ProPublica presents a database of doctors on the take from pharmaceutical companies, and praise is not universal. Mandelbrot is dead, but the Mandelbrot Set lives on. And Schrodinger's Cat acquires a canine companion.
[We have an RSS feed. No orange icon, but click here. If that doesn't work, the URL is http://www.nasw.org/rss.xml]
FOR THE PUBLIC, NEWS ABOUT PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY PAYMENTS TO DOCTORS. Knight Science Journalism Tracker Paul Raeburn has drawn flak for his critical post about the journalism accompanying the latest ProPublica project. ProPublica, the nonprofit that does investigative journalism, has compiled an interactive database of docs who took payments from pharmas. (The total number of recipients is a stunning figure, all the more stunning for being a partial list only. On the record nearly 18,000 physicians took the payments, but the data are not at all complete. They came from only the 7 drug companies that currently list recipients on their Web sites. By 2013, all pharmas will be required to do so.)
Paul criticized the accompanying takeout's focus on anecdotes about the 250 recipients who had been investigated for various ethical breaches. He pointed out correctly that the issue was pharmas paying any docs, not just payments to the 1.4% of total recipients with dubious backgrounds. But he got into trouble because he slammed the ProPublica piece for being too long and too much — while also declaring that he hadn't read it in full, or any of the pieces by ProPublica's project partners: the Boston Globe, Consumer Reports, NPR, the Chicago Trib, and PBS.
Commenters in turn criticized Paul for complaining about the ProPublica piece without having read it completely. Since (Full Disclosure) I haven't either, I will confine myself to blogging links.
The Carlat Psychiatry Blog describes the project and explains how the database can be used. (Author Daniel Carlat is also the author of Unhinged, about how the psychiatry profession is hooked on drugs rather than other forms of therapy.) Andrew Van Dam also describes the project at the Association of Health Care Journalists's blog Covering Health. (AHCJ president Charles Ornstein is one of the authors of the ProPublica story.) At Forbes Treatments blog, Robert Langreth takes out after colleague David Whelen, who defended the pharma payments at his Forbes blog, Health Dollars.
At Gooznews on Health, Merrill Goozner points out that although pharmas tout the recipients of their largesse as leaders in their respective specialties, in aggregate the docs have less-than-stellar publication records. Goozner yearns for regulation and offers details about conflict-of-interest in drug prescribing and drug approval. He declares:
... conflict of interest defines the American way of life, and not just in medicine. Journalistic exposes of such conflicts are the functional equivalent of the cock crowing when the sun comes up in the morning. The poor bird heralds the event, but he has no chance of changing its inevitability.
MORE NEWS FOR THE MANDELBROT SET. I drew your attention to photos of fractals in nature a few weeks back, and now comes the news that mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who named fractals, is dead. Although he contributed to many fields, he was most strongly associated with something he did not invent: the fractal Mandelbrot set, named so in his honor.
SciAm has posted a 1985 "Computer Recreations" column by A.K. Dewdney that reaches for poetry in defining the Mandelbrot set. (The column is mostly about how to play with the set on your 1985 computer, which probably wouldn't have been do-able on the Kaypro I owned at the time. 8 inch screen! 64K RAM! On a later DOS machine I had a Mandelbrot set program, and it was the most mesmerizing of screensavers.) You can get to a PDF of the full article here too.
Quoting from Dewdney's poetics:
In principle one can zoom in for a closer look at any part of the set at any magnification. From a distant vantage the set resembles a squat, wart-covered figure eight lying on its side. The inside of the figure is ominously black. Surrounding it is a halo colored electric white, which gives way to deep blues and blacks in the outer reaches of the plane. Approaching the Mandelbrot set, one finds that each wart is a tiny figure shaped much like the parent set. Zooming in for a close look at one of the tiny figures, however, opens up an entirely different pattern: a riot of organic-looking tendrils and curlicues sweeps out in whorls and rows. Magnifying a curlicue reveals yet another scene: it is made up of pairs of whorls joined by bridges of filigree. A magnified bridge turns out to have two curlicues sprouting from its center. In the center of this center, so to speak, is a four-way bridge with four more curlicues, and in the center of these curlicues another version of the Mandelbrot set is found. The magnified version is not quite the same Mandelbrot set. As the zoom continues, such objects seem to reappear, but a closer look always turns up differences. Things go on this way forever, infinitely various and frighteningly lovely.
Mandelbrot was a literal polymath; see, for example, his 1999 SciAm Article "How Fractals Can Explain What's Wrong with Wall Street" — which SciAm reprinted in 2008 to explain the collapse of Lehman Brothers. At SciAm's Cross-check, John Horgan pays tribute and traces the chaotic history of chaos theory.
Generate your own fractals by following links at the site for Nova's program on fractals. Also take a look at Arthur C. Clarke's quirky 1994 documentary. There are clips all over the Web, but you can find the whole 50-some minutes here.
Finally, just for fun, play two video versions of Jonathan Coulter's musical exploration of the Mandelbrot set and fractal geometry. Parental advisory: Adult Language. Find them here and here.
FOR THE PUBLIC, SCHRODINGER'S DOG IS THE CAT'S MEOW. Calling your attention to a new physics blog, which I mention partly because of its ambition, but, I confess, mostly because of its name: Schrodinger's Dog. (If you're not sure why this amuses, see Cecil Adams's Straight Dope on Schrodinger's Cat here. Which, actually, is worth reading for its own self.)
Blogger Vatche Sahakian, a theoretical physicist at Harvey Mudd College, explains physics thus:
Physics is about understanding something for the sake of understanding it ... Physics is an endeavor driven by pure idealism, the belief that we ought and deserve to understand how Nature ticks; and if we do, perhaps everything else will fall into its right places.
Perhaps.
Anyway, Sahakian's stated ambition is to explain developments in physics — relativity, gravitation, and quantum mechanics — to the gen'l public. Sahakian tags these introductory posts "frosh," which is a bit troubling, frosh being a descriptive term for a n00be that I haven't encountered since my Archie Comics days.
But let us reserve judgment. It is perhaps not surprising that the blog is the leading edge of a flotilla of Sahakian projects that includes (of course) a book, but also videos and even an iPhone app. In this post, based on a NASA timeline of the history of the universe, Sahakian wrestles (pretty successfully to this non-physicist's eye) with quantum fluctuations and inflation.
.png)
