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It certainly won’t come as much of a surprise to readers around here that lobbyists from Roche/Genentech were able to get 42 different members of Congress to include text they had written into the Congressional Record. For way too long, we’ve seen how much politicians seem to rely on lobbyists to write the legislation, create the talking points and (at times) even deferring questions to the lobbyists themselves. Is it any wonder that lobbyists have become the new celebrities?

But what is rather stunning about the NY Times story on how Genentech’s talking points were mentioned (with multiple Congressional reps using the exact same language) is how unconcerned everyone is about it. The lobbyists wrote up talking points for both sides of the aisle. It wasn’t about being in support or against the current healthcare bill, but just to get these Congressional Reps “on the record” in supporting key concepts, so that those same lobbyists can go back and point to such “bipartisan” support in the future, even if the Congressional reps themselves don’t even know what they’re talking about.

The NY Times talked to a bunch of Congressional offices about this, and they all seem to admit freely that the language came from Genentech lobbyists, and they incorporated it directly (sometimes with a few minor changes) into the remarks that get put into the Congressional record. This isn’t the fault of Genentech or its lobbyists — who, of course, are going to push for such things. The really damning part is that all of these Congressional reps don’t seem to think there’s any problem at all with simply taking text directly from a company and putting it into their own remarks as if they agree on the concept, when they don’t even seem to understand what they’re saying half of the time. Often these sorts of Congressional remarks are later used to show “Congress’ intent” in doing certain things. But, perhaps they should just start being upfront and honest about the fact that these remarks are “the industry’s intent” and simply signing them with the companies that actually wrote the language (or at least tagging the remarks with the name of the company/industry group that wrote it).

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 Crytek has just teamed up with universities yet again for their technology, CryENGINE 3. Their goal is simple: get them hooked.Crytek’s R&D …

With Firmware 3.10 officially out, Sony can now get your direct report if in case your PS3 encounters some major errors, say, like unwarranted freezes…

 It’s not as much of a shocker as, say, Cactuar being already taken, but it’s just as much of a news. ESRB has finally come out with their rating…

Practice to help address nationwide physician shortage

Bloomington, Ind. (November 20 2009) – Today, the Southern Indiana Medical Group (SIMG) held a groundbreaking ceremony for its newest primary care practice to be located in Bloomington.  The practice, set to open in summer 2010, will be located at 1302 South Rogers Street, near the intersection of Rogers and Patterson Streets.

“Nationally, our health care system faces a shortage of primary care physicians.  Estimates say in 2010 the shortage will be approximately 54,000 physicians.  By 2025, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) says the physician shortage will grow to between 124,000 and 159,000 physicians,” says Mark Moore, president & CEO of Bloomington Hospital.  “Today’s groundbreaking is moving our community one step closer to increasing the number of primary care physicians available in Bloomington and Monroe County.  We are excited to be able to offer a new primary care practice in this redevelopment area.”

Primary care physicians, most often specializing in family medicine or internal medicine, provide patients with a “medical home” and are often the entry point into the health care system for many patients.  The primary care physician is the person who helps patients coordinate their care among specialists as needed, and follows them throughout their lifetime.  And, as the population ages, the need for additional primary care physicians will continue to grow.

“Primary care medicine is now taking center stage locally and nationally to provide some of the missing pieces in our national health care system. This includes a return to having the patient at the center of attention, in a setting that facilitates partnerships between patients, their physicians and their families,” says Lee McKinley, M.D., a Bloomington physician board-certified in internal medicine and critical care medicine who will practice at the new facility.

The Southern Indiana Medical Group’s new practice will have four to five primary care physicians in addition to nurse practitioners, nurses and other health care professionals.  First Capital Group is developing the new space, which was designed by Bynum Fanyo and will be built by Fox Construction, both local firms.

Bloomington Hospital operates four primary care physician practices through the Southern Indiana Medical Group.  For more information about the Southern Indiana Medical Group, please visit bloomingtonhospital.org/simg.

