The Lancet gives truth the shaft

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not been a real good week for The Lancet, the well-known medical journal based in London and New York.

Remember the famous Iraq casualty study, researched by one Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins, and published in Lancet’s pages back in October of 2006? The one that found deaths far exceeding all previous estimates, and was quoted favorably by the antiwar crowd?

Now the American Association for Public Opinion Research has accused author Burnham of violating its code of ethics in failing to disclose his research methods, and Johns Hopkins is studying to see whether Burnham violated its research guidelines as well.

As for Burnham, he’s refusing to come clean, even now. Being secretive about such things is in and of itself a huge violation of standards: research must be transparent if it is to be considered valid, because it cannot be evaluated, tested, or perhaps replicated without this vital information. And Lancet is keeping mum as well about its role.

Now still another hugely influential piece of research originally published in Lancet has become exceedingly suspect. There is growing evidence that Andrew Wakefield, the man who popularized the idea that there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and whose 1998 research caused a resultant drop in the number of parents willing to have their children immunized, fudged his results.

This sort of thing happens in research periodically, amd it is always a disgrace. It goes to the heart of trust in science and violates its most basic tenets. The special problem here is that both studies had a great hand in shaping public opinion on controversial and important topics, as well.

A widely-read and highly-respected periodical such as Lancet has a profound duty to subject its articles to proper peer review. In recent years it appears to be falling down badly on the job. Could it be that the periodical is more interested in circulation and stirring up controversy than promoting proper science?

[NOTE: I have previously discussed the misconceptions about the so-called “autism epidemic,” as well as the fears that keep parents from vaccinating their children, here and here.]

The Madoff whistleblower: it’s the math, stupid(s)

The New Neo Posted on by

Just call him Cassandra.

Who? Harry Markopolos, that’s who, the man who tried to blow the whistle on Bernie Madoff for nine long years. But nobody heard—or, rather, nobody who was actually in a position to do anything heard him clearly enough.

Markopolos, an accountant and former investment manager from Boston, is having his moment in the sun, that long-awaited chance to say “I told you so.” Although it may give him some personal satisfaction to be vindicated, I doubt it does a whole lot to assuage the frustration he feels at having failed to stop Madoff’s Ponzi scheme before more people got taken in and more damage was done.

Markopolos says as much:

Why would people think I feel good about this?” Markopolos asked at one point in a series of recent interviews. “People think I’m a hero, but I didn’t stop him. He stopped himself.”

Over the past nine years, Markopolos sent detailed and multiple reports to the SEC pointing out red flags in Madoff’s fund operation, all to no avail. He could not get the New York office to understand what he was saying, and it was New York that had jurisdiction.

In an even more ironic note, the SEC head in Boston, Mike Garrity, was listening, understood, and told Markopolos that if he’d had oversight of the case “he would have had an inspection team inside Madoff’s operation the very next day.” But although Madoff’s investors were nation- and world-wide, Boston’s opinion didn’t count.

What was the problem in New York? Why did the top brass at the SEC there ignore what Markopolos colorfully describes as “the equivalent of Major League Baseball player batting .966 and no one suspecting a cheat?”

It’s hard to say for sure, since the former head of the New York SEC (she left the job for personal reasons before the Madoff scandal broke), Meaghan Cheung, seems to be forbidden at this point to say precisely what steps she followed in her investigation of the Madoff threat after she received a heads-up from Markopolos in 2005.

Markopolos thinks Cheung’s problem was that she was mathematically challenged:

In my conversations with her, I did not believe that she had the derivatives or mathematical background to understand the violation,” Markopolos wrote…

As for Markopolos’ reference to her supposed lack of mathematical acumen, Cheung said, “Investigations are conducted by lawyers and examiners and investigators. We have experts available to help us.”

Cheung is a lawyer, not an economist or an accountant or a financial expert. I don’t know how SEC investigations usually work. But if her investigation of Madoff did not involve her calling on the help of a very able accountant or accountants who were trained to detect fraud, then IMHO she would be guilty of gross negligence.

Yes, the math is complex. And yet Markopolos was able to do it. What’s more, Markopolos had given her “a map and a flashlight” to the problems, and yet she could not see them.

