Archive for the ‘Behaviour’ Category

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Results falsified but only “inadvertently” by researchers at Queensland University of Technology

July 31, 2013

There are strange goings-on down under at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

The story has all the necessary ingredients for a genuine scandal. Falsified results in a grant application and a paper, the paper retracted, grant money awarded on the basis of the alleged results, a University with commercial interests in the alleged results of the alleged research, a whistleblower’s name illegally revealed by the Vice Chancellor of the University, and the Crime and Misconduct Commission accused of colluding with the University.

The University has found that the falsification of results was inadvertent and not fraud and nothing to worry about.

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UPDATE: Now the QUT “investigation” which came to the “finding” that the falsification was “inadvertent” and not fraud is itself being questioned by the federal agency that gave the scientists a $275,000 grant for stem cell work.

31st July: The National Health and Medical Research Council is not satisfied with some of QUT’s investigative procedures and wants a review by the Australian Research Integrity Committee. The move is unusual, with the ARIC set up in 2011 to ensure research allegations of misconduct are investigated properly taking on just a handful of cases.

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It is compelling reading and lives up to the convoluted tradition of Australian politics. But I have some difficulty in telling the “good guys” from the “bad guys” – if there are any “good guys” in this saga at all!

29th July: QUT reputation at risk after grant application and research mistakes

RESEARCHERS at one of Queensland’s top universities have admitted to incorrectly filling out a lucrative grant application in a mistake that could cost the university hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The “inadvertent” mistake by Queensland University of Technology scientists has put the university’s reputation at risk, the Vice-Chancellor says. The National Health and Medical Research Council is examining the circumstances under which it awarded QUT a $275,000 grant for research, and QUT boss Peter Coaldrake said the university faced having to pay it back. 

Whistleblowers have exposed errors in the reporting of embryonic stem cell research, prompting an internal probe into alleged misconduct and the retraction of a key research paper. The lead researcher has admitted to The Courier-Mail that an “inadvertent mistake” occurred in the writing of the grant application and an associated scientific paper published in 2010.

The NHMRC awarded the money to fund research into stem cell cultivation at QUT’s prestigious Institute for Health and Biomedical Innovation. The scientists were working on developing a “world-first” product to safely grow human cells in the lab without the use of risky animal proteins.

However, university insiders accused the researchers of exaggerating some results. “It was alleged that some data in the grant application had been falsified,” Prof Coaldrake said.

The scientists were subsequently cleared by a QUT inquiry. QUT later told the NHMRC there was no misconduct in the grant application. The journal involved has since retracted the article, a highly unusual step. …

30th July: QUT researchers cleared of fraud

AN “inadvertent” mistake in filling out a grant application by researchers at Queensland University of Technology saw the university awarded $275,000 for stem cell research and which has subsequently lead to an internal probe into research misconduct and the retraction of a research paper, the Courier Mail reported yesterday.

The NHMRC awarded the grant for research into stem cell cultivation at QUT’s Institute for Health and Biomedical Innovation. The scientists were working on developing a “world-first” product to safely grow human cells in the lab without the use of risky animal proteins, the Courier Mail said.

But the researchers were accused of falsifying some results, even though the scientists were subsequently cleared by an internal inquiry of any wrongdoing.

The whistleblowers who drew attention to irregularities in the research say QUT has a conflict of interest because it is a shareholder in a company called Tissue Therapies which was set up with the express purpose of developing and commercialising products based on the research.

30th July: Premier Peter Beattie gave QUT researchers in grant controversy an extra $225,000 for related work

QUT scientists at the centre of a controversy over a $275,000 federal grant for a now discredited journal paper also received $225,000 from then premier Peter Beattie for related work, as part of a 2007 funding package worth more than $1 million.

But while QUT has informed the Crime and Misconduct Commission and the National Health and Medical Research Council about errors in the application for the federal grant and the retraction of a key research paper, the university has not told the State Government.

31st July: QUT vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake reports himself to CMC for disclosing whistleblower’s identity

QUT Vice-Chancellor Peter Coaldrake has reported himself to the Crime and Misconduct Commission after disclosing the identity of a protected whistleblower.

