My wife recently posted about an interesting exchange she had about her blog. Last Fall she applied to a number of PhD programs. At one of the places that turned her down, she heard through a pretty reliable source that not only did students and faculty read her weblog, but that if she wanted to have a better chance at being admitted to a PhD program she should shut down her blog altogether.

She links to a debate among others in academia about whether or not students and others should stick with anonymous blogs and web sites rather than risk harming their careers.

But there are two distinct issues. My wife mentions that there are people who are employed by the university we work at who engage in protests against the war in Iraq during their personal time, and of course I blog about those folks sometimes here on my own time. I think it would be absurd to sit around worrying that this is going to hurt careers either way. I wouldn’t want to work for someone who is going to let their personal feelings about my political views affect our personal relationship. I work everyday with people whose political/social views are 180 degrees opposite of mine, and never think twice about it because it is completely irrelevant to our professional relationship.

On the other hand, a lot of the academic bloggers who are anonymous spend a lot of time bitching about their colleagues and students. I don’t have a lot of sympathy or use for that form at all. If you have those sort of problems, be an adult about it already and talk privately with the people involved, friends/spouses you trust, or any number of outlets that are usually omnipresent at universities. Creating an anonymous blog so you can publicly complain about how horrible your co-workers are or how stupid you think some student is seem to me the least productive solution imaginable.

Conversation over a reasonably fast, reasonly cheap PC I bought at Best Buy this week:

Me: I really like this one, but I need to know whether it has an AGP slot or a PCI-Express slot for the graphics card.

Best Buy Staff: Oh no, all of these machines have AGP slots. You wouldn’t want to run a PCI card for graphics if you want to use the machine for gaming.

Me: No. PCI-Express is a new standard that is replacing AGP. HP and other manufacturers are starting to ship PCs with PCI-Express motherboards, but Radeon and Nvidia don’t have high-end cards out for PCI-E yet.

Best Buy Staff: Oh. [Pops case and peers inside]. Oh yeah, that’s an AGP slot.

[Two hours later at home with the computer and a Radeon 9800 XP Pro].

Me: Goddamit, that’s an PCI-Express slot.

John Stossel apparently used John Edwards to make a point about the effect that out-of-control lawsuits are having on health care. Early in his career, Edwards made a name for himself representing clients with cerebral palsy in medical malpractice lawsuits.

Edwards’ basic argument went like this — the cerebral palsy suffered by his client was caused by oxygen deprivation which the attending obstetrician could have prevented if he had performed a cesarean section or other medical intervention earlier than he or she did. Edwards was apparently very good at both choosing the best cases to go forward with as well as making his case in court and made himself millions of dollars.

The problem is that this explanation for cerebral palsy and what might be done to prevent it appears more and more bogus. Oxygen deprivation does play a part in a very small number of cases, but the vast majority of the 8,000 or so annual cases of cerebral palsy appear to have other causes. Moreoever, research on the subject is pretty clear that performing cesarean sections doesn’t reduce the likelihood of a baby being born with cerebral palsy. In fact as Stossel notes, the percentage of births done by c-section has climbed steadily since 1970, but the percentage of infants born with cerebral palsy hasn’t changed.

But Stossle then goes on to make a claim about cesearean sections that is just as spurious. According to Stossel,

However, today many C-sections are still done in hopes of avoiding a lawsuit, even though C-sections are a more painful way to give birth, as well as more expensive, requiring a longer hospital stay, and carrying greater health risks.

There are probably more C-sections being performed today due to concerns of lawsuits, but everything else in the above sentence is false.

Contrary to Stossel, studies have found that C-sections are not more expensive than vaginal births. They do cost a bit more upfront, but the cost is lower on average because women having C-sectionse experience fewer long-term complications.

Which brings us to Stossel’s claim that C-sections carry greater health risks. In fact, a recent Health Grades Inc. found that post-natal complications occurred in 8.4 percent of cesarean sections but in 12 percent of vaginal births. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found a lower maternal mortality rate for women undergoing c-sections compared to those undergoing a vaginal birth (though maternal mortality rates are extremely low in the United States for vaginal births).

It appears Stossel didn’t bother to interview anyone about the alleged dangers of cesarean sections but simply assumed that since it is a surgical procedure it must be more dangerous than “natural” child birth. Sounds like he’s got the makings of a good trial lawyer there.

Source:

Lawyers and the Little Guy. John Stossle, ABCNews, July 23, 2004.

