Not-so-smart-smear tactics from Consumer Reports

Here’s an update to Consumer Reports charge that STATS is funded by ExxonMobil. Apparently, because STATS received grants from the Sarah Scaife foundation (though not in recent years), and Scaife had stock in ExxonMobil,  therefore STATS was being funded by ExxonMobil.

By the same logic, every employee for Consumer Reports should now disclose the nature of their stock investments and retirement accounts – just in case they turn out to be funded [sic] by the companies whose products they rate.

Meanwhile, back to the science – a top EPA expert today rejected Consumer Reports claim about BPA.

Consumer Affairs unhappy with STATS

Consumer Affairs, a publication that should not be confused with Consumer Reports, has reported STATS material before;  but this morning, it isn’t happy with us. In fact, it’s so unhappy that we criticized Consumer Reports for its new study on BPA in cans, that it made a few errors of its own.

For the record, I do not have degrees in philosophy from Trinity College Dublin, as the publication claims.  My STATS bio and my own personal website indicate my education, and I don’t actually describe what I read for at Trinity (BA Hons in English and Art History, M.Phil in Reformation and Enlightenment Studies – an interdisciplinary degree that did include some philosophy – for those interested).  I do note that I did  graduate work in philosophy at Georgetown University. I also have an MS in journalism from Columbia University.

Consumer Affairs claims that STATS is “loosely affiliated” with George Mason University in Virginia, as if this was merely a gloss.  But the author fails to note that STATS Research Director, Dr. Rebecca Goldin,  is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at GMU, or that STATS president, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, was a founding professor of the University’s Center for Health and Risk Communication, and that STATS and the Center collaborated on a groundbreaking survey of toxicologists on chemical risks. Would a close affiliation require us to sleep on the Fairfax campus ?

Consumer Affairs, which runs advertisements for BPA-free products and trial lawyers, and which only appears to run BPA stories about studies which find evidence of risk, no matter how tentative  (BPA makes girls mean) while neglecting to run stories about studies which refute the claims of a risk (last week’s massive EPA study), criticized STATS for:

“findings [that]are nearly always presented in an adversarial, take-no-prisoners format that leaves little room for disagreement or scientific discourse.”

STATS primary findings on BPA are contained in a 27,000 word, 50-page analysis that extensively cited the lead authors of three risk assessments, including that of the European Union. In fact, I can safely say that no non-academic publication has reported the issue in such scientific detail. And if God is in the details, so is the devil.

As Consumer Affairs claims,

“Federal guidelines currently put the daily upper limit of safe exposure at 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight. But that level is based on experiments done in the 1980s rather than hundreds of more recent animal and laboratory studies indicating that serious health risks could result from much lower doses of BPA.”

But how can we not sound adversarial when we note that this reference dose was affirmed by the European Union in 2006 and 2008 as being safe. (In Europe it is called the Tolerable Daily Intake, or TDI). This can be checked by going to the EU’s risk assessment. A visit there will also explain why the “hundreds of more recent” studies were rejected as methodologically flawed. So the reference dose is not out of date, and the FDA’s recent decision on the safety of the chemical relied on the work done by Europe.

We do not believe its in the interests of scientific discourse to pretend that this – and masses of other statistically rigorous data – doesn’t exist. Or that its impossible to distinguish reliable from unreliable research. We also believe that the European Union’s regulatory apparatus – especially given its deference to the precautionary principle -  is more rigorous than the testing capabilities of Consumer Reports.   If the mainstream media reported the European Union’s findings on BPA – or those of Japan, Australia or New Zealand, or even California, which did not find any cause in the data to restrict BPA -  STATS would have no interest in following this topic.

Don’t bank on the rank

The United States ranks 37^th in the world in health care, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Google the key words, and you find 3.7 million instances, with numerous mentions in recent months as the debate on health care reform heated up. What you won’t find are many articles questioning whether the statistic is true.

Enter the Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy,” Carl Bialik, to deconstruct this damning statistic. First, it is based on a report released almost ten years ago. Second, this very report is based on out-of-date statistics that are incomplete and inaccurate.

