How should we treat scientific fraud?

We know there's a lot of fraud on Wall Street. It doesn't end there though ...

Anesthesiologist Faked Data in 21 Studies: Scientific American

Over the past 12 years, anesthesiologist Scott Reuben revolutionized the way physicians provide pain relief to patients undergoing orthopedic surgery for everything from torn ligaments to worn-out hips. Now, the profession is in shambles after an investigation revealed that at least 21 of Reuben's papers were pure fiction...

... Reuben, 50, has been stripped of his research and educational duties and has been on medical leave since May...

... His lawyer, Ingrid Martin of Dwyer & Collora, LLP, in Boston, told ScientificAmerican.com that Reuben has cooperated with the investigation and that he "deeply regrets that all of this happened." She added that "with the [investigating] committee's guidance, he is taking steps to ensure this never happens again."

... Reuben's career would begin to unravel as Ekman began to suspect foul play. In addition to collaborating with Reuben on the now-retracted Celebrex study, Ekman agreed to review a Reuben manuscript on surgery on the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in the knee. But when he asked the anesthesiologist for the name of the orthopedic surgeon on the study, Reuben ceased communication with him...

... By then, Editor in Chief Shafer had already put several Reuben manuscripts on hold after learning that Baystate had initiated a probe into the validity of his research. The investigation later identified 21 articles based on patient data that had been partially or completely doctored...

This man caused great harm. He effectively stole large amounts of money. His fake results misled researchers, clinicians and patients and likely led to at least some suboptimal care.

He's done vastly more harm than the average crack addict, but in some states someone caught using crack cocaine can spend years in prison.

Why don't people who commit scientific fraud go to prison?

Another day, another 200 billion to pay

More taxes to pay one day for the trillion printed today ...

Fiscal aspects of quantitative easing (wonkish) - Paul Krugman Blog

... My back of the envelope calculation looks like this: if the Fed buys $1 trillion of 10-year bonds at 2.5%, and has to sell those bonds in an environment where the market demands a yield to maturity of more than 5%, it will take around a $200 billion loss.

It's comforting that we'll pay I guess. I assume the interest rate more or less works out to something near the Fed rate, and that Krugman has corrected for inflation with the loss amount.

Let's assume there are 100 million Americans who'll be paying back the $200 thousand million. That's $2,000 apiece, more for high earners so say $6,000 if you're doing ok.

That's a lot of money. On the other hand, if I'm unemployed for a few months I'm out far more money than that. Adjusted for risks and so on it seems like a reasonable bet even for those doing relatively well.

For folks not doing so well it's a bargain. Of course if the market were to recover it would be a real bargain for us.

Religion and recycling bin aversion

We all know we're heading for the recycling bin. (Yes, you too Mr. Kurzweil.)

Beyond that, many Americans say they expect better things. Yet they don't act on those stated beliefs ...

Religion, medicine and evading death | But not yet, Lord | The Economist

HOW do a person’s religious beliefs influence his attitude to terminal illness? The answer is surprising. You might expect the religious to accept death as God’s will and, while not hurrying towards it, not to seek to prolong their lives using heroic and often traumatic medical procedures. Atheists, by contrast, have nothing to look forward to after death, so they might be expected to cling to life.

In fact, it is the other way round...

So does religion promote fear of death, or does fear of death promote religion?

My money is on the latter.

Jurassic Lark? Nooooooooo

First Pluto. Now T Rex?

Did all dinosaurs have “feathers”? | Our feathered friends | The Economist

... Taxonomically, the very definition of a bird was until recently an animal that has feathers. Now, taxonomists argue that since birds are descended from dinosaurs they should be classified merely as a subgroup of the Dinosauria. But if feathers truly are the diagnostic criterion, then perhaps things should be the other way round, and Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Tyrannosaurus and their kin should no longer be thought of as terrible lizards, but as overweight, flightless birds.

It must stop now.

Urban renewal - Habitat tears down houses

I think this is a good sign ...

Saginaw Journal - In Hard-Hit Areas, Habitat for Humanity Adds Demolition to Its Mission - NYTimes.com

... International leaders of Habitat for Humanity, an organization more than three decades old, say their focus is changing to meet the demands of a changing economy. In cities where so many homes sit empty, the group is leaning away from building new houses and instead fixing up old ones, said Ken Klein, the vice chairman of the group’s board.

