How Good Need Medical Evidence Be to Prevent Quackery?

Here is an interesting observation posted in a medical journal. It concludes:

Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticized the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

So, do we really know if parachutes are better than a placebo for surviving skydiving? Alt-Med advocates are all over this one.

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The real cost of college

Bob Samuels puts the numbers on the table. Here's what a student (and his or her parents) are really paying for when they fork over huge chunks of tuition to a prestigious college.

[T]he reasons why the numbers never add up in higher education is that universities and colleges use a false and misleading method to determine the cost of undergraduate instruction. Many institutions calculate this important figure by taking the total cost for all undergraduate and graduate instruction, research, and administration, and dividing that cost by the total number of students. Schwartz argues that this common method for determining cost is misguided because it assumes that all students will be taught by professors and that there is no difference between the cost of undergraduate and graduate education. In other words, when a university or state calculates how much it has to spend to educate each additional student, it includes in the costs, the full salary of a professor, but everyone knows that at research institutions, professors only spend a small percentage of their time teaching undergraduate students. According to Schwartz, parents are really paying for the cost of undergraduate instruction plus graduate instruction plus research plus administration. To be precise, undergraduates are subsidizing the cost of research and graduate education, and no one admits this fact.
I think that he leaves out another big factor in his informative post. Many people pay big money for prestigious colleges because they want their children to attend school alongside other people who can pay big bucks to go to a prestigious college. Why is that important? Why isn't their only one goal to become smarter, which many people do by self-study? In Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior (2010), Geoffrey Miller explains that universities are often in the business of "educational credentialism."
Harvard and Yale sell nicely printed sheets of paper called degrees that cost about $160,000.... alumni of such schools . . . work very hard to maintain the social norm that, in casual conversation, it is acceptable to mention where one went to college, but not to mention one's SAT or IQ scores. If I say on a second date that "the sugar maples in Harvard Yard are so beautiful every fall term," I am basically saying "My SAT scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my IQ is above 135, and I had sufficient consciousness, emotional stability, and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree." The information content is the same, but while the former sounds poetic, the latter sounds boorish.
Miller also has a lot to say about conspicuous consumption in his book, and it should be another factor for why so many colleges can get away with charging immense amounts for education without justifying those amounts. It doesn't hurt the universities financial condition that the ability to pay exorbitant tuition is a plus for many parents. It is boorish to announce one's high salary at a social function, but it is quite acceptable to drop the following in conversation: "Tuition is coming due for my two kids; one is at Harvard and the other is at Yale." Mission accomplished, because you just announced to the world that your kids both have the minimal intellectual and social requirements for entry at those institutions (and they got those genes from you!) and that you have the financial wherewithal to pay for all of that tuition.

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Nanny’s Gone Wild

This may actually be more about problems in cross cultural communication. But it does appear to be a case of runaway Nanny-State-ism. I have come to accept with a chuckle the warning labels on toasters and VCR's to not use them in the bath or shower. I'm sure they are slippery when wet, and one might drop them on ones foot. This is a problem among electrocuted zombies, I'm sure. But what am I to make of the warning on this product? Warning on a chest of drawers I need ANSI-Approved eye protection to open a drawer? Did an actual lawyer sign off on this? This box is actually lower quality than a similar one that I'd bought at Target a couple of years earlier for the same price. Target doesn't have them any more, so I resort to Harbor Freight. I've been mail-ordering from Harbor Freight since the 1980's, long before they had stores east of California. This is a cheap tools import house that now has an outlet a few blocks west of Crestwood Plaza Court. The prices are amazing, but you get what you pay for.

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Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

Jamie Oliver is a chef who wants to talk about people who are killing themselves by eating dangerous food. Obesity is killing us in huge numbers, though the media still would rather scare us about homicides, which are relatively rare. We have become so big that there is a significant market for double-sized coffins. The system is rife with misinformation. We are a country where food manufacturers make prominent "no fat" labels when the food (including milk) is full of sugar. One of his messages is that we've got to stop trusting food manufacturers to properly label their food products. What we do to our children by feeding them crappy food is "child abuse." Our schools are complicit, along with food manufacturers. Oliver's talk is an up front and personal look at the perpetrators and victims of the problem, and they are often the same people. But consider, also, that we now live is a system where accountants choose our food, not nutritionists. The low-light of the video is at the 11-minute mark. How well do our kids recognize fruits and vegetables? Not well at all. We are failing miserably at educating our children about food. We can do a lot better, and Jamie offers some promising solutions that all focus on educating our families and children. Oliver offers a positive energy and an urgency that we desperately need. Here's Oliver's wish: jamie-oliver-food-wish

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Warming to Climate Claims

As Washington D.C. gets record snowfall, climate denialists cackle with glee. It was a cool summer, and now a cold winter. So, they wonder, where is this global warming? "People," I want to condescendingly say, "look at the sun." Weather girls of all genders and persuasions are mentioning that this is the coldest winter in 11 years. Notice that? Are they unaware that there is an 11 year cycle of solar warming and cooling that corresponds to -- and can be measured by -- sunspots? So it's like saying with implied importance that this is the coldest month since 12 months ago. The spots are just starting up, much like the days getting longer at the end of December. Here is a nice look at the sunspot phenomenon. It is intuitively confusing that dark spots mean more heat. But the pair of images here shows visible and ultraviolet views of the same scene. Those dark spots are tunnels into the gamma-hot regions of the sun. Our eyes can only see one octave on the spectrum. Both hotter than blue and cooler than red ranges are invisible. Dark. Red hot is the coldest temperature that gives off light. (Read about Black Body Radiation if you want to know how this is known.) Another detail that climate denialists get wrong is the meaning of heavy snowfall. If you get heavy precipitation, it implies much moisture aloft. That is, many more megatons of water are evaporated. By heat. So before you point to a low local current temperature as evidence against global warming, please look at the time scale that climatologists use, like the Temperature record of the past 1000 years, or even for the last century and a half:

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