You just can’t trust them. Article by Arlene Weintraub in Business Week:

A group of researchers at Duke University scoured 746 studies on heart stents published in medical journals over the course of a year and were shocked to discover two huge omissions. First, 83% of the papers failed to disclose whether any of the authors were paid consultants for companies, even though many journals formally require that information. And of those articles specifically describing clinical trials, 72% didn’t say who funded the research. When it comes to policing their disclosure rules, says lead author Kevin Weinfurt of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, “these journals should be doing better.”

Virtually every medical organization urges physicians to be up front about their financial ties to industry. It’s especially a concern when doctors who publish studies about drugs and medical devices receive funding from the companies that make those products. Over the past few years, a spate of safety warnings and product recalls has left journal editors fearful that company-paid researchers might be filtering their results to highlight the positive. So the publications have toughened up their disclosure policies, hoping that transparency by itself would neutralize conflicts of interest.

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Very good article by Mike Lillis (he’s been doing a lot of them, eh?) in the Washington Independent. Interesting that, from my point of view, the White House is on the right side of this issue. The article begins:

Millionaire farmers will continue getting taxpayer subsidies, sugar producers will inherit more government protections and foreign food aid will take a whack under a five-year, $300 billion farm bill approved by the Senate Thursday.

The vote was a sweeping 81 to 15, far beyond the two-thirds majority needed to override the Bush administration’s promised veto. The House approved the same bill Wednesday by a 318 to 106 count, also safely veto-proof. The margins indicate that the bipartisan proposal is almost certain to become law.

Enactment of the enormous bill would mark a rare departure from the legislative stalemate that has otherwise marked the year. Faced with the choice between moving legislation to the right to satisfy the White House or pushing it to next year, Democratic leaders have increasingly picked the latter. That the farm bill is an exception, lends testimony to the influence of the agriculture industry over congressional lawmakers — and to the fear among party leaders of losing middle-of-the-country seats in November.

Not insignificant, agribusiness has donated roughly $31 million to Washington lawmakers in the 2008 election cycle alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, making it one of the most powerful lobbies in the nation.

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My God, the EPA is a totally different animal under Bush. Paul Kiel reports in TPMmuckraker:

For those who’ve been watching the Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration, you’re familiar with the following pattern: the EPA, over the objection of its own scientists, issues a new rule that weakens environmental controls, but when pressed for an explanation, EPA officials explain that the new rule has nothing to do with easing the restrictions on polluters. No — the change is merely a clarification, or a technical fix to some nonsense bureaucratic rule, or the inescapable conclusion drawn from a sober appraisal of the law.

And here we go again. Here’s the rule change (note the dissent from EPA scientists):

The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to “Class 1 areas,” federal lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the nation’s most prized tourist destinations, including Virginia’s Shenandoah, Colorado’s Mesa Verde and North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt national parks.

And here is the explanation — from a former EPA official who has departed to head the the environmental strategies group at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani (yes, that Giuliani) no less:

Jeffrey R. Holmstead… helped initiate the rule change while heading the EPA’s air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that the EPA’s scientific staff was taking “the most conservative approach” in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.”The question from a policy perspective was: Do you need to have models based on the absolute worst-case conditions that were unlikely to ever occur in the real world?” Holmstead said in an interview Thursday. “This has to do with what [modeling] assumptions you’re required to do. This is really a legal issue and a policy issue.”

The new rule changes how pollution levels in parks are measured — instead of frequent measures, the new rule “would average the levels over a year so that spikes in pollution levels would not violate the law.” Just a common sense fix, you might say. But as one environmental advocate explains, “It’s like if you’re pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, ‘If you look at how I’ve driven all year, I’ve averaged 55 miles per hour.’”

It looks like the EPA is really competing to not only be the most politicized of the agencies in the Bush Administration, but also to create the most lasting damage.