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Bloomington Hospital has been innovative in providing quality care to south central Indiana communities for more than a century. Offering a comprehensive continuum of care, Bloomington Hospital is a not-for-profit organization and has a patient base of 413,000 in 10 counties (Brown, Daviess, Greene, Jackson, Lawrence, Martin, Monroe, Morgan, Orange and Owen.) Bloomington Hospital currently operates two hospital campuses (Bloomington and Orange County) with regional specialty offerings for Heart and Vascular, Behavioral Health, Cancer, Women and Children, Neurology and Orthopedic services.  As a leading hospital in Indiana, Bloomington Hospital enhances health by advancing the art and science of medicine through the use of new technologies, procedures and care.

By Carmi Levy, Betanews

I’m sure I’m not the only one who looks at renderings of Apple’s long-rumored tablet – or iTablet, or whatever name the faithful have assigned to it this week – and wishes the FedEx truck would pull up to my door with an early demo in time for the holiday season. I’m sure I’m also not the only one who’s ready for the endless speculation to, well, end.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an unreleased product generate so much discussion without so much as a peep from the vendor of record. I realize the frenzied speculation is as frenzied as it is because we’re talking about Apple, and that if this were any other company, we’d collectively yawn our response before moving on to the next big thing. This is a company that seems unique in its ability to generate so much activity around what is, for now at least, vapourware. And while I appreciate the value of healthy exchanges in advance of a major product launch, I can’t shake the feeling that the never-ending iTablet fever is just a little much, and that we’d all be doing ourselves a favor by giving it a rest and waiting until Apple actually ships a working product.

Like junk food – great taste, not so healthy

Don’t get me wrong: This is all good for Apple. Once again, without spending so much as a dime on advertising, Apple has managed to keep its corporate brand front and center in both tech and mainstream media. It hasn’t had to use its PR firm retainers to pre-announce anything because breathless conventional and social media folks have been perfectly willing to share their so-called news on the company’s behalf. Any other vendor would sell its first, second and third born offerings to have even a fraction of this kind of market visibility and influence. Decades from now, when media mastery is taught in institutions of higher learning, Apple’s ability to time and again conjure a deafening buzz around things that may or may not see the light of day will serve as an iconic case study.

But is any of this good for us? Is it helpful or hurtful for consumers and wannabes alike to spend days on end hovering over blog entries, twittering madly or debating in online forums? These activities in and of themselves are the sign of a healthy community, of course, and are crucial to giving vendors the kind of insight they need to continue to deliver market-relevant products and services. But has the uber-hype that seems to follow Apple around – and that has seemingly impossibly shifted into an even higher gear for the iTablet – finally reached the point of diminishing returns?

Too much of anything isn’t good for you

I’m going to argue that the hype has gone well beyond the point at which it adds any value to our collective lives. We’re working ourselves into a tizzy over something we know nothing about. We don’t know what OS this thing will run, how large it will be, what kind of screen it will have and how much it’ll cost. We’ve seen lots of beautifully rendered images of it and heard a near endless string of confirmed – then scotched – confirmations of imminent component orders and production. And as much fun as it is to bat around possibilities, it hardly seems like a productive way to spend time.

That’s because while we’re all breathlessly sharing thoughts and opinions – but precious few facts – on a mysterious device that we now won’t apparently see until late next year, we continue to be challenged with more mundane needs, like using technology that’s available today to keep customers happy, our bank accounts filled and our lights on. I have no issue gazing into the collective crystal ball as a means of informing the kinds of decisions we need to make either today or in the near future. Keeping at least half an eye on what’s coming is one way of avoiding nasty surprises and keeping one step ahead of everyone else. But when said crystal ball becomes our sole focus of conversation, I’d like to humbly suggest that we’ve gone too far. Balance matters here, too, and if we’re spending all our time discussing a mythical product that’s close to a year from possibly seeing the light of day, we’re missing the significance of today.

We’re missing the real point

In a way, it’s a little disappointing that the enormous halo cast by this not-quite-a-product product eclipses the real issue at hand: that vendors have for the better part of the last decade failed to convince consumers that they should pony up for devices in the empty space between pocketable mobile devices and laptops. UMPCs and later MIDs failed to gain any traction thanks to low value propositions and ridiculous pricing. Netbooks have come close, thanks largely to their just-good-enough-for-the-purpose performance, conveniently portable form factor and recession-friendly price point. Timing has also helped netbooks carve out a niche, as their short range wireless and, increasingly, carrier-supported 3G connectivity gives them mobile capabilities that earlier, less well-connected devices could only dream of. Increasingly Web-centric application models don’t hurt, either.