In recent years, about 100 of the organization’s affiliates around the country have done the same, removing recyclable items, like cabinets, floorboards, plaster and light fixtures, from condemned houses and, in a few cities, even razing some structures...

When we drove across the northern-eastern border of the United States last year I was forcibly struck the immense stretch of desolation.

The region has been in decline for decades, but things felt much worse than even two years before. Since then we've been reading reports of vast stretches of Cleveland with many abandoned homes.

People still live where the lumber, water, and railways of the 19th century put them. In some cases new economies make those places viable. In most cases they, like the American automotive industry, need to downside by at least 50%.

It's possible to image a satisfactory end point in a world where telepresence and telecommuting are becoming commonplace. Cities with large parks and green spaces, better aligned along transportation corridors. Larger homes with expansive lawns. Bicycle paths and playgrounds.

To get there however a lot of homes have to go, and existing homes must be refurbished and expanded.

The classification and heritage of American torture

Everything has a history...

The history of CIA torture - By Darius Rejali - Slate Magazine

In the 20^th century, there were two main traditions of clean torture—the kind that doesn't leave marks, as modern torturers prefer. The first is French modern, a combination of water- and electro-torture. The second is Anglo-Saxon modern, a classic list of sleep deprivation, positional and restraint tortures, extremes of temperature, noise, and beatings.

All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details...

...For 30 years, I've studied a long and remorseless two centuries of torture around the world, and I can find only one instance of an account resembling the collars and plywood technique described in the ICRC report...

America needs a truth commission.

The other side of a bad kid dead

A troubled young man with a record commits suicide in jail.

Just another local story.

Except there were a few people who loved him.

There usually are.

Against creationism - the toenail

No rational creator would give humans toenails.

Ouch.

Get ready to refinance your mortgage?

The Fed just “printed” a trillion dollars.

One analyst expects mortgage rates to fall as a result …

Economists’ Reactions to the Fed’s Move - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

David Greenlaw, Morgan Stanley: The Fed’s announcement signals a clear intent to continue to drive mortgage rates lower and we expect them to meet this objective. This could represent a powerful source of stimulus for the household sector of the economy. In 2008, the average mortgage rate on the outstanding stock of loans was about 6.50%. So, if the Fed brings 30-yr fixed rate mortgages down to 4.50% and all homeowners are able refi, the aggregate permanent cash flow savings would be on the order of $200 billion per year.

We’ll be watching.

Of course now we’ll all be watching for bubble #3. We had stocks, then we had real estate. What’s left? A bonds bubble?

Annals of poorly chosen words - best and the brightest

I haven't had a strong opinion on what the feds should do about the AIG bonuses you and I are paying to the team responsible for history's greatest financial disaster. It feels like only one manifestation of a much bigger failure of the compensation market, a zero-bound type failure because the winners now work to win, not to live.

In other words, the winners of the compensation wars can leave the game whenever they want. They play by different rules than the rest of us. We can change that in the future, but it's hard to fix it today.

David Leonhardt's observation does a nice job of skewering one common rationale however ...

Ah, retention pay. It has been one of the great rationales for showering money on chief executives and bankers regardless of how well they are doing their jobs. It’s just that the specific rationale keeps changing.

In the booming 1990s, companies supposedly had to pay retention bonuses because executives had so many other job opportunities. There was a war raging — a war for talent, said McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm.

Then came the aftermath of Enron, when new scrutiny and regulations apparently made some chief executives wonder if they still wanted their jobs. “I’m thinking of actually getting out,” David D’Alessandro, the head of John Hancock Financial Services, reported hearing from one fellow chief executive. The antidote to such doubts? Retention pay, obviously.

Now comes Mr. Liddy, the government-appointed chief of A.I.G., defending multimillion-dollar bonus payments for the people who run the small division that brought down the company. If the government doesn’t let them have their money, they will walk away, Mr. Liddy says, and nobody else will know how to clean up their mess...

So this is a big and deep problem, but skewering AIG's winners is most likely a distraction. We've been taken, but if we spend all our energy beating up on these particular winners we're likely to forget about the bigger failure in the global compensation market.

On the other hand, I do have a strong opinion that Edward Liddy, the winner who returned from retirement to manage AIG [1], showed the insight of a gnat when he wrote (italics mine) ...

