Recipe, Article à l’indienne:
Copy.
Add “The Indian Scenario” to the title.
When accused of plagiarism, blame people junior to you.
You want a class act, you way definitely want West Virginia University. The CBS News writer quoted above doesn’t even bother going back to football coach Rich Rodriguez, who brought such esteem to WVU’s sports program shortly before Heave-Ho Holgorsen came along.
An Australian professor and judge dies.
[Roddy] Meagher was … Challis lecturer in principles of equity and Roman law at the University of Sydney for many years. He wrote important books and monographs on several topics, most significantly Equity: Doctrines and Remedies with W.M.C. Gummow and J.R.F. Lehane.
He taught legions of students at the law school on Phillip Street over almost three decades, some of whom complained that he talked to a painting on the wall rather than to them. He said he was shy and did not know quite where to look, so he just looked to one side.
… He valued beauty, honesty, humour, loyalty and scholarship and was the most devoted friend imaginable. He loathed foolishness, hypocrisy and pretension…
“Ghosted” medical school professors – researchers who allow themselves to be named as authors of studies which are in fact all, or in part, written by ghost-writing agencies in the pay of drug firms promoting certain pills and devices – are a dime a dozen.
But not all ghosted – or in various other ways pharma-compromised – professors are created equal. When they come from our most respected universities – Harvard, Duke, Penn, Stanford – they lift a merely scummy underhanded practice all the way up to a national disgrace.
Professors are themselves of course reluctant to talk about the practice. In his withering response to Brown University professor Peter Kramer’s recent effort to defend antidepressants, Felix Salmon notes that Kramer
…takes care not to even mention part two of [Marcia] Angell’s two-part [New York Review of Books] series, where she talks at length about how psychiatry has been captured by drug companies, who “are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers”. (After reading Angell’s second essay, you’ll certainly wonder why Kramer doesn’t disclose how much income he gets from pharmaceutical companies.)
One of these prestigious medical centers, and the president of its university, has just hit all the papers.
[It is alleged that] five psychiatrists allowed their names to be appended to a manuscript that was drafted by medical communications company Scientific Therapeutics Information, hired by SmithKline Beecham, now GlaxoSmithKline. The paper [reportedly] misrepresented information from a research study on the antidepressant drug Paxil.
The manuscript published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2001, and cited many times since, suggested that Paxil may be beneficial in the treatment of bipolar depression, without acknowledging the medical communication company’s contribution or the extent of GSK’s involvement.
If any of the claims are true, it’s a really icky case: The complainant, a University of Pennsylvania professor who, along with colleagues, was involved in the research and writing of the paper, even claims that “the ghostwriting firm, Scientific Therapeutics Information in Springfield, N.J., chose [one researcher] as the paper’s first author and that Glaxo then decided to replace him with [Charles] Nemeroff.” [Background on Nemeroff here.]
Eeny meeny miny mo, who’s the biggest pharma ho? Ghost company offers one candidate; pharma co. another… Meanwhile, where are the actual, like, professors of medicine who supposedly wrote this shit? Sitting on their asses, directing their secretaries to add another ghost-written article to their hundreds and hundreds of ghost-written or guest-written articles…
Since this scandal largely involves the University of Pennsylvania, one would expect at least a word or two from its president, Amy Gutmann – especially since she chairs President Obama’s bioethics commission. Rather than traveling to Washington and generalizing about good and evil in the world of science, Gutmann should stay home, release a statement about this situation, and investigate the troubling ethical matters in her own backyard.
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Many more details here, including the shameful non-involvement of some authors of the study, and the undisclosed pharma affiliation of others.
Mr UD is away at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, La Kid is at her internship at Congressional Quarterly Press, and UD is at home in Garrett Park. It’s too hot to go outside. She has positioned her laptop in front of the kitchen windows because she wants to watch two yellow-shafted flickers feed their baby.
These beautiful birds look like this.
If you enlarge the image (click on it), you’ll see a bit of yellow under one of the bird’s wings. What the image doesn’t show you is the whole bird suddenly turning bright yellow when it flattens and shakes itself in the dirt while cleaning its wings.
UD can watch tons of robins and cardinals feed their babies. That’s nothing. The flickers are special.
After her dog died last year, UD cleared the fenced-in wilderness that had been his play area. She took out a lot of bushes and weeds, cut back on ivy, relocated azaleas. She created a path and threw down mulch.