The success of the netbook is giving rise to new forms of devices and revenue models that could – maybe – finally fill in the veritable valley of death that has already claimed so many mid-sized, mid-priced form factors. While it’s unclear where Apple’s product will ultimately fit, it’s hardly a big story until the company actually moves closer to marketing the thing. Until then, every other competing vendor has just gotten a bit of additional breathing room to figure out what resonates with consumers before Apple satisfies the fanboys and finally introduces its tablet. Or whatever it is.

Until then, count me among the cynics who really doesn’t care whether or not it has an OLED or a TFT screen, whether it’s released as one product or two, or whether it costs $2,000 or half that. Only when we begin to see actual data points will we be able to decide whether it’s worth pulling the plastic out or our wallets. For now, even Apple is capable of overstepping the limits of my patience.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

In October, we wrote about how, just as Rupert Murdoch and crew look to put up paywalls for online content, the operators of the London Evening Standard were going in the other direction and making their physical paper free. So, how’s that been working out? mowgs alerts us to the news that the paper has doubled its circulation in just a month. Not bad. But what’s more interesting is that it’s also slashed its distribution costs massively. It used to cost about 30p, and now it’s just 4p per paper.

This actually brings up a point that’s rarely talked about in the free vs. paid debate. Charging can be expensive. It takes quite a bit of effort to charge, to take money, to manage the money, to set up the accounting and bureaucracy for managing each transaction. And, even worse, if you’re working with third party distributors, like news agents, then you have to handle financial relationships with them as well. Getting rid of the per paper price changes the economics not just on the revenue side, but on the cost side as well — something that’s rarely discussed at all. And, yes, this impacts online news orgs too. Putting up a paywall is going to prove a lot more expensive than most people think on the cost side.

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I’m absolutely in love with the beautiful designer fabrics used on these pet beds from Etsy seller Apartment C. There are so many to choose from! Each bed is handmade by Alling Welsh. The beds measure 18 inches, perfect for a cozy cat nest!

I love these beds in the black and white patterns. Very mod! And the kitties below sure do seem to be enjoying their beds.

BONUS GIVEAWAY! ENTER TO WIN! TWO WINNERS!

Alling is offering not one, but two beds for this giveaway! And here’s the hard part, the winners will get to choose whichever bed they want! Oh, that will be difficult! To enter, please take a look at the fabric selections in the Apartment C Etsy shop, then come back here and leave a comment on this post with the name of your favorite design. The winners will be chosen in a random drawing on November 27. One entry per person. This giveaway is open to US addresses only.

ZAGG is one of the most popular full body consumer electronic screen protector maker out there,  and they are back with something new and unique. The new ZAGGSking is the highly advance unscratchable invincible shield with the added customization of a skin.

This new product is set to be lunched tomorrow and will have everything that a skin should have with the protection a full body protector has.

On Friday the 20Th visit ZAGG to get yours.

Thanks For the Details

One of the terrific things about greening a print marketing program is that many of the best practices in marketing today have “green” as a by-product.

Take the example of J. C. Penney, which made marketing headlines today when it announced that it would be discontinuing its semi-annual Big Book catalog after the Fall-Winter 09 season. Over the years, J. C. Penney was finding that its catalog was less a direct selling channel than a way to prime the pump for online sales. Instead of wasting volumes of paper, ink, and coating — not to mention the fossil fuels to deliver the 800-1000-page books — it decided to slim things down.

Read more of this story »

The PS3-exclusive beta for DICE’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (game also on Xbox 360 and PC) is already available for download, so get it while it’s st…

It looks like a lot of people are excited about toilet training their cats! Out of 599 entries, the two lucky winners of the CitiKitty giveaway are:

• Cindy Martin (comment #230)
• Kimberly (comment #507)

Not only do Cindy and Kimberly each win a CitiKitty Cat Toilet Training Kit, but they both get to go on a $100 shopping spree at www.CittyKitty.com! Have fun checking out all the cool cat products!

 And now for our weekly report on the hardware sales from Japan. Media Create has released the numbers for the week of November 9th through Novem…

This is the third in a series of posts about the proposed Google Book Search settlement.

