talk like you know

Music of the Year 2011

2011-12-17T08:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/12/the-best-hip-hop-of-2011.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/12/the-best-music-of-2011-the-american-singers.html

Controversy of Screening Tests

2011-11-27T08:57:00.000-08:00

Controversy about the role of medicine. It's not that we should abandon it, but that we should use it better and more effectively...

As one columnist suggests says...

In Canada, we like to pretend that overtreatment is a problem unique to the profit-driven U.S. system, but we have many of the same problems. They are driven by culture more than by greed.

In medicine, sometimes it’s better to do nothing

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/andre-picard/in-medicine-sometimes-its-better-to-do-nothing/article2235830/

Why the new breast cancer screening guidelines make sense

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/andre-picard/why-the-new-breast-cancer-screening-guidelines-make-sense/article2246955/

Confusion on the Hill over new breast screening guidelines

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/confusion-on-the-hill-over-new-breast-screening-guidelines/article2250616/

Histograms in Excel for Mac

2011-11-04T20:34:00.000-07:00

Definitely more difficult compared to Excel for PC!!!!!

Note The formula in the example must be entered as an array formula. First, type the formula into cell A13 and then press RETURN. The single result is 1. Next, select the range A13:A16, press CONTROL+U, and then press ⌘+Z+RETURN.


1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

A	B
Data	Bins
79	70
85	79
78	89
85
50
81
95
88
97

Formula	Description (Result)
=FREQUENCY(A2:A10,B2:B4)	Number of scores less than or equal to 70 (1)
	Number of scores in the bin 71-79 (2)
	Number of scores in the bin 80-89 (4)
	Number of scores greater than or equal to 90 (2)

Ontology and Epistemology - research

2011-09-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

Source:

http://britbohlinger.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/exam-revision-epistemology-and-ontology/

Ontological and epistemological positions provide fundamental aspects of research as they concern the philosophical questions what counts as reality and how beings come into being as well as what constitutes knowledge and how knowledge comes to be established. Two core positions can be distinguished in either area: positivist and constructionist.

positivist ontology: the world is ‘out there’, it operates in a systematic and lawful manner, discrete and observable events, reality is separate from human meaning-making;
constructionist ontology: assumes the world we can study is a semiotic world of meanings, represented in signs and symbols, language is central to this position;

positivist epistemology: knowledge can only be gained by gathering facts in a systematic and objective manner, predominantly by the experimental method and by testing of hypotheses in order to gradually build laws. The aim is to refine them and achieve applicability on a universal level;
constructionist epistemology: knowledge is constructed rather than discovered, it is a representation of the ‘real world’ and interpreted by the researcher. Knowledge is subject to time-space configurations and a means of power (e.g. doctors as ‘architects of medical knowledge’). Scientists and their institutions shape the production of knowledge by their choices and values.

Introducing Students to the Generic Terminology of Social Research
Jonathan Grix

Ontology

Ontology is the starting point of all research, after which one’s epistemological and methodological positions logically follow.

Examples of ontological positions are those contained within the perspectives ‘objectivism’ and ‘constructivism’. Broadly speaking the former is ‘an ontological position that asserts that social phenomena and their meanings have an existence that is independent of social actors’. The latter, on the other hand, is an alternative ontological position that ‘asserts that social phenomena and their meanings are continually being accomplished by social actors. It implies that social phenomena and categories are not only produced through social interaction but that they are in a constant state of revision’ (Bryman, 2001, pp. 16–18).

If ontology is about what we may know, then epistemology is about how we come to know what we know.

1. You feel loved because someone gives you money

2. You feel loved because some wrote a little heart on a piece of paper

Epistemology

‘the possible ways of gaining knowledge of social reality…claims about how what is assumed to exist can be known’ Two contrasting epistemological positions are those contained within the perspectives ‘positivism’ and ‘interpretivism’. These terms can be traced back, and illuminated by reference to, specific traditions in the philosophy of social sciences. Broadly speaking, the former ‘is an epistemological position that advocates

the application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of social reality and beyond’. The latter, on the other hand, can be seen as an epistemological position that ‘is predicated upon the view that a strategy is required that respects the differences between people and the objects of the natural sciences and therefore requires the social scientist to grasp the subjective meaning of social action’

1. You repeatedly receive money from someone that says they love you.

2. You see different actions of "being there" of different circumstances, (eg. being picked up at the busstop, calling to see how you are feeling when you are sick, etc).

