bearing blog

Justice for Henry.

Katie Allison Granju is finally going public.  Last year her teenage son Henry was severely and permanently disabled from complications after an assault and a drug overdose.  He later died from his injuries.  Katie has maintained that, contrary to Tennessee law, the local authorities have refused to thoroughly investigate her son's death as a homicide, and believes that because he suffered from drug addiction, the authorities simply did not care about pursuing the people whose criminal actions or inactions may have helped kill him.

Katie has been writing about her grief and at the same time, carefully, about her interactions with the investigation.  She has not shared details until now.

Here is an excerpt from her introductory post:

Over the coming week, I will for the first time be sharing here on my blog every single specific detail of what happened to my teenage son, as well as all the information regarding how authorities have handled the case thus far.

I have waited nine long months for Knox County [TN] authorities to do the right thing. Polite, well-behaved southerner that I am, I have continued to err on the side of discretion and silence over all these months, in hopes that by being “good,” things would be made right. But I am no longer willing to do that.

My son did not die of an “accidental” overdose, and the investigation into his death has been inept and callous. The people who killed Henry are still free, and unless they are arrested and prosecuted, I have no doubt that someone else’s child will die.

Here is the latest update, "Justice for Henry, Part 6" which contains links to the previous five installments.  You may judge for yourself, but I find her descriptions of the official communications from the prosecutors breathtakingly appalling.  

There's a lot of perspectives from which we can be outraged about Henry Granju's case.  I hesitate to write anything political about it, because what it has to mean above all is a terrible grief, for one real family of real people who are really hurting. 

So the only observation I wish to make is that it looks to me like a terrible reversal of what ought to be.   People suffering from drug addiction and trying to escape it are dismissed as useless trash, their deaths shrugged off as being only what they deserved.  Violent assailants who beat a young man up until he bleeds from the ears are ignored. 

Meanwhile, the public servants whose job it is to prosecute criminals -- dangerous ones in particular -- sneer at grieving parents in their official correspondence.  I don't think it's too much to ask government workers to pretend in their official capacity as if they have a shred of respect for the members of the public they ostensibly serve.

UPDATE:  the latest post is now "Part 8."  Please read.  I am beginning to understand why Katie has so urgently insisted that she believes other young people will be harmed if the local authorities don't investigate.

When women have low iron, look more closely please.

An interesting post on an example of stupid medical nonsense about menstruation, this type of nonsense causing underdiagnosed internal bleeding.  

When I was thirteen years old, I got my period. Soon after, I remember going with my mother to the nurse practitioner's office -- her name was Debbie. Debbie told me that once girls got their periods, they were more likely to be anemic, and I would have to watch out for it. She suggested I start to take an iron supplement.

However, the sex difference in iron status in males and females derives from an increase in male iron stores at puberty, not a decrease in female iron stores...

...[T]he main culprit for iron-deficiency anemia (IDA) in men is upper-gastrointestinal bleeding, so when men present with IDA the first thing they do is an endoscopy. When women present with IDA they give her iron supplements and tell her to go home because it's just her ladybusiness. Kepczyk et al (1999) decided to actually do endoscopies on women for whom a gynecological source was diagnosed by a specialist for their IDA. They found a whopping eighty-six percent of these women had a gastrointestinal disease that was likely causing their IDA. Therefore, menses likely had nothing to do with their IDA, and the assumption that menses made them pathological actually obstructed a correct diagnosis.

 I may have to bookmark that blog, it looks like a good one.

"Wakefield's article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent."

Wow. If the allegations referred to in this British Medical Journal editorial are true -- that scientist Andrew Wakefield, who was being paid by law firms who wanted to sue vaccine companies, deliberately manufactured data linking vaccines to autism  -- then Wakefield has blood on his hands.

Count me in among the mothers who (back in 2000 when my first child was born) chose to vaccinate on a delayed and modified schedule in part because of the doubts engendered by reports like Wakefield's 1998 paper in the respected British journal Lancet. 

It has been suggested for a long time that the preponderance of the evidence since Wakefield's report tended to refute the alleged vaccine-autism connection, and I had come  to believe that it was in error -- one of those common dead-end pathways in scientific research.  Eventually, the paper was even retracted, as does happen sometimes when there prove to be mistakes.   I no longer had a concern about vaccines and autism specifically.  I hadn't been following the story closely since then, and so I wasn't expecting a finding of fraud.