Now that we’ve described the proposed settlement agreement’s biggest potential upside for the public—expanded online access to books, particularly out-of-print books—that benefit must be weighed against the potential down-sides. On that score, the settlement’s potential impact on competition in the online book market has loomed large. Critics of the settlement have emphasized two principal dangers:

1. The potential for a Google monopoly over orphan and unclaimed books.
2. The potential for monopolistic pricing of the Institutional Subscription Database, particularly for higher education.

The revised Settlement 2.0 made little or no effort to address these concerns, leaving it to Congress or antitrust authorities to fix later.

A Google Monopoly on Orphan & Unclaimed Books?

At the heart of the proposed settlement is a bargain that lets Google (and only Google) leapfrog the problem of “unclaimed works”—books whose copyright owners cannot be found or whose owners can’t be bothered to fill out paperwork for a small payment disbursed by the Registry (consider how many “class action” notices you’ve tossed in the trash unread). Thanks to the magic of the class action process, the settlement solves this problem by resolving the copyright claims of these otherwise unreachable copyright owners and designating all of their works by default as available for “Display Uses” by Google. In other words, so long as no one steps forward to claim these books, Google (and only Google) has a license to make them available in all the ways the settlement allows.

Many who filed objections to the proposed settlement, including the Department of Justice, Microsoft, Amazon.com, the Internet Archive, and Public Knowledge, among others, argued that this could create a de facto Google monopoly over online use of these unclaimed works. And while the revised Settlement 2.0 creates an “Unclaimed Works Fiduciary” (UWF) to act as a guardian on behalf of owners of unclaimed works, neither the UWF nor the Registry has the power to grant a similar license to any other entity that might want to make the same kinds of uses that Google will be entitled to make under the settlement.

Nobody likes this “only-for-Google” aspect of the settlement—in fact, Google has said that it would support orphan works legislation that would empower the Registry to make the same deal (or even a better deal) with others who want to use these unclaimed works. (Where the claimed books are concerned, in contrast, the Registry will likely ask the rightsholders to appoint it to license companies other than Google. But that still leaves all the unclaimed books out.) The settlement agreement even has a provision that makes it clear that the UWF can license others “to the extent permitted by applicable law”—what amounts to an “insert orphan works legislation here” invitation.

But absent some legislative supplement to the revised Settlement 2.0, it still seems that any other company would have to scan these books, get sued, and hope for a class action settlement. That, of course, is the kind of barrier to entry that any monopolist would envy.

This raises a worthy question: if legislation is necessary to fix the competition problem posed by the settlement, then why do we need a class action settlement in the first place? Why not solve what seems like a quintessentially legislative problem with legislation, instead? (As Amazon points out, that’s exactly what was done when music publishers brought a class action against the first digital audio tape (DAT) recorders).

Here’s where realpolitik enters the equation. Google correctly points out that Congress has been working on orphan works legislation for years, to no avail. And none of the legislative proposals came close to the comprehensive solution embodied in the proposed settlement. So the question boils down to a political one: do you believe that approval of Settlement 2.0 will make orphan works legislation more likely, or less likely? Without a crystal ball, it’s hard to know.

Monopoly Pricing of the Institutional Subscription Database?

One of the commercial services that Google is authorized to provide under the proposed settlement is the “Institutional Subscription Database” (aka “ISD”), which will provide “all-you-can-eat” access to the corpus of scanned books. The chief customers for the ISD are likely to be universities (the same folks who are providing Google with the books to be scanned), for whom instant digital access to every word in every book in Google’s collection is likely to be very compelling.

The big question is whether, over time, the ISD will become the one database that no university can do without, and the one database with no market substitute (again, because Google will be the only company who can provide a comprehensive corpus without fear of copyright liability, for the reasons explained above). This, of course, is a recipe for monopolistic price gouging, as a group of academic authors led by Prof. Pam Samuelson have pointed out. Over time, universities could face spiraling prices as Google and the Registry conspire to maximize their revenues on the ISD product.