... We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury...

Even in the context of our day, that's breathtaking. It's so revealing that Liddy could write that, and that Larry Summers didn't blow a gasket reading it.

Maybe it's just basal ganglia running on automatic. CEO's everywhere call their team the "best and the brightest" even when they've already decided to fire everyone and try with a new batch of losers. In which case using the phrase in this context is merely an idiotic mistake.

It's more likely, however, that Liddy believes he and his team are indeed "the best and the brightest". Winning does that to primates, it's in our genes and our neurochemistry. Unfortunately, Geithner and Summers may believe it as well.

Whatever else comes of this bit of interesting times, let's skewer, rend and bury the phrase "best and the brightest" for all time. CEOs, find another euphemism for "you're all a bunch of losers but I can't get rid of you today".

[1] Update: Turns out if AIG goes bankrupt Liddy loses a massive retirement package that he's probably depending on. So he does have skin in the game.

Update 3/19/09: I think this is right ...

Why AIG paid the bonuses (Nate Silver, 538)

The thing about these "bonuses", however is that they're not really bonuses, which we usually think of as incentive-based compensation. On the contrary, they are something the opposite of bonuses: they took compensation that had been incentive-based and guaranteed it...

The fundamental issue here what I call asymmetrical agency bias. We as human beings tend to attribute our results to skill when we are performing well, but (bad) luck when we are performing poorly...

... I'm interested in compensation and incentivization structures in general. Aggregate compensation throughout the financial services industry, I would guess, is much higher than is economically optimal (there is a lot of evidence that this is true of CEO pay). A lot of people are getting paid for what is thought to be skill but is really just luck (or economic rent).

If, as at most hedge funds, the employees are buying in with their own capital and bearing a lot of the downside risk, that is one thing. At a publicly-traded company, however, those employees are taking profits out of the shareholders' hands. And at a publicly-traded company that happens to be owned by the taxpayers, they're taking money out of the taxpayers' hands.

The compensation paid to AIG's employees, however, is less a moral failure than a market failure. We don't like to admit to market failures because they indict our collective judgment; instead we scapegoat and move on. But there are some ways to address these market failures; the more time we spend focusing on those, and the less on AIG, the more money we the taxpayers will save ourselves in the end.

Avoiding the baby in car tragedy - the tethered parent

When I read of a parent who forgets their infant in car seat and leaves them to die in a hot car, I don't think "bad parent". I think "thank you random chance, there but for the odds go I".

I remember a young child asking me from his car seat why I'd missed the turn off for work. (This was a "special needs" child who's always had a knack for directions.) I'd forgotten he was there. Bad feeling.

About 20 American parents (mostly fathers I bet) make the ultimate mistake every year. Typically it's a change to an automatic routine, a chance request to drop a child in day care on the way to work. The infant falls asleep, the basal ganglia takes over, then tragedy.

My children are old enough that they can get out of the car. If they were in car seats though, I'd follow this advice when in the high risk situation of deviation from a common habit ...

Schneier on Security: Leaving Infants in the Car (comments)

... Secure a string to the car seat and yourself (belt, wrist, etc.). Leave plenty of slack so it doesn't interfere with driving, but if you try to exit the car and forget, the string will tug. Having to unclip the string will provide the reminder...

Another study showing why 65 is a reasonable retirement age

Speaking as someone closer to 65 than to 30, this is not surprising ...

Brain study says 30 is the new 60 | Good Morning Silicon Valley

... according to a new study by Professor Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia, functions like reasoning, spatial visualization and speed of thought peak around age 22 and start to decline around 27. Based on performance tests like those used by doctors to spot signs of dementia, Salthouse found that memory functions start to go at 37 on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60. After that, you’ll need to depend on the animal cunning that comes with perspective and experience...

This is normal degeneration of course, not the accelerated degeneration we call "dementia". As go the abs, so goes the brain.

The saving grace is that even as our middle-aged brains and biceps turn to pudding, we play the experience card for all its worth. Similarly personality quirks (and even some very serious brain disorders like schizophrenia) often improve with age. So while my 50 yo brain can't reason its way out of a paper bag, it can get a reasonable amount of work done.

The trick is the other side of 65 - even for "healthy" brains. That can be a prime age for a politician, but it ain't so hot for much other cognitive work.

