Watch author and senior STATS fellow Patrick McCloskey talk with Ben Birnbaum, editor of Boston College Magazine, about his book The Street Stops Here – an account of a year in the life of a Catholic School in Harlem.

For more information, you can also read Patrick McCloskey’s article for STATS, Making the grade in Memphis. Catholic schools now provide a lifeline for disadvantaged, non-Catholic minorities in urban America, boosting graduation and college acceptance rates, and outperforming many equivalent public schools. But they are also disappearing from the very neighborhoods that need them most. McCloskey reports on how one diocese has bucked the trend, what it means to one family, and what it could mean for America.

Wii may actually be a real form of exercise

Games from Wii Fit and Wii Sports really do help burn off some calories. The study, funded by Nintendo and presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association, found that about one-third of the games in Wii Sports and Wii Fit are equivalent to moderate intensity exercise. The game that helps to burn the most calories is the single-arm stand in Wii Fit, followed by boxing in Wii Sports.

How communication drives work performance

According to a new survey by Watson Wyatt, companies that have effective communication have a 47 percent higher return to shareholders over a period of five years. The survey also found that highly effective communicators are 37 percent more likely to report that their social media tools are cost-effective. Watson Wyatt defines effective communication as having courage, innovation and discipline.

How efficient are energy-efficient light bulbs?

A new study published in Engineering and Technology magazine reveals that the packaging for energy efficient light bulbs may be misleading consumers. The study found that the energy efficient bulbs lose an average of 22 percent of their brightness over their lifetime, compared to about 7 percent with traditional light bulbs.

Oceans not absorbing as much human-made carbon dioxide

According to a study out of Columbia University, the world’s oceans might not be able to keep up with the amount of carbon dioxide being emitted by humans. In 2000, the oceans absorbed 27 percent of human-made CO2. In 2007, the amount decreased to 24 percent. Although the drop seems small, this falling percentage could mean major changes are in store for the future climate.

Playing sounds while asleep may help memory

Research out of Northwestern University has found that playing specific sounds while one sleeps may help to enhance associated memories. The study’s participants were taught to move 50 pictures to corresponding locations on a computer screen. Each picture was accompanied by a related sound; for example, a meow for a cat, shattering glass for a wine glass.

Afterward, each subject was told to take a nap and after verifying the participant was in a deep sleep, the researchers played 25 of the sounds along with white noise. The participants had much better recall of the picture locations associated with the 25 sounds that had been played while they napped. The findings indicate that while sleeping, the brain may work to strengthen and consolidate memories.

NPR’s On the Media recently had a very interesting discussion about the dismal state of television’s health and science reporting.  Here’s a look at some of the examples.

1. NBC Today show clip on losing weight while you sleep.

In this segment, Meredith Viera says 63 percent of Americans do not get enough sleep, which just happens to coincide with the percentage of adults who are overweight or obese. Perhaps more sleep will make you slimmer, reasons Today, which then turns to the well-known science journal, Glamour, to test this incredible hypothesis on a sample of seven women. As Health News Review Editor and Health Journalism Professor Gary Schwitzer says, “it’s just sad, and… insulting to women viewers.”

2. CBS Early Show segment on whether blue food dye can prevent paralysis.

When researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center injected rats suffering from spinal cord injuries with the compound Brilliant Blue G (BBG), used in M&Ms and Gatorade, they were able to walk again with a limp (the rats also temporarily turned blue). However, CBS waits to tell viewers that the study was on rats until two minutes into the three minute segment. Schwitzer calls this “unforgivable” and says it gives viewers a sense of false hope.

Schwitzer, who leads a project to evaluate the accuracy of health news in the media has decided his team will no longer rate every item of medical news on TV because of the ongoing relentless espousal of dismal scientific standards.

Originally posted on our collaborative site, Ourblook.

OurBlook interview with Dr. Margaret Lewin, medical director of Cinergy Health

Please provide your definition of evidence-based medicine.

