… Many of these [outsourced] trials are conducted for the benefit of international drug companies, at unacceptable cost to the local population; … trial subjects could be put at risk; … subjects often have not given their informed consent to participate; … they might be provided care that is of lower quality than if they had been recruited for a trial in the West; … injuries during a trial might not be investigated thoroughly, and … those injured may not receive treatment of the highest standard, or even compensation; and … drugs that are tested are often too expensive for people who need them in India.

The kidney minyan has already alerted us to desperate people around the world induced to sell this or that organ; this journalist from Himal South Asian describes The India Advantage.

India is now prominently on the radar screen of the international pharmaceutical industry in terms of clinical trials, given its vast population of potential trial subjects…

An increasing number of reports are coming to light of unethical and illegal practices that exploit people’s social and economic vulnerability, subject them to serious risks without their knowledge and consent, and do not even assure them of access to the drugs developed from the trials. Certain types of trials depend on paid volunteers who desperately need money. In Gujarat, unemployed diamond workers and migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar get paid between INR 5000 and INR 20,000 to take part in bioequivalence trials – sums large enough for them to put money over personal safety. Indeed, trial participants may be both financially and socially vulnerable.

… The pharmaceutical industry depends on constantly getting new drugs into the market. New drugs include new uses for old drugs (a cancer drug that can also be used for infertility?) or ‘improved’ or ‘me-too’ versions of older drugs (all those antacids, blood-pressure and cholesterol-lowering drugs, anti-depressants or antibiotics). These drugs must be tested on human beings before they can go into the market. Permission has to be obtained, patients have to be recruited, trials carried out and the results filed – all at top speed, because time is money.

… Clinical trials in developing countries depend not only on physical infrastructure – hospitals and laboratories – and trained human power. They also depend on drug companies getting access to bodies on which they can test their drugs. So, [Contract Research Organizations] in India market Indian bodies. In a 2006 advertisement on their website (which has since been removed), a CRO named Igate advertised the ‘India advantage’ as “40 million asthmatics, about 34 million diabetics, 8-10 million people HIV positive, 8 million epileptic patients, 3 million cancer patients.”

… The reports of people dying in trials are likely to be merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg…

My blogpal Bill links me to this New York Times article about professors who allow drug companies to put their names on articles the professors haven’t written.

The practice is immoral and dangerous, but no one seems to care.

… In 1997 … DesignWrite, a medical communications company in Princeton, N.J., proposed to Wyeth a two-year plan that would include the preparation of about 30 articles for publication in medical journals.

The development of an article on the treatment of menopausal hot flashes and night sweats illustrates DesignWrite’s methodology.

Sometime in 2003, a DesignWrite employee wrote a 14-page outline of the article; the author was listed as “TBD” — to be decided. In July 2003, DesignWrite sent the outline to Dr. Gloria Bachmann, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J.

Dr. Bachmann responded in an e-mail message to DesignWrite: “Outline is excellent as written.” In September 2003, DesignWrite e-mailed Dr. Bachmann the first draft of the article. She also pronounced that “excellent” and added, “I only had one correction which I highlighted in red.”

The article, a nearly verbatim copy of the DesignWrite draft, appeared in 2005 in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine, with Dr. Bachmann listed as the primary author. It described hormone drugs as the “gold standard” for treating hot flashes and was less enthusiastic about other therapies.

The acknowledgments thanked several medical writers for their “editorial assistance,” not disclosing that those writers worked for DesignWrite, which charged Wyeth $25,000 to generate the article.

Dr. Bachmann, who has 30 years of research and clinical experience in menopause, said she played a major role in the publication by lending her expertise. Her e-mail messages do not reflect contributions she may have made during phone calls and in-person meetings, she said.

