Stupid Slashdot Tricks

Every time I see someone online talking about the accuracy of traditional media vs. weblogs — and usually extolling the virtue of the latter — I think of Slashdot. A few errors could be forgiven, but often it seems like they actively try to avoid reading the actual articles that they post about and link to.

For example, Slashdot has a story on its front page that is headlined,

Circuit Court Okays Vote Swapping Site

The text of the post and the headline lead many of Slashdot’s readers to think that the 9th Circuit Court has ruled that it was legal for a web site to facilitate the trading of votes for Al Gore and Ralph Nader (the idea was that a Nader voter in Alabama would vote for Gore, and in exchange a voter in California — where Gore was going to win by a large margin anyway — would vote for Nader).

But the court said absolutely nothing in its ruling about whether or not what the web site did was legal. All it did was reinstate a lawsuit that the web site owner and the ACLU had filed against California’s Secretary of State, Bill Jones.

Jones threatened the web site with prosecution if it didn’t bring a halt to the vote trading. The web site and the ACLU in turn sued saying their First Amendment rights were violated. A lower court dismissed part of the lawsuit and found against the web site on another part.

All the 9th District Court did was reverse those decisions and told another lower court to take a fresh look at the lawsuit.

Yes, the details are buried at the bottom of the CNET story that Slashdot links to, but would it really kill Slashdot editors to read the whole story before posting?

Omnivores, Vegetarians and Big Babies

On Feb. 2, 2003, Dr. John McDougall posted a long response to the CDC’s reporting on a couple of cases of babies who suffered from B12 deficiencies due to their mother’s poor vegetarian diets. McDougall was outraged at the report characterizing it as “sensationalism” whose primary purpose was to reinforce people’s feelings about their “own bad habits” (i.e. including meat in their diets).

McDougall himself was not above sensationalism, however, in his criticism of “the Western diet.” For example, McDougall wrote,

For the unborn infant the consequences of mother following the Western diet are:

1) An abnormally large baby that is too big to fit through the mother’s birth canal, and therefore requiring a caesarean section — the medical description is “failure of progression of labor.”(1) Twenty-five percent of mothers deliver by this major surgery in the USA.

There are a couple of problems with this statement. First, the reader might assume that McDougall cites a study of caesarean sections and birth weights with his reference there, but instead the reference simply directs readers to one of McDougall’s books, The McDougall Program for Women.

The reality is that the percentage of cesareans in the United States has fluctuated wildly over the last 20 years, and has reached the 25 percent level for a variety of reasons which appear to be largely unrelated to birth weight.

First, many women appear to be opting for caesarean births rather than undergo vaginal births to avoid the pain and potential long term health effects of vaginal delivery. Second, both doctors and mothers appear to be using C-sections to better time births. Finally, legal and medical concerns are leading to Caesarean sections today where in the past a vaginal birth would have likely been attempted.

What role, if any, larger babies play in that mix is up in the air, but there is one thing we do know about babies — the bigger they are, up to a point, the lower the risk of infant mortality.

Here’s a breakdown from 1996 live births of the infant mortality rate by birth weight:

Weight

Infant Mortality Rate (Per 1,000 Live Births)

<500 g.
889.0
500-749 g.
512.3
750-999 g.
167.1
1,000-1,249 g.
77.1
1,250-1,499 g.
52.7
1,500-1,999 g.
30.3
2,000-2,499 g.
13.4
2,500-2,999 g.
5.1
3,000-3,499 g.
2.7
3,500-3,999 g.
1.9
4,000-4,499 g.
1.7
4,500-4,999 g.
2.0
5,000+ g.
6.2

So, to keep infant mortality as low as possible, the ideal would be for infants to get as close to possible to the 4,000 g. level as possible. Infant mortality only starts increasing after infants pass the 4,500 g. level, but births that large constituted only 1.5 percent of all live births in 1996.

In contrast, the real weight-related health problem for babies is low birth weight, with births under 2,500 grams constituting a steady 7 percent of all births in the United States (though, to be fair, part of this increase in low birth weights is due to the dramatic changes in medical treatment for premature infants over the past 30 years).

If McDougall is right then — that “the Western diet” is leading to babies with higher birth rates — the appropriate response is: thank goodness for the Western diet!

Similarly McDougall makes inane comments about folic acid deficiency,

2) Thousands of birth defects annually, of which most are known to be due to too little folic acid in the expectant mother’s diet. Folic acid is from foliage, in other words, plants. . .. You will never see folic acid deficiency in a healthy vegan mother.

Of course, you won’t see folic acid deficiency in a healthy omnivore either. The main cause of folic acid deficiencies are poor diets.

Moreover, the reason folic acid is important is because it lowers levels of homocysteine. But research on vegetarians and vegans as found they tend to have homocysteine levels that are 20 to 30 percent higher than omnivores.

And since this all started with B12 deficiencies, that same research found that 78 percent of screened vegetarians and 26 percent of screened vegans had levels of B12 that were clinically deficient compared to none of the screened omnivores.

Since the science doesn’t support his position, McDougall falls back on unspecific generalities,

If you have any doubts about the wisdom of a healthy vegan diet then look around your neighborhood. Children on B-12-sufficient diets with lots of ice cream, milk, hot dogs, egg muffins, and chicken nuggets are fat and sick.

That’s a nice little rhetorical trick, to pretend that the only possible omnivorous diet must be an unhealthy fast food one. McDougall continues,

The obvious signs and symptoms are snotty noses, ear infections, stomach aches, and headaches. Get to know them better and you will find them constipated with bloody bowel movements. The pain and suffering inflicted on children by the American diet is so brutal that if it were administered with a stick, parents would put in jail. Because the instruments of injury are a fork and spoon, everyone ignores the agony as if nothing was out of the ordinary, and nothing could be done to remedy the problems — you know so well that is not true.