The WHO ranking is composed of five criteria – life expectancy, responsiveness in providing diagnosis and treatment, inequality in health-care outcomes, inequality in responsiveness, and individual spending. The latter three proved to be the most controversial.

One huge issue was that the required data was not readily available for every nation; therefore, Bialik explains, WHO researchers would calculate the relationship between the five factors and whatever available numbers they could find. This means that literacy rates were sometimes used to approximate the quality of health care.

It is also difficult to create a ranking based on life expectancy when it is affected by a variety of factors outside of the heath-care system, such as diet and exercise habits, poverty, and homicide rate.

But wait, there’s more! According to an article from the Cato Institute, the data for each factor was collected from individual agencies and ministries. This creates inconsistencies in definition, reporting and methodology.

When individual spending is removed, the U.S. actually ranked much higher on the list. Bialik writes:

“…the WHO took the additional step of adjusting for national health expenditures per capita, to calculate each country’s health-care bang for its bucks. Because the U.S. ranked first in spending, that adjustment pushed its ranking down to 37th. Dominica, Costa Rica and Morocco ranked 42nd, 45th and 94th before adjusting for spending levels, compared to the U.S.’s No. 15 ranking. After adjustment, all three countries ranked higher than the U.S.”

Click here to see a chart from the Wall Street Journal that shows health care rankings when spending is removed.

OurBlook talks with Thad McIlroy

Originally posted on our collaborative site, Ourblook.

(Author-editor Thad runs The Future of Publishing, Inc. …www.thefutureofpublishing.com… what better guy to ask than him about the future of books?)

Newspaper circulation is declining, and fewer people are watching the TV networks’ evening news. What is the situation with books? Are any segments doing particularly well; any particularly badly?

TM: Book publishing is not suffering nearly as heavily as most other media segments. As another example beyond newspapers and TV news, after years of rapid sales increases, the computer gaming industry saw June 2009 sales decline 31 percent (emphasis mine) from the same month last year. (I consider all forms of publishing and media in my studies on www.thefutureofpublishing.com, as I believe that there are very important interrelationships between different media industries).

According to the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), total U.S. book publishers’ net revenues reached $40.32 billion in 2008, up 1.0 percent over 2007, while 2008 unit sales reached nearly 3.1 billion, down 1.5 percent over 2007.

Children’s book sales are often down when it’s not a “Harry Potter Year,” although Stephanie Myers and her vampires are picking up the slack. According to the BISG, sales of professional books showed strong revenue growth, posting a 4.0 percent increase between 2007 and 2008. Sales of Elhi and College books also continued to grow in 2008, seeing an increase of 4.5 percent in net revenue for each category. Meanwhile the religious segment underperformed the book publishing industry as a whole in 2008, with revenues declining 10 percent.

Book review sections at some major newspapers have been eliminated or curtailed. Your thoughts?

TM: I don’t see this as a major problem because the web is providing probably several thousand times the coverage of books beyond what newspapers ever did, and is engaging readers more deeply than just reading reviews. When you look at a web site like Canada’s largest newspaper The Globe and Mail, while its print coverage of books is down, its web site has greatly enhanced book coverage, of course in a far more engaging way.

It is easier than ever to write a book … if it’s ever easy to write one … in that e-mail makes interviewing and research more convenient, and word processors make adding to, deleting or shuffling content as efficient as possible. Yet many great books were produced in the past with laborious quill pen handwriting. Is there much of a correlation between the type of process and the quality of product? Are books better than ever or worse than ever or neither?

TM: Great question; tough to answer.

I recall that when the use of personal computers first exploded in the 1980s, many authors insisted they would continue to use pen, pencil or typewriter … that the ease of making changes made them worse writers, not better ones. I still occasionally encounter that sentiment in author interviews today.

I argue that creativity in writing exists completely apart from the tools used to create. All writers must use the tools that they are most comfortable with … good writers will produce good work; bad writers the opposite.

With nonfiction, there’s a significant distinction to be made. Probably more than two categories are required here, but to simplify the argument let’s say that there is literary nonfiction and there is informational nonfiction. As with fiction, literary nonfiction requires great skill with language, grammar, and also great intelligence in formulating arguments and presenting them persuasively.

