Month: September 2009

The Ethical Stupidity of Med School Professors: Plagiarism Very Very Bad, Ghostwriting Okay

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Do medical school professors live in a different ethical world than the rest of us? Apparently. A friend of mine just entered grad school at Tsinghua. She was required to attend four different lectures about how academic dishonesty is wrong. (The last one, she said, was good; the speaker told a lot of stories.) China has a huge plagiarism problem, sure, but at least they say that plagiarism is wrong.

Whereas medical school professors haven’t managed to grasp that ghostwriting is plagiarism (taking someone’s words and ideas as yours without acknowledgment). And it happens all the time. NYU med school Professor Lila Nachtigall, as I’ve noted, considered the deed so minor she forgot that she’d done it. Apparently using a different word confuses them. A recent article in Nature reveals the befuddlement of the entire medical establishment about this. We’re not sure what to do about it, journal editors say. As Tony Soprano’s mom would say: Poor you.

What’s so nauseating about this is that ghostwriting is certainly worse than the garden-variety plagiarism that American undergraduates and the odd Harvard professor engage in. (And at least they are embarrassed, unlike Nachtigall, when caught.) Garden-variety plagiarism is merely self-serving; you save time, get a higher grade. Whereas drug-company ghostwriting makes drugs appear better than they are. Which harms millions of sick people.

Although American universities publicly condemn plagiarism and other types of cheating, in practice they allow them. (Believe me, I know. When I tried to stop cheating in my Intro Psych class at Berkeley, the chairman of my department told me, “We’re not in that business.”) And the student cheaters — having been told by university blind-eye-turning that cheating is okay — grow up to be med school professors who do horrible things routinely. That’s my theory.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

How Dangerous Are Cell Phones?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A new report has come out that says that cell phones probably do cause cancer, as several people, such as David Servan-Schreiber, have argued. But the news is not all bad:

The design of the study is fundamentally flawed, as well-documented by “Cell Phones and Brain Tumor.” For example, users of cordless phones only were treated as unexposed. But, two independent studies found users of cordless phones had an increased risk of brain tumors. So, excluding such users underestimates the risk of brain tumors. This flaw suggests either ignorance or dishonesty on the part of the researchers running the Interphone Study. Then, there’s the suspicious finding from some parts of the Interphone Study which concluded the use of a cell phone for less than ten years lowers your risk of brain tumors. This suggests the bias was so strong it eliminated enough tumor risk to show decreased incidence. The Interphone studies did find more brain tumor risk after more than ten years of cell phone use. The report notes that the risk was so great it could not be camouflaged even by the bias of the study.

Emphasis added. The person who wrote that hasn’t heard of hormesis.

Beijing Wal-Mart

Seth Roberts21 Comments

To buy a refrigerator, a friend suggested I try a store called Vollna, to which I found references online. When I got to the right subway station, however, no one had heard of it. She’d meant Wal-Mart. The Beijing Wal-Mart has many interesting features:

  1. They sell live turtles.
  2. A whole display case is devoted to sea cucumbers.
  3. Like any upscale American or Beijing supermarket, they have a sushi case. The prices are half what they’d be in America, but the pieces of fish are much thinner.
  4. They cut up meat in front of you. A whole pig was being butchered on a table. A roast duck was being sliced for packaging.
  5. They had pairs of escalators (actually sloped moving walkways) going in the same direction. For heavy traffic, I guess. I’ve never seen such a thing anywhere else.
  6. It’s extremely convenient, right next to a subway station. In America, as all Americans know, Wal-Marts are almost never convenient. Which is why I’ve been to an American Wal-Mart only twice, in spite of the large selection and low prices.
  7. The refrigerators were hidden behind large stacks of what looked like flour.
  8. After I bought a blood pressure monitor, the salesperson added batteries and showed me how to use it. Such product verification/education has happened before to me in Beijing, never in America.
  9. A staggering number of food samples. Maybe a hundred. Other Beijing supermarkets are like big-city American supermarkets; some have samples, some don’t. This was a full-court press. Every possible sample. The roast duck was the best, the yellow kiwi (sweeter than green kiwi) the most unusual. I got tired of sampling and stopped. I can’t remember that happening before.
  10. The prices were ordinary Chinese prices. Not unusually low. To bring flaxseed oil to China I’d bought a very large duffel bag from Land’s End, so large I had to drag it. (Which ruined it.) It cost $70 plus shipping. Wal-Mart had a more reasonably-sized large duffel bag, better-made and with wheels for $20. Ugh. It was the wheels, not available at Land’s End, rather than the $50 difference, that pissed me off. My too-heavy duffel bag was a pain in the butt because I had to drag it (at the same time carrying other luggage). This made me never want to shop in America again for anything I could get in China.
  11. Cigarettes are in a special booth off to the side. About 200 choices.

