… is apparently the suspect in Annie Le’s murder.

… his ex-wife. In a parking lot near a graduate student housing complex.

They were fighting over child custody. He killed her in front of the child.

… are emerging in the Annie Le case. But so far they’re just rumors.

Here’s Yale’s official investigation page.

(A psychotic stalker, as in the Johanna Justin-Jinich case? How did he get in the building?)

(Or, as others suggest, someone who worked in the building? Who knew where crawl spaces were, etc.)

… and outside.

… is now up at Inside Higher Ed.

… where the curiouser and curiouser medical journal industry is meeting to talk about itself.

… [S]ome conference participants [questioned] the journals’ financial models: They rely on unpaid volunteers to review article submissions and on revenue from companies that buy reprints of articles that depict their products favorably.

Your subscribers are mainly American doctors — among the most highly paid people on earth. What do you charge them? Doesn’t say in this Chronicle of Higher Ed article, and UD‘s too grossed out by the subject to check at the moment … But… unpaid volunteers as reviewers? Can’t do any better than that? Even UD, a lowly humanist, gets money or books or some sort of compensation to review manuscripts.

[Update, correction: UD had in mind book manuscripts as something for which people like her do get various forms of compensation (rarely money — usually free books). As the comment thread of this post makes clear, she should have disentangled book from article manuscript. Indeed the reading of articles is, in her field as well, uncompensated (at least it is for her and the people she knows).

I don’t know whether the Vancouver participants who suggest paid reviewers are correct that this will help things.]

Conference topics included the failure of journals and their authors to disclose corporate connections, the reluctance of researchers to share their data, the use of misleading rhetoric in journal articles, and the almost uniform ability of authors rejected by one journal to get published in another.

If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again.

… The conference participants included representatives of several of the drug companies, who largely sat silently through the repeated depiction of their industry as an obstacle to the unbiased pursuit of medical research.

Zzzzzzz……

… that a body has been discovered in the Yale science building where Annie Le was last seen.

Details from the Yale Daily News.

More details from the New York Post:

… [A] university student has failed a lie-detector test when questioned about the missing young woman but [investigators] refused to provide details, including whether he was the same young man who had been led from the building for questioning early Saturday.

… Lars Russell, a San Francisco-based writer, starting reading the entirety of Finnegans Wake out loud at Civic Center [last Wednesday] … and hasn’t slept since.

… watch what happens.

“Plus,” said UD to Mr UD at lunch just now (they had leftover Chinese food plus an egg and cheese omelet), “there are ghost letters.”

“Ghosted scientific articles, and ghosted letters?”

“Listen to this:

[Jenny] White and colleague Lisa Bero, PhD, [both] of the University of California San Francisco, found 24 articles that were produced as a result of grants that Parke-Davis gave to [ghostwriting firm] Medical Education Systems in 1996 and 1997 to draft articles and letters to the editor regarding gabapentin [Neurontin] for publication in peer reviewed journals.

So they ghostwrite articles, and they ghostwrite letters in response to the articles they themselves have ghostwritten.”

“So… say a letter to the editor criticizing a ghostwritten article that the corporate ghost who’s written the original article then ghosts a response to is itself ghostwritten,” mused Mr UD. “If you catch my drift. Then you have significant research debate in high-level journals carried on exclusively by ghosts.”

“Ghost vs. Ghost, as Mad Magazine would say… But wait. Say the entire debate is carried on by the same ghost, in order to make the thing look more legit. Like, you know how corporate-generated, pretend-grassroots campaigns feature letters with on-purpose writing mistakes to make them look real? So maybe here you’re getting a vast fake controversy about the Neurontin results — all of it generated by one ghost, back and forth, back and forth with himself — here indignant, there defensive, here threatening to sue, there threatening to cancel his subscription… ”

“Fun!”