Translation: when all else fails, rant or go straight to irrational appeals,

First, have faith that a low-fat vegan diet, based around unrefined starches, vegetables and fruits, is the healthiest diet for men, women and children (after the age of 2 years).

Amen brother, preach that vegan gospel. Don’t worry though, McDougall has a nutty explanation and suggestion on why the vegan diet is deficient in B12 and how to get around it,

You might ask, “Why would a [vegan] diet so perfect in all other ways be deficient in a necessary vitamin?” Most likely the answer is that we live in an unnatural world these days. Remember, B-12 is made by bacteria. Our world is sterilized because of an irrational fear of germs. Once people consumed trillions of helpful B-12 producing bacteria daily — they lived with their chickens, goats, and horses. Today everything is sanitized by hand-washing, antiseptics, antibiotics, mouth washes, and cleaning agents. To compensate, we must add back B-12 or possibly, live more naturally, like I do, with my B-12 producing dog, cat, and birds.

Huh? People long ago received B-12 much like omnivores do today — they consumed meat laden with the bacteria that produce it. Plants might have some B-12 bacteria, but most of it is eliminated when the food is washed and otherwise prepared for eating.

If mouthwashes and antiseptics are responsible for killing off the B-12 bacteria, it’s odd that omnivores don’t suffer from this problem. The reality, of course, is that the vegan diet is not perfect and (like other diets, including the Western diet) has a number of nutritional challenges that must be properly accounted for in order to be healthy.

Sources:

Vegan diet damages baby’s brain — sensationalism! John McDougall, February 2003.

One-quarter of all births done by Caesarean section. Washington Post, December 16, 2002.

Caesarean births on the rise. Associated Press, June 6, 2002.

Big rise in Caesarean births. The BBC, August 9, 2000.

Study finds efforts to reduce rate unsuccessful. Associated Press, November 7, 2002.

Live Births, Infant Deaths, And Infant Mortality Rates By Birth Weight, Race Of Mother, And Age At Death: United States, 1996 Period Data. Centers for Disease Control.

Vegetarians and Vegans Have Elevated Homocysteine Levels. Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism 2000;44:135-138.

World Health Organization Presents BSE Report

The World Health Organization’s Maura Ricketts presented her organization’s October 2002 report on Mad Cow disease in late January. The report warns that Eastern European and Asian countries are still vulnerable to possible outbreaks of the disease.

The report notes that the key to preventing BSE is to ensure that meat and bone meal from ruminants is not be fed back to ruminants. A few countries have gone further and enacted laws banning the use of meat and bone meal from ruminants in animal feed altogether.

The report also finds that other than Europe, Australia, New Zealand and some countries in the Pacific Rim and Americas, much of the world lacks any sort of active surveillance system to detect BSE.

On the other hand, all of the available evidence — including from the WHO report — is that BSE is far less of a threat to human health than most existing foodborne illnesses and diseases. According to WHO, worldwide from 1994 to 2001, there were a total of 122 deaths either confirmed or probably caused by vCJD which is believed to be caused from exposure to BSE. There are a total of 11 other individuals who are still alive but have conditionally been diagnosed with vCJD (an accurate diagnosis of vCJD is impossible, at the moment, before death of an individual afflicted with the disease).

Source:

Understanding the BSE Threat. World Health Organization, October 2002.

World health body warns that mad cow still a risk. Reuters, Richard Waddington, January 30, 2003.

2003 Web Site Statistics

Site
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec TOT
AnimalRights.Net
146,482
138,364
159,673
174,628
142,223
126,098
132,461
200,796
198,175
218,020
1,641,113
Brian.Carnell.Com
67,623
59,202
79,272
75,391
65,695
68,979
110,944
120,248
137,647
114,709
899,710
EquityFeminism.Com
45,983
46,204
48,655
47,844
34,303
32,483
37,717
35,550
42,096
48,081
418,916
LeftWatch.Com
50,563
50,182
72,905
84,101
50,225
48,425
54,423
55,794
67,979
68,841
603,438
LibertySearch.Com
8,550
7,162
8,744
11,139
6,242
12,172
5,636
8,475
9,422
12,032
89,574
Overpopulation.Com
52,818
62,265
74,242
63,072
55,338
38,447
49,462
51,518
95,874
119,590
662,626
Skepticism.Net
48,281
42,203
43,947
39,826
35,456
31,331
31,762
26,593
38,117
54,326
391,842
Total
420,300
405,582
487,438
491,834
389,482
356,987
422,405
498,974
589,310
635,559
4,707,219

Damage to Shuttle Tiles on STS-87

Yesterday I linked to an analysis written by NASA engineer Gregory Katnik about damage sustained to the Shuttle’s heat shielding tiles following the use of a newly formulated, freon-free insulation. The New York Times has more this morning with a story about Katnik’s eventual report which foudn that over 300 tiles were damaged from the break away insulation after the launch of STS-87.

Moreover, according to the New York Times,

The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., later concluded that the absence of Freon led to the detachment of the foam.

While the formulation was later improved, the episode revealed potentially dangerous new ways in which tiles could be damaged.

I suspect one of the questions that will be raised soon is just how improved that later reformulation was.

Source:

Engineer’s ’97 Report Warned of Damage to Tiles by Foam. James Glanz and Edward Wong, The New York Times, February 4, 2003.