Example

Plato’s famous allegory of the cave is instructive for making us aware of the root of ontology and epistemology, for it shows how very different perceptions of what constitutes reality can exist. Prisoners in a cave are chained in such a way that they can only see forwards, to a wall, upon which shadows of artefacts, carried by people behind them, are reflected in the light of a fire. The prisoners give names and characteristics to these objects, which, to them, represent reality. Plato then imagines a scene in which one prisoner leaves the dark cave and sees that not only are the shadows reflections of objects, but also that the objects are effigies of reality.

The passage cited above mirrors how some people can come to think in certain ways, which are bound by certain cultural and social norms and parameters, for example those established by disciplines in academia. Any premises built upon the experience of the cave dwellers are certain to differ from those who are on the outside. It is for this reason that we need to be aware of, and understand, that different views of the world and different ways of gathering knowledge exist.

Who does America owe its debt to?

2011-08-13T08:09:00.000-07:00

From the Toronto Star, David Olive columnist article.

There’s lots we can do to fix the debt crisis

America has averted a first-ever default in its 235-year history, only to have its triple-A debt rating stripped from it by Standard & Poor’s. This prompted panicky investors to dump $1 trillion worth of stock last Monday alone.

Japan, mired in a two-decade-long economic malaise, has taken a turn for the worse after the deadly tsunami earlier this year. And China, after a decade of double-digit GDP growth, has abruptly throttled back on its industrial revolution, fearing a bout of double-digit inflation.

Obviously America is having an especially rough time of it, coping with a record deficit and debt; 9.1 per cent unemployment; and hundreds of thousands of home foreclosures on the horizon. A record 46 million Americans are on food stamps, or 15 per cent of the population. Consumers are on a spending strike, in the major world economy most reliant on domestic consumer spending.

Yet in their “flight to safety,” panicky investors have piled into, of all things, U.S. Treasury bills. Demand for Treasuries was so great this week that yields on the benchmark 10-year note actually fell to 2.3 per cent. That compares with the more than 5 per cent yield insisted upon by buyers of riskier Italian and Spanish bonds.

That’s no irony. America owes most of its debt to itself, after all. Only 31 per cent is held by offshore investors, compared with as much as 83 per cent for Europe’s most debt-impaired countries. America’s debt-to-GDP ratio has climbed to a supposedly perilous 99 per cent. Well, the Japanese ratio is 204 per cent, pretty much where it’s been for years. But just seven per cent of that debt is held by non-Japanese lenders.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, already has injected $2.5 trillion of liquidity into the global economy since the 2008-09 financial meltdown. Bernanke has a printing press and is independent of the gridlocked White House and Congress. He can pump more money into his domestic economy if the discomfort of current malaise strikes him as a bigger risk to the U.S. social fabric than an outbreak of punishing inflation.

Just letting the fiscally ruinous U.S. tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 lapse would scare up $1 trillion or so, enough to cover two thirds of the deficit. And the long-term threat to the solvency of Social Security and Medicare? America’s population, in contrast with expected declines in most advanced economies, is forecast to surge 41 per cent by mid-century to 438 million. That’s 127 million new taxpaying Americans to the rescue.

Debilitating dogmatism has characterized U.S. politics of late. But bipartisan comity was the rule as recently as the late Ted Kennedy’s shepherding of then-president George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation through the Senate in the early 2000s. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the notion of Tea Partiers or aliens taking America’s public-policy agenda hostage was unthinkable, Democratic legislators working with Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and G.H.W. Bush refinanced Social Security, agreed on the post-Cold War closing of hundreds of military bases, and forged the budget that laid the groundwork for the surpluses Bill Clinton posted in the last years of his tenure.

The challenge in Europe, of course, is overcoming fractious relations among policymakers within countries — as in the U.S. — and also between nations. Which will make difficult the necessary task of creating a sustainable funding mechanism for Europe’s elaborate array of social programs. Americans notoriously hate taxes, yet the U.S. has one of the highest rates of tax compliance in the world, at 84 per cent. The figure for Italy is 62 per cent. In Greece, paying income taxes is widely regarded as silly.

Europe’s common currency region, or eurozone, must be reinvented. Which is not as challenging as it sounds. At 11 years of age, the eurozone is hardly bred in the bone, and it has failed its first test. Its architects assumed no eurozone member nation would face insolvency, so there is no coordinated mechanism for rescue missions.

