Studies of cancer treatments were more likely to report improvements in overall survival when the investigators reported some kind of financial conflict of interest, researchers said.

Analysis of 124 oncology clinical trials showed that those with a conflict of interest — either direct industry funding or an author’s declarations of financial relationships — were more than twice as likely to find significantly improved patient survival, according to Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., of the University of Michigan, and colleagues.

The finding emerged from an online report in Cancer covering conflicts of interest in more than 1,500 oncology studies in major journals during 2006.

Among 52 randomized, controlled trials with no conflict of interest, 14% found significantly better survival with the intervention relative to control, 72% found equivalent survival, and 6% significantly favored the control.

In 72 similar trials with a conflict of interest, 29% found in favor of the intervention, 61% showed no difference, and none reported better survival with the control (P=0.04 for trend relative to nonconflicted studies)….

The natural poetry of an Irvine student who notices birds on campus, and makes a top ten list.

… 4. Black Phoebe

A species I truly adore, these flycatchers are so dapper in little tuxedos: black back and tails with white bellies. They perch on a branch or sign, then fly off, catch an insect and fly back to their perch. This behavior is known, appropriately, as fly-catching. They like head-level branches in the park and call, “fee-bee.” …

From the Associated Press:

France’s education minister says protesting students who have blocked universities for months will not get diplomas.

Xavier Darcos says just a handful of students protesting against a proposed university reform have succeeded in disrupting operations at several French universities. Those students will not be awarded their degrees, he told RTL radio on Monday.

The protests have disrupted or completely blocked universities across the country, delaying many exams, in recent weeks and months.

The government says the university reforms are aimed at freeing up universities to allow private sponsors and become more competitive. Students say the government is commercializing universities

The protesters’ tactics have been disgusting. People attempting to attend or teach class have been met with barricades and intimidation. University presidents have been held hostage.

… who’s a recent Wesleyan grad reflects on the social networks she followed after the news of Johanna Justin-Jinich’s murder:

… [W]hen you’re part of a community, a crime produces shock, anger, a surplus of emotion, and you seek out information. This week, I learned how social networks offer a way through the clutter of “rational” reporting, sensationalism, and gossip that plague our tragedies, and are no substitutes for the proximity and empathy I was craving. These days, even after you leave a place, you get to keep your social bonds online. They lie dormant, ready to be reactivated with a few keystrokes, when you need them most.

… to direct your attention to this Google News page rather than summarize the contents of these articles, make snide remarks about how badly some of them are written, and compare in detail the president of Jacksonville State to the president of Southern Illinois University, who also plagiarized his education degree.

Our entire budget has been directed to sports stories.

UO MATTERS is a new blog written by anonymous faculty members at the University of Oregon, a school that’s gotten more than its share of negative attention on University Diaries.

The pun in the blog’s title points to matters of importance on campus (an overpaid president, too many administrators, a sports obsession, a budget crisis, anti-intellectualism, etc.) and the basic attitude of concern among the blog’s authors — their university matters, and its betrayal of fundamental academic principles is so severe that these people have gone public.

Reasonably public. The university can be vindictive, so they’ve chosen to remain anonymous.

If you take a look at UO MATTERS, you’ll see that at this point it’s still rather an insider’s document, most of it offering specifics about salaries, cutbacks, distribution of funds, and so forth. UD anticipates that this blog will evolve toward a more public voice, since its issues are the same issues all ill-run universities confront.

UD thanks one of its writers for alerting me to UO MATTERS.

Bowling Green had the blow job picture to deal with. Now Shasta College also has to figure out what to do when Mr Stiffy pays a visit.

… The painting, titled “See It Go” and styled on the mid-20th century-era “Dick and Jane” books, depicts two children playing outdoors and making motions to greet a grown man wearing a blue bathrobe. The robe hangs open and the man, in a state of arousal, is fully exposed.

… In response to complaints, officials duct-taped white poster board over the painting, which hangs in the college’s Art Gallery, and attached a note that reads, “Advisory: Provocative Content.” Near the bottom is an arrow with the directions, “Lift to view.”

Wesleyan’s president’s tears.

Roth … cried when he recalled Justin-Jinich’s last paper, on the dignity of man.

A BBC reporter in Paris describes the paralyzed French university system.

… The French leader wants to give individual universities more autonomy to run their faculties along the lines of successful commercial businesses and to make them more competitive.

Students and lecturers, however, have interpreted his proposal as an ultra-capitalist attempt to privatise the education system which will simply force up fees.

“Competition is just a right-wing ideology – in the case of humanities, competitiveness doesn’t even make any sense,” says Sorbonne English Professor Barbara le Lan.

“French universities are the least demanding universities as far as results go.”

Everyone in France who passes the Baccalaureat or “Bac” has the right to take up a state university place.

The result is that the France’s public universities are overcrowded, under-funded, have high drop-out rates and fail to make any international league tables. So would a little competition really hurt?

… One of President Sarkozy’s demands is that lecturers at the state universities, who are paid to research as well as teach, should be monitored a little more closely to make sure that they are indeed researching and are not simply doing nothing or spending their spare time giving private lessons.

He wants to set targets for the number of academic papers they publish. Professors like Ms Le Lan are simply horrified at the idea that academics should be subjected to quotas.

The government is determined to shake up the terms of employment for lecturers.