Which is why I find talk of "working to 75" a bit disingenuous. Working at the grocery store maybe ...

iPhone 3.0 - how many of my wishes were granted?

Here's how my personal wish list of last week played out. The Good stuff is in purple, Bad news in Red...

Gordon's Notes: Dreaming of iPhone 3.0 - my wishes

1. External keyboard support like the folding keyboards that were once sold with Palm. Maybe, since 3rd parties can now use the connector.
   
2. A standard way for 3rd party applications to synchronize with the desktop (maybe through the heretofore off-limits dock connector). No, this was not included (my first impression was wrong).
3. Something that lets me do instant messaging without paying SMS fees. Yes.
4. A Calendar API so 3rd party apps can get at Calendar data and manipulate it. No, this was not included.
   
5. Filemaker for the iPhone (not Apple so doesn't count)
6. Fix the weird scrolling and text limit problems with long contact and calendar notes (unknown)
7. Make the Calendar app more real. Better control of alerts, ability to do invitations, etc. (unknown)
8. Tethering. Widely expected, but not included. Of course there is the open connector. Either AT&T's network isn't ready or Apple and AT&T couldn't agree on revenue sharing and price. (Update: in the Q&A Apple confirmed the phone is ready, it's now all about the operators.)
   
9. Support multi-account synchronization: Additional calendar types sounds like it does at least part of what I want.
10. Cut, Copy, Paste: I assumed that was a done deal so I didn't bother to list it. They did this one very well.

Against this list there are former "Demands" that I've now given up on ...

1. Tasks and Notes: They did Note Sync after all, no tasks though. I don't care since Google is going to do Tasks.
2. Search: I gave up on this one, but Apple did it anyway. Yay!

Since there's an API for iPod.app I assume Clock.app will finally be able set music alarms. I'm perfectly happy with using Spotlight to find apps.

Overall, very good news for me. Sometime this summer (September?) I'm going to get somewhere between 50% and 80% of what I hoped for. I liked Apple's hardware announcements last month so that's twice in a row Apple has done good things for me.

Update: Tidbits claimed that VOIP is among the API services. Huh?! That can't be right.

Update 2: Ars Techica says the same thing. iPhone 3.0 will offer VOIP? Am I confused? Between Google Voice and iPhone VOIP why do I need all those AT&T minutes and long distance services?

Update 3/18/09: More like 50% of what I'd asked for. Unfortunately two of my key requests, Calendar access and a standard sync infrastructure were not included. I've revised my original post. So for me it's only a good announcement, not a great announcement.

Why is iPhone 3.0 push notification carrier specific?

The big value proposition for iPhone 3.0 push notification is dumping SMS fees and using instant messaging.

That's an internet app though. So why does iPhone 3.0 push notification require adjustment by carrier?

Macworld | iPhone Software 3.0: Live Update

... IT's a unified generic push notification service for all developers. They've also optimized it for mobile networks. Since they're in over 80 countries, with over 25 carriers, there are a bunch of different configurations. Apple does the hard work keeping the connection open. "And now it's really scalable and ready to go...

So do the carriers get to protect SMS revenue after all?

Storms in the cloud: Google Reader, Google Calendar ...

I really don't trust the cloud. I care about my data far more than any corporation cares.

It's tough to fight mother nature though, so I've made a big family bet on Google.

So some recent news is distressing.

It started with Google Reader. For the past week the "blogroll" feature has been broken. That's no big deal. Bugs happen, they get fixed. Problem is there's been no response from Google to what, at last count, were 38 posts from 20 authors (ok, so I posted more than once) in the Google Reader Help group.

And I thought Reader was one of Google's better products.

Today it hit Google Calendar. I'm not seeing any events that are more than a week or two in the future.

Needless to say, I'm sincerely hoping this is a transient glitch. It's not like I can restore from backup. [1]

At this rate I'm going to move from distrusting the Cloud to loathing the Cloud.

[1] Update 3/18/09: My Google cloud joy has grown so much I've a f/u post pending. I did, however, discover that there's now a feature to export all calendars as a zipped .ics file (see Calendar Settings page), so there is an awkward backup option. Of course non-automated backup is pointless, but this is a nice data freedom example. What I'd like to see is the ability to automatically archive a calendar snapshot to a google "backup"/snapshot service.