That has to change, perhaps as part of a long overdue conversion of the eurozone into a genuine fiscal union. One whose members are held to strict spending limits. Greece will have to emulate Germany, the strongest economy in Europe, in the latter’s zealous pursuit of tax evaders. Germany, for its part, will have to drop its resistance to the introduction of Eurobonds. These would be backed by the collective might of Europe’s $16-trillion economy, rather than that of Ireland or Portugal alone.

The West’s debt crisis is man-made, not an act of God. It is amenable to man-made solutions. This will require shedding some ideological fixations. But the alternatives are a U.S. that someday does default. And the shattering of a European union whose existence not coincidentally has marked the continent’s longest period of uninterrupted peace.

There’s no telling when an outbreak of political will and common sense will occur. But it will. This too shall pass.

Maya Angelou on love

2011-03-20T22:34:00.001-07:00

Love recognizes no barriers, it jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls, to arrive at a destination full of hope.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry, to get my work done, and to try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/maya_angelou_2.html#ixzz1HD4D9AjT

Bitter Fruit - Kim, Claire Jean - Yale University Press

2011-03-20T18:18:00.000-07:00

I am putting this book on my reading list! It talks about race relations between Koreans and Haitians in the United States. Specifically how they are pitted against each other by the dominant White culture.

Bitter Fruit - Kim, Claire Jean - Yale University Press

Randy Moss Postgame Press Conference - 12/20/2009

2010-12-18T18:54:00.000-08:00

This guy is so damn gansta!!!

Randy Moss Postgame Press Conference - 12/20/2009

A-Alikes - Sirens in the Distance Featuring Mos Def

2010-11-25T22:46:00.000-08:00

This is a gangsta song...

Movie review: Soundtrack for a Revolution

2010-11-21T16:49:00.000-08:00

I just watched "Soundtrack for a Revolution" over the weekend. "Freedom songs" are performed by recording artists such as Wyclef Jean, Angie Stone, and The Roots, while the history of the Civil Rights movement during the early sixties is traced and interviews with activists and leaders are conducted.

My favorite quote of the movie was by Lula Joe Williams: "I knew that we had to make some changes, I didn’t know how changes were going to be made, but I knew that whatever took place that I had to be part of it."

Its a movie that shows how society is able to change for the better by coming together.

IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1358885/

Goals in Life

2010-11-21T09:03:00.001-08:00

You'd better start working hard if you ever want to amount to something!

Simpsons Episode - Lisa, This Isn't Your Life

2010-11-14T18:21:00.000-08:00

Lisa learns that being an A+ student - although a noble ambition to have - isn't her sole purpose in life.

Great episode. I was actually a little moved by it.

HIV and TB

2010-10-26T16:51:00.000-07:00

HIV virus basics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS1GODinO8w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqDkYJn7w9Y&feature=related

Anti-Retrovirals to combat HIV:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO8MP3wMvqg&feature=related

Reverse transcriptase inhibitor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7V1eVwxV_c&feature=related

DNA to proteins:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3fOXt4MrOM&feature=related

Good Time magazine article about HIV antibodies:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2027592,00.html

TB:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtyX694ubio (start halfway)

Quote of the day

2010-10-04T19:21:00.000-07:00

"Discipline is making the choice between what you want now and what you want most."

amazing pick 6 by tracy porter!!

2010-09-28T19:34:00.001-07:00

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-films-anatomy-of-a-play/09000d5d8165a034/Super-Bowl-Anatomy-Porter-to-the-House

ABC World News Reporter David Muir visits Syracuse, NY

2010-09-27T18:16:00.001-07:00

Bible verse of hope and redemption

2010-09-13T21:42:00.000-07:00

Though you have made me see troubles, many and bitter, you will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up.

Psalm 71:20

Washington/Shenandoah 2008

2010-06-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

g20 alternative protests

2010-06-18T11:00:00.001-07:00

Here’s a list of the major alternative events. More listings, including information on the Themed Days of Resistance (June 21-24) and Days of Action (June25-27), can be found on http://www.g20.torontomobilize.org/

The Peoples’ Summit, June 18-20; www.peoplessummit2010.ca; at Ryerson University, pay what you can.