How did Markopolos come to believe so strongly in Madoff’s guilt? It was the math, stupid.

In 2000, Markopolos was the resident math whiz at Boston’s Rampart Investment Management when he was asked by his boss to figure out a way to match Madoff’s fabulous double-digit returns by figuring out how Madoff did it. But that proved much easier said than done:

“I’d say, ‘Hey Harry, how come you can’t run a program like this?,’ ” said Frank Casey, a former Rampart colleague who now runs a consulting firm for hedge fund investors.

For Markopolos, though, it was no joke. Again and again he could not simulate Madoff’s returns, using information he had gathered about Madoff’s trades in stocks and options. Madoff seemed to make money whether stock markets went up or down, a red flag to Markopolos.

“You can’t dominate all markets,” Markopolos said. “You have to have some losses.” Also, Madoff seemed unusually secretive, even to his own clients—another warning sign.

But although Markopolos saw the warning signs—and warned about them—it is curious that so few people understood what he was saying, or what to do about it. Markopolos seems to be an unusually tenacious sort of person, motivated by a sense of fairness and justice, as well as intellectual curiosity and excellent math chops. Unfortunately for him, the nation, and Madoff’s clients, these seem to be rare qualities.

The entire mess reminds me somewhat of the plight of Roger Boisjoly, the man who tried to warn of the problems with the space shuttle’s O-rings in the 80s, to no avail. The result? The Challenger explosion. Boisjoly has spent some time afterwards as a speaker on workplace ethics. Would that the New York SEC office had been on his engagement list.

Inexcusable and irresponsible

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama said it would be “inexcusable and irresponsible” if Congress doesn’t act immediately on his stimulus bill.

On the contrary. It’s “inexcusable and irresponsible” to rush it through without ascertaining whether its provisions are truly designed to stimulate the economy, and without eliminating the Democrat special-interest giveaways sandwiched in among the better proposals in the bill. The American people demand it, and a thoughtful approach requires it.

War on Guantanamo

The New Neo Posted on by

The charges against Cole bombing suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri have been dropped—for now.

It’s certainly not for lack of evidence. It’s due to the fact that President Obama isn’t keen on the way the Bush administration handled those captured in the so-called war on terror, and one of his big campaign promises was to close down Guantanamo and find a different way than military tribunals to try the enemy combatants there. He says he needs time to review all the cases. In order to do that for al-Nashiri, he needed to stop his military trial before it began. This would protect the right to try him later and not violate the double jeopardy law.

Will al-Nashiri ever come to trial? We don’t know. But if he does, it’s a good guess that if Obama has his way it will be in an ordinary court of justice, subject to all the legal protections (and liberal rules of discovery) such a venue guarantees. As an expert on the subject, Andy McCarthy, writes, this would be a very bad idea:

Obama will discover…evidence for his own belief that terrorism cases belong in the civilian justice system, where they were before 9/11. That would be a lamentable outcome. The military commissions have not performed well, but the paradigm of detentions and prosecutions under the laws of war””whether administered by the military or by a new hybrid system with civilian judicial oversight””is essential to our security.

If we go back to a September 10 way of doing things, under which only those who can be convicted under daunting civilian court standards may be detained, we will get September 11 results.

McCarthy, by the way, wrote one of the best articles I’ve ever read on the problems inherent in treating enemy terrorist combatants under our non-military criminal justice system. Here’s an excerpt:

In the constitutional license given to executive action, a gaping chasm exists between the realms of law enforcement and national security. In law enforcement, as former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr explained in congressional testimony last October, government seeks to discipline an errant member of the body politic who has allegedly violated its rules. That member, who may be a citizen, an immigrant with lawful status, or even, in certain situations, an illegal alien, is vested with rights and protections under the U.S. Constitution. Courts are imposed as a bulwark against suspect executive action; presumptions exist in favor of privacy and innocence; and defendants and other subjects of investigation enjoy the assistance of counsel, whose basic job is to thwart government efforts to obtain information. The line drawn here is that it is preferable for the government to fail than for an innocent person to be wrongly convicted or otherwise deprived of his rights.

