bearing blog

How often does this happen?

All along I'd been (naively) assuming that Terri's case was some kind of first, at least on the national scene.  But no:

Marjorie had once told her brother Maynard that she didn’t want a feeding tube if she were terminally ill. Despite the fact that she was not dying, Maynard believed that she had meant that she would rather die by dehydration than live the rest of her life using a feeding tube. Accordingly, he ordered all of Marjorie’s nourishment stopped.

As she was slowly dehydrating to death, Marjorie began to beg the staff for food and water.

The Washington Post reports that someone at the hospital restrained her in her bed to prevent her from grabbing food from other patients' plates until she finally died.

This was in 1996.  Hat tip: this week's Grand Rounds.

A wrapup on Terri.

A good article to keep in mind, with some new material.  By Robert Johansen.  H/T Bettnet.

One more reason why "Footprints" is not the same as the Gospels.

Food for thought from Disputations:

It's kind of strange, isn't it, how a familiar passage doesn't become dull so much as silent. They don't tell you what you already know; they simply don't tell you anything at all. And of course there are passages that are silent from first reading on.

And then... pop!

This caught my eye because the process of coming to terms with "Footprints in the Sand" happened to me too.  For years I was somewhat ashamed of my thunderstruckness on my first reading, because after I discovered how ubiquitous it is on cheap "inspirational" plaques and samplers I started to regard it as treacle. 

Which, of course, it is, compared to Scripture.   But then, so is a lot of stuff.

Hat tip:  Emily at After Abortion.

Smart kid, close call (UPDATED)

This, in my local paper, is the sort of thing that makes my heart skip a beat:

The two boys told police that they noticed a man watching them as they played at an apartment building playground in the 1000 block of Duluth Street. Shortly before 6:40 p.m., the man grabbed the younger boy by the arm and started to walk off to a wooded area, police said. The older boy, 9, yelled and threw rocks until the man let go.

Last summer I had a suspicious impulse towards a man who approached my four-year-old son at a playground, and stared him down until he walked away.  (Short version:  Lone man walking dog, ten o'clock on a weekday morning, starts conversation with small boys playing in an isolated corner of the playground.) 

I know this sort of thing is very rare, but not rare enough for me to let a boy this age play unsupervised in a public place.

UPDATE:  OK, so it's even rarer than that.  The boys have admitted to lying.

Maggie hits it on the head.

Fabulous essay by Maggie Gallagher in the NCR.  It's in the form of a letter explaining love and marriage to her grown son Patrick.

Here’s the place to begin. Every time you make love, you could be making your first-born child...

The fate of your first child will lie in the hands of this woman to whom you give the perhaps unwelcome gift of your seed. Afterwards, our society gives you no say in what happens next: whether she kills your baby, or bears it away from you, or asks for your help raising it in a quasi-family, one where love, money, sexual attachments, and parenting are split up among multiple people and households.

If you are lucky perhaps she will secretly long for you to propose marriage. But you lose control. What happens next will be up to her, not you.

Your capacity to protect your own child will depend entirely on the woman to whom you have made love. You have placed your fatherhood in her hands.

(My son, here’s a secret: Fatherhood is always the gift of a woman).

Read it all.  Hat tip:  Sara Butler at familyscholars.org.

Scientists Say

Mark was leafing through last week's issue of Science at the breakfast table.  "This is a weird magazine."

I said, "It's really a journal, even though it looks like a trade mag.  It's fairly prestigious to be published in there." 

"Yeah, it looks like one in the back."  He pushed it across the table and pointed to the Letters page (link requires paid subscription).  "Is it prestigious to get your retraction published?"

The report "Defective transcription-couped repair of oxidative base damage in Cockayne syndrome patients from XP group G" (1) is retracted.  An ad hoc investigatory committee ... has found that the last author (S. A. L.) of the paper "fabricated and falsified research findings"... The first three authors of the paper were not cognizant of any irregularities and were not involved in any wrongdoing.  The fourth author (S. A. L.) declined to sign this retraction.

I don't know how often papers are formally retracted because fake data is uncovered.  Retraction because mistakes are discovered is a normal part of the process, or at least it should be, because mistakes happen all the time.

A year out of graduate school, I suspect fakery is very, very common, especially if you include the omission of data along with fabrication and falsification.  I suspect that it falls on a spectrum:  at one end, the deliberate creation of data that never existed, reports from experiments that were not done or that turned out quite differently; at the other end, decisions to omit certain data and report others that are rooted in unconscious bias.  Somewhere in there, too, obfuscation or exaggeration in the write-ups.

A lot of people are suspicious of university research that is funded by corporations with a stake in the findings.  Supposedly this creates an incentive for the investigator to skew the data in favor of the funding corporation.  Maybe that's true at the level of the primary investigator, i.e. the supervising professor. 

In my experience, it's not true for the graduate students who do most of the research, at least not in physical science and engineering.  What do they care who funds them as long as they get their stipend? 

No, with graduate students the incentive is all about time.  I've been here seven years and I don't have anything to show for it.  If this keeps up they'll kick me out.  As soon as I finish this up and get something---anything---that will look good to the thesis committee, I'll be making real money. 

Or maybe it goes like this:  Everyone else in my group finishes within five years.  I'm starting to look bad.  My advisor is pressuring me to finish.

My own thesis was theoretical; the "data" came from one computer program I wrote myself, and later from another computer program that a visiting professor, who is much better at programming than I am, wrote after I set up the equations.  (Yes, I properly attributed the work to the professor.)  Mine has nothing but my own reasoning to stand on.  That's one thing I like about theoretical investigation.

UPDATE:  Here's a link to a news article on the retraction.  Sounds like the alleged faker has issues that go beyond research.