The Bush FDA continues it new role of protecting businesses. Brian Clark Howard posts on The Daily Green:

The controversy over the safety of the chemical bisphenol A continues, as the U.S. FDA issues a statement saying that the agency sees no reason to tell consumers to stop using products that contain it, Reuters reports. This includes polycarbonate baby bottles, water bottles and more (which should be labeled with the #7 recycling code).

The FDA’s statement, released in a climate of heavy pressure from the chemical industry, is in contrast to developments in Canada. On April 19 the Canadian government began a 60-day public comment period on whether polycarbonate baby bottles should be banned in the country. Observers have said a comprehensive ban on polycarbonate is even possible up north in the near future.

For its part, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., makers of Nalgene bottles, have announced that they will stop using polycarbonate. Wal-Mart says it expects all baby bottles it carries to be free of the material by early next year, and Toys R Us has discussed a similar plan.

If such major players are clearly expressing concern over BPA, what legs does the FDA have to stand on for its reassurance? According to Reuters, the FDA’s associate commissioner for science, Norris Alderson, said the feds are reviewing safety concerns, and pointed to two industry-funded studies claiming it poses no risk.

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And goodby to uncounted species of plants and animals. Business has won, as reported by Daniel Howden in The Independent:

Brazil has been accused of turning its back on its duty to protect the Amazon after the resignation of its award-winning Environment Minister fuelled fresh fears over the fate of the forest. The departure of Marina Silva, who admitted she was losing the battle to get green voices heard amidst the rush for economic development, has been greeted with dismay by conservationists.

“She was the environment’s guardian angel,” said Frank Guggenheim, executive director for Greenpeace in Brazil. “Now Brazil’s environment is orphaned.”

In a letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Ms Silva said that her efforts to protect the rainforest acknowledged as the “lungs of the planet” were being thwarted by powerful business lobbies. “Your Excellency was a witness to the growing resistance found by our team in important sectors of the government and society,” she wrote.

The decision by Ms Silva to walk away five years on from her triumphant unveiling as a minister in President Lula’s first term has underlined just how far the former trade union hero’s administration has drifted from the promises made in its green heyday.

“Her resignation is a disaster for the Lula administration,” said Jose Maria Cardoso da Silva, of Conservation International. “If the government had any global credibility in environmental issues, it was because of minister Marina.”

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This post lists (and briefly reviews) six applications that record videoconferences. If you use that medium, I think these would be quite useful given how malleable and fallible our memories are: if you remember a requirement one way and the client or programmer remembers it another, the recording can resolve the issue and possibly explain why the requirement was stated as it was.

The cause of the rise of autism and ADD disorders is still unknown. It’s not likely to be simply better detection and reporting: There really is an increase in those ailments as well as in illnesses such as asthma. [See comments below for reason for strikeouts. - LG] One thing that has also increased, of course, is the variety and amount of chemical pollutants in our environment. Discover has an interesting interview with a doctor who investigates these things. It begins:

Philip Landrigan doesn’t look like a tough guy. With his nest of white hair and vibrant blue eyes, he seems more like an amiable country doctor than a Harvard-trained physician who has fought the world’s most powerful corporations and bullied bureaucrats to protect the public from poisonous pollutants for nearly 30 years.

In the early 1970s, as a newly minted pediatrician, he was dispatched to El Paso, Texas, by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to investigate lead poisoning in children living near a lead smelter. His medical sleuthing revealed that even minuscule levels of lead caused profound damage to health and cognition, a discovery that helped propel the phaseout of lead in gasoline in 1976.