Prof Coaldrake named the person in an interview with The Courier-Mail in which he discussed the allegations by the whistleblower of research misconduct by QUT scientists. Prof Coaldrake later turned himself in to the CMC.

QUT later confirmed the employee’s status as a whistleblower protected by the Public Interest Disclosure Act. This law makes it an offence for public officials to disclose the person’s identity without their consent, except for the purposes of official investigations. The offence carries a fine of up to $9000. …… In the same interview Professor Coaldrake declined to name four academics from other universities involved in investigating research misconduct allegations involving a retracted scientific paper. He said this was because he wasn’t sure if the academics’ identities were known by the stem cell researchers being investigated. … QUT has declined to explain why Prof Coaldrake volunteered the name of the whistleblower.

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Posted in Academic misconduct, Australia, Behaviour, Ethics, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »

Ahluwalia’s PhD cleared of fraud by Imperial College

July 31, 2013

I have posted extensively about Dr. Jatinder Ahluwalia’s scientific misconduct while at University College London and earlier at Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD by Imperial College London in a collaborative industrial doctorate with Novartis as his sponsor.

Following the ruckus, Imperial College investigated his PhD but have now cleared him of any fraud but their report does complain that access to Ahluwalia’s lab books was restricted by Novartis and only supervised access was permitted. Ahluwalia’s career in academia has virtually come to an end but I do have a suspicion that his PhD supervisors at Imperial College (Dr. Istvan Nagy) and at Novartis ( Dr Marco Compagna) cannot be completely free of all blame.

On the atmosphere in the research group, Dr Nagy suggests that Jatinder Ahluwalia was under no pressure to publish or to produce results in Dr Nagy’s group and Dr Nagy felt that a climate to produce fraudulent data did not exist, since there was no reason to produce papers in a hurry.
From discussions with Dr Nagy on the set-up of Dr Ahluwalia’s supervision arrangements it appears that the separation between Novartis and Imperial may have led to errors in supervision, where any mistakes that Jatinder Ahluwalia may have made in methodology and interpretation could not easily be checked.

THES and Retraction Watch cover the story.

THES: 

Imperial College London has cleared disgraced researcher Jatinder Ahluwalia of committing fraud during his industrial doctorate at the institution. 

However, a report setting out the finding also reveals that Imperial experienced considerable difficulties in investigating its suspicions due to the reluctance of the industrial collaborator on Dr Ahluwalia’s studentship to grant access to his lab books.

The investigation was announced in August 2011, after Dr Ahluwalia’s co-authors agreed to retract a 2003 Journal of Neurochemistry paper, of which he was first author, following the failure of his former supervisor, Istvan Nagy, to replicate its findings.

In 2010 a paper written while Dr Ahluwalia was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London was retracted by his former boss, Anthony Segal, after a UCL committee found that he had manipulated his results and had probably interfered with colleagues’ experiments to cover his tracks.

It subsequently emerged that Dr Ahluwalia had been dismissed from the University of Cambridge’s PhD programme in 1997 after his supervisor suspected him of faking results.

He then did a PhD at Imperial between 1999 and 2002, funded by a Medical Research Council “Case” studentship, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Novartis.

In 2009, while the UCL investigation was ongoing, Professor Segal informed Imperial of his suspicions about the 2003 paper. No misconduct was found during a subsequent investigation, but the paper was corrected in 2010 after “an arithmetical error” was identified.

Following its 2011 retraction, a six-person panel investigation panel – which included Imperial’s pro-rector for education, dean of students and student union president – was formed to check Dr Ahluwalia’s PhD work for fraud. None was found. …..

Dr Ahluwalia left the University of East London, where he had been a senior lecturer in pharmacology, in 2011 following an internal investigation. His current whereabouts are unknown.

Retraction Watch: 

We’ve uploaded the entire report here.

Ahluwalia, as Retraction Watch readers may recall, has had a paper in Nature retracted, as well as one in theJournal of Neurochemistry. The Nature retraction followed an investigation at University College London, where he was a postdoc, and he then left the University of East London after we reported that he had been dismissed from Cambridge the first time he had tried to get a PhD.