Informational nonfiction is tasked mostly with being clear, comprehensible and accurate. The very good (and best-selling) computer journalist, David Pogue (from the New York Times), dictates all of his books using Dragon Naturally Speaking … excellent transcription software. I write a great deal, but find that my conversational voice is very different from my writer’s voice, and so stick with the computer (not however with pencil or pen!). I find that I type at roughly the pace that I compose reasonably clear sentences and am a great believer in rewriting and in good editors.

The extraordinary growth in self-publishing .. I estimate one million titles were self-published last year (although a significant portion were reprints of out-of-print books) … means that a lot of not-very-skilled writers are getting their work into print, generally without bothering to pay a good editor to help, so there is a lot more dross on the market than ever before. But the dross does not inhibit great writers to continue in their work, and while the largest publishers are cutting back on their total title output, I’d argue that any fine author can find a publisher who will bring their book into print. Marketing on the Internet: well that’s still a relatively new and developing skill (which even the largest publishers have yet to master).

Do you foresee any social media techniques … i.e., Twitter, texting … being used by people writing books in either seeking or receiving material?

TM: Certainly social networks are a great mechanism for reaching out to people, whether to source information, solicit input or comment, and to publicize the final product. Narrative is not well-served if constructed a sentence or two at a time; it favors more comprehensive forms. Yet apparently in Japan writers are finding some success with novels sent as numerous short text messages.

The overriding point is that the novel is as much an accident of history, technology and economics as the feature film is. The LP, cassette tape and CD in the music industry were convenient formats to manufacture, market and distribute and led to a particular form of music called “the album.” Wikipedia defines this as “a collection of related (emphasis mine) audio or music tracks distributed to the public.” But now that people can easily download single tracks from an album (CD, mp3, whatever), the concept has been revealed for the essential fraud that it was. Relatively few albums had any thematic consistency. They were just collections of music that could fill about 60 minutes. Back then selling “singles” was not as profitable, and so they were priced too high to become as popular.

There’s no question that the Internet and the web will create numerous remarkable opportunities for creative expression. The book has no monopoly on creativity.

Books have always been fixtures in our culture because they are personal, physical products that are lovingly kept in one’s home. Do electronic reading devices such as Kindle threaten that or augment that?

TM: Years ago one of my mentors, Neil McLean, began referring to books as “artifacts.” It was a prescient recognition that the physical object is just that; what’s contained within is what truly matters. At the same time, “book arts” should not be neglected. Designers are self-interestedly inclined to overemphasize the value of design and manufacturing in a book. But consider the alternative. What is “Alice in Wonderland” without the superb illustrations of Sir John Tenniel? What are the great dictionaries without their very fine and carefully-selected woodcuts? Many authors and designers feel that choices in typography can enhance the meaning or impact of their text.

The current e-reader offerings tend to drop illustrations and do a great disservice to typography (amongst other small crimes). Of course technology can address these issues over time. But I just do not think that the notion of dedicated eReaders makes any sense. Those who read almost always are interested also in some combination of film, music, e-mail, phone, texting, Web-surfing, etc. The winning technology will find a single device to offer optimal user-experience for each of these varied but connected interests.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about the past, present or future of books?

TM: When the U.S. media look at the changes in media consumption trends, naturally enough, they tend to focus on the United States. This is terrifically misleading. Newspapers are thriving in countries such as India and China. Pirating is a even larger challenge in those countries than it is here. The increase in literacy in the Third World drives greater demand for books: on what medium remains to be seen, although paper is currently most cost-effective in those countries.

On my thefutureofpublishing web site, I focus on the interconnectedness of all media and on many external influences. Right now a lot of the energy driving the demand for e-books is a belief that electronic books are more carbon-neutral than paper books, although this argument is highly suspect when you consider the power demands of the enormous computer server farms that facilitate their distribution, and the non-biodegradability of most of e-reader components. But of course it’s easy for people to think that digital = eco; paper = destruction.

I say to my friends and colleagues: “You should feel blessed. You are part of a revolution in how information is distributed far greater than the invention of the printing press, and certain to have more far-reaching effects. Yes, it can be wearying to keep up with it all, but think of it as adventure, not as threat.”