Not so the realm of national security, where government confronts a host of sovereign states and sub-national entities (particularly terrorist organizations) claiming the right to use force. Here the executive is not enforcing American law against a suspected criminal but exercising national-defense powers to protect against external threats. Foreign hostile operatives acting from without and within are not vested with rights under the American Constitution. The galvanizing national concern in this realm is to defeat the enemy, and as Barr puts it, “preserve the very foundation of all our civil liberties.” The line drawn here is that government cannot be permitted to fail…

As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has observed, weakness is provocative. The fecklessness of meeting terrorist attacks with court proceedings””trials that take years to prepare and months to present, and that, even when successful, neutralize only an infinitesimal percentage of the actual terrorist population””emboldened bin Laden. But just as hurtful was the government’s promotion of terrorism trials in the first place. They were a useful vehicle if the strategic object was to orchestrate an appearance of justice being done. As a national-security strategy, they were suicidal, providing terrorists with a banquet of information they could never have dreamed of acquiring on their own.

Under discovery rules that apply to American criminal proceedings, the government is required to provide to accused persons any information in its possession that can be deemed “material to the preparation of the defense” or that is even arguably exculpatory. The more broadly indictments are drawn (and terrorism indictments tend to be among the broadest), the greater the trove of revelation. In addition, the government must disclose all prior statements made by witnesses it calls (and, often, witnesses it does not call).

This is a staggering quantum of information, certain to illuminate not only what the government knows about terrorist organizations but the intelligence agencies’ methods and sources for obtaining that information. When, moreover, there is any dispute about whether a sensitive piece of information needs to be disclosed, the decision ends up being made by a judge on the basis of what a fair trial dictates, rather than by the executive branch on the basis of what public safety demands.

It is true that this mountain of intelligence is routinely surrendered along with appropriate judicial warnings: defendants may use it only in preparing for trial, and may not disseminate it for other purposes. Unfortunately, people who commit mass murder tend not to be terribly concerned about violating court orders (or, for that matter, about being hauled into court at all).

Andrew McCarthy should know. He was the prosecutor for the 1993 WTC bombing case.

The al-Nashiri case isn’t about a suspect being held indefinitely without a trial—al-Nashiri was about to face trial, and now his trial is delayed while he remains imprisioned. But al-Nashiri was apparently subject to the controversial practice known as waterboarding, which could make his confession suspect. He’s certainly pleading that he only spilled the beans because of the waterboarding, and that he takes back his admissions.

Waterboarding was not the basis of the government’s decision to withdraw the charges, though. That had to do with the more general question of how and where these enemy combatants should be tried. At some point Obama will need to make up his mind about that, but that time may be a way off.

In the meantime, how about extraditing al-Nashiri to Yemen, where he already drew the death penalty in 2004 when he was tried in absentia for the Cole bombing?

Bill Gates and his mosquito moment: fighting malaria

The New Neo Posted on by

A showboating Bill Gates caused a momentary flurry of fear when he released a bunch of mosquitoes at the high-powered TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference, indicating to the prestigious movers and shakers he was addressing there that they should get a taste of what it might be like for poor third-world denizens of countries subject to mosquito-borne malaria (“there’s no reason only poor people should get malaria”). After they squirmed a bit, he let them know the mosquitoes weren’t infected.

Funny guy, that Bill. I guess his stunt came under the “entertainment” heading in the TED acronym. Next up on the agenda, no doubt, is a sort of shantytown set up on the grounds of the conference, where the leaders will experience what it’s like to live in hovels with no indoor plumbing.

What’s up with Gates? My guess is that he honed his skills teasing his sisters during his formative years (he’s a middle child and only son, with one older and one younger sister). But whatever the possible deep and murky psychological motivations for his approach, the thrust of his talk itself was to emphasize how many people in Africa still die of the disease, most of them children.

Gates has a plan:

He called for greater distribution of insect nets and other protective gear, and revealed that an anti-malaria vaccine funded by his foundation and currently in development would enter a more advanced testing phase in the coming months.

‘I am an optimist; I think any tough problem can be solved,’ he said.

All are laudable actions and very laudable goals. Funny thing, though; there’s a pretty good approach already for this particular tough problem—if environmentalists would stop discouraging the use of DDT. It’s a very effective means of controlling the insect vector that spreads the disease.