Imperial, where he earned his doctorate, began investigating more than two years ago. They began looking in whether he should lose his PhD after the Journal of Neurochemistry retraction, because that paper formed the basis of his thesis. They found:

The panel determined that there was no evidence of research misconduct in Dr Ahluwalia’s thesis. It noted that fraudulent activity by Dr Ahluwalia had been reported elsewhere but that this did not suggest that misconduct had occurred at Imperial. As no evidence of fraud or misconduct at Imperial had been identified, the award of the PhD should stand.

Part of the reason the investigation took so long was because of problems accessing Ahluwalia’s data, given that his supervisor was a :

An initial confidential review of the thesis and publications was carried out by a private firm contracted for the purpose and identified the need for further investigation. In parallel to this a protracted negotiation ensued between the College and Novartis for the panel to have access to Dr Ahluwalia’s notebooks which were in Novartis’ possession. Eventually supervised access to the notebooks on Novartis’ premises was agreed by Novartis.

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Facebook and Twitter are “publishers”, not merely “couriers”

July 30, 2013

Social media like to claim that they merely provide a “platform” or  are just “communication enablers” or only provide “communication media” and therefore that they are not responsible – and should not be held responsible – for the content they disseminate.

But they protest too much.

It is quite wrong to compare Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn to a telecommunications enterprise or a postal service or a courier service or an e-mail service provider. In all of these a specific identifiable “sender” directs a communique to a specific, identified “receiver”. The carrying of the communique to the specific receiver is the service provided by the communications enterprise and is not in any sense “publishing”. The service provided by the social media is more than just the provision of a soap box in Hyde Park (a platform) or the provision of a Board or a Wall in a town square onto which a newspaper could be appended. Any website could be a platform for comments but the website owner must take ultimate responsibility for the content published on the web-site.

Facebook and Twitter disseminate their users communiques to a general audience without discriminating as to who may receive the communique. Their business models rely on this audience being as large as possible. Their advertising revenues depend upon the dissemination being as wide and as “indiscriminate” as possible. They are not so different to a radio or a TV broadcast where the broadcaster tries to reach as large an audience as possible. The broadcaster is clearly responsible and accountable for the content of the broadcast. A free newspaper being distributed at all Metro stations but where revenues are dependent upon advertising also has a responsible publisher. Any advertising revenue accrues to the publisher.

The clincher for me is that the placement of advertisements based on circulation is decisive proof of the existence of a publisher. All published material does not contain advertising. Not all advertising is proof of the existence of a publisher. A billboard or sandwich-board owner for example, is not a publisher. But the mere existence of advertising based on circulation numbers or “reach” or any similar parameter is conclusive proof – I think – of the existence of a publisher. And it is the person or organisation responsible for the circulation who takes the advertising revenues and in consequence must be the responsible and accountable publisher.

Freedom of speech does not really enter the argument. The publisher may choose to publish whatever he pleases. He may refrain from “censoring” his users if he so wishes. Or he may – at some cost – ensure that the content he publishes meets criteria that he sets himself. But he remains responsible and accountable for what he publishes. Facebook and Twitter cannot abdicate their responsibility because they choose not to exercise the quality control they could.

It seems to me to be self-evident that Facebook and Twitter are not “billboards” or “sandwich-boards” but are full fledged “broadcasters”. And a broadcaster is a publisher. They could take responsibility for the content they disseminate if they wanted to. It just costs. They can be held accountable for what they indubitably do publish – and they should.

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Posted in Behaviour, Ethics, Media | 1 Comment »

A retraction can achieve more publicity than the original paper

July 30, 2013

A jaundiced view of retractions and questions of a cynical kind:

  1. Could an article or paper be deliberately written so as to be retracted later for the ensuing publicity?
  2. Can a deliberate retraction be managed so as to generate credit for the journal or the author who requests the retraction?
  3. And is it not “perfectly correct” to cite a retracted paper in a subsequent paper as a  “publication (retracted)”?

A retraction – if sufficiently “interesting” – can get more publicity than the original paper. It may be a cliche but it is nonetheless true  that there is no such thing as bad publicity. And if the retraction is at the “request of the authors” the author may actually demonstrate and even build a reputation for integrity!