It would set the pattern for his career. In the forefront of battles to eliminate environmental toxins ever since, the Boston native has helped show the relationship between asbestos, pesticides, and benzene and human disease. From 1988 to 1993, Landrigan was chairman of the National Academy of Sciences committee whose chilling report showed that children in the United States were steeped in pesticides from a host of environmental sources, resulting in the Food Quality Protection Act. More recently, his cavernous, sparsely furnished office at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York has served as nerve center for tracking the environmental impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

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Stephen Faris has a good article in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly: It begins:

During the tobacco wars of the 1990s, attorneys Steve Susman and Steve Berman stood on opposite sides of the courtroom. Berman represented 13 states in what was then seen as a quixotic attempt to recover smoking-related medical costs, and conceived the strategy that would break the tobacco industry’s back: an emphasis on charges of conspiracy to deceive the public about the dangers of cigarettes. Susman had turned down offers to represent Massachusetts and Texas against the cigarette makers; instead he defended Philip Morris—until 1998, when the industry settled for more than $200 billion, the biggest civil settlement ever. Now, a decade later, the two lawyers find themselves on the same side of the aisle, working on a case that seems just as improbable as the ones that brought down Big Tobacco ever did—and with implications that could be at least as far-reaching.

The Eskimo village of Kivalina sits on the tip of an eight-mile barrier reef on the west coast of Alaska. Fierce storms are ripping apart the shores. Residents report sinkholes in nearby riverbanks. Despite emergency erosion-control efforts, the crumbling coast threatens the village’s school and electric plant. In 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concluded that Kivalina would be uninhabitable in as little as 10 years, and that relocating its approximately 400 residents would cost at least $95 million. Global climate change, the Corps report said, had shortened the season during which the sea was frozen, leaving the community more vulnerable to winter storms.

As scientific evidence accumulates on the destructive impact of carbon-dioxide emissions, a handful of lawyers are beginning to bring suits against the major contributors to climate change. Their arguments, so far, have not been well received; the courts have been understandably reluctant to hold a specific group of defendants responsible for a problem for which everyone on Earth bears some responsibility. Lawsuits in California, Mississippi, and New York have been dismissed by judges who say a ruling would require them to balance the perils of greenhouse gases against the benefits of fossil fuels—something best handled by legislatures.

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And does the GOP care? (The answer to the second question is definitely “No”.) ThinkProgress:

After years of delay, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne finally declared the polar bear a “threatened species,” under the Endangered Species Act, due to global warming. Yet at the same time, Kempthorne also decreed that drilling in the Arctic can still continue:

This rule, effective immediately, will ensure the protection of the bear while allowing us to continue to develop our natural resources in the arctic region in an environmentally sound way.

Kempthorne’s decision calls into question the legality of a Feb. 6 sale of oil and gas drilling right in polar bear habitat, when the ESA decision was being illegally delayed. Go to the Wonk Room for in-depth analysis.

Sometimes we read good news and the day gets a bit brighter—for example, this article by Tom Zucco in the St. Petersburg Times:

How’s this for bad timing? Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum’s law librarian received a publication she did not order and was subsequently billed for it. She told McCollum, who launched an investigation. Tuesday, McCollum said he reached an agreement with Thompson Publishing Group Inc., a Tampa business that markets and sells books and other publications to government agencies, law firms and businesses. Under the agreement, Thompson must set aside $1.2-million for refunds to customers who were billed for materials they did not request. Thompson also has to reimburse the state $450,000 for the cost of its investigation. According to McCollum, in 2006 Thompson began enrolling many of its customers who purchased books and other publications in an “Automatic Update Program.” Under the program, Thompson periodically sent publications to customers without receiving a prior order.

Strange how that works:

The proposed Food and Drug Administration tobacco bill currently under consideration would ban artificial flavors like cinnamon and cherry from cigarettes, but strangely gives special protection to menthol. Public health advocates wonder why menthol has been exempted from the bill, especially when it masks the harsh taste of cigarettes for beginners. A 2006 study also showed that menthol makes it harder for addicted smokers to quit. Menthol brands are also disproportionately popular among African Americans; seventy percent of blacks smoke menthols, compared to only 30 percent of whites. While African Americans smoke less than whites overall, they suffer higher rates of cancer and other tobacco-induced diseases. Despite all this, legislators believe that menthol cannot be eliminated as a cigarette flavoring under the bill because menthol is crucial to the $70 billion cigarette market. It is of particular importance to Philip Morris, which has been planning for, and driving FDA regulation of cigarettes since 1999. The watered-down terms resulted from legislators’ belief that the bill won’t pass without PM’s buy-in.