They can’t compete on price in China, of course. So my guess is that they are trying to compete on selection, convenience, and customer service (thus all the sampling). That you can return stuff was very clear.

Advances in Cooking: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Toni Rivard, a Dallas dessert caterer, makes one of the best chocolate-chip cookies in America, according to Forbes Traveller. She ages her cookie dough about three days. She says it improves the texture. I wonder if it improves the flavor, too:

Rivard’s secret? “I like to age my cookie dough and feel that it makes for a better texture in cookies. As a result, the aptly-named OMG! [which is what customers have actually said when they taste one] chocolate chip cookies at Creme de la Cookie are soft and chewy with a deep rich flavor.

Fermenting cookie dough should certainly improve the flavor, although chocolate already supplies a lot of complexity. My experience has been that cooking delicious stuff became a lot easier when I started using fermentation to help (e.g., miso soup instead of soups flavored without fermented ingredients).

Thanks to David Archer.

Are We Running Out of Omega-3?

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Apparently. The obvious source is fish but we are running out of fish:

In 2006, aquaculture production was 51.7 million metric tons, and about 20 million metric tons of wild fish were harvested for the production of fishmeal. “It can take up to 5 pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of salmon, and we eat a lot of salmon,” said Naylor, the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. [via Future Pundit]

This is why Jared Diamond’s Collapse is so unfortunate. Diamond is a good writer and the question he tried to answer in that book is extremely important. But he whiffed. Suppose I write a book about obesity. I give a list of ten reasons people are fat: 1. Too much Food X. 2. Too much Food Y. And so on. (Just as Diamond gave a list of eight-odd reasons societies collapse.) Such a book would be far less helpful than a book with a correct theory about obesity, a theory that explains why Foods X, Y, etc. cause obesity. The theory could be used to find new, better, flexible ways of avoiding obesity. The list of foods to avoid cannot. In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs (whom Diamond doesn’t mention) said that collapse happens for one overarching reason: The society is too resistant to new ways of doing things. The crucial struggle in any society, said Jacobs, isn’t between the rich and the poor or between owners and labor; it’s between those who benefit from the status quo and those who benefit from change.

Thanks to Peter Spero.

More about the Effects of Flaxseed Oil

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Commenting on an earlier post, Jack Rusher reports:

Like Anonymous, I’m an MMA [Mixed Martial Arts] enthusiast. My experience with 3 T/day of flaxseed oil have been more or less identical to his. Before: high doses of NSAIDs [non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs] just to survive training, constant soreness and fatigue, etc. After: no joint pain at all, complete discontinuation of NSAIDs, lower frequency and severity of injury.
Dental results: my hygienist made strong comments regarding the improvement of my gums on my first post-flax visit, attributing it to changes in my oral care behavior . . . of which there were none.

Perverse Incentives in Medicine

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In the comments, Timothy Beneke wrote:

My experience with a friend who had unexplained stomach pain was instructive. She saw 6 “experts,” 3 who worked for fixed salaries at institutions (Kaiser, Stanford, etc.) and 3 who were in the marketplace getting paid based on what they brought in each year. The three who were on fixed salaries were professionally cordial, and openly admitted that they could not say with confidence what was causing her pain. The three who were not on fixed salaries were very touchy-feely and charming and spoke with complete confidence about the cause.

Wow. This reminds me of my surgeon, Eileen Consorti, telling me that the operation she recommended would help me, that there was evidence for this, and then — when I couldn’t find any evidence — telling me she would find it and never doing so. She would have gotten thousands of dollars for that operation. It also reminds me of my dermatologist prescribing a medicine that didn’t work and, until I did an experiment that showed it didn’t work, having no idea it didn’t work. He got paid in any case.