This story at Retraction Watch of an article pulled by Slate raises my suspicions that just publicity was actually the objective.

RetractionWatch: 

Slate has retracted an essay they published as part of a partnership with Quora, an online question-and-answer site, after acknowledging that they “did not vet the piece properly.”

The piece garnered hundreds of comments, many of which questioned whether its claims were legit, and some of which pointed out that the author may have posted questionable material on the web before.

This now appears where the article, originally published at 5:01 p.m. on Thursday, July 25, originally did:

Editor’s note: On July 25, Slate published in this space an essay from its partner site Quora titled “Are Doctors Biased Against Obese People?” Because the piece did not meet our editorial standards, we have taken it down.

On Friday at 6:09 p.m., brandchannel started a post about the article with a quote from the piece:

When I was pregnant, one OB called me disgusting and told me to have an abortion.

brandchannel doesn’t mention the retraction, which Slate tells us happened Friday night, just over 24 hours after it as originally posted. But brandchannel anticipated that move, including the entire Slate-Quora piece saved for posterity, …..

I note also from Professor Debora Weber-Wulff’s blog that retracted papers still show up being cited – as retractions – in other papers. The paper is in PLoS and is supposedly a peer-reviewed online publication.

36. Rathinam C, Klein C (2012) Retraction: transcriptional repressor gfi1 integrates cytokine-receptor signals controlling B-cell differentiation. PLoS One 7.

Retraction? Are they citing the retraction of the article as a reference for what had been stated in the article retracted? 

Retracted papers are also being included in CV’s! I suppose that the paper was accepted for publication – even if later retracted – is some kind of an achievement!

It reminds me of the old story where CV’s in India would regularly include something like

“BA, 1943, University of Aligarh (fail)”.

This was considered – socially and academically – acceptable as proof that the author had at least done the course and had appeared for the examination!

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Vatican — duping or duped about VSEL stem cells?

July 29, 2013

Vatican theologians have a long history of going to extraordinary lengths and convolutions to align theology with every new scientific advance. It has not been unknown for theologians to try and massage the facts and to direct new research along theologically “acceptable” paths.

The Vatican – and other religious organisations – consider the use of adult stem cells to be ethically quite acceptable whereas they consider the use of embryonic stem cells to be unethical since it involves the “murder” of the embryos. And they have put their weight behind VSEL (very small embryonic-like) stem cells. But they have gone overboard in promoting the possible benefits of the use of adult stem cells even to the extent of holding conferences about the potential benefits. But many researchers are appalled by theology overriding science and holding out false hopes.

Nature: April 2013

The Second International Vatican Adult Stem Cell meeting, held on 11–13 April in Vatican City, was a shamelessly choreographed performance. Sick children were paraded for television, sharing the stage with stem-cell companies and scientists desperate to hawk a message that their therapies must be speeded to clinical use. ….

A kilometre away at the Italian senate, meanwhile, parliamentarians further eroded protection for vulnerable patients targeted by stem-cell companies. On 10 April, they amended an already controversial ministerial decree (see Nature 495, 418–419; 2013) with a clause that would redefine stem-cell therapy as tissue transplantation, thereby releasing it from any regulatory oversight. If the second parliamentary chamber endorses this amendment, Italy will be out of step with the rules of the European Union and the US Food and Drug Administration, both of which define stem cells modified outside the body as medicines.

Many scientists around the world were appalled by the events in Rome, and rightly so. It is wrong to exploit the desperation of the disabled and the terminally ill and to raise false hopes of quick fixes, as some at the Vatican meeting tried to do. It is also wrong to try to use such patients as experimental animals by bypassing regulatory agencies, as the Italian parliament seems to want to do. ….

Now it seems that the Vatican has either been duped about very small embryonic-like stem cells or has been involved in perpetuating the myth that these cells even exist and offer an alternative.

RawStory:

Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine issued a report this month that said a type of stem-cell alternative approved by the Vatican and other theologians has turned out to be a myth. According to an essay by bioethicist Arthur Caplan, Dr. Irving Weissman and his team have concluded that so-called very small embryonic-like (VSEL) stem cells are at best a laboratory error and at worst a deliberate fraud perpetrated on the scientific and religious communities.