Wow — according to BoxOfficeMojo.Com, Catwoman is a financial as well as critical disaster. The film took in less than $18 million this weekend after costing an estimated $135 million to make and market (including a $12.5 million payday for Halle Berry).

Personally, I thought the marketing for the film was absurd and somewhat offensive. Roger Ebert sums the film up this way,

“Catwoman” is a movie about Halle Berry’s beauty, sex appeal, figure, eyes, lips and costume design. It gets those right. Everything else is secondary, except for the plot, which is tertiary. What a letdown.

In other words, take the absurdly adolescent view of female sexuality that (still) tends to permeate comic books, and then turn it up a notch. Yeah, that’s a film I really want to see. (The Catwoman costume looked so stupid and over-sexualized that even the fanboys couldn’t find it in their, uh, hearts to embrace it).

Didn’t these people watch “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” and their sequels? You have to be able to sell the characters as real people or it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief about the whole super power thing.

This blogger points out a bizarre example of a New York Times reporter inventing a story out of whole cloth about the 9/11 Commission’s Report. According to a story in Friday’s New York Times by Matthew Wald, the 9/11 Commission Report debunks widely circulated claims that Todd Beamer, one of the passengers aboard Flight 93, said “Let’s roll!” as he and other passengers went off to try to re-take control of the cockpit. Wald writes,

The report from the 9/11 Commission on Thursday provided new, chilling details about what happened in the cockpit of Flight 93 in its last minutes. It provides a gripping account of the battle to gain control of the aircraft by passengers who knew that terrorists had seized the plane and were determined to prevent them from using it as a missile. It also discloses that the phrase “Let’s roll,” previously reported as a rallying cry for those passengers, may have been misinterpreted.

. . .

The voice recorder captured sounds of continued fighting, and Mr. Jarrah pitched the plane up and then down. A passenger is heard to say: “In the cockpit. If we don’t we’ll die!”

Then a passenger yelled, “Roll it!” While earlier accounts reported the phrase as “Let’s roll,” which was repeated in speeches by President Bush and became the title of a bestseller, some aviation experts have speculated that this was actually a reference to a food cart, being used as a battering ram.

This speculation apparently exists only in Wald’s mind. There is certainly nothing in the 9/11 Commission Report that calls into question the “Let’s roll” line and Wald’s unnamed aviation experts are probably unnamed for a good reason.

The basic problem is that Wald’s is conflating two separate incidents as one. The source of the “Let’s roll!” comment was never claimed to have come from cockpit recordings. Rather it was made by Beamer in a phone call to GTE supervisor Lisa Jefferson using the plane’s onboard phone system. Beamer in that call described the hijacking and that passengers were considering assaulting the cockpit to regain control of the plane. After the passengers have arrived at a plan, the supervisor hears Beamer say, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!”

The “roll it” comment from the cockpit recorder is a later statement as the passengers are busy assaulting the cockpit and appears to refer to using a food cart as a battering ram. This is confirmed by the Los Angeles Times’ account which notes that the “Roll it” comment comes at least after 10:00:08, which appears to be after Jefferson had hung up on Beamer and regardless is well after the assault on the cockpit has begun The odd thing is that the Times also screws the story up as well, claiming that,

Separately, a passenger, Todd Beamer, called his wife from the plane and she later reported hearing someone say “Let’s roll.”

Which is not true. Beamer’s wife didn’t learn about this until Friday, September 14, 2001, when the GTE supervisor called her to relay what her husband had said in his final conversation.

Perhaps this is what Alex Jones meant when he wrote in the LA Times on July 18,

Blogging is especially amenable to introducing negative information into the news stream and for circulating rumors as fact. Blogging’s fact-checking apparatus is just the built-in truth squad of those who read the blog and howl loudly if they wish to dispute some assertion. It is, in a sense, a place where everyone has his own truth.

If he would just change “blogging” to “Major newspapers” I think he might have had a point.

Source:

New Details in Battle of Hijackers and Passengers to Control Plane. Matthew Wald, The New York Times, July 23, 2004.

9/11 Report Reveals New Details of Fight for Flight 93. Richard Serrano, Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2004.

The existence of large ocean waves in excess of 80 feet tall that form and disperse quickly used to be thought impossible. Then the conventional wisdom is that such waves were possible, but extremely rare. Now Reuters notes that a satellite survey of the ocean during three weeks in 2001 finds that such waves are, in fact, relatively common occurrences.

In just those three weeks, researchers spotted ten waves in excess of 80 feet tall. As Reuters notes, that poses a problem since ships and off-short platforms are generally built to survive maximum 50 foot waves