Full disclosure:  I'm still unhappy with vaccines that have a fetal-tissue connection.  I still prefer to give kids one vaccine at a time the first time they get one, so that the cause of any reaction can be known.   I'm supportive of religious- and philosophical-exemption laws.  And I am aware of the concerns about vaccine reactions of other kinds, and am understanding of the nervousness with which many parents approach them, as well as being generally sympathetic with a low-medical-intervention and individual- rather than population-focused medicine.  

But this?  Outright falsification of medical data that affected vaccination decisions (and possibly disease outbreaks) in several countries, as well as influencing the direction of autism research?  

I can't figure out whether I'm outraged more as a mother or as a scientist.

(Knowing me, probably as a scientist.)

Mainstream-type folks often like to characterize alternative-type folks as crackpots.  Homeschoolers know this.  Home-birth mamas know this.  Mothers who practice extended breastfeeding know this.  Consumers of alternative medicine of all kinds know this.  People who source some of their food outside the mainstream production/processing industry know this.  Hey, religious people know this.  It's annoying to see experts whose knowledgeable advice you rely on, referred to as crackpots, or evil.

It's even more annoying when some of the  "experts" DO turn out to be  crackpots, or evil, or both.

Chemistry blogger Derek Lowe weighs in:

The 1998 paper that linked MMR vaccination with autism has had a long way to fall. It made, of course, a huge media sensation, and energized the whole vaccination/autism controversy that still (in spite of evidence) goes on. But it didn't look very robust from the start, scientifically. And over the years it's gone from "Really needs shoring up" to "hasn't been reproduced" to "looks like there's something wrong with it" to "main conclusions retracted" to the final, lowest level: outright fraud.

Here's a good history of the whole affair in the BMJ. And here's the first part of a series of articles by Brian Deer, the journalist who dug into the study and found how fraudulent it really was. Not one of the 12 cases in Wakefield's original study hold up; the data were manipulated in every single one to make it fit his hypothesis. His hypothesis that he was getting grant money for. His hypothesis that he was already planning lawsuits around, before the study even started.

His hypothesis, I might add, that has led to completely unnecessary suffering among the unvaccinated children this scare has produced over the years, and has diverted enormous amounts of time, energy, and money away from useful study of autism. This sort of deliberate action is really hard to contemplate, as a reasonable human being - it's like some sort of massive campaign to persuade people to throw bricks through the windows of ambulances.

In a better world, we'd be getting expressions of sorrow and contrition from all the celebrities and others who've profited from this business. But that's not going to happen, is it?

Don't hold your breath.

Sequelae.

I live far, far away from the Gulf of Mexico.  I have never walked its beaches and have not seen its waters (unless you want to count a single airplane flight into New Orleans for an American Chemical Society conference some years ago).

The kind of natural getaway that's within a day's drive of my family is the north woods of Minnesota.  Also beautiful and fun for the family, but not much like a beach.

So I appreciated this:   a brief, wistful description of the immediate effects from the BP oil disaster, on a family with kids, much like mine.

Noticed this at the bottom and thought it was worth repeating:

We plan on still supporting our beach towns by returning here throughout the year. Although we may not have been able to prevent the ecological destruction caused by BP, we can prevent the economical fallout and keep our beach towns alive. If you live nearby, I encourage you to do the same.

Professional values.

Interesting discussion at Althouse about the human interchanges revealed in the so-called "climate-gate" email leak.  Actually, interesting discussion in a lot of places, but I'll just pick Althouse to start.

I write this at a time before the emails are confirmed to be completely genuine, and I write as a global-warming agnostic.  It is reasonable to take prudent steps to alleviate the problem as long as there is a significant consensus among climatologists that there's a problem and there's something we can do about it, as seems plausible; it is also reasonable to continue to take data, to publicize raw data, and to keep objectively re-evaluating the data we have in preparation for revising those steps if necessary.   Really, that's the sort of thing I would say about any kind of research that seems to demand Action Be Taken -- look at the health recommendations of heart-disease researchers, for example.  

But there's nothing terribly shocking to me about how the climatologists are apparently behaving in these e-mails.  And I am not saying this because I believe climatologists to be peculiarly biased or peculiarly political-minded.  