Source: New York Times, May 13, 2008

Apparently the industry veto power is quite strong—as strong as the president’s.

Very interesting article suggesting that copyright is headed for the dustbin of history. Worth reading in its entirety, but this snippet in particular caught my eye as an example of unintended consequences:

On June 27, 2005, the US Supreme Court decided to hold companies that make file-sharing software responsible for copyright infringements perpetrated by the software’s users. Everyone expected that they would rule as they did when Universal City Studios sued Sony over the Betamax in 1984: there were legitimate uses of the technology, and it shouldn’t be held responsible simply because it can be used unlawfully. Instead, however, they ruled that file-sharing software actively encourages piracy and the makers should be held accountable.

The Supreme Court’s action has done the exact opposite of what MGM and the other content distributors who brought the suit hoped it would. File-sharing software will become open-source and public domain. File-sharing will continue to grow ever more popular, but now there will be no one to sue. The Supreme Court’s ruling hasn’t even delayed the inevitable; it has actually brought it closer.

Anne Fisher reports in Fortune:

Each year, Weddle’s (www.weddles.com), a major U.S. publisher of print guides to Internet job hunting, invites the public to visit its Web site and vote for their favorite job boards. The 30 sites with the most votes at the end of the year are declared the winners of the Users’ Choice Awards. It’s not a scientific survey, since those polled are a self-selected sampling and tend to feel strongly about certain sites, both pro and con.

Some voters’ comments are raves: “SimplyHired is hands-down by far the best job board on the Web,” wrote one fan. Other remarks are “unprintable,” notes publisher Peter Weddle. Either way, the awards are “the only recognition in the $6 billion-a-year global online recruitment industry where actual users - job hunters, employers, and recruiters - get to pick the winners,” he says.

This time around, one-third of the sites with the most votes are general-purpose job boards that serve a broad cross-section of industries, professions, and locations. The other two-thirds are niche sites that focus on a specific industry, career field, or geographic area.

That mix is probably no coincidence. “Most job seekers use a number of different sites. The average now is five,” says Weddle. “I recommend using two of the big general sites like CareerBuilder.com or Yahoo! HotJobs and three specialty sites — one that concentrates on your career field, one industry site, and one that focuses on the location where you live or want to live. That way you’re covered from all angles, and keeping track of the activity on five sites is easier than it sounds, because most of them have features that will notify you when a new opportunity that’s appropriate for you gets posted.”

Now, without further ado (as they used to say at the Oscars), here are the 2008 Users’ Choice Award winners, listed in alphabetical order by category:

General Purpose

• CareerBuilder.com
• CareerJournal.com
• Craigslist
• Indeed
• Job.com
• Monster
• SimplyHired.com
• Workopolis.com (Canada)
• Yahoo! HotJobs

Niche - Career Field

• CareerBank.com (accounting, finance)
• ComputerJobs.com
• Dice (IT jobs)
• HealthEcareers Network
• JobsInLogistics

Niche - Industry

• Absolutely Health Care
• AllHealthcareJobs.com
• Bio Space
• Hcareers (hotels, hospitality)
• HealthCareerWeb.com

Niche - Geography

• JobCircle.com
• Jobing.com

Niche - Affinity

• CollegeRecruiter.com (new grads)
• LatPro (Hispanic and bilingual)
• VetJobs (military veterans)

Niche - Employment category

• EmploymentGuide.com (hourly)
• ExecuNet (senior level executive)
• The Ladders.com (senior level executive)
• Net-Temps (contract, temporary)
• 6FigureJobs (senior level executive)
• SnagAJob.com (hourly)

Here’s hoping one or more of these lists just the job you’re looking for, but remember: Don’t spend too much time online. Particularly in a sluggish economy, many openings are never posted anywhere, and your best bet is to meet and speak with as many real live humans as you can. Happy hunting!

