as lobbyists."
For 200 years, American newspapers were copying from other newspapers. (And American inventors were copying steam engines and everything else from Europe.) The main difference now is that the Internet has unleashed corporate lawyers to find them and persecute them.
Yes, but I donated it to the public domain for non-commercial purposes.
this is the Excalibur in the shower mirror range - I have no connection with this outfit. http://www.shop-com.co.uk/op/~The_first_truly_dedi cated_shaving_mirror_that_won't_fog_up_-prod-31820 485-41490276?sourceid=309
I'm afraid that's a commercial purpose.
Let me add here my great contribution to science and simple living:
You don't need shaving cream to shave.
I once read an interview in the Wall Street Journal with a scientist from Gillette. He said that a razor blade can cut a wet beard much more easily than a dry beard. It takes a minute or two for your beard to be soaked through. The only purpose of shaving cream is to hold the water to wet your beard for a minute or two while the hairs gets saturated.
I thought, "When I step out of the shower in the morning, my beard is soaked. I should be able to shave without any shaving cream."
I tried it next morning, and I got the smoothest, cleanest shave I ever got in my life.
I haven't used shaving cream for 30 years.
(Conversely, if you just spread shaving cream on your face and don't give it a minute or two to wet your beard, you'll get a rough shave.)
Actually it's telephone harassment in some states to call people repeatedly. My crazy neghbor kept calling me all night, among other harassments, so I had him busted. It was nice to see the cops take him away in handcuffs after all his threats. He finally moved.
In New York State, it's harassment to call somebody 2 or more times between the hours of (I think) 11pm and 8am.
Not that they don't deserve it.
So don't do it.
Or if you do it, don't get caught.
They seem to be litigous SOBs.
Democrats voting for the abolition of habeas corpus and alternative interrogation methods in cases of people declared enemy combatants:
Carper (Del)
Johnson (SD)
Landrieu (La)
Lautenberg (NJ)
Lieberman (CN)
Menendez (NJ)
Nelson (FL)
Pryor (AR)
Rockefeller (WV)
Salazar (CO)
Stabenow (MI)
Republicans voting against:
Chafee (RI)
Olympia Snowe did not vote.
>Part of me wants to dismiss his entire argument as nonsensical luddite ramblings. Another part of me wonders if he might have at least a small point. But it's where those two parts of me meet and ask "where's the proof?" that I finall come to the conclusion there is nothing to see here, move along.
e ws/2006/09/12/njunk112.xml While they may have good hearts, these are people who don't understand academic evidence. They're teachers and consultants, and even a couple of psychoanalysts. There are also a couple of Waldorf teachers, and this letter is consistent with the Waldorf philosophy. Love it or hate it, where's the evidence? They also display a lack of specific suggestions, which makes me wonder what their specific program really is.
You've hit on the central issue here -- they don't provide any evidence to support their claims.
That's not surprising if you look at the signatures of the letter http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
The letter says:
>We therefore propose as a matter of urgency that public debate be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century this issue should be central to public policy-making in coming decades.
"Initiated"? Where have they been for the last 100 years?
Here's the news story in Science magazine, which you can get without being a subscriber. It's not the actual peer-reviewed article, but it's written by somebody who understands this research.
/ 2006/831/3
What Rosenberg did, BTW, is to find a patient who was cured, and therefore had T cells that could kill the cancer. Then he found a patient who wsn't cured, and therefore had T cells that couldn't kill cancer. He took a receptor from the T cell that could kill cancer, and inserted the receptor into a T cell that couldn't kill cancer, therefore giving the T cell what it needed to kill the cancer. (In 2 of the 17 patients, anyway.)
One problem with this study is that they only followed the 2 successful patients for 18 months. There are lots of treatments that looked good after 18 months, and then tanked. You have to kill every cancer cell, or else they'll come back. And this is just for melanoma, and might not work for another cancer. But it might work out.
Building a Better Tumor Killer
By Jocelyn Kaiser
ScienceNOW Daily News
31 August 2006
In a first for gene therapy, researchers have successfully treated cancer patients by genetically modifying their immune cells to attack tumors. Although the treatment worked in only two of 17 patients, the researchers say this proof of concept, reported online today in Science, should pave the way for more gene-therapy cancer cures.
(more)
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full
Here's a Nobel laureate http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laure ates/2005/schelling-lecture.html who says that more people are killed in bathtubs than by terrorists.
... We really ought to give North Korea some kind of nonaggression assurance." It's rational for countries to get nuclear power for deterrence, but not to use it.