France is the only European country, and in fact one of the last countries in the entire developed world, where teachers are civil servants.

Those that support the government’s reforms feel that the current higher education system is geared very much towards the teachers’ needs and very little to the students’.

Last year, I attended a psychology class at Montpellier University, where students were crammed into a grubby lecture hall and where the acoustics were so bad that the pupils on the back three rows had given up trying to catch the wise mumblings from the distant podium and had either nodded off altogether under a copy of Liberation or were simply listening to their iPods…

Chuck Grassley is sticking around as the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, one of the centers of power in the health reform debate.

… Grassley and Max Baucus, who chairs the committee, had lunch at the White House today with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. They spent most of the meal talking about health reform, the Des Moines Register reports.

… The prospect [that Grassley might leave Finance] apparently had some pharma lobbyists pretty excited, given Grassley’s scrutiny of the industry.

But it didn’t work out that way…

***************************************

LAMENT OF THE MED SCHOOL FACULTY

We thought with the end of Chuck Grassley
We could go back to acting all crassly.
But our passion for pharma’s
Run into bad karma:
The man is alive, and it’s ghastly.

Academics at Oxford University have banned step-ladders from its world famous Bodleian library – because of health and safety fears.

The ban means students are unable to reach books on the top shelves but dons refuse to bring them lower because it would remove them from their “original historic location”.

Students travel to libraries as far away as London to view other copies.

… Books on the top shelves include tomes about art history and poetry.

… Laurence Benson, the library’s director of administration and finance, said: “The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location – where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the health and safety office.”

It involves drug company payments to Karen Wagner, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas. Big payments, over many years, for her touting the benefits of various dangerous concoctions for the most vulnerable among us — children.

The Commission’s very hush-hush. Wagner never reported any of this money to her university. Well, once she reported she’d gotten six hundred dollars. That left multiple hundreds of thousands that she concealed.

The university thought it’d be a great idea to put Wagner on a committee reviewing other professors’ conflict of interest forms.

Wagner knows how to keep a secret:

In March 2006, Dr. Wagner was being deposed in a case on Paxil. During that deposition, Dr. Wagner was asked how much money she had taken from drug companies over the previous five years.

Her response? She said, and I quote, “I don’t know.” In fact, she testified that she couldn’t even estimate how much money she received from the drug companies.

The latest on the Wagner Commission:

An influential U.S. senator has reported a University of Texas researcher’s financial relationship with a drug company to the top investigator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter to the University of Texas System in September raising concerns that child pharmacology researcher Karen Wagner had not properly disclosed her financial connections with drug companies. He reported her in a letter to the Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General.

An extended search of the Japanese island Kuchino-erabu for traces of Craig Arnold had offered up hope the poet might be injured, but still alive, among one of the island’s many crevices.

That hope died Friday afternoon once a search team announced that a trail discovered the previous day showed signs that Arnold, 41, suffered a leg injury, then fell from a steep cliff to his death soon afterward.

Authorities say a body has been discovered in an area near where a University of Georgia professor’s Jeep was found.

The professor, George Zinkhan, is accused of killing his wife and two others outside a community theater last month.

The Athens-Clarke County Police Department said in a news release Saturday that the body is being taken to a state crime lab for positive identification.

—————————

Update: Cadaver dogs
found the body. Did you
know about cadaver dogs?

UD didn’t. Here’s
cadaverdog.com.
They offer a course called
Advanced Cadaver.

—————————

Another Update:

Fugitive murder suspect George Martin Zinkhan III dug his own grave and covered himself with debris before firing a single bullet into his head, investigators said Saturday.

“A person not accustomed to the woods would not have found it,” Athens-Clarke County Police Chief Jack Lumpkin said. “The body was beneath the earth… The body was purposely concealed in a manner not to be discovered.”

Searchers found two handguns in the grave.

Zinkhan’s well-hidden body was discovered Saturday by cadaver dogs — an Australian shepherd and a German shepherd — at 9:50 a.m. Saturday. The civilian Alpha Search and Rescue Team was working woods beyond the initial search area. Zinkhan’s temporary grave was in thick woods about 1,000 yards from an elementary school and about a mile from where his red Jeep Liberty was recovered more than a week ago. Zinkhan’s home in Bogart in Clarke County is not far away.

The police chief said this was the second time in his 35 years in law enforcement that he had encountered a suicide victim who buried himself first…

… from Key West, UD‘s been spring cleaning.

Yesterday, Les UD‘s bought sphagnum moss
for their topiary bulls. (The bulls honor
Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand the Bull,
who lived in UD‘s house.)

This morning, while pressing the moss
into the topiary’s frames, UD prepared
various clever sallies to use when passersby
remarked, as she knew they would, on her
activity. She practiced the lines in her head
— timing, tone, facial expression, etc.

Right away, two women walking two black
labs stopped just outside UD‘s wooden fence.

“So… Look what you’re doing…”

You could tell this woman wanted to say
something clever but couldn’t.

Okay. Here goes.

“Don’t you two stuff your bulls every morning?”

UD chose this riposte because it sounded obscene.

The women, unfazed, came right back.

“No,” said one of them. “I stuff myself full of bull every morning.”

Although this riposte was as meaningless as UD‘s sally, UD liked it. She found it, speed-of-ripostewise, impressive.