ML: Evidence-based medicine is the practice of medicine in which decision-making is based on evidence acquired from carefully-controlled clinical trials.

What are the pros of evidence-based medicine?

ML: The pros are that these decisions are statistically most likely to achieve the desired clinical result given the current state of knowledge and might lower the costs of delivering healthcare.

What are the cons of evidence-based medicine?

ML: The cons are that .

– There are only a limited number of clinical trials whose outcomes are conclusive enough to answer the enormous number of clinical questions.

– Controlled clinical trials are expensive and usually take years to reach their conclusion; even then, they usually require confirmation by other trials.

– Medical science continues to advance at such a pace that clinical trials cannot keep up with the questions raised.

– It is likely that many treatment options not proven by evidence-based medicine will be rationed (i.e., they will not be reimbursed by public or private insurance).

How do you apply it in your own practice?

ML: When clinical trials give evidence of superior results of a given therapeutic intervention, I recommend that intervention.

Would there be a significant impact on the U.S. healthcare system if it were implemented much more widely?

ML: Medical problems could be solved more efficiently and effectively, leading to better clinical outcomes.

Does the reform legislation now before Congress carry provisions for evidence-based medicine and if so, are they adequate? If not, what should be added?

ML: These bills at least give lip-service to Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) … but it is not clear that this research will be funded adequately over either the short- or long-term. The question of rationing has been addressed but not answered.

How does evidence-based medicine affect the legal malpractice problem that plagues healthcare providers?

ML: If a medical decision is based on such evidence, one would hope that even bad outcomes could not be attributed to malpractice by the practitioner.

With prescribed treatment plans for various diseases, it almost sounds that there could be no deviations. Is that true, and if so, how can U.S. healthcare improve if new and different treatments can’t be used?

ML: Deviations would have to be justifiable by other means, leading to the risk of malpractice action should the outcome be unfavorable; these deviations may not be covered by either public or private plans.

It would still improve, but much more slowly … awaiting the results of clinical trials before new approaches and modalities could be widely used.  This delay would, however, probably encourage more clinicians to enter their patients in clinical trials and would similarly encourage those patients to enroll in the trials.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about evidence-based medicine?

ML: This is an important concept which, if fully implemented, could lead to better outcomes and lower costs. The current state of knowledge is inadequate for basing a healthcare system on this concept … and rigidity could lead to rationing unacceptable to the American people, who are used to having access to all options in care.

A graduate of Case Western University School of Medicine, Dr. Lewin earned her undergraduate degree from Purdue in aeronautics, astronautics and the engineering sciences, and she holds an M.S. in applied mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Board-certified in internal medicine, she is an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. She also is immediate past president of the New York County Medical Society. Her decades-long volunteer work has included service to many local projects and organizations and has been enriched by her medical missions to the Third World.

According to new research published in Australasian Science, being grumpy isn’t all bad. Those in a cranky mood are less gullible, think more critically and tend to do better with decision-making.

Joe Forgas, a psychology professor from The University of New South Wales, designed experiments that would induce either a positive or negative mood on the study’s participants. According to BBC News, Forgas would do this by showing films that invoked either happy or sad emotions and having the participants think about positive or negative life experiences. He then had them partake in a variety of tasks, including judging the truthfulness of urban myths and providing an accurate recollection of an event.

Those in a bad mood performed better in each task, making fewer overall mistakes and communicating more effectively. The UK Telegraph reports that those in a grumpy mood were also less likely to make rash decisions based on racial or religious prejudices.

However, a positive mood also has its upsides. Professor Forgas explains:

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.”