In 2011, the Vatican called a press conference to present Polish stem cell biologist Mariusz Z. Ratajczak, who claimed that he had discovered heretofore unknown stem cells present in adult cells. These tiny cells, he claimed, could perform the same tasks as embryonic stem cells, including tissue regeneration and the miraculous capacity that embryonic stem cells have to mimic other types of cell tissue. Moreover, these VSEL cells, said Ratajczak, could be harvested from adult cells without harming human embryos or relying on them for cell material.

“The theologians,” wrote Caplan, “were delighted.” They believed that the new technology could halt what they see as the murder of unborn children. The Vatican took the unprecedented step of investing heavily in NeoStem, a company claiming to specialize in VSEL research and production, in hopes that the new technology would render the destruction of embryos for stem cells obsolete. ….. The trouble is, the cells don’t exist. At least, according to Weissman, who said that his team not only hasn’t been able to make VSELs perform their tissue-regenerative miracles in the laboratory, they can’t find them at all. …

….. Rüdiger Alt, head of research at Vita 34, an umbilical cord blood bank in Leipzig, Germany — whose team also failed to get results from Ratajczak’s methods — told the journal Nature, “Weissman’s evidence is a clincher — it is the end of the road for VSELs.”

Bioethicist Caplan wrote that supporters of VSEL research “say their peers just don’t have the techniques down for finding them. But it is just as likely that in their hope to find a solution to stem cell research acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups they have let themselves find something that is just not there.”

He concluded, “Until someone other then those tied to the power of VSELS for religious or business reasons can find them, be wary of any claims about their power to heal.”

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Transylvanian Hypothesis lives again — Now lunar cycles found to affect sleep

July 26, 2013

Moon sickness is becoming all the rage. Hot on the heels of the report that cardiac surgery results are affected by the phases of the moon comes this study showing that lunar cycles do – in fact – also affect sleep. Our bodies it seems also dance to a lunar rythm and maybe it is time to revive the Transylvanian Hypothesis and revisit all the myths and legends about the effects of the moon (werewolves, induced lunacy, epileptic fits and even lunar effects on general practice consultancy rates!)

A new paper in Current Biology

Christian Cajochen, Songül Altanay-Ekici, Mirjam Münch, Sylvia Frey, Vera Knoblauch, Anna Wirz-Justice. Evidence that the Lunar Cycle Influences Human Sleep. Current Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.029

from planetsforkids

EurekAlert: 

Many people complain about poor sleep around the full moon, and now a report appearing in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on July 25 offers some of the first convincing scientific evidence to suggest that this really is true. The findings add to evidence that humans—despite the comforts of our civilized world—still respond to the geophysical rhythms of the moon, driven by a circalunar clock.

“The lunar cycle seems to influence human sleep, even when one does not ‘see’ the moon and is not aware of the actual moon phase,” says Christian Cajochen of the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel.

In the new study, the researchers studied 33 volunteers in two age groups in the lab while they slept. Their brain patterns were monitored while sleeping, along with eye movements and hormone secretions.

The data show that around the full moon, brain activity related to deep sleep dropped by 30 percent. People also took five minutes longer to fall asleep, and they slept for twenty minutes less time overall. Study participants felt as though their sleep was poorer when the moon was full, and they showed diminished levels of melatonin, a hormone known to regulate sleep and wake cycles.

“This is the first reliable evidence that a lunar rhythm can modulate sleep structure in humans when measured under the highly controlled conditions of a circadian laboratory study protocol without time cues,” the researchers say.

Cajochen adds that this circalunar rhythm might be a relic from a past in which the moon could have synchronized human behaviors for reproductive or other purposes, much as it does in other animals. Today, the moon’s hold over us is usually masked by the influence of electrical lighting and other aspects of modern life.

The researchers say it would be interesting to look more deeply into the anatomical location of the circalunar clock and its molecular and neuronal underpinnings. And, they say, it could turn out that the moon has power over other aspects of our behavior as well, such as our cognitive performance and our moods.