“There was a need for a review article and I said ‘Yes, I will review the draft and make sure it is accurate,’ ” Dr. Bachmann said in an interview Tuesday. “This is my work, this is what I believe, this is reflective of my view.”…

This filthy practice incorporates just about everything people rightly revile about some precincts of academia: Plagiarism. Fakery. Arrogance. Laziness. Cynicism (Wyeth was promoting drugs that turned out to be dangerous.).

People make fun of postmodernists by talking about the Postmodern Generator, a program that automatically generates articles full of obscurantist rhetoric. But that’s only generating words. Ghosting whores among our medical faculties are generating real sickness.

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Bachmann-Wyeth Overdrive.

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Still uncertain why this is filthy? Read Daniel Carlat’s post.

Freakonomics finds the correct headline:

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TEACHER CHEATING

Freakonomics also finds the correct words:

Ubiquitous in classrooms, PowerPoint makes lecturing easy, boring, and forgettable … That’s exactly why lazy students like it: if their teacher isn’t truly engaging with the material, they don’t have to either…

Many commenters on the post – students, professors, businesspeople – also find the correct words. A sample:

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I’ve been out of college for a couple years, but I began seeing PP as a cop-out for true lecturing and presentation skills back in high school (when everyone was jumping on and just loving it)…

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The powerpoint problem has been realized in the DOD for years, and is the butt of jokes at all ranks. It is actively despised by the poor souls who try to condense complex 30 page reports into 3-4 bullets, and those forced to sit through them.

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I speak professionally on a regular occasion and I loathe PowerPoint; however, it’s just taken as commonplace at meetings. Instead of paying attention to your presentation the attendees are busy on the Blackberries while then relying on you to give them copies of the presentation.

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So nice to hear I am not alone in loathing the standard Power Point presentation, wherein we must see the slides, have them read to us, and then take them home. Why not just email the lecture to us to read in our pajamas?

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…PowerPoint and similar software programs have a single purpose. They fill that need very, very well. If what you need is something that aligns with that need, then you should definitely use them.

That purpose is persuasion.

They are, fundamentally, sales tools. They very effectively show (just) your side of the story, in a slick, shiny, carefully constructed, but artificial, environment that makes whatever you say appear to be neater and more logically progressive than it really is.

“Persuasion” is not “informing people”. It is not “educating people.” It is the opposite of “getting people to think about options, alternatives, and flaws in your line of argument.”

If your actual need is different, then you should NOT use them. Sure: with sufficient effort, you can use the software to do something else — say, by turning off all the PowerPoint-y features and using it as a means of displaying text that you would otherwise write on a chalkboard. Or displaying your name and contact information in the background while you just talk. I hear you can import movies into software and use it instead of a regular DVD player, too.

But if you’re not selling anything, you should instead choose tools that are better suited to your actual need, like “paragraphs on paper” or “hands-on demonstration” or whatever best communicates your ideas and information….

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I teach at the university level. Many professors use Power Point. I never have. Why?

The best way to engage a class — whether there are 10 or 300 students is to talk as though you’re talking to one person. Improvise each lecture to some degree, even if you’ve covered the material many times before; give example of subject matter as they occur to you…

Power Point is more like reading a lecture: b o r i n g ! Engage your audience by having a conversation with “one” person — even if there are hundreds in the venue.

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Just graduated from college and I hated almost every class that used powerpoint. Made every class boring and hard to pay attention.

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Don’t use it for math. I had a math class that did this and learned 0.

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I have presented using PP and I find it is better to plan a dynamic presentation, engage your audience, and then hand out the notes at the end. You are guaranteed more interaction and questions if you give them the notes on the presentation at the end.

Why not engage more, encourage people to pay attention and ask educated questions. Include them in the learning process!

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[PP] presenters essentially treat the audience as illiterates and read the content of their slides OR they do not read the slides, expecting the audience to read them while they talk about something else. Too often, presenters (me included) prepare slides with so much content that neither they nor their audience can possibly read them because it is very difficult to dumb down complex points to Twitter format.