In 2006 WHO lifted its ban on the insecticide, and many believe the substance’s adverse environmental and health effects have been greatly exaggerated. For example, South Africa found that it was a very effective tool in the anti-malaria arsenal, with no seeming ill effects. And, as even this environmental group observes as it reluctantly agrees that wider use of DDT would be a good thing, “we believe that the benefits derived from eliminating malaria through the use of DDT far outweigh any dangers.”

Although I don’t have a full transcript, Gates seems to have ignored the entire question of DDT when addressing the TED crowd. Developing a vaccine is great, but in the meantime DDT would be a good stopgap approach:

Where DDT is used, malaria deaths plummet. Where it is not used, they skyrocket. For example, in South Africa, the most developed nation on the continent, the incidence of malaria had been kept very low (below 10,000 cases annually) by the careful use of DDT. But in 1996 environmentalist pressure convinced program directors to cease using DDT. One of the worst epidemics in the country’s history ensued, with almost 62,00 cases in 2000. Shortly after this peak, South Africa reintroduced DDT. In one year, malaria cases plummented by 80 percent. Next door, in Mozambique, whick doesn’t use DDT, malaria rates remain stratospheric. Similar experiences have been recorded in Zambia and other African countries.

No other chemical comes close to DDT as an affordable, effective way to repel mosquitos from homes, exterminate any that land on walls, and disorient any that are not killed or repelled, largely eliminating their urge to bite in homes that are treated once or twice a year with tiny amounts of this miracle insecticide. For impoverished countries, many of which are struggling to rebuild economies wracked by decades of disease and civil war, cost and effectiveness are critical considerations. For poor African countries, cost alone can be determinative.

Gates is a philanthropist, with a great concern for the poor in Africa. But it’s ironic that he doesn’t seem to be advocating the use of the most effective—and cost-effective—way of combating the problem that we have today, in addition to trying to develop newer and better approaches.

Obama: losing the message war vs. the idea war?

The New Neo Posted on by

What’s the problem with the stimulus? According to Jeanne Cummings of Politico, it’s all about spin, and Obama doesn’t have the resources he used to command to get his message across.

Say what? As President of the United States, he’s hampered? Whatever happened to TR’s bully pulpit?

Note that whenever President Bush (remember him?) had trouble selling one of his presidential programs, it was his own fault. Never mind that most of the MSM was against him from the start, as opposed to the pro-Obama press.

Now granted, Bush really was a somewhat poor communicator—although never as poor as the press and/or his opponents made out. But those of us who never drank deeply from the Obamalove well have noticed that although Obama has a nicer flow of rhetoric, the actual content has never been all that great or all that informative.

Cummings contrasts the resources Obama used to command as campaigner with those he now has in the White House. Poor guy, they just can’t compare:

Obama’s campaign was lauded for its visionary use of modern tools for old-fashioned politics. Through the Internet, it recruited supporters, collected dollars, rallied supporters and organized get-out-the vote operations. But when these modern heroes arrived at the White House, it was like the lights all went out.

Their contact with their millions-fold supporters was cut off, literally, as e-mail systems broke down and ”˜The List’ of political supporters was blocked at the iron gate…

Even with closet-sized spaces, the White House can only accommodate about only about 200 or so people for jobs ranging from national security to health care reform to Internet guru.

The Obama team “built this incredible campaign and now they have these ridiculously primitive tools. The communication tools they mastered don’t exist in the White House. It’s like they are in a cave,” said Trippi…

According to Evan Tracey, president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, about $65,000 has been spent on pro-stimulus ads in a handful of states.

In the last week of the presidential campaign, Obama was spending an average of $250,000 a day on commercials in the Philadelphia market, alone.

The solution is crystal clear: Obama needs a bailout. The government should vote to give this man more money! And soon—or we’ll have a catastrophe.

Tears, idle tears: we know not what they mean

The New Neo Posted on by

We sometimes speak of having a “good cry,” reflecting the common assumption that crying when upset can lead to a release of tension and make us feel better.

This NY Times article reports on research that indicates that this is more true in some situations than others:

The study found crying with just one other person present was significantly more likely to produce a cathartic effect than doing so in front of a larger group.

