The Secret Life of Dr. Chandra

The CBC’s The National ran an exposé on Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra. It turns out he’s been faking his research data for 20 years:

Chandra claimed to have given 96 healthy seniors from St. John’s a daily multivitamin pill for a year. He then tested their memory for improvements. But the test results didn’t make sense.

“It turned out that the scores that his subjects were getting put them in the demented category,” Sternberg says. “The average score made them demented. Now, ah, so they would have been hospitalized or under some kind of care. But in fact, he claimed that none of them was demented. They were all normal functioning people.”

“Yeah, these people would have been too demented to understand what a study was, if you believed his numbers,” Roberts says.

Yet after just one year of taking his multivitamin, these same seniors went from demented to completely normal. Then there was Chandra’s claim that he had tested each vitamin in his multivitamin separately and at different strengths.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s just too much work. Gigantic, gigantic resources would be needed to do such a study,” Roberts says. “He’d have to have a gigantic grant just to do that study… Dozens of helpers and hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The two professors found many more glaring errors in Chandra’s study.

Was there any possible explanation for the errors found in the study?

“Oh yes,” Roberts says. “There’s a very possible explanation. It’s that he made it up.”

Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal says:

“People who behave fraudulently tend to behave fraudulently in all aspects of their life,” Smith says. “And you see that, unfortunately, fairly commonly. And so my suspicion, not proven, is that you’ll find fraud in other aspects of his work.”

So one question remains: did he fake the data to get his PhD, too?

tim redmond loses it

the san francisco bay guardian‘s editor, tim redmond, has been drinking something funny lately, resulting in him ranting against craigslist:

The problem with that is simple: When Craig comes to town (and he’s coming to just about every town in the nation soon), the existing community institutions – say, the locally owned weekly newspaper – have a very hard time competing. In many ways, he’s like a Wal-Mart – yeah, landlords get cheaper real estate ads, and consumers find some bargains, but the money all goes out of town. And he puts nothing back into the community: He doesn’t, for example, hire reporters or serve as a community watchdog.

… because his paper is losing classified ad revenue. wah, wah, my business model is obsolete!

Anil Dash told him to jump off a cliff. Well, Anil was much nicer. And more eloquent.

when your warranty expires

Ssomeone called me last week and asked what do about his 16-month-old monitor that had just died. He had already shown it to a dealer, and the dealer told him there would be a $500 minimum charge.

Since monitors aren’t something you can easily troubleshoot or repair, i started think about ways to avoid paying the money.

  1. If the product is just out of warranty, and it has previously been repaired, you may still be covered due to warranty tolling. the idea here is that for every day your product is in the shop being repaired, your warranty is extended by a day. As far as I can tell, warranty tolling exists in a few US states (California, Tennessee, Connecticut) and Mexico. The relevant sections of the California Civil Code are 1795.6 and 1795.7:

    1795.6. (a) Every warranty period relating to an implied or express warranty accompanying a sale or consignment for sale of consumer goods selling for fifty dollars ($50) or more shall automatically be tolled for the period from the date upon which the buyer either (1) delivers nonconforming goods to the manufacturer or seller for warranty repairs or service or (2), pursuant to subdivision (c) of Section 1793.2 or Section 1793.22, notifies the manufacturer or seller of the nonconformity of the goods up to, and including, the date upon which (1) the repaired or serviced goods are delivered to the buyer, (2) the buyer is notified the goods are repaired or serviced and are available for the buyer’s possession or (3) the buyer is notified that repairs or service is completed, if repairs or service is made at the buyer’s residence.

    (b) Notwithstanding the date or conditions set for the expiration of the warranty period, such warranty period shall not be deemed expired if either or both of the following situations occur: (1) after the buyer has satisfied the requirements of subdivision (a), the warranty repairs or service has not been performed due to delays caused by circumstances beyond the control of the buyer or (2) the warranty repairs or service performed upon the nonconforming goods did not remedy the nonconformity for which such repairs or service was performed and the buyer notified the manufacturer or seller of this failure within 60 days after the repairs or service was completed. When the warranty repairs or service has been performed so as to remedy the nonconformity, the warranty period shall expire in accordance with its terms, including any extension to the warranty period for warranty repairs or service.