(Thad says about himself: “Writing and publishing are in my blood. My father, Kim McIlroy, was an author, playwright and broadcaster. My great-uncle, Gordon Hill Grahame, was a novelist (his first novel, “The Bond Triumphant,” won Hodder and Stoughton’s Canadian Prize Novel Contest in 1922). My great-great-great (etc.) uncle was Kenneth Grahame, author of the children’s classic “The Wind in the Willows” (remember Toad of Toad Hall?).” For the rest of his bio, go to … http://www.thefutureofpublishing.com/pages/about_thad.html )

The “best buy” in public health for the West

In the late 1940s, Jerry Morris, Director of Britain’s Medical Research Counci’s Social Medicine Unit devised one of the first great epidemiological studies to figure out why so many Britons were dying of heart attacks: he looked at bus drivers and their counterparts who, this being the land of double-decker buses, ran up and down the stairs each day collecting tickets. “And there was a striking difference in the heart-attack rate,” Morris tells the Financial Times Simon Kuper. “The drivers of these double-decker buses had substantially more, age for age, than the conductors.”

The key difference between the two groups: the bus drivers led, essentially, sedentary lives; the ticket collectors were constantly moving.  As Kuper notes, in a fascinating article, the idea that exercise  – or the lack thereof – was intimately associated with disease was so radical, Morris sat on the results until they had been tested by every conceivable means. Then the data from postal workers came in, and the results were the same: those who actually delivered the mail were significantly healthier than those who sat behind counters or worked in an office.

Morris went on to write one of the pioneering works of modern epidemiology,  The Uses of Epidemiology (1957);  but he also started to live out the conclusions from his study of the data, becoming possibly Britain’s first jogger. Still alive at 99 – and still working – Morris has constantly advocated for physical exercise as a vital change required of humans living, for the first time, in a sedentary culture. As he tells Kuper:

“For the first time in history,” says Morris, “the mass of the population has deliberately got to take exercise. It’s a new phenomenon, which is not appreciated.” For decades he has tried to persuade governments to make exercise easier. He was involved in the pioneering English National Fitness Survey of 1990, which found that half of women aged 55 to 64 could not comfortably walk a mile. These people were in effect disabled. The government ignored the report. Since then, British exercise levels haven’t changed much. His voice becomes high-pitched with outrage: “Just imagine, what historians in the future are going to say about the way we’ve allowed this epidemic of childhood obesity. ‘Disgrace’ is a sort of mild word.”

There are no straight lines in nature

It turns out we really do walk in circles. A new study published in Current Biology finds that people have difficulty walking in a straight line when cues are not available to guide the way.

The researchers, from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, observed the walking patterns of the study participants using global positioning software. They had the volunteers walk unfamiliar terrain and found that they all had a tendency to walk in a circle or veer from a straight line.

According to the Associated Press, in one test, two of the participants were told to walk a straight line through the Sahara Desert during the day – both veered slightly from a straight path. Another participant walked through the desert at night and started out going straight; however, when it became cloudy he started to turn and ended up in the same direction in which he began.

A second test took place in the Bienwald forest in Germany with six participants. As soon as the sun disappeared, four ended up walking in circles even though they thought they were going straight. Two others walked when the sun was clearly visible and managed to walk in a reasonably straight line

One theory, according to Reuters, has said that people tend to walk in circles because of differences in leg strength, creating a tendency to move in one direction.

To test this, the researchers had the participants attempt walking a straight line while wearing a blindfold. They found that the same participant would walk in random directions and paths, without a bias toward a particular direction.

Lead researcher, Jan Souman, told Reuters:

“Walking in circles is therefore not caused by differences in leg length or strength, but more likely the result of increasing uncertainty about where straight ahead is.”

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STD testing recommended for DC teens

According to the D.C. Department of Health, a program that began last year at eight Washington D.C. high schools found 13 percent of 3,000 students tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease – gonorrhea and chlamydia being the most prevalent. Even more shocking? Half of the cases of gonorrhea and chlamydia in D.C. are found in teenagers.