AP has this story showing how sincerely the Bush Administration opposes public health:

The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Arkansas City, Kan.-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere.

Less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows are currently tested for the disease under Agriculture Department guidelines. The agency argues that more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers.

“They want to create false assurances,” Justice Department attorney Eric Flesig-Greene told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

But Creekstone attorney Russell Frye contended the Agriculture Department’s regulations covering the treatment of domestic animals contain no prohibition against an individual company testing for mad cow disease, since the test is conducted only after a cow is slaughtered. He said the agency has no authority to prevent companies from using the test to reassure customers.

“This is the government telling the consumers, `You’re not entitled to this information,’” Frye said.

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McClatchy Washington Bureau has a somewhat depressing story by David Goldstein:

he Senate grounded the airline safety bill this week, a victim of political infighting and partisan wrangling.

“The most frustrating week I have spent in the Senate in my 24 years here,” Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who led the fight for the bill, said on the Senate floor. “It defines what the American people find so inadequate about Congress. Days go by and nothing happens.”

The only vote taken was a 49-42, nearly party-line procedural step to end debate and bring the airline safety bill to a vote. But the largely Democratic backers needed 60 votes to be successful.

It was a defeat for consumer groups and labor, which backed mandates in the bill for tougher air safety oversight and better passenger conditions. Airports also would have benefited by being able to raise more revenue.

The Federal Aviation Administration now won’t have the money to hire more air traffic controllers, who safety advocates said are overworked and under stress.

Nearly a fifth of the workforce has left the FAA since 2006, plunging the number of experienced controllers to a 16-year low, according to Patrick Forrey, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. He said 2,300 more were eligible for retirement.

“We need urgent trauma care to stop the bleeding,” Forrey said at a press conference after the Senate failed to act on the legislation.

Inaction also will delay the agency’s plan to modernize the air traffic control network by replacing radar with a satellite system.

The bill probably won’t come up again until next year. In the meantime, Congress likely will approve temporary funding, but nowhere near the amount needed to do everything the bill had intended.

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The media quickly ignore another breaking story:

Bruce Falconer is calling out the mainstream media for ignoring the disturbing testimony that dominated recent U.S. Senate hearings into corruption by private contractors in Iraq. The testimony came from whistleblowers Frank Cassaday, Linda Warren (both former employees of Kellogg, Brown and Root) and Barry Halley (who worked in Iraq for Worldwide Network Services, the Sandi Group and CAPE Environmental Management. They told stories of widespread theft of materials and supplies needed by soldiers, looting Iraqi treasures (in one case melting down Iraqi gold to make cowboy spurs), and a prostitution ring run by the manager of a “major defense contractor,” which led to the death of a colleague whose armored car was diverted “to transport prostitutes from Kuwait to Baghdad.” Cassaday, Warren and Halley say they were punished and harassed when they tried to alert their companies to these abuses. Aside from Mother Jones, the only news outlet to file a report on their testimony was David Ivanovich of the Houston Chronicle, although a transcript of the hearings is available on the Senate’s website.

Source: Mother Jones, May 2, 2008

Page van der Linden has an important story that, alas, is less surprising than it should be:

Whether you’re a conservationist or a climate change denier, undoubtedly you’ve been following the ongoing efforts to officially declare Ursus maritimus (also known as the polar bear) listed as an endangered species, under the US Endangered Species Act.

In 2005, the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned for the polar bear’s protection, based on research done by climate and wildlife experts worldwide (pdf). Indeed, there is international scientific agreement that the polar bear is heading toward extinction unless it is protected (details here). At last, in 2006, the US Fish and Wildlife Service responded to the Center’s petition, and proposed that the polar bear be listed as endangered.

