Scott Lemieux’s “Tech Central Journal of Medicine”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/12/tech-central-journal-of-medicine.html excerpts a WSJ article that uncovers some pretty nasty practices in medical academic publishing.

bq. In 2001, the American Journal of Kidney Diseases published an article that touted the use of synthetic vitamin D. Its author was listed as Alex J. Brown, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis. But recently, that same article was featured as a work sample by a different person: Michael Anello, a free-lance medical writer, who posted a summary of it on his Web site. Mr. Anello says he was hired to write the article by a communications firm working for Abbott Laboratories, which makes a version of the vitamin D product. Dr. Brown agrees he got help in writing but says he redid part of the draft. It’s an example of an open secret in medicine: Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the by-lines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objective articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats.

bq. …

bq. Susanna Dodgson, who holds a doctorate in physiology, says she was hired in 2002 by Excerpta Medica, the Elsevier medical-communications firm, to write an article about J&J’s anemia drug Eprex. A J&J unit had sponsored a study measuring whether Eprex patients could do well taking the drug only once a week. The company was facing competition from a rival drug sold by Amgen Inc. that could be given once a week or less. Dr. Dodgson says she was given an instruction sheet directing her to emphasize the “main message of the study”… That report said the study’s goal “could not be reached.” Both the instruction sheet and the report were viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The higher figure Dr. Dodgson was asked to highlight used a broader definition of success and excluded patients who dropped out of the trial or didn’t adhere to all its rules. The instructions noted that some patients on large doses didn’t seem to do well with the once-weekly administration but warned that this point “has not been discussed with marketing and is not definitive!”

Meanwhile, the backers of the real Tech Central Station may have been involved in the New Hampshire “phone-jamming scandal”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_New_Hampshire_Senate_election_phone_jamming_scandal.

bq. McGee’s testimony suggested that the DCI Group, a powerful public relations firm which publishes the Tech Central Station website and is closely connected to the Republican party, was involved through lawyer and New Hampshire native Bruce McCabe. He also said he had talked to Darrell Henry of the American Gas Association, who said that he would keep the phone jamming going after it was officially called off.

“Pootergeek has a post”:http://www.pootergeek.com/?p=1908 on using “Google’s blogsearch”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch as an alternative to Technorati. For full instructions follow the link to his site, but meanwhile “here’s the search set up for Crooked Timber”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&filter=0&q=%22crooked+timber%22+-site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcrookedtimber.org%2F&btnG=Search+Blogs

A.J. Julius posted an earlier version of this paper on his website a few months ago, and I’ve only just got around to blogging it. It is a crisp and powerful critique of Nagel’s recent defence of the claim that the scope of justice is limited by national boundaries (free content). Julius makes the same foundational assumptions as Nagel and shows, elegantly, that the boundaries of justice are nevertheless….well, global. I’m a big fan of Julius’s work, so I might be a bit baised, but I think its terrific. Forthcoming in Philosophy and Public Affairs, presumably in the issue after the one that’s just been announced, so get it while its hot, as Larry Solum likes to say.

I wasn’t going to post about “last night’s BBC Newsnight”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4507010.stm (still watchable for a few hours) which staged a mock trial of allied conduct in the “war on terror”. Clive Stafford Smith, the advocate for the prosecution, was simply in a different class from his opponent John Cooper. Via “Oliver Kamm’s site”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/newsnight_on_tr.html I learn that William Shawcross was invited to take part in the programme and declined, apparently because the “trial” format would constitute a trivialization of serious issues. As Shawcross puts it:

bq. A ‘courtroom’ pastiche is a fashionable but frivolous conceit …. The allegations about “rendition” need a thorough investigation and merit the closest attention of Newsnight, but a ‘trial’ will do nothing in that regard.

But commenter Max Smith at DSPFW “reminds us”:http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.blogspot.com/2005/12/newsnight-on-trial.html that Shawcross had no such qualms two years ago when “he appeared”:http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/tv-channels/channel-4/419783/ as an advocate in a similar televised “trial” on the war (on Channel 4). I’m sure that losing by 2 to 1 in that debate had no impact on his general view of the merits of such devices.

Update: Kamm has emailed me to say that “frivolous conceit” is a phrase of his making rather than Shawcross’s. Others seem to have also read the passage in Kamm’s post as a direct quotation rather than as Kamm summary of Shawcross’s communication with him. The basic point stands, presuming that Kamm’s summary accurately reflects Shawcross’s thinking.

… and Brussels imposes.