Google and its supporters respond by pointing out that the settlement requires that pricing for the ISD be set with regard to “two objectives: (1) the realization of revenue at market rates for each Book and license on behalf of Rightsholders and (2) the realization of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education.” The settlement goes on to promise that Google and the BRR “will use the following parameters to determine the price of Institutional Subscriptions: pricing of similar products and services available from third parties, the scope of Books available, the quality of the scan and the features offered as part of the Institutional Subscription.”

But Google’s own people have reportedly admitted that there might not be any “similar products and services” to the ISD. And the settlement does not give ISD subscribers the right to go to court to enforce these “objectives” and “parameters.” Instead, Google has entered into “side agreements” with some of its major library partners (U. of Michigan, U. of Wisconsin—both of which will be receiving subsidies from Google for their ISD fees) that allow only those institutions to challenge pricing, and only under certain circumstances. So what we are left with is a “trust us” from Google, the Registry, and their biggest library partners.

Of course, the chances of this coming to pass are hard to know in advance. As we have pointed out, if many large publishers pull their books out of the ISD database, then perhaps the ISD service won’t become indispensable to universities after all. So, ironically, the more successful the ISD proves to be, the more of a danger its pricing mechanism might prove to be for higher education.

Fixing the Competition Problem

Just because the proposed Book Search settlement isn’t good for competition doesn’t mean it’s illegal. There is a robust debate going on (see, e.g., articles by Picker, Elhauge, Fraser, Lemley, and Picker again) about whether the proposed settlement might violate antitrust laws, and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice will doubtless continue its investigation.

But we shouldn’t be satisfied with antitrust law here. This is not just a simple market transaction between commercial entities. Google is building an enormously important public resource, a task it can only undertake with the blessing of a federal court. The public deserves a solution that is not “barely legal,” but that instead encourages real, robust competition. As written, without some modification or legislative adjunct, Settlement 2.0 does not do that.

My new Fast Company essay is now up, looking at the news that IBM researchers have produced a cortical computing system with the connection complexity of a cat’s brain. (My original title is shown here on the illustration; the replacement title is a bit inaccurate and I’ve suggested a replacement, so let’s just move along.) It’s a follow-up to the research from a couple of years ago on a mouse-scale brain simulation; we’re still on-target for a human-level brain connection simulation by 2020.

All of the stories about this, including my own, have emphasized the cat brain aspect, but in reality the truly nifty development is the improved ability to map brain structures using advanced MRI and supercomputer modeling.

Ultimately, this is a very interesting development, both for the obvious reasons (an artificial cat brain!) and because of its associated “Blue Matter” project, which uses supercomputers and magnetic resonance to non-invasively map out brain structures and connections. The cortical sim is intended, in large part, to serve as a test-bed for the maps gleaned by the Blue Matter analysis. The combination could mean taking a reading of a brain and running the shadow mind in a box.

Science fiction writers will have a field day with this, especially if they develop a way to “write” neural connections, and not just read them. Brain back-ups? Shadow minds in a box, used to extract secret knowledge? Hypercats, with brains operating at a thousand times normal speed? The mind reels.

The phrase “shadow minds” should be familiar to anyone who read the Transhuman Space game books — this is almost exactly what the game talked about, and on an even more aggressive schedule!

Pity the poor lipophobes and statinators.  They’ve just taken another grievous wound to their favorite theory and haven’t even got sense enough to know it.  In fact, not only do they not have sense enough to realize they’ve taken the hit, they’re actually crowing about it.

The current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has an article titled Trends in High Levels of Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol in the United States, 1999-2006 that puts another major dent in whatever validity remains of the lipid hypothesis of heart disease.

I’m going to start categorizing the types of findings published in this paper under the rubric of The Statinator Paradox.  I find it interesting that whenever scientists discover data that shows the opposite of what their hypotheses predict, they don’t conclude that their hypotheses might be wrong; instead they deem the contradiction a ‘paradox’ and bumble on ahead with their hypotheses intact.

The lipophobes hold the hypothesis dear that saturated fat causes heart disease.  When the data began to surface that the French eat tons more saturated fat than do Americans yet suffer only a fraction of the heart attacks, the French Paradox was born.  Nothing wrong with our hypothesis, it’s just those pesky French people who are somehow different.  It’s a By God paradox, that’s what it is.