Predictably, those interested more in the welfare of the fossil fuel industry than in the survival of the polar bears have been doing their best to prevent the bears from being protected.

To make a long story short, there was an initial Senate hearing in which Senator James Inhofe and a carefully chosen “expert” did their best to confuse the issue; there was a follow-up hearing investigating the Bush administration’s foot-dragging (to which a senior official didn’t even bother to show up ). Finally, a federal judge put her foot down and ordered the Department of the Interior to make a final decision by May 15, 2008.

Which leads us to the latest attempt by lawmakers to keep the bears off the endangered list. If the science shows something you don’t like, why, you pay scientists to come up with conclusions that match your business interests.The Alaska State Legislature has decided to go “scientist” shopping:

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Because they’re making money from it? See this article by Richard Skaff:

What do war, Congressmen, Senators, and the defense/offense industry have in common? The answer, if you haven’t already guessed is “profits.”

Conflict makes money for the military industrial complex, and the cronies they place in Congress, the Senate, and the White House.

An investigation by Ralph Forbes from American Free press reported on May 05, 2008 that more than a quarter of US senators and congressmen have invested at least $196 million of their own money in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD) that profit from the death and destruction in Iraq [1].

The report also edifies that 151 members of congress invested close to a quarter-billion dollars in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. These companies got more than 275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to Fedspending.org [2]. In 2004, the first full year after the current Iraq war began, Republican and Democratic lawmakers-both hawks and doves invested between $74.9 million and 161.3 million in companies under contract with the DoD [1]. No wonder the Democratic congress kept approving the enormous spending bills on the war, since a significant portion of it happens to end up in their deep pockets.

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Mike Lillis has two excellent articles on the healthcare crisis in the Washington Independent. The first begins:

In 2004, Tommy Thompson, then-Health and Human Services secretary, approached his boss with a request. Observing that the nation’s doctors and hospitals operate a tangled web of incompatible forms and technologies, Thompson asked President George W. Bush to create a universal system of electronic medical records that would follow patients around the country, eliminate redundant treatments and, according to some estimates, trim billions of dollars from the nation’s annual health care tab. Thompson wanted the president to establish the system within 18 months.

“He came out for 10 years,” Thompson said this week, “and as a result, we haven’t been able to get there.”

The anecdote, which Thompson told the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday, offers a glimpse of the obstacles facing health-reform advocates. With medical costs skyrocketing, employers increasingly dropping or trimming coverage, Medicare projected to go belly-up in a decade and the number of uninsured Americans tickling the 50 million mark, most observers contend the health-care system needs a complete overhaul. But such shakeups are rare in Washington, where special interests spend millions to keep things as they are, and the political will to confront industry is all but absent. Instead, lawmakers tend to dabble at the edges of problems until sweeping change becomes unavoidable. The health reform debate now seems to revolve around when that time will arrive.

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Fascinating article in New Scientist by Paul Marks. Very encouraging, since the first action of any organization or institution is to slap a whistle-blower silly. Article begins:

Just how accurate are GPS-guided precision bombs, and what is most likely to send them off-target? Now you can find out by simply reading the smart bomb’s tactical manual on the internet. No, the Pentagon didn’t slip up and post the instructions online. Rather, a whistle-blower leaked the manual via Wikileaks, a website that uses anonymising technology to disguise the source of leaked information.

Launched online in early 2007, Wikileaks is run by an informal group of open government and anti-secrecy advocates who want to allow people living under oppressive regimes, or with something to say in the public interest, to anonymously leak documents that have been censored or are of ethical, political or diplomatic significance.

Wikileaks’ fame has spread rapidly in recent weeks, thanks to the release of some headline-grabbing documents. These include the design for the Hiroshima atomic bomb, a report on how the UK acquired its nuclear weapons capability, and hundreds of camera phone pictures of the Tibetan riots.

In the last fortnight alone it has released 50 documents and it is now hosting more leaks than its global network of volunteer editors appear able to check.

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