    …

  2. If you purchased the product on your credit card, you may be in luck. many credit card companies will double the warranty, up to an additional year. check with your credit card company; they may cover the cost of the repair.
  3. Check with your insurance company. if you have homeowners or renter’s insurance, you may be covered. you may need a personal articles rider on your policy to cover this sort of thing. they’re cheap, however — mine costs $50/year and well worth it.

musician bingo

Some musicians are more comfortable in studio than on stage, and it shows. While on stage, they often resort to clichés and canned lines.

We should have a game called “musician bingo.” We can print out cards and bring them to shows. Here’s what I have so far:

  1. musician mentions name of city
  2. musician asks how crowd is doing
  3. musician mentions name of city, but gets it wrong
  4. musician mentions name of bar
  5. musician mentions name of bar, but gets it wrong
  6. musician thanks audience for coming
  7. musician thanks sound guy
  8. musician thanks lighting guy
  9. musician thanks bartender
  10. musician tells audience to put their hands up/together/in the air
  11. musician mispronouces other performer’s name
  12. musician mispronouces city
  13. musician mispronouces bar
  14. musician asks if anyone is from other city
  15. musician tosses guitar picks or drumsticks into crowd
  16. musician toasts (with) audience

16 four down, 8 to go.

the west wing

Why Farhad Manjoo still watches The West Wing:

The show is a fiction, certainly. There isn’t a politician in the world like Jed Bartlet, an exceedingly smart, (mostly) honest man with principles, who doesn’t govern by politics, who takes counsel from the cooler, calmer heads on his staff, and even from his opponents. Today in politics, you won’t find anyone half as good. And that’s precisely why I watch: Some people might look at “The West Wing” under the Bush administration as a fantasy. I look at it as a blueprint. We should be so lucky to have a real White House like that. And maybe, one day, we will. Until then, it’s nice to have it on TV.

great speeches of the 21st century

Robert F. Kennedy at the Sierra Club, September 10, 2005 [via Wil]:

I do 40 speeches a year in red states, and there is no difference between how Republican audiences and Democratic audiences react when they hear what this White House and this Congress are doing. There is no difference except that the Republicans come up afterward and say, “Why haven’t we ever heard of this before?” I say to them, “It’s because you’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush.” Eighty percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on.
…
If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of changes and ask them, “Why are you doing this?” What they invariably say is, “Well, the time has come in our nation’s history where we have to choose between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other.” And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy.

Al Gore at the Liberty Coalition (2, video) [via bn]:

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution – our system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

saying no to diamonds

A couple of months ago, Sarah got engaged. She declined to get an engagement ring (she doesn’t elaborate on her reasons). This, in my opinion, was an excellent decision. Why? Since then, I came across an Econ-Atrocity Bulletin “Ten reasons why you should never accept a diamond ring from anyone, under any circumstances, even if they really want to give you one,” which seemed like a good time to remind people of why diamonds are a Bad Thing.

The extensively footnoted Bulletin empahsizes the human rights and economics angles:

  1. You’ve been psychologically conditioned to want a diamond
  2. Diamonds are priced well above their value
  3. Diamonds have no resale or investment value
  4. Diamond miners are disproportionately exposed to HIV/AIDS
  5. Open-pit diamond mines pose environmental threats
  6. Diamond mine-owners violate indigenous people’s rights
  7. Slave laborers cut and polish diamonds
  8. Conflict diamonds fund civil wars in Africa
  9. Diamond wars are fought using child warriors
  10. Small arms trade is intimately related to diamond smuggling

A couple years ago, Anil Dash’s daming indictment of the business, “Diamonds are for never,” hit on the sleaziness and misogynism of the ads:

But how can you look at a list on the industry’s own marketing website and see “Of course there’s a return on your investment. We just can’t print it here.” and not be aware that they’re selling, along with war and market dominance, dysfunction. Want your materialistic, easily-misled wife to stop being such a frigid bitch? Buy her a diamond! Did your husband decide to increase your consumer debt in order to buy you a pair of earrings that were mined at gunpoint by children in Africa? Reward him with grudging sex and a temporary cessation of your relentless nagging!

The best resource for this, hands down, is the 1982 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Have You Ever Tried To Sell A Diamond?” by Edward Jay Epstein. It’s long, like every Atlantic Monthly piece, but also very much worth your time. Here’s the lede to get you started:

The diamond invention — the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem — is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value — and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

There is hope, however: Wired‘s “The New Diamond Age” offers a glimpse of a cartel-free future.