Same thing happened with the Spanish.  Researchers looked at the food consumption data in Spain and discovered that Spaniards had been eating more meat, more cheese and more dairy while decreasing their consumption of sugar and other carbohydrate-rich foods over a 15-year period.  And, lo and behold, during this same period, stroke and heart disease rates fell.  Can’t be.  Saturated fat causes all these things.  But the data show…  Thus came the Spanish Paradox.

Statinators and lipophobes believe with all their little fat-free hearts that LDL-cholesterol is bad and is the driving factor behind heart disease.  So whenever I come upon data that gives the lie to this notion, I’m going to start calling it the Statinator Paradox.

This JAMA paper is a classic case of the Statinator Paradox.

Researchers using the NHANES data looked at the change in the prevalence of elevated LDL cholesterol and found that it fell substantially from 1999-2000 to 2005-2006.  In a period of about six years the prevalence of high LDL cholesterol dropped by a third, which is a lot of drop in a fairly short period of time.

And since everyone knows that high LDL cholesterol causes heart disease, it should go without saying that during this same time period there occurred a significant decrease in the prevalence of heart disease.  Right?  Uh, well, no, not really.  If anything, the prevalence of heart disease actually increased.  But not to a statistically significant degree.  So statistically there was no difference in the prevalence of heart disease during a time in which high LDL cholesterol levels were falling.  But if high LDL cholestrol causes heart disease…? It’s the ol’ Statinator Paradox writ large.

It was fun reading this paper because a basically fairly simple project was cloaked in all the regalia of academia and academic speak.

It starts out with a great opening sentence that is a paragon of academic weaselry:

High total blood cholesterol is recognized as a major contributing factor for the initiation and progression of atherosclerosis.

Recognized?  What does that mean?

I could substitute words in this sentence and come up with the following:

The policies of Barrack Obama are recognized as a major contributing factor in the initiation and progression of socialism in America.

What does that mean?  Depends upon whom you say it to.  If I were to shout this sentence at a Sarah Palin campaign event, I would be cheered loudly.  If I said it at a Nancy Pelosi event, I would be tarred and feathered.  Since the ‘truth’ of the sentence is a function of the bias of the person hearing it, it’s not a meaningful sentence.  As written, the sentence doesn’t mean squat, which makes it perfect for academic writing.

The authors, I’m sure, are believers in the lipid hypothesis but just can’t muster the gumption to write ‘high total blood cholesterol IS a major contributing factor…’  Instead they use the word ‘recognized,’ which makes the sentence meaningless and lets them off the hook should the lipid hypothesis ever blow up in their faces.

In setting up the study, the researchers went through a lot of rigmarole to allocate subjects to three different categories depending upon their degree of risk for developing heart disease.  In determining this risk, researchers used the Framingham risk equation, which relies to a great extent on cholesterol levels to allocate that risk.  Which is strange since the Framingham Study has never shown elevated cholesterol to be a risk factor for heart disease.

Once subjects were divvied into these three groups, the researchers measured LDL-cholesterol levels and calculated what percentage of subjects in each group had high LDL-cholesterol levels.  The threshold as to what was high varied as a function of the risk level of the group as a whole.  The bar for what was high was lowest in the high risk group and highest in the low-risk group.  In other words, if subjects had multiple risk factors, then an LDL-cholesterol level of anything over 100 mg/dl was considered ‘high,’ whereas in subjects in the lowest risk category, an LDL-cholesterol level over 160 was considered ‘high.’

Researchers calculated as a percentage the number of subjects who had high LDL-cholesterol in each risk group and did the calculations again six years later.

The weighted age-standardized prevalence of high LDL-C levels among all participants and among participants in each ATP III risk category decreased significantly during the study periods.

Which is what they were crowing about.  Our therapy dramatically decreased the number of people at risk for heart disease.

But as for heart disease itself:

No significant changes were observed in the prevalence of CHD or CHD equivalents from 1999-2000 to 2005-2006.

So what did our researchers conclude from the fact that there were one third fewer people with high LDL-cholesterol yet there was no decrease in heart disease?

They concluded the obvious.  There were still two thirds of people with LDL-cholesterol levels that were too high.  And, no doubt, these people were not on statins.

Don’t believe me?  Here it is in their own words.