 

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Rebranding of Narendra Modi is well under way

July 26, 2013

Back in 2011 I posted about the rebranding of Narendra Modi being orchestrated by Steven King and APCO Worldwide and which had started in 2009. His chances then of overcoming his Gujarat-riots reputation to become the BJP’s candidate for Prime Minister  were small at that time.

That has all changed now and the odds of his being the PM candidate are very high and his chances of becoming the next PM of India must be better than 50%.

Modi is not only the leading candidate to be the BJP’s candidate for PM for the 2014 elections, he has also been appointed the head of BJP’s campaign. He has started his efforts to gain acceptance across the country and regional parties are beginning to position themselves and even if they are not all rushing to show their support for him, they are certainly busy getting onto the fence so that they could support him if it becomes necessary or it could be beneficial. (Indian political parties all strictly follow the ideology of Opportunism).

Steven King – after his plagiarism fiasco – is no longer shown on APCO Worldwides’s website. If APCO are still working for Modi they are not doing it directly. During the floods in Uttarakhand a rather stupid effort was made to show Modi as a hero in the rescue of flood victims. This quickly backfired as in this article in the Times of India. The article mentioned APCO Worldwide  and led to APCO denying that they had anything to do with the rescue story or that they were working for Modi.

India is a big market for APCO and they are going to very careful in the run-up to the election to keep their ties to all political parties alive.  APCO India Brochure

Whatever the truth of APCO’s involvement (and I think the rescue story was a little crude for APCO) some PR group is certainly trying to orchestrate the rebranding of the Modi image. I would not be at all surprised that such a PR Group had – or has – links to APCO.

The latest story about 65 MP’s writing to Obama to ensure that Modi was not granted a US visa followed by 9 MP’s claiming that their signatures on the letter were forged is sufficiently convoluted to make me suspect the guiding hand of a well experienced PR exponent. The result of the circus is that the 65 MP’s look petty and vindictive and are all on the defensive. The Congress Party and the Left parties are busy distancing themselves from the writing of such a letter. Even the BJP has had to point out that they have no significant differences in foreign policy from that of the present government. Modi comes out very nicely with the faint glow of a halo beginning to appear.

Even the reports in the media that Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has stated that he does not believe in Modi’s economics and does not want him to be his Prime Minister are actually working to Modi’s advantage. (Sen’s attack on the real achievements in Gujarat is particularly silly – but I note in passing that it is not at all uncommon for Nobel laureates in Economics to make idiots of themselves). In fact, Sen now being “associated” in the public mind with Rahul Gandhi, is to Gandhi’s disadvantage. In my suspicious mind I see the hand of a skilled PR man again, who has successfully provoked Sen into making a silly – almost stupid – attack on Modi – to Modi’s eventual benefit. If Amartya Sen is really opposed to Modi, he has just scored an own goal – or three.

If the 2014 election becomes a personality contest between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, it would – I think – be a walk-over for Modi. The real skill of Modi’s PR strategists will show in their ability to marshall the diverse regional parties behind Modi. Exactly how they can mobilise and align the different caste groups will be particularly convoluted and fascinating to watch.

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Yoghurt and Spice

July 26, 2013

Bowel disease found to be twice as common in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe.

Of course they don’t know why it should be  that “Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are. twice as common in Western Europe as in Eastern Europe”.

I think it’s because there’s much more yoghurt in the Eastern European diet and not enough spice in the Western European diet!

Yoghurt and spice chicken image- health.com

 ScienceNordic  reports: 

A huge study with data from ten million people points towards a previously undescribed tendency. The bowel diseases Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are twice as common in Western Europe as in Eastern Europe. The international study was headed by a group of researchers at the Digestive Disease Centre, Copenhagen University Hospital, Herlev, Denmark.

The researchers gathered data about CD and UC patients from 31 intestinal health centres from more than 20 countries throughout Europe. The centres covered a total of some ten million people.
”The whole point of setting up a project such as this one is that we want everyone to take part. We have approached as many of the relevant institutions as we could,” he says.

The reason why Burisch decided to focus on the incidence of these two diseases was that the number of patients started to increase in Eastern Europe, including Hungary and Croatia. …..