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 Reports posted a response on its blog to STATS criticism of its recent report on BPA. The following is a letter sent by STATS President, S. Robert Lichter Ph.D to the magazine:

In their response to Trevor Butterworth’s criticisms, Andrea Rock and Urvashi Rangan devoted most of their efforts to trying to discredit STATS by linking it to industy. Luckily, this is a scientific debate, in which the best science will ultimately win, regardless of the rhetorical tactics adopted by some participants. Mr. Butterworth will respond further to the scientific issues. But it is necessary to reply immediately to the institutional allegations.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) was founded in 1984 to conduct social scientific studies of media coverage. The Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) was founded ten years later with a different mission – to improve the transmission of scientific and quantitative information to the public. They are independent non-profit organizations that share some administrative personnel and expenses; both are affiliates of George Mason University. The STATS websites describes them as “sister organizations.”

To avoid the appearance of any conflict of interest in its critiques, STATS does not accept industry funding. However, Rock and Rangen claim to have examined documents showing that STATS has received funding from ExxonMobil. Since no such funding has taken place to my knowledge, I call on the authors either to publicly release any such documents so that everyone can examine them or to retract this assertion.

The authors also cast aspersions on CMPA for having once done a study for a tobacco company. Specifically, in 1994 CMPA conducted a content analysis on media coverage of tobacco for Philip Morris. CMPA has done many such social scientific content analyses commissioned by groups in both the private and non-profit sectors. For example, the same year we studied media coverage of tobacco, we examined television’s coverage of Hispanics for the National Council of La Raza.

The most salient question is whether, as the authors intimate, CMPA’s critical faculties were bought off by Big Tobacco money. As it happens, during the 1990’s we were actively involved in conducting and publicizing research on the risks of tobacco in a series of articles, newsletters, and public statements, including Congressional testimony.

The publications began appearing in 1993 (the year before Philip Morris commissioned a content analysis) and culminated in a 1999 Yale University Press book showing that cancer researchers not only “placed tobacco in a league of its own among cancer agents,” they believed the media understates the cancer risks associated with tobacco.

STATS also has an extensive history of criticizing the health risks of tobacco. For a lengthier explication of all this material, click here.

Rhetorical devices aside, it is well to remember that taking industry money isn’t the same as doing industry’s bidding.

S. Robert Lichter
Professor of Communication
Director, CMPA and STATS
George Mason University

Past research has hinted that technology might be the cause of social isolation; however, a new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that the use of technology actually leads to increased and more diverse social networks.

Keith Hampton, lead author of the report and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, explains:

“It turns out that those who use the Internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages…People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities.”

Data about discussion networks was collected using a 2008 telephone survey of 2,512 adults. The study controlled for a variety of factors such as sex, age and education. According to Reuters, here are some of the report’s key findings:

• Social isolation has barely changed since 1985; only six percent of adults have reported no one significant in their life.
• A discussion network is 12 percent larger among cell phone users and nine percent larger for those who use instant messaging and share photos.
• The diversity of social networks was the largest for those who use the internet frequently, 25 percent larger for cell phone users and 15 percent larger for basic internet users.
• The internet has not discouraged people from visiting public places (parks, cafes, etc).
• The average amount of friends and family a person typically confides in has decreased; however, this was not associated with the use of technology.
• People now use cell phones more than landlines to stay in touch.
• Face-to-face contact is still the primary method people use to keep in touch. On average, a person sees their close group of friends 210 days out of the year.

Click here to read the full report.

You would think that pain, being an obvious and compelling condition, would have an obvious and compelling cure. In fact, for years it was a neglected area of medicine; and one that endured willful neglect after falling victim to the war on drugs. Over-anxious law enforcement authorities began targeting doctors who prescribed opioid pain killers in the belief that they were doing so injudiciously, fueling drug abuse across the country. The abuses created by the fear of abuse, and the media’s over-reliance on law enforcement at the expense of doctors, have been documented by STATS (here, here and here).

Thankfully, there appears to be change afoot. John Tierney in the New York Times writes about a new report from the Mayday Fund, arguing for  “a revolution in the training of doctors, the financing of research and the education of law-enforcement officials.”  Given the number of Americans who suffer from undertreated or neglected chronic pain, the report is a vital contribution to public debate.

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.