However, our study found that almost two-thirds of participants who were at high risk for developing CHD within 10 years and who were eligible for lipid-lowering drugs were not receiving medication.

So, let me see if I’ve got this straight.  This study shows no evidence that lowering LDL-cholesterol levels decreases the prevalence of heart disease.  And what we conclude from this data is that we simply need to treat more people.  Brilliant!

As I was reading this paper online, I got a bing alerting me that I had an email from Medscape bringing me the latest in mainstream medical thought.  I opened the email and began scrolling through the various articles displayed when my eye fell on one titled “Lipids for Dummies.”

I clicked on it, and what opened was a video of a statinator of the deepest dye interviewing an alpha statinator about how to best deal with the risk of heart disease.

It was unbelievable.

Here in a short interview is everything that is wrong with mainstream medicine today.  We have two influential doctors at the pinnacle of their academic and clinical prowess – no doubt on the payrolls of multiple pharmaceutical companies – who are absolutely full of themselves blathering on about expensive treatments that have no true scientific grounding.  And their BS is being disseminated to practicing doctors everywhere. Instead of ‘Lipids for Dummies’ this interview should have been called Dummies for Statins.

Watch and just shake your head.

Click here to view the embedded video.

These guys aren’t really talking about reducing the risk for heart disease or early death; they’re discussing how to use extremely expensive medications that are not particularly benign to treat lab values.  As I’ve written countless times, statins can quickly and effectively treat lab values, but there is little evidence they treat much else.  So if you want to have lab values that are the envy of all your friends, statins are the way to go.  But if you want to really reduce your risk for all-cause mortality, you might want to think twice before you sign up for a drug that will cost you (or your insurance company) $150-$250 per month, make your muscles ache, diminish your memory and cognition, and potentially croak your liver.

If you wonder who underwrites these kinds of interviews, take a look at the actual Medscape link in which the video is embedded.  See if you, like Sherlock Holmes, can figure it out.

This link requires requires free registration.

(If I weren’t so pleased with a nice Sous Vide Supreme review we got today, this kind of nonsense would make me contemplate seppuku.)

We’ve had a few posts recently about the growing scandal in the pharma and publishing worlds, whereby big pharma companies would produce fake medical journals with the stamp of approval from big publishing houses, to make it look like their drugs had a lot more scientific support than they really did. To make matters even more insane, often the pharma companies would ghostwrite articles, and then get professors to basically put their names on the works, which were designed to emphasize the benefits of certain drugs, while hiding or de-emphasizing the risks. Copycense points us to the good news that Senator Grassley is at least asking various med schools to explain why this was allowed, while probing how putting professors names on ghostwritten articles is any different than plagiarism.

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PALATINE, IL – Harper College will save at least $155,000 a year in electricity costs by installing new, high efficiency chillers that will provide air conditioning to six campus buildings. The project was approved by the Harper Board of Trustees at their regularly scheduled meeting on Thursday night.

The new chillers will replace old air conditioning equipment, some of which use chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are considered harmful to the environment. In addition to being more environmentally friendly, the chillers will reduce energy usage by approximately 60% compared to the old equipment. 

“The old chillers were approaching the end of their useful life, so this is a good time to replace them and get considerable cost savings,” said Jim Ma, Director of Physical Plant. “Because of the poor economy, the bids for the chillers and construction came in well below estimates. It’s definitely a buyer’s market right now.”  

“Given the difficult economy and the ongoing problems with state funding, it is essential that we find ways to reduce costs while not affecting the programs and services we provide,” said Harper College President Dr. Kenneth Ender. “With more efficient equipment, we should be able to reap the benefits of lower costs to cool these buildings for many years to come.”   

Harper will spend about $3.2 million to install new chillers that will serve buildings F,L,P,R,A and W. The cost includes related infrastructure improvements, including new cooling towers, pumps, controls, piping, masonry and concrete work.  

Money for the project will be drawn from the $153.6 capital referendum that was passed last year.  The new funds will be spent primarily on the repair and renovation of facilities. 

“By investing in critical infrastructure improvements now, Harper will be better equipped to address the needs of our rapidly growing enrollment,” said Harper Board Chair Laurie Stone. “This is especially important as we look to add new programs to help workers train for new jobs and careers.”