AND it is far too easy to essentially lecture to one’s slides and not to the audience, thereby missing critically important data about listeners’ reactions. I also agree with others who point out that when listeners know that they will receive copies of the slides, they feel free to use the time to prepare shopping lists, think through their schedules, and other tasks that are far removed from the topics at hand. What should be a tool that facilitates learning seems more often than not to impede it in my experience.

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Powerpoint is truly where education goes to die. Such lazy, lazy professors. All they do now is stand there and read off their powerpoint slides, which they probably just recycle semester after semester. What is even the point in going to class? You can just download the powerpoint slides, which some professors make available now, perhaps in a tacit admission of, “yeah, I’m useless and I know it.” Lots of professors hate undergrads and really only care about getting on with their research, and this is an expression of it.

If you are a professor and you rely on your powerpoint slides, you FAIL. They should be used SPARINGLY and OCCASIONALLY, and really should only be necessary for presenting multimedia things that you’d have no way of introducing otherwise. Maybe in a few places they could be used to outline some basic diagrams or bulletpoints. You should NOT be just standing there and reading off your slides.

And is it just me or were those slides a one-way ticket to slumberland? Something about the lights off, monotonous slides, and lazy professor just put me right to sleep.

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The last one’s my favorite.

… by a place called Louisville.

Record flooding has prompted the closure of the University of Louisville.

School officials began sending employees home around midday. They were organizing carpools to get some employees home and arranging for alternate transportation for others.

Many employees’ vehicles were inundated by flood waters on part of the campus Tuesday morning after the campus picked up about six inches of rain in less than two hours. A second storm Tuesday afternoon added to the complications…

… from students and classmates of Charles Gwathmey, the architect. He died on Monday.

From a New York Times comment thread:

… Professor Gwathmey’s most important lesson [as an architecture professor at UCLA in the ‘seventies] was surprisingly personal, and not technical or aesthetic. He taught us all that that it is ultimately the individual architect who must synthesize all of the many factors & forces which impact any final building design, and thus architects must nurture the courage to establish that balanced design which best reflects a comprehensive solution, shorn of any single preconceived design ideology.

He also taught us that whenever as architects we are asked why we made any given design decision, the always-correct answer should be: “Because, after careful consideration, that is the way that I thought best as to how it should be, all things considered in good balance.”

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Charlie taught a visiting critic’s design studio at UT Austin in the early 90s. i remember seeing him in the architecture building courtyard doing yoga, way before anyone cool did yoga…

A new court document released yesterday reveals more details about Ezra Merkin’s lucrative non-management of money.

Non-profits – New York University, and, of course, Yeshiva University, which made him a trustee — especially admired his bundle-the-bucks-for-Bernie investment philosophy.

… revolt.

You know how exciting this is for me.

Let me catch my breath.

OK:

So, here’s Use Number One, perfectly fine, correct, as upright and respectable as Ryan O’Neal’s parenting skills:

Is it possible that there is something in the Orthodox community in general and the haredi community in particular that creates fertile ground for this type of fraud? I’ve too often witnessed, here and in Israel, a perverse notion that we few who feel bound by the laws of God are free to flout the laws of man.

Here’s Use Number Two:

There is much to be said about the culture of a haredi community where, as Mark Charendoff, the president of the Jewish Funders Network, points out in a Jewish Week opinion piece , there seems to exist “a perverse notion that we few who feel bound by the laws of God are free to flaunt the laws of man.”

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Mysterious and beautiful are the ways of usage error.

He’s even quoting the first guy!

“Uh… Canada?” said Mr. UD as he gazed at a hazy August morning at the beach.

“Try Bogus Hormonal Receptor Paper,” said UD.

The University of Manitoba has sanctioned a former researcher after an internal investigation concluded he faked data and made up experiments that led to a seemingly groundbreaking study published in one of the world’s most prestigious science journals.