Or not. Ireland – or rather the Irish Dept. of Justice – is threatening to legally contest the traffic data retention directive passed (with disgraceful ease) by the European Parliament (EP) this week. The directive will force internet service providers and telcos to store at their own cost all the traffic data of their users in case it is ever required by government agencies. Using the well-worn ‘national competence’ argument, the Irish government is arguing that the EP had no right to decide about data retention in the first place. The argument runs like this; Ireland should retain its veto in sensitive justice matters, and should not be told what to do by the European Commission and EP. This is a very disingenuous argument on the face of it, and rather perplexing when you dig deeper.
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Iraqis “vote for their first post-Saddam, full-term parliament”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/15/news/iraq.php today. As I write this it’s just before 7am in Arizona, but I’m sure some warbloggers are already up and about, compiling evidence of indifference to freedom and democracy amongst anti-war types.

My own view on the long-term prospects hasn’t changed much since “last January’s elections”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/31/prospects-for-iraqi-democracy/. If the goal is a viable multi-party democracy, then in the short-term the election should be free and fair with a clear winning coalition, which ideally would then lose the next election and peacefully hand over power. Back in January I thought it looked like this:

It’s often said that the key moment in the growth of a democracy is not its first election but its second, because—as Adam Przeworski says somewhere—a democracy is a system where governments lose elections. The question planners need to be asking is what are the chances that Iraq will be able to do this again in four or five years without the presence of U.S. troops and with the expectation that whoever wins will get to take power. This partly depends on whether some functioning government can really be established within the country, and partly on whether the U.S. wants a working democracy in Iraq (with the risks that implies) or just a friendly puppet state. … Unlike thousands of desk-jockey warbloggers, I don’t have any expertise in Iraqi politics. But it seems to me that if Iraq is going to succeed as a democracy then it has to consolidate itself in something like this way. A continued heavy military presence by the U.S. won’t help this goal, because it won’t do anything to legitimate the government as an independent entity. … The current prospects are not good at all, especially with respect to the continuous attacks on the new police force and the efforts to systematically eliminate the nascent political class. The fact that Iraq has a lot of oil and was formerly a brutal dictatorship doesn’t help much either. … Cases of successful transitions in resource-rich nations are few.

This time around, as before, voting will probably go reasonably smoothly (by Iraqi standards I mean: there will probably only be a small number of attacks and deaths), and this counts for a lot. I think the main problem will be the protracted round of post-election negotiations between the various blocs. If it’s anything like January’s election, we might not see a government for months. Another drawn-out tussle between the two or three biggest slates will do little to consolidate the legitimacy of the election or the institutions of government, especially seeing as the occupying power has a strong interest in seeing their favored groups win. An outcome like that will just continue to raise questions about the viability of the state itself, while doing little to change the day-to-day round of violence.

WaPo:

President Bush said yesterday he is confident that former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is innocent of money-laundering charges, as he offered strong support for several top Republicans who have been battered by investigations or by rumors of fading clout inside the White House.

Now help me finish this thought by providing links to ALL those occasions when the President has not been so forthcoming. Mr. Google gives pretty good hits in response to “Bush won’t comment on ongoing investigations”.

Following swiftly on Gerhard Schroeder’s decision to accept the chairmanship of a “pipeline consortium owned by Gazprom”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/23e9ee86-6906-11da-bd30-0000779e2340.html, “this”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e4c849c0-6c87-11da-90c2-0000779e2340.html is rather creepy.

bq. Donald Evans, a close friend of president George W. Bush and the former commerce secretary, met president Vladimir Putin of Russia last week but refused to be drawn on growing speculation that he had been offered the chairmanship of Rosneft, Russia’s state-controlled oil company. A person close to Mr Evans on Tuesday confirmed the meeting with Mr Putin but refused to comment on a report by Russia’s Kommersant newspaper that he had been offered the job ahead of Rosneft’s expected initial public offering next year. The appointment of a former high-ranking Bush administration official to the top ranks of a Russian oil company would generate shock waves in Washington.

I’ve just discovered when poking around for some figures that you can now analyse data from the “World Values Survey”:http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ online. This is a very neat tool, not only for political scientists and sociologists, but for anyone else who’s interested in getting basic information on attitudes in different countries to politics, society and religion. You don’t have to be a stats wizard to play around with the numbers. As far as I’m aware, the Survey is outstandingly the most comprehensive database of its kind.

In other news, Sam Rosenfeld points in comments to an interesting “response”:http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/001317.php to the Bartels paper that I “blogged”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/12/not-in-kansas-anymore/ a couple of days ago. According to David Gopoian and Ralph Whitehead, whether Bartels is right depends on how you define the white working class, and Bartels, by their books, is working with a non-standard definition. Bartels talks a bit in the paper about definitional questions, but it would be interesting to know what his counter-response would be.

Bush on the war: “Whether or not it needed to happen, I’m still convinced it needed to happen.”

Maureen Dowd, on this bit from the interview [sorry, NY Times select]: “The Bubble Boy can even contradict himself and not notice.” It does seem like a deeply irrational thing to say, yet it clearly is not a contradiction, per se. In fact it seems like a disjunctive variation on Moore’s paradox. Bush’s version (inadversion, rather) is perhaps rather interesting. “Whether or not P, I believe P” has the same truth-conditions as “I believe P”. So one can turn any of one’s own belief statements into a Bushian bit of madness without impairing its truth. (Just try it at home.)