Wall Street Journal
November 7, 2005
A Nobel Economist Analyzes the Strategies Of the Deadly Serious Games Nations Play, Jon E. Hilsenrath.
Interview with Thomas C. Schelling, 2005 Nobel Laureate in economics.
[snip]
Schelling: "With the exception of the Twin Towers in New York, terrorism is an almost minuscule problem. [John] Mueller, at Ohio State University, estimates that the number of people who die from terrorist attacks is smaller than the number of people who die in their bathtubs. If you take the Trade Towers, we lost about 3,000 people. Three thousand people is about 3 1/2 weeks of automobile fatalities in the U.S. If you rank all of the causes of death in the U.S. or around the world, different kinds of accidents, drowning, falling down stairs, automobile accidents, struck by lightning, heart attacks, infections acquired during hospital surgery, terrorism is way down at the bottom."
[snip]
"It's perfectly clear that [the Bush administration] had no success in Iran, and it's had no success in North Korea.
[snip]
Global warming is a problem; if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts, sea level could rise by 20 feet.
Yeah, I stopped off in Atlanta too and I was watching the baggage handlers through the picture window in the passenger lounge -- in horror.
They had these big wheeled carts to carry the baggage to the planes, and the baggage was stacked on 2 levels of the cart. I saw the baggage handler stand on top of the cart, and throw a bag down to the concrete tarmack, a drop that I estimated at 10 feet (physics majors, get out your slide rules).
Of course I wouldn't check my laptop, but I had gotten these really neat plastic carrying cases in Singapore that all the high school kids use to carry their books. They were just right for carrying my laptop accessories. They were pretty sturdy but no match for the baggage handler. When I unpacked they were broken, and I couldn't even fix them with duct tape. And I couldn't find them in the U.S.
My friend stopped traveling by air because they were hassling her about her flute (she likes to play in her hotel at night). You've seen Mozart's Zauberflute -- they just start playing their magic flute, and silver bells, and take over the plane.
This policy of ignoring the latest news in favor of long, analytical feature stories, is a necessity that they turned into a virture. In the old days the CSM was distributed by mail. They continued that policy in the Internet age, since it's even more valuable now -- when I hit Google News, I don't need 3,000 versions of the same wire service story. I'd rather click on CSM and get the whole thoughtful story from somebody who took the time to talk to people from all sides and figure out what's really going on.
The "Christian" part is mostly reflected in their touching belief that, people are basically intelligent and if you give them the information they need, they will make the right decisions. I get discouraged about this myself sometimes but maybe they're right to keep trying.
Good point. Here's a good answer.
Clinical hype: Don't buy it, Marcia Angell, USA Today, 30 July 2001
(Actually you're giving a dying patient the best available treatment plus a randomization to either a new treatment or a placebo.)
Basically Angell says that if we knew these treatments were effective, we wouldn't have to do a clinical trial. The reason we're doing a trial is that we have no idea whether they're effective -- we're in equipoise. The beneficiaries of clinical trials are the future patients, not the ones who are in the trial. In order to join a clinical trial, you have to accept that deal. If we treated everybody with every drug that seemed to work (and most of them turn out not to work), we'd never have effective treatments.
Having said that, I once made this argument and somebody told me that she had cancer and her life was saved because she got into a clinical trial and the treatment worked. The classic example of that is Steve Dunn
Angell as you may know is former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (some of which is unfortunately available only to subscribers). They've had lots of interesting debates about this, if you want a good place to look it up.
But remember that there's a big difference between Phase II reports and Phase III.
On the Oncolytics web site, they only list Phase I and Phase II trials. That's just to evaluate safety and dosing. In Phase III, they finally get around to testing for effectiveness, and they haven't done that yet.
I've seen lots of drugs that did this well in Phase II trials but flunked Phase III. I remember seeing Fortune magazine with the headline on the cover, "Cure for Cancer!" 20 years ago. Unfortunately not. (They got over-enthusiastic about cancer vaccines.)
Phase III is a randomized controlled trial. They randomly assign half the patients to the drug, and half the patients to a placebo. If it really works, you should see the difference. A lot of times it doesn't work and you know the drug is useless. Until the RCT you don't know anything for sure.
Another distinction you have to make is the end point. It's one thing to shrink a tumor, but the main thing most cancer patients are interested in is whether they're going to die. There are a lot of drugs that shrink tumors, but have no effect on how long they live.