In addition, depressed people don’t seem to benefit as much as others from crying.

To me, both findings are in the nature of, “Well, duh.” And the study didn’t appear to deal with what is perhaps the most common setting of all for crying: alone.

Crying is nearly universal, but not all that well understood. So let’s just let the poets (Tennyson’s wonderful and mysterious “Tears, Idle Tears”) have the last word [emphasis mine]:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Naysaying the stimulus bill is stimulating for Republicans

The New Neo Posted on by

As the stimulus bill becomes more and more unpopular with the American public, the Republican Party seems for the moment to be the unexpected political beneficiary, because of their opposition to it.

I haven’t read the bill myself, since it’s over seven hundred pages long. But those who have (and my hat is off to them) describe it as composed of programs that actually might have the desired effect of stimulating the economy, plus another bunch of proposals that will not.

Here’s a summary from Joshua Zumbrun of Forbes:

We estimate some $350 billion is likely to flow into the economy quickly, $255 billion won’t do much, at least not in a useful time frame, and the impact of $144 billion in promised payroll tax cuts are a toss up. The remainder, about $135 billion, is comprised of dozens of smaller programs that would have little individual effect.

Some of the non-stimulus proposals involve energy and the environment, education, and infrastructure spending.

So what are the Republicans proposing? According to Byron York, writing in The Corner:

Several Republicans now want to throw the whole bill out and replace it with a package that is nearly all tax cuts ”” “twice the jobs at half the price.”

The stimulus package highlights not only the usual political jockeying for position and power in Congress, but the very real economic disagreements between the two parties. Republicans have gotten away from their traditional fiscal conservatism in recent years, but now is the moment they just might return to it—especially since a return to principle may suit their political fortunes, as well.

Obama: reality may not bite yet, but it seems to be nibbling

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama’s hit a bit of a rough patch lately.

He’s finding that changing Washington isn’t as easy as it sounded on the campaign trial. It’s been harder to get a pass from the press and public for his nominees than it was to get one for himself way back when he was running for president instead of actually having to be president.

It will be interesting to see how this novel notion of accountability affects Obama. Something seems to be making him rather tired, however. Yesterday he said as much on a visit to a local school:

“We were just tired of being in the White House,” the president candidly told the gleeful second-graders at Capital City Public Charter School.

“We got out! They let us out!” Mrs. Obama said as the kids and their teachers laughed.

Yes, yes, of course—they were joking. But it’s an odd jest to make, isn’t it? I think it may represent more than a little bit of the truth.

I worried about Obama’s stamina way back in May of 2007, when he offered being tired as an excuse for an early verbal flub. To the best of my knowledge, this vulnerability to exhaustion (and the need to offer it as an excuse) was the very first thing I noticed and wrote about regarding Obama:

Just as the Presidency is not for the shy or those tortured by ambivalence, just as it requires a certain amount of narcissism (perhaps more than is healthy in ordinary life), it also requires true grit and enormous””almost superhuman””endurance. And if the President doesn’t feel up to it all the time, he/she is supposed to shut up about it and not let others see.

The photo accompanying yesterday’s school visit showed Obama and wife reading to the children in the usual photo-op:

obamareads1.jpg

Remind you of anything? It did me. When I saw the picture, I couldn’t help but think of a day in 2001 only a few months after President Bush had become President.

As nearly everyone knows, he was reading to schoolchildren when notice of the terrorist attacks first came to him. He was widely criticized for waiting several minutes for further information from aides before reacting, and for certain actions in the first few hours afterwards that seemed in retrospect to be evidence of confusion and indecision on his part.

I always cut him a lot of slack, even back then when I was an opponent of his. I think he did a remarkable job of regrouping fairly quickly from news that must have been not only shocking, but truly unprecedented.

I do not wish anything even remotely resembling 9/11 on either the nation or on President Obama. But when I saw yesterday’s photo, I could not help thinking that the confusion of his first couple of weeks is hardly an indication that he would face a similar crisis with complete clarity, making split-second decisions that would be any better than Bush’s. Perhaps they would even be quite a bit worse.

[NOTE: Let’s hope Cheney is wrong about this prognostication.]