In a hidden corner, she placed a black chaise.
Years of overgrowth and a surrounding of mature trees make the place very shady, a private little garden wrapped in green. As UD cuts back on it more and more, she realizes what she’s got, what she’s wrought, is a meditation space, a zen oasis.
… so with Paul’s two wine bottles, it’s the object that counts. Like it or not, human beings glom onto things. When it comes to questionable behavior, they find physical, discrete, countable things vivid and graspable.
Vast convoluted abstract bad behavior — Goldman Sachs pushing all that money around — eludes us, but the four hundred dollar haircut, the seven (I think. I’ll have to ask my staff.) houses, these we get.
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Although the Ryan story does have an easily detectable gamey scent, its real meaning indeed lies deeper. At Daily Kos, Laura Clawson narrates:
Hedge fund billionaires make giant contributions to elite universities and get like-minded professors hired to named chairs… Together, they influence politicians, who set the economic agenda in Congress and to a great extent in the media.
… [T]he very baldness of what’s we’re seeing in this particular case is a helpful reminder of the myriad ways money buys access. It’s not just campaign contributions or even the promise of high-paying jobs to politicians who’ve left office. Money buys experts. It buys credentials like named chairs for the experts you, as a billionaire, want to be influential. And then you and your pet expert go to a nice dinner and drink $350 bottles of wine with a high-profile member of Congress and when he cites the ideas you were pushing, he’s not citing some self-interested hedge fund guy, he’s citing a University of Chicago economics professor.
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Fifty years ago, Clark Kerr wrote The Uses of the University.
Clawson is describing the uses of the university today.
Daktronics Inc., in conjunction with the University of Kentucky, are pleased to announce the addition of an integrated, high definition football video and sound system for Commonwealth Stadium, home of the Wildcats. The debut for the multi-million dollar system is scheduled for the Wildcats’ 2011 home opener September 10 vs. Central Michigan. … The most visible components of the system will undoubtedly be the two high definition Daktronics HD-X video displays to be installed behind each end zone. Measuring approximately 37 feet high by 80 feet wide, each display will provide live and recorded video in high definition, with picture in picture capability with multiple zones to show scores, statistics, and sponsor information. …
Yes, your Adzillatron can never get enough upgrades. There’s a lot of sponsor information to pound into your head, and students love to pay for the privilege.
… can be ugly. Some of these details may be difficult for more sensitive viewers.
But if you’re not that sensitive, read on.
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UD‘s alma mater, by the way, is getting quite the gold-plated reputation.
Remember M. Todd Henderson?
And in Ravelstein, Saul Bellow immortalized Allan Bloom:
[Nobody had ever questioned Ravelstein’s] need for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban cigars, unobtainable in the U.S., for the Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Mont Blanc pens or Baccarat or Lalique crystal to serve wine in — or to have it served… [At Lucas-Carton restauarant we were] attended by no fewer than four waiters. The sommelier, wearing his badge of office on a chain of keys, supervised the filling of the glasses. For each course there was an appropriate wine, while other waiters working like acrobats reset the china and the silver.
Yeah, well. Problem is – what comes after this? First they “vacate revenues earned from using ineligible players.” Next thing you know they’ll stop giving three million dollars a year to coaches who cheat.
Misdeeds — from hiding study results to paying off doctors — have made Big Pharma an inviting and, frankly, an appropriate target… Antidepressants have something like celebrity status; exposing them makes headlines.
It’s not that anti-depressants have celebrity status; it’s that more Americans take them than almost any other drug. Americans of all ages, including very little children. They make headlines because they are – I and many other observers believe – massively over-prescribed.
Peter Kramer’s missing the point here, in other words. As a result, his effort, in tomorrow’s New York Times, to defend anti-depressants against Marcia Angell, Irving Kirsch, and a range of other scientists who’ve argued that they achieve only a slightly better outcome than placebos, has a vague, irrelevant feel. He complains about the limitations of the studies Angell and Kirsch cite, but these limitations aren’t particularly significant, and the studies he cites have their own limitations.
Kramer insists, for instance, that anti-depressants seem to work for “social unease.” He does not ask whether social unease is something we should think of as needing treatment. Treatment with powerful brain-altering chemicals, chemicals that have significant side effects. He does not ask what we should do about a culture in which wall-to-wall happy pill television commercials make socially uneasy people demand anti-depressant medication.