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

(UD thanks Pharma Marketing Blog
for the image.)

ty of teaching again at George Washington University after a yearlong sabbatical:

*** There are three-foot tall Purell dispensers in front of all elevators.  (The elevators in her own building, Academic Center, are being upgraded.  One of them is already way chic, with recessed lighting and bright silver buttons; but when its doors close, it lets out a high-pitched whine that goes on forever; and when it takes you to the first floor, it flashes the number seven.)

*** Now that Michelle Obama and UD‘s university have made their pact, UD ponders, while walking to class, what she’s done for the world (blood donation; tutoring; town clean-up… what else?).   Plus she marvels at how many Peace Corps, Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, etc., people there are among her students.

*** Because she’s picked up extra teaching duties this semester (an independent study; other classroom stuff) on top of her regular courses, UD‘s on campus all the time, working, working.  She has renamed herself Ekaterina Stakhanova.

*** And because she’s always on campus, marching from one classroom to another, UD has taken to scanning the students around her, hoping for a La Kid sighting (her daughter goes to GW). She often thinks she’s had one, only to discover that almost all GW women have straight blond hair, fine threads, and UGG boots.

[Florida State University President T.K. Wetherell] should tell the whole world what an absolute shame it would be if [Coach] Bobby [Bowden’s]’s iconic career is tainted because of the malfeasance of others. He should point out how unfair it would be for Bobby’s reputation to be disgraced because some nameless, faceless tutors helped FSU football players cheat in an online music course.

This kind of statement, from Mike Bianchi in the Boston Herald, upsets UD.

There’s an elemental unfairness in dismissing FSU’s tutors as nameless and faceless. They have names; they have faces. They’re human beings, and they deserve to be recognized for their part in the nation’s largest cheating scandal.

But what Bianchi also overlooks is that they were only little cogs in the big cheating machine that is Florida State University.

Why make it appear they acted alone? No one group of people can create an entire university devoted to academic violations on behalf of sport. There’s the music course’s professor, a notoriously negligent instructor whose course had served FSU athletes well for decades until something went tragically awry. There’s the university’s board of trustees, willing to do their part to keep everyone stupid and unethical. There’s the university’s coaching staff who recruited the players. And of course there’s Wetherell himself, who continues to preside over a massive joke at the expense of Florida’s taxpayers.

Give credit where it’s due, says University Diaries.

… What a filthy business. And it’s not going to change.

Details.

Because it’s not going to change — I mean, the journals aren’t going to do anything about it, just as universities aren’t going to do anything about conflict of interest — we need to think about ways of protecting ourselves from the many bogus, corporate-run studies that inspire doctors to prescribe dangerous drugs.

Remember that the assault comes from more than these sources. In bogus, corporate-run Continuing Education events, in direct payments in exchange for prescription, in the training of a drug sales force made up of medical school professors, in countless ways, we’re cultivating a generation of compromised practitioners who hurt us and our children with the meds that enrich the practitioners.

Don’t forget the crucial adjunct to these practices: Constant frightening television advertisements.

What can we do?

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

Beats me. They’ve got all the money. And they’re fucking geniuses.

From The Journal, Queen’s University:

… Wayne Cox, a political studies professor [at Queen’s University in Ontario], said he thinks technology in the classroom can turn students into a passive audience.

“Professors become dependent upon technology and I would argue that that is a bad thing,” he said. “My teaching philosophy is to try to engage the students as much as I possibly can.”

Last year, Cox tried an experiment in his class, POLS261, Introduction to International Politics.

“I banned all laptops in Dunning and made my students a deal,” he said. “I would put all my energy into the lecture if they didn’t bring their laptops to class.”

Cox said he received positive feedback from his students on his actions.

“Students wanted to come to class,” he said. “It was a resounding success and students found it refreshing.” …

… a passage that captures my thoughts about The Blount Punch perfectly.

… I’m not thinking about the taunting that set him off, Blount’s own actions or the season-long suspension. What bugs me is our whole disingenuous reaction. Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

The writer is David Fleming, for ESPN.