Here's a discussion, "Levels of Clinical Evidence in the Primary Literature" which describes the different levels of evidence. Or look at BMJ Or if you want to search Google look for "Evidence-based medicine."
I hope this will encourage investors to throw lots of money at basic research and give us a better understanding of why cells become cancerous. It makes the New England Journal of Medicine more fun to read. Who knows? Maybe they'll come up with something useful some day. But not today.
I'm a medical writer so I can comment on the medical content of the sites in the Consumer Webwatch reports. I don't think they're good enough.
(Since I write for the web, I found the programmer comments very useful. OK, I'll change that code in my site RSN).
I agree completely that (my) content doesn't matter if you can't find it, and without good graphic design, backed up by good programming (thanks guys), you can't find anything on those web sites (which have thousands of pages). Everything you want to know about medicine is on the Internet many times over, but the problem is (1) finding it (2) in a form that you can understand and (3)evaluating its accuracy and validity.
Here's a good example: I went to a doctor for a checkup, and he didn't perform a digital rectal examination, although he did give me a guiac test. A DRE is a way of screening for prostate cancer and rectal cancer, and the American Cancer Society among other well-known organizations recommends it for everyone above 50, like me. A guiac test samples the stool for blood, which is often a symptom of colon cancer. Various organizations also recommend sigmoidoscopy (a fiber optic scope that goes through the rectum and up the colon about a foot) and colonoscopy (which goes up the colon even farther) as screening for colon cancer. My medical textbooks were either out of date or ambiguous on these issues.
So, here's my question for the medical web sites:
Should my doctor have performed a DRE on a 50-year-old man in a routine physical?
My first stop was the web site rated No. 1 by the experts National Institutes of Health. Once I got there, I realized that I had to refine the question. What I really wanted to know is,
would a DRE have lowered my chances of dying of cancer?
As it turned out, there are scientific studies with control groups that found that there was no good evidence that patients who had screening DRE, sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy lived longer than patients who did not. However, patients screened with guiac tests did live longer (endpoint of death, they call it). I found this on the professional side of the site, not the consumer side, couched in technical language. Not easily accessible or understandable -- for something that your life depends on.
So when I read the Consumer WebWatch report, I decided to see how the expert's No. 2, MayoClinic.com handled it. To my surprise and dismay, the Mayo Clinic web site, in its extensive discussion of screening for colon cancer, did not make the point that only guiac testing had been shown to save lives. There is criticism in the medical literature that doctors don't provide enough hard information to their patients to enable patients to make an intelligent decision. I think the fact that the life-saving ability of 3 of those 4 screening tests is not supported by evidence-based medicine is an important fact for patients that the Mayo clinic should have provided for patients who are trying to decide whether to take an uncomfortable and (for the scopes) expensive test with a risk of perforating the bowel.
Evidence-based medicine, BTW, is a term of the art, and a good Google search. It means practicing medicine on the basis of scientific evidence, when it exists (the catch: you wind up saying, "science doesn't know" too much of the time).
EBM started when 2 doctors in Canada were having trouble keeping up with all their reading, and said, "Hey, let's just read the stuff that's supported by scientific evidence." That cut down the pile significantly.
A good explanation is on the Bandolier web site, from Oxford, UK. This will reduce medicine to the rationality that engineers and other geeks are used to thinking in.
What is series:
Evidence-based Medicine
Bandolier
Forms of evidence
Evidence is presented in many forms, and it is
important to understand the basis on which it
is stated. The value of evidence can be ranked
according to the following classification in
descending order of credibility:
I. Strong evidence from at least one
systematic review of multiple well-designed
randomised controlled trials.
II. Strong evidence from at least one properly
designed randomised controlled trial of
appropriate size.
III. Evidence from well-designed trials such as
non-randomised trials, cohort studies, time
series or matched case-controlled studies.
IV. Evidence from well-designed
non-experimental studies from more than
one centre or research group.
V. Opinions of respected authorities, based on
clinical evidence, descriptive studies or
reports of expert committees.
BTW, when people ask me where to find medical information on the Internet, I recommend peer-reviewed sources, starting with the Merck Manual Home Edition , then British Medical Journal, then Medicalstudent.com.
But you can't do it on the Internet alone without professional guidance -- medical librarians explained to me how to search the medical literature. And very often what you want to know is only available on paper.
I went into this in more detail when I taught a class in medical journalism. I interviewed a medical librarian and posted her explanation in an article on my web site. That's why brick libraries are so valuable -- they don't just have paper, they have librarians.