The news that disgraced U of M plant science researcher Fawzi Razem committed the biggest sin in science comes eight months after the journal Nature retracted what was once considered a breakthrough study.

Razem, working in the lab of Prof. Robert Hill, claimed to have discovered a receptor for the major hormone linked to a plant’s response to environmental stress. The receptor that has eluded scientists for two decades was identified in an article and featured in the editor’s summary in the January 2006 edition of Nature, one of the world’s most renowned international science journals.

The receptor was long sought after, as it could help plants better adapt to cold or drought.

Concerns about the research emerged last summer when a team of researchers from New Zealand couldn’t replicate Razem’s work — a red flag that there could be serious problems with the original findings…

Winnipeg Free Press

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Toward the end of the article, a UM ethics professor says,”universities should rely on government, not corporations, to fund independent research.” That is, this sort of thing – not just (sometimes related) conflict of interest, a big story here in the States – will happen when you have professors competing for corporate dollars…

… Russian authorities have recently begun allowing universities to open up—even if that means greater exposure to outside ideas. Many Russian schools, for example, have started reviving academic exchanges with Western universities. Their motivation is simple: desperation. Last year, not a single Russian university made it into the top 100 of a world ranking put out by Quacquarelli Symonds, a U.S.-based compiler of international university standards. Even Moscow State University, the pride of Russia’s education system, slid from 97th place in 2007 to 180th in 2008.

To stop the rot, last year Prime Minister Vladimir Putin founded two new universities, bankrolling them to the tune of $300 million. More important, “education policymakers gave a signal to Russian universities to quickly embrace all the most innovative international programs, and now nothing is stopping them from inviting or hiring as many U.S. professors as they can,” says Andrei Volkov, an adviser to the minister of education and rector of Moscow’s Skolkovo School of Management. Accordingly, Moscow University recently signed a cooperation deal with the State University of New York to share students and award joint diplomas, and 65 U.S. visiting professors are working in Moscow this year. Another joint agreement with the University of Southern California is due to be inked this fall.

… and an enemy of PowerPoint, is featured, along with other anti-PPers, in a Wall Street Journal piece.

Excerpts:

… José Bowen, a SourPointer who serves as dean of Southern Methodist University’s School of the Arts… is a jazz musician who has played with Dizzy Gillespie and written for Jerry Garcia. So he knows performance. And he insists that PowerPoint undermines it, serving as a crutch for professors and lulling students into boredom and passivity. He encourages his SMU colleagues not to use the program in lectures—to “teach naked,” as he says.

T.X. Hammes brings a quite different background to the ranks of the SourPointers. A retired colonel in the Marine Corps and an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, Col. Hammes wrote in this month’s Armed Forces Journal that PowerPoint “is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making.”

In the Defense Department and military, he writes, the agenda is driven by vague, oversimplified and easily misunderstood bullet points. While decision-makers once read and slept on “succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues,” today they are harried by PowerPoint’s pace and “are making more decisions with less preparation and less time for thought,” Col. Hammes charges.

As Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, Mr. Bowen, Col. Hammes and other SourPointers are propped on the shoulders of Edward Tufte. A design guru and former Yale University professor, Mr. Tufte travels the country giving six-hour lectures that people in advertising, programming and publishing pay hundreds of dollars to attend. Upending PowerPoint is a chief goal of his work.

Mr. Tufte’s case against PowerPoint is lengthy, detailed and not subtle. The program is evil and wasteful, he wrote in 2003—a “prankish conspiracy against evidence and thought.” On the cover of his self-published pamphlet, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” Mr. Tufte depicts Josef Stalin overlooking a large, rigid Soviet military parade and declaring “Next slide, please.”…

Tufte sent UD the Stalin poster, which you can see on the wall next to her office door.

UD just asked Mr. UD this question.