Discuss.

Bonus points for working in the following lines from the interview:

Bush: “I’m interested in the news. I’m not all that interested in the opinions.”

Brian Williams: “So what is truth, Mr. President?”

Getting back to the paradox, I think the proper diagnosis of the peculiarity of Bush’s statement must run as follows. For Gricean reasons, you wouldn’t preface a belief statement with a tautology, in this way, unless you meant to conversationally implicate the irrelevance of one question to another. (That’s not adequate, and there’s got to be a better way to say it.) Example: ‘whether Bush sincerely believes the war was a good idea or not, I believe the the war was a bad idea.’ That’s completely coherent. (It also highlights the inadequacy of my brief gloss: obviously I don’t think Bush’s mental state is totally irrelevant to an assessment of the wisdom of the war plans. But I think the question about the war plans can be answered without settling that other thing.) Anyhoo, to complete the thought: what is odd about Bush’s statement is that he is conversationally implicating that facts about P are irrelevant to/do not determine his beliefs about P. An epistemic bubble, yes, but not a logical contradiction.

Today it is “exactly two years”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/14/newsid_3985000/3985287.stm since the capture of Saddam Hussein. I’d have expected the insurgency to have calmed down a bit in the interim. It doesn’t seem to have happened.

Lifehacker Editor Gina Trapani is hosting a holiday giveaway around the topic of efficient desktop uses. She has created a group on photo-sharing site Flickr for people to post annotated pictures of their desktops: Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell. The idea is to see how people maximize this work space for productivity. I like the idea, but it seems to me that there are alternative ways of going about this. After all, how often do you even look at your desktop? I don’t look at it much. My default screen is Firefox.

So I propose an alternative: Firefox Show and Tell. Unlike Gina, I don’t have goodies to give away, but if you are interested in taking part regardless then share your annotated screenshots of your Firefox screen in the Firefox Show and Tell Flickr photo pool. I find that most productivity tools I have on my computer are embedded into Firefox anyway so it seems like an appropriate focus. Perhaps reliance on one’s desktop – or lack thereof – depends on the operating system. (No, I am not proposing we get in an OS fight over this.) In any case, I think Gina is right that there is much to learn from how other people have optimized their settings for various applications so sharing could be helpful.

If you don’t have a Flickr account, you can create one for free. To add a photo to a group pool, first visit the group page (here in this case) while logged in as a Flickr user. To the right will be a big bold link “Join this group?”, click on that. On the next page confirm that you want to join the group. Next, head to the photo you want to add to the group. While viewing the photo’s page, click on the “Send to Group” icon toward the left above the image. Then choose the group to which you want to post the picture. This may sound complicated, but it should be pretty painless once you have an account and are looking at actual pages instead of following this abstract description.

Maybe Gina at Lifehacker will consider sending some goodies to helpful screens from this photo pool as well.:)

Go read about Warner Brothers’ attempt to shut down a non-commercial mashup of Greenday’s “American Idiot” album. Then go listen to it while you still can. All I can say is that there are a lot of very talented people with a lot of time on their hands – amazing stuff.

It doesn’t shock me that Tookie Williams was refused clemency. It saddens me, as do all such executions, but it doesn’t shock me. I can even see things from Schwarzenegger’s point of view: the courts have had their say, the process has come to an end, and the state has determined what the penalty should be. It is difficult for an elected official to use his personal discretion at the last moment. But I “was shocked to read”:http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-analysis13dec13,0,4494420.story?coll=la-home-headlines , among Schwarzenegger’s justifications for his refusal, the following:

In addition to arguing that Williams’ continued claims of innocence should be counted against him, the governor made a point of quoting the dedication of Williams’ 1998 book “Life in Prison.”

In the dedication, Williams named 11 people, all of whom had been imprisoned or in custody. Among them were Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid leader; Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader assassinated in 1965; and Angela Davis, the black Marxist professor acquitted of murder charges in 1972.

Schwarzenegger and his aides focused on one name on the list — George Jackson, the author of “Soledad Brother,” a book about life in prison. Jackson was “gunned down on the upper yard at San Quentin Prison” on Aug. 21, 1971, in a “foiled escape attempt on a day of unparalleled violence in the prison that left three officers and three inmates dead,” Schwarzenegger said.

“The inclusion of George Jackson on this list defies reason and is a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems,” the governor said.

I posted a while ago about the British government’s plans to criminalize statements “glorifying terrorism”. Here it seems that if it tipped the balance of Schwarzenegger’s decision, Williams’s dedication of a book to a controversial historical figure, may have cost him his life. A book dedication hardly amounts to an endorsement of all of a person’s attitudes and actions anyway. What can Schwarzenegger have been thinking in including this in his statement?