Having got out of the academic research business immediately after receiving my doctorate, my experience with the writing and submission of scientific papers is limited. I have served as peer reviewer exactly once. My name appears on a couple of papers that I didn't write (and didn't ask to have my name attached to). I chose not to put in the work to finish or to submit the papers that were based on my thesis research.



That's a long caveat for this observation: Scientists and engineers are subject to human nature just like everybody else. 

Because "objectivity" and "adherence to the data" are explicit values of our profession, I think the human tendency to let our feelings about people influence our beliefs about their competence, or to ignore data we don't like, or to nudge our conclusions in the direction of our own ideologies, are probably mitigated relative to many other professions. (Which is why "Show me the data" is a demand that will always have teeth.)

 But those tendencies don't go away, and they never quite let go their sway over people. 

Every once in a while you hear someone sniff, "We're scientists, we make recommendations based on objective observations" -- as if the mere fact of "being a scientist" is a guarantee that he or she will behave like scientists are supposed to.  (What would you think of a sitting congressman who stated, "I'm an elected official, therefore you can be sure that I always act in the interest of my constituents and the good of the country?") It would be better for scientists and engineers to acknowledge that they must have biases, being human, and that those biases always exert a pull on their work, and then do their best to overrule them with the rational mind, to root them out in the service of the values of the profession.  

One way to root them out is to show your data to someone who disagrees with you, of course, and let him or her have their say.  That's one of the things which peer review is supposed to accomplish, but it's also the sort of thing that one could do in private, as a preliminary exercise or test of one's own conclusions.  How solid are they, really?  Can you really say "incontrovertible?"  That's almost like saying your theories are "untestable."  Which is treading close to saying that they are not scientific statements at all.

Anyway, my point is just that there's nothing special about climatology, or about other lines of research with policy implications, that make the scientists and engineers who are involved in it peculiarly subject to the whims of human nature.  You see it everywhere you look hard enough.  Maybe that's just another way of saying that everything is fraught with politics, and it doesn't matter how petty the politics is -- we could merely be talking about intradepartmental politics, or hunger for power within one single research group in one department in one corner of one university in the middle of nowhere -- it still gets deep into people and makes them forget the higher values of their profession.

Grammar.

Eugene Volokh is blogging about grammar again and getting lots of comments.  It's the old "what is standard?" argument again...

So, commenters, is it that all these writers (whose work ranges from the late 1500s to the 1900s) and many more were wrong, and you’re right, when you say that “their” can’t be used in these contexts? Is it that you have the Logic of the Language on your side — the same logic that tolerates the singular “you are,” “aren’t I?,” “ice cream,” and much more, but that as a matter of the laws of logic balks at a singular “they”? Or is it just that you’re discussing what you find aesthetically pleasing (or even pedagogically optimal, for instance with an eye towards teaching students usage that will satisfy self-described “purists” and will thus serve them well socially)? If it’s the latter, I’ll happily end the debate. But my sense is that many people who denounce the singular “they” (including where the singular relates to nouns with a collective meaning, such as “everyone”) and similar matters are making an assertion about correctness, and not just about their own tastes or about the most useful teaching approaches.

As a writer -- of blog posts, personal correspondence, scientific papers, and the like -- my style priorities come in this order.

1. Clarity
2. Elegance (a context-dependent subjective judgment)
3. Logical construction
4. Adherence to standard grammatical rules

Most of the time, these four goals align.  Occasionally they don't.  And when they do, a writer has to make a choice.  Everybody must take his or her own bag adheres to rules, and is logical.  It is, I think, just as clear as Everybody must take their own bag.  In most contexts it's not as elegant.

As a teacher, though, I'm a big believer in instructing kids and other emergent writers "slavish adherence to standard grammatical rules," followed by "logical construction of sentences."  

First, I want them to learn the rules; occasionally context demands slavish adherence to standard rules, and in most contexts nonstandard writing creates unintended distraction rather than intended style and elegance.

Second, it's easier to teach younger children objective, clear rules.  It's much harder to explain concepts like "elegance" and "clarity," at least until they're older.

Third, subjective evaluation of writing is made easier over time as learners gain confidence and comfort with the language they're writing in, and as they gain exposure to many contexts and to examples of really excellent writing that may play looser with standard syntax.

Fourth, you get more leeway with nonstandard writing when you're good at it, and especially, good at judging when it works and when it doesn't.  