After the Summer Institute in Civic Studies was over, Mr. UD met an old friend, David, at the Red Barn Grill and Tavern, in Summit, New York, and from there they drove to our house in the hills (take Bear Gulch Road – if your car can handle it – and you’ll eventually get to our hidden lane) for a little male bonding in the wilderness.

As these results show, there’s not much to do up there, so a lot of people — including college students — get drunk or high. You can, in season, go hunting. Hiking. Berry-picking. Swimming (lots of ponds). But drinking’s big all year round.

“Sure we drank,” said Mr. UD, glancing up from a piece of paper headed A CIVIC INTELLECTUAL DISCIPLINE. “Water.”

Greece will finally allow private colleges to operate this fall.

Or maybe not.

Greece’s terrific higher education sector isn’t happy about this, and may torch all the cities in response.

After all, September’s around the corner.

Tailgaters at this season’s Texas Tech football home games could see changes to the university’s alcohol policy and will have to seek alternative parking spots as the campus accommodates stadium construction.

A proposed change to the university’s alcohol policy would ban kegs from the campus…

… The university already bans alcoholic beverages from the campus, but Student Government Association President Suzanne Williams said that hasn’t stopped tailgaters in campus parking lots from consuming alcohol before and during football games.

“It’s become where policy and practice are very different things,” she said. “We’re trying to make sure the policy is up to the practice.”

Some reader comments:

I would be for anything that could bring some class to what has become a black eye for the University. I hear too many first hand reports of ill-treatment of visitors like vehicle vandalism,verbal confrontations of people wearing opposing jerseys from drunks and don’t forget the classless profanity laced altered fight song. I hear more people say that the Lubbock experience is just not worth the trip.

How about enforcing the rules you have now and throwing the drunks in jail. The TTU police have their hands tied because heaven forbid they throw the wrong guy (big donor) in jail…

… I’ve seen an older drunk Tech fan punch and knock down a sober opposing fan, just for cheering for his team. I’ve also had that turned towards me and my family. It was so bad that none of my family will go back to Jones for a game….

Here’s TTU’s problem. You want to keep them drunk enough not to notice that Alberto Gonzales is on the faculty earning $100,000 for teaching one course, but not so drunk that they attack visitors.

But this might be Number One.

It makes it SO easy to cheat. And to charge other people money for helping them cheat.

Distance education makes it easy for students to learn nothing, while at the same time allowing people in the distance education office to supplement their salaries.

Best thing about it — Even when people get caught, the university can’t stop it from happening again!

Read and learn. But you probably already know.

A two-month UTB-TSC police investigation found school employees in 2008 had committed “gross academic fraud” after student employees and regular staff used their positions to steal test answers, according to a UTB police report obtained by The Brownsville Herald.

The wrongdoing occurred within the Blackboard Learning System, an online service commonly used at universities.

The system allows professors to post tests and course materials for students, teach entire courses online and keep online grade books. Blackboard generally serves to enrich the learning experience; however, former student employees of the school’s Office of Distance Education, the office that manages Blackboard, confessed to a police investigator that they had used the online system to access test answers to help themselves cheat, give the answers to other students, or even to sell.

… The police report shows that one student employee, who worked in the Office of Distance Education, sold test answers to another student through a student middleman for $60. The student employee got $30 and the middleman got $30. That same student employee agreed to take a test for another student in exchange for $40. A different student middleman was involved in this deal, but it’s unclear how much money that person was to receive. The student employee said he never received payment in this scam.

“The agreement was I would take the exam for a friend of (the middleman) and score no less than 96,” the student employee wrote in his confession. “The friend would then give (the middleman) $40, so that (the middleman) could give (the money) to me.”

That student goes on to give a detailed explanation of how he was able to obtain the other student’s Blackboard password, and take the test for the friend on one monitor, while pulling up the answers to the exam on a second computer screen.

“It was very easy to use this method,” he wrote. That student employee also said he stole answers for a friend to give to a girl his friend wanted to “get with.”…

— Brownsville Herald —