The results of a 2007 survey by the D.C. public school system also provided some troubling numbers. Out of the 12,000 students that attend public school in D.C., 60 percent of public high school students reported being sexually active and 20 percent of those students reported having sex with at least four partners. 30 percent of middle school students reported having sex, and 12 percent of those students said they had three or more partners.

To help put this in perspective, a 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one in four girls between the ages of 14 and 19 has an STD in the United States – that’s 26 percent or 3.2 million teenage girls. Forty percent of the girls reported having sex. HPV (human papillomavirus) was found to be the most common infection followed by chlamydia and the herpes simplex virus. According to Avert.org, STD statistics frequently show an uneven gender distribution, typically with a higher rate among females than males.

As a response to these alarming findings and as an expansion of last year’s program, D.C. will now offer STD testing to all high school students for the upcoming school year. First, the students are required to attend a lecture about sexually transmitted diseases. They can then choose whether they would like to provide a urine sample for testing.

The D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a non-profit dedicated to solving public policy problems in D.C., praises the program in a new report. They commend it as a step forward in decreasing the city’s AIDS rate, which has now reached about 3 percent and is the highest in the country, according to the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration.

Walter Smith, executive director of D.C. Appleseed tells the Washington Post:

“The program tells us that a lot of students in the public school system are engaging in unsafe sex…if 13 percent of these students are testing positive for STDs, those same kids could get HIV. A lot needs to be done to get the message out to the schools… and this very high STD rate is an indication that what we’ve been doing is not effective.”

This program allows D.C. to join the increasing number of cities that provide STD testing for high school students.

Cash gain = less pain

A new study finds that money not only eases physical pain, but also helps lessen the emotional pain caused by feeling socially rejected. The results concluded that participants experienced both psychological and physical effects from either touching money or thinking about expenses.

Through six experiments, the researchers hoped to determine if money can alter how one experiences social acceptance and rejection, as well as physical pain.

One experiment consisted of 84 participants who were divided into two groups. One group was asked to count money and the other counted paper. Each person was then asked to play a computer game called Cyberball. Half of the participants played a rigged version designed to exclude the players from receiving turns. The volunteers who played this version reported feeling snubbed; however, those that had counted the money experienced lower levels of social rejection than the group that had counted paper.

Another experiment also began with one group counting money and the other plain paper. The participants were then asked to immerse their fingers in very hot water. Overall, the group that counted money reported lower levels of pain.

The scientists repeated the experiments without the bills to determine if the money had served as a distraction. This time, one group wrote about their expenses and the other wrote about the weather. Afterward, the participants  either put their fingers in hot water or played the fixed version of Cyberball. The research team found that writing about expenses caused anxiety and intensified the physical pain and the feelings of rejection.

As study co-author Kathleen Vohs told Live Science:

“These effects speak to the power of money, even as a symbol, to change perceptions of very real feelings.”

This study appeared in the June issue of Psychological Science.

Till cohabitation do us part

A new study has some grim news for the majority of unmarried couples in the United States. According to researchers at the University of Denver, couples who live together before marrying have a higher chance of divorcing than those who wait to be married or engaged. The research team estimates that at least 70 percent of couples in the U.S. live together before marriage.

It has previously been thought that living together can be a good test run for marriage; however, another study conducted by the same team found that living together solely for this reason leads to the most problems. Lead author of the study, Galena Rhoades, explains why:

“We think that some couples who move in together without a clear commitment to marriage may wind up sliding into marriage partly because they are already cohabitating.”

The researchers conducted telephone surveys of more than 1,000 married men and women between ages 18 and 34 who had been married within the past ten years. As part of the survey, the team asked questions about relationship satisfaction, dedication, and divorce potential.

According to the study’s findings, approximately 43% of couples surveyed lived together before getting married or engaged. These couples reported considerably lower relationship satisfaction, dedication, self-confidence, and greater divorce potential than those who waited to cohabitate until they were engaged (16.4%) or married (40.5%).

This study was published in the February issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. Rhoades’ study examining the reasons couples decide to move-in together can be found in the February issue of the Journal of Family Issues.

What would an ER staffed by homeopaths look like?

The award-winning British comedy show, That Mitchell and Webb Look, tries to save a car crash victim whose chakras are fading…