That's pedagogy for you -- and not everyone with an opinion on the subject has bothered to distinguish pedagogical from stylistic issues.

The quote not taken.

At the last meeting of the homeschool co-op, someone suggested using audiobooks on CD in the car to expose the kids to poetry.   I thought that was a great idea of the "why didn't I think of that?!" variety -- they have had little patience for poetry as read-alouds, but they have loved classical music CDs in the car.  I  had an order almost ready to go at Rainbow Resources anyway; I immediately added A Child's Introduction to Poetry and sent in my order, and when the box arrived we put the disc in the car right away.

Success!  The kids love it and have been reciting snippets of sonnets and haikus.  I will be getting more poetry CDs for sure.  It has been nice for me, too, to listen to recitations of famous poems, many of which I remember from high school English, while driving.  When they come in through the auditory channel, it's really quite a different experience from reading them off the page, even reading them aloud.  You're more of a passive receiver, rather than using your own voice to modulate and interpret the poem, and you have to receive the poem linearly instead of visually taking it all in at once, knowing which lines are long and which short, and when to expect the end.  Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandburg, Robert Browning -- it's a nice collection, mostly of well-known favorites.

Listening to the recitation of Frost's "The Road Not Taken," I was reminded of my favorite rant about quotations out of context.  By the time I got to tenth- or eleventh-grade English literature, I had read the famous quotation from this poem about eleventy-thousand times:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

This quote is always, always, always used to support the thesis that the wiser, better man will take the "road less traveled."  Have you ever seen a place where it is not used as an implication that the road less traveled is the one that leads to happiness?  Something about being unconventional, I suppose.  You will see people writing, for example, that the poem offers "good advice."  That sort of thing.

I remember being really annoyed and angry at the quoters when I encountered the whole poem, finally.  Because of course the poem as a whole implies nothing of the sort, offers no advice at all, contains no judgment about the relative merits of the two paths.   The last stanza contains a whiff of mystery and not a little regret alluding to the consequences of the choice, but to me most of the regret is contained in the line "I could not travel both/And be one traveler."  

It strikes me as a simple meditation on the tragedy of reality:  that you can't experience everything.  Listening to it again, maybe for the first time, in a purely audio format, I was even more strongly struck by it.

But I have always been irritated at the quoters who take the last three lines, not even the whole last stanza with its "sigh," and use it to imply the inherent superiority of the road less traveled.  Hey, sometimes it's the right choice.  Other times it's not.  Logic, people.

"There were nine blokes in the place but only one man."

Best comment from the thread here.

I agree with those who write in the comments that Britain's ridiculous laws against forceful self-defense likely contributed to this situation, in which nine younger men stood by and watched while an octogenarian RAC veteran single-handedly tackled an armed robber, successfully enough to drive him to flee.

Hopefully the robber won't sue for injuries received, because he would have a decent chance of success (cf. the case of Tony Martin, or this video or even you-can't-make-this-up cases like these:

In 1994 an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house while he called the police. When the officers arrived, they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or intimidate. In a similar incident the following year, when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to drive off a group of youths who were threatening her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear. Now the police are pressing Parliament to make imitation guns illegal.

I don't fault anybody for deciding not to attack an armed man -- that's a call you've gotta make under the circumstances.  But it takes a special kind of cowardice for a young man not to step in to help an old guy who's already gotten the gunman in a headlock, wrenched his gun away and is bashing the robber over the head with it.

Fear of a lawsuit or of getting charged with assault yourself might do it.  Now that's scary.

Sink into the seat, turn the key, head down that road.

Am I being fooled by highly noticeable anecdotes, or does it seem that an inordinately large number of fraudulent-schemers use their money to buy a whole bunch of showy fancy cars?

If it were me, I think I'd want to be a little less conspicuous.  I'm just sayin'.  From the Strib:

Two federal judges in Minnesota have unsealed 47 documents outlining what federal investigators describe as "a large-scale, multi-year, multimillion-dollar online bid-rigging scheme" that the Coles allegedly used to exploit a flaw in Best Buy's system for buying computer parts.

Among the items seized were $2.9 million in cars... Robert Bossany, a former Best Buy vendor-relations employee, told federal investigators that Cole referred to his $2 million custom home with its multicar garage as "the house that Best Buy built."

