Seth's Blog

• Big Pharma versus Parkinson’s disease — perfectly good non-Big-Pharma treatments (ECT, nicotine, caffeine) are neglected in favor of a much worse Big-Pharma treatment (L-dopa).
• Substances high in Essential Fatty Acids, such as evening primrose oil, used to treat  allergy-associated problems (case reports). From the 1980s. Other articles from the Foundation for Integrated Medicine.
• Artisanal sake survives the tsunami and makes an accidental discovery.
• Food tour of Tokyo by Jeffrey Steingarten.
• Should England’s Royal Society be taken seriously? Judging by their leaders’ certainty about global warming . . .
• 60 Minutes covers the Anil Potti scandal at Duke University.

Thanks to Allen Carl Jackson, Phil Alexander and Navanit Arakeri.

If it isn’t clear for whom law schools exist, now it is clearer:

The saga began last year, when Strauss and Anziska, both veterans of corporate legal work, filed lawsuits against New York Law School and Thomas M. Cooley Law School, in Michigan. The allegation: That Cooley and NYLS, by allegedly inflating post-graduate employment numbers, had committed fraud and violated local consumer protection acts. . . . The job market for lawyers has been contracting for years; hiring is down across the board. At the same time, law schools have continued to crank out young lawyers at an alarming rate.

This is the legal version of the joke that people go to law school because they aren’t good at math. So far twelve schools have been sued. I look forward to learning how the teachers at those schools react. Which side will they take? .

More about the lawsuits. I blogged about the deception a year ago. The California Culinary Academy in San Francisco was successfully sued for similar deception a few years ago. Inside the Law School Scam, a blog.

• Edward Jay Epstein on The Lessons of Le Carre (the spy novelist)
• Gary Taubes recommends five excellent books, including Weston Price.
• This article about the Marc Hauser case tells a brief story about a Harvard coverup in the 1960s. “In the late 1960s I was eating lunch in William James Hall with a few fellow assistant professors in the Harvard psychology department when a woman named Patricia Woolf sat down at our table. . . . She asked whether we had heard anything about the fabrication of data by one of our colleagues.”
• This sad and fascinating post tells how pediatricians encourage Vitamin D deficiency by warning parents to keep children out of the sun.  Then, making things even worse, children with broken bones due to Vitamin D deficiency are assumed by pediatricians to be victims of child abuse. “Dr. Carole Jenny, head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Child Abuse, implies such tragic miscarriages of justice simply don’t happen. She then claims, “We have been checking every child with multiple fractures for metabolic bone diseases for several years and have not identified a single child with vitamin D deficiency.” How can that statement be true if every other researcher is reporting infantile and early childhood vitamin D deficiency to be rampant in normal children? Furthermore, how can an infant beaten severely enough to cause multiple fractures not be bruised or in distress? Dr. Jenny cleverly avoids the question.”

• omega-3 blood levels correlated with better mental performance in the elderly. “The team found that people who had higher blood levels of vitamins B, C, D and E and omega-3 fatty acids scored higher on the mental-function tests, including attention tasks and visual and spatial skills, than those with lower levels of these nutrients.”
• “Inflammation, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease.” An influential New England Journal of Medicine article from 2005. The next time someone tells you that heart disease is due to high cholesterol, refer them to this article.
• Weak evidence that bacteria in food stimulate the immune system. Indian women who ate yogurt to which a probiotic had been added had more of an immune-related molecule in their feces than before and after that ingestion.
• Speaking of India, do medical students who gain admission by fraud become dangerous doctors? India has a problem.

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

• The art and science of miso. High-quality miso from Massachusetts.
• A former BMJ editor on research misconduct. Biased reporting of research.
• Health-care CEOs are America’s best-paid executives. “John Hammergren, chief executive of McKesson Corporation, . . . took home $145,266,971 in 2010. McKeeson is . . . is the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America. . . Ronald Williams, boss of health insurance giant Aetna, made $57,787,786 in 2010. . . . Since he became CEO, Aetna’s stock price declined by 70%.”
• “How one man got away with mass [scientific] fraud.” I agree with almost none of the opinions expressed in this article, but the facts are interesting.
• From here: Compare the number of articles written by an average physicist and an average mathematician:
  • Physicist: The first announcement, the second, correction, detailed version, and the crucial error found. [5 articles]
  • Mathematician: The proof. [1 article]

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky and Casey Manion.