Instead, Kramer points out that “data bearing on the question is messy.” Yes, it is. But increasingly the data points toward remarkably little effect, for many of the people taking them, from anti-depressants. To say this is not to be a headline-grabber. On the contrary, it is to express a concern about the well-being of one’s fellow Americans.
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Lacking an empirical basis for his claim that anti-depressants deserve to be given to masses of people, Kramer turns to scare tactics.
[I]t is dangerous for the press to hammer away at the theme that antidepressants are placebos. They’re not. To give the impression that they are is to cause needless suffering.
No one says anti-depressants are placebos. Would that they were. People getting bad side effects from anti-depressants would be far safer taking placebos. What people are increasingly saying — and shame on the press for reporting it! — is that when it comes to lifting depression, these pills are pretty much the same as placebos. For most people, they don’t seem to do squat.
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Felix Salmon also notices the remarkably vague, not-really-there feel of Kramer’s article.
… Ohio State University needs to be bending over backwards to show the world it’s an institution of higher learning and not a football program that has students and classrooms in place to provide a fan base.
A puzzled Protestant in James Joyce’s “The Dead” tries to understand the morbid ways of monks:
He was astonished to hear that the monks never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins. He asked what they did it for.
“That’s the rule of the order,” said Aunt Kate firmly.
“Yes, but why?” asked Mr. Browne.
Aunt Kate repeated that it was the rule, that was all. Mr. Browne still seemed not to understand. Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world. The explanation was not very clear for Mr. Browne grinned and said:
“I like that idea very much but wouldn’t a comfortable spring bed do them as well as a coffin?”
“The coffin,” said Mary Jane, “is to remind them of their last end.”
This phrase, their last end, returns in the final sentence of the story, as its main character suddenly feels, in a way he never has before, the reality of his own, and others’, deaths:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Or say he feels not so much the physical immediacy of personal dissolution as the snowflake-like delicacy, the fragile tentativeness, of any life… So that the coffin-lying monks don’t seem all that odd, acquainting themselves in this way with the quiet dark that underlies our lives.
I thought of Joyce’s story this morning as I read about a Korean professor who offers classes in therapeutic coffin-lying. She explains:
“The top cause of death for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s [in Korea] is suicide. These people are the working age group … [The seminar] can change the meaning of one’s life and give a chance to know oneself.”
Indeed Korea has a very serious suicide problem… And since it does seem to be the case among some young suicides that they do it because they don’t really believe death is death, as it were, it might make sense to get them closer to its reality… If lying in a coffin for a few moments does anything like this…
But Professor Kang Kyung-ah clearly has a greater epiphany in mind here, a moment of clarity about the meaning of life which allows you to climb out of the coffin and live joyously and authentically.
There are other versions of therapeutic, or spiritual, coffin-lying, almost all of them carrying this same assumption that descending into being dead is a way of reascending into being alive.
It’s an intriguing literalization of Heidegger’s being-towards-death idea, the idea that we can’t live authentic lives until we’ve come to authentic grips with our last end. Simon Critchley summarizes it:
[F]reedom consists in the affirmation of the necessity of one’s mortality. It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. …[T]he acceptance [of] one’s mortal limitation [is] the basis for an affirmation of one’s life… It is only in relation to being-towards-death that I become passionately aware of my freedom [and am thus enabled to live an authentic life].
There’s an excellent overview of the gruesome mental health industry in today’s Globe and Mail.
Even as the DSM tries to be more inclusive and “dimensional,” it runs the risk of sucking millions of merely unhappy and eccentric souls into the ranks of the mentally disturbed, at vast cost.
… in the case of depression would be the practice of giving depressed people multiple anti-depressants. A recent study suggests that
Combination antidepressant treatment using 2 antidepressants appears to offer no advantage over monotherapy in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and may even do more harm than good, new research suggests.
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A public policy group in England responds to the amazing statistics on British women and their use of antidepressants:
These shocking figures reveal an escalating crisis in women’s use of anti-depressants. We know from working with women and girls in our centres that anti-depressants have a role to play but they are too readily prescribed as the first and only remedy. Three in five women are offered no alternatives to drugs at their reviews and one in four currently on anti-depressants have waited more than a year [to be considered for psychotherapy].