The federal investigators described it as an "online bid-rigging scheme" but it might be better described as "exploiting a programming flaw in the bidding system to raise the invoice price that was to be paid for a part."   Sort of hacking.

An interesting story, I thought. I wonder how people like that feel when they're driving their cars around town.  

Many of the wrong things people do today -- some of them a good deal worse than stealing money -- you can quite reasonably argue "They didn't know it was wrong."  Sometimes it's willful blindness, but other times it's poor catechesis, poor whole-society catechesis, stuff that tells people in strong terms that they have a right to try to get what they want (even if you have to leave your family, you've gotta be true to yourself) or that the legal norm is the moral norm (hey, we're both consenting adults here) or that what they did doesn't actually hurt anybody  (it's just a blob of tissue).    I'm  trying to give sinners a break here.  A lot of people really, truly, "do not know what they do."  

But then you look at "stole millions of dollars through many individually chosen acts of deceit" and that's a real head-scratcher.  What on earth could make a couple think this was ... something they ought to do?   Or, if they didn't think that, if they never managed to fool themselves into justifying themselves, how?  I don't mean, how can you sleep at night, I mean... how can you do it again and again and again?  How is it that nothing inside stopped you?

Many other acts are more objectively evil than theft or fraud, even of a large amount of money like this.  I alluded to three of them above.  But we hold and teach that full knowledge and consent (and even in some cases, absence of force of habit!) is necessary to name the perpetrators "guilty of serious sin."  Has it always been so that so many of the evils that surround us, we are so painfully aware that the perpetrator wasn't taught, or has consciously rejected and no longer believes, that there's anything wrong at all?  Has it always been so that pity rather than anger is what we should feel towards most people who do others wrong?  

That's the case so often, it's almost (I know, I should NOT feel this way) refreshing when somebody comes along and does something so obviously immoral that you are pretty sure there aren't going to be any mitigating circumstances, although the lawyers for the defense, that being their job, will probably try to produce some.

Redefinition of terms.

It's common to dismiss numbers that prove somebody else's point as "lies, damned lies and statistics."  

That kind of flip refusal to engage with data is a sure sign of someone who doesn't want to think too hard.  Or someone who is deeply suspicious of anything that looks like math.

  Numbers are numbers.  If they're properly gathered and accurately reported -- that's key of course -- they just don't spin, obscure, imply, connote, the way that the English language can.  Obviously people are tempted to emphasize numbers they like and downplay numbers they don't like, say, in press releases and things like that; but if you take the time to go back and look at the source data, and get to decide for yourself which numbers are important, you can get at something approaching truth.  

So I reject the glib "statistics = lies" equation. 

But then something comes along that makes me want to title a post "Lies, damned lies and statistics."  James Taranto reports:

Amid all the gloomy economic news, the New York Times brings us an encouraging report on social trends:

"The number of black children being raised by two parents appears to be edging higher than at any time in a generation, at nearly 40 percent, according to newly released census data. . . .

"According to the bureau's estimates, the number of black children living with two parents was 59 percent in 1970, falling to 42 percent in 1980, 38 percent in 1990 and 35 percent in 2004. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, it was 40 percent."

What accounts for the turnaround? The Times explains:

"Demographers said such a trend might be partly attributable to the growing proportion of immigrants in the nation's black population. It may have been driven, too, by the values of an emerging black middle class, a trend that could be jeopardized by the current economic meltdown.

The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child's biological parents."

The problem of illegitimacy and broken families had seemed intractable for decades, but the Census Bureau has been able to make a significant dent in it, at virtually no cost to the taxpayer, merely by redefining the word parents.

I have to remind myself that it's not the numbers that are lying.  What's wrong here are definitions.  Which has to do with language, with words.  

Although it's a handy reminder that language and mathematics are perhaps inextricably combined.  For isn't classifying items into sets a basic operation of mathematics?  And how do you do that without naming them?

In any case, shame on the NYT for reporting the "good news" uncritically in the lede, and burying deeper in the story, with almost comical understatement, the sleight-of-hand,  the redefinition of terms -- a really heinous one, a damned lie if I ever saw one.

(One hopes that the Census Bureau was still asking the right questions, so that the numbers are in fact there, somewhere, buried in the data, and that it was only in turning the numbers into the words of a press release, of a report, that the fudge occurred.  Otherwise -- if all they asked was, "is there a man and a woman residing at the same address as this child?" -- we'll never know, will we?)