…. It turned out that the diseases were twice as common in the West as in the East. ….. 

An obvious reason for this difference could be that Western Europeans are generally better at examining and diagnosing, which means that there may well be a significant number of undiagnosed patients in Eastern Europe. ”But the Eastern European centres that we looked at were good at diagnosing. In fact, they appeared to be more in line with international guidelines than we are [in Western Europe].”

An alternative explanation is that the immune system can become lazy as the living standards improve.

”In Western Europe we have high standards of hygiene and we consume lots of controlled and processed foods, which may confuse and dull our immune system,” says the researcher, pointing out that the search for an explanation is still at the speculative stage. …

And since it is in the speculative stage I suggest it is due to more yoghurt in the East and not enough spice in the West!

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Successful owl species to be killed off to assist an unsuccessful owl species!

July 24, 2013

“Conservation” is fundamentally anti-evolution if human intervention is to protect unviable species while killing off the successful ones. And here it would seem that the intervention by the US Fish and Wildlife Service is more to atone for their past sins than for any sound principles. All in the name of “Conservation”.

Barred owl

A barred owl is seen near Index, Wash. The federal government is considering killing some of the owls in the Pacific Northwest to aid the smaller northern spotted owl in the area. (Barton Glasser / Associated Press)LATimes: 

LA Times: Federal wildlife officials have moved one step closer to their plan to play referee in a habitat supremacy contest that has pitted two species of owl against one another in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a final environmental review of an experiment planned in three states to see if killing barred owls will assist the northern spotted owls, which are threatened with extinction after a major loss of territory since the 1970s.

The agency’s preferred course of action calls for killing 3,603 barred owls in four study areas in Oregon, Washington and Northern California over the next four years. At a cost of $3 million, the plan requires a special permit under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prohibits killing non-game birds.

“It’s a fair assessment to say that going after the barred owls is the plan we’d prefer to pursue,” Robin Bown, a federal wildlife biologist, told the Los Angeles Times.

The agency began evaluating alternatives in 2009, gathering public comment and consulting ethicists, focus groups and conduction scientific studies.

It will issue a final decision on the plan in 30 days.

…..

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Repression of the bulk of the people, by some of the people for the benefit of others of the people

July 24, 2013

How the political tables do turn.

It seems more than a little ironic – but quite delicious nevertheless – that a Democratic President in the White House is trying to block an amendment by a Republican in the House which aims to restrict the unbridled spying by the Government on the bulk of the people, on the grounds that the amendment is a ” blunt approach” which ” is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process”.  

Business Insider: In a terse statement late Tuesday evening, the White House blasted the so-called “Amash Amendment” that would limit the National Security Agency’s ability to collect data on personal phone communications, calling the program crucial to national security. 

 “We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation,” Press Secretary Jay Carney said.

The amendment is one of several the House of Representatives will consider to the 2014 Defense Appropriations Bill. It was introduced by Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian Republican from Michigan, and has earned bipartisan backing from, among others, Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Jared Polis (D-Colo.). Conyers is a co-sponsor.

The amendment would “end authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act,” as well as prevent the NSA from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, “including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.” It is targeted at the first part of revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in disclosures to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

Tuesday’s statement clearly shows that the White House is worried about it passing. The NSA is also worried — it held a “top secret” meeting with members of Congress to lobby against the amendment. 

Here’s the full statement from Carney:

In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens.  The Administration has taken various proactive steps to advance this debate including the President’s meeting with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, his public statements on the disclosed programs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s release of its own public statements, ODNI General Counsel Bob Litt’s speech at Brookings, and ODNI’s decision to declassify and disclose publicly that the Administration filed an application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.  We look forward to continuing to discuss these critical issues with the American people and the Congress.

However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools.  This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.  We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.

It must be a little galling for President Obama that history will probably show a Democratic President as being more “repressive” of citizens than most Republican Presidents. But probably not as galling as having a US citizen who discloses his Administration’s repression of US citizens now receiving sanctuary and seeking asylum in Russia!

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Posted in Behaviour, Politics | Comments Off on Repression of the bulk of the people, by some of the people for the benefit of others of the people

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