This is the big one, with the backing of the COC, GreenPeace Canada, the United Church, labour organizations, environmental groups and progressive think tanks. A countermeasure to the “self-appointed, undemocratic assembly of the world’s wealthiest countries,” the three-day program features some 100 workshops, film screenings, panels and lectures on global justice, the environment, gender and economics designed to get participants “educated and agitated.” It kicks off next Friday at the Carlu with speeches and music, all hosted by Mary Walsh.

The Oxfam Gender Justice Summit, June 18-20 www.oxfam.ca, at The Carlu and Ryerson U. Open to Oxfam members. New members welcome. Fees are $90, $0 for students

Running as part of, and parallel to, the Peoples’ Summit, this three-day event will gather Oxfam members, volunteers and donors, as well as academics, advocates and activists from around the world to explore the themes of gender-based violence, maternal health, poverty, security, climate change and food security.

“Most often when world leaders do talk about women and issues related to women and girls, they look at them as incubators, as victims, as survivors rather than women as leaders, change agents, as the people that produce most of the world’s food and do much of the world’s work,” Robert Fox, Oxfam Canada’s executive director, told the Star. “We want to shine a spotlight on women’s rights and these issues of gender justice.”

Themed Days of Resistance, June 21-24; The Shout Out For Global Justice, June 25 www.canadians.org/g20 and at Massey Hall

$14 for Council of Canadian members, $20 for non-members (includes membership) An evening of entertainment and inspiration with prominent activists hosted by Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and chair of the board of Washington-based Food and Water Watch.

The Human Summit, June 27; www.humansummit.com/joomla; at Woodbine Park, free

Neither about economics nor activism, the Human Summit, three hours of meditation and entertainment, is the calm after the summit storm. “We started noticing how much fear was being raised by all the security conditions being put on the people of Toronto, all the stories of protestors coming to town and all the thoughts of violence,” says Reverend Barbara Schreiner-Trudel, the summit’s spiritual director. “We wanted to come together to bring a greater sense of stability to the city, and a level of peace — while realizing that each one of us, we have the power. If we come together on any good idea, everything begins to change.”

Welfare special diet allowance at risk

2010-03-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

Welfare special diet allowance at risk

March 13, 2010

Laurie Monsebraaten

Ravenous hunger and crushing fatigue have plagued Julie Sauve since she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2003 and forced to quit her job as a food and beverage manager.

But Ontario’s Special Diet Allowance, which helps people on welfare manage medical conditions, means Sauve can afford to buy the lean meats and fresh fruits and vegetables she needs to maintain her weight and fight her illness.

“MS is different for everyone,” says the 38-year-old Bracebridge woman of the disease that attacks the central nervous system. “For me, it has sped up my metabolism meaning I have to eat five or six times a day. So the extra money has made a huge difference to me.”

But the program, which provides up to $250 per month for people managing more than 40 medical conditions, is taking a big bite out of provincial coffers. And a provincial auditor’s report last December said there is evidence of abuse.

All of this making Sauve – and thousands of others whose health is dependent on the extra money – worried the program may be eliminated, or drastically reduced in the provincial budget expected later this month.

Complicating matters, an Ontario Human Rights Commission ruling last month found the program discriminates against people with certain conditions. It ordered Queen’s Park to increase payments for three complainants and boost benefits for everyone under similar circumstances within three months.

That decision could add tens of millions more to a program that has ballooned to $200 million from just $6 million since 2003.

The allowance, which can only be obtained if a doctor or other health professional completes an application form, has been a longstanding – if not well-known – part of Ontario’s social assistance program.

But in the early 2000s, after a 22.6 per cent welfare cut in 1995 and a subsequent eight-year freeze, anti-poverty activists, legal clinics and community health centres began promoting the allowance,

In one highly publicized “hunger clinic” held on the lawn in front of Queen’s Park in 2005, doctors filled out more than 1,000 special diet application forms.

Today, more than 162,000 people on welfare, including 108,000 on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and about 54,000 on Ontario Works receive the allowance, or roughly 1 out of every 5 people on welfare.

As the provincial auditor noted in his 2009 annual report, some doctors are approving a large percentage of applications. A review of case files found instances where eight to 10 family members were all diagnosed with the same medical conditions resulting in extra payments of up to $30,000 annually.

At least one Toronto doctor has acknowledged he routinely signs application forms for people on welfare because he doesn’t believe Ontario’s meager monthly welfare cheques of $585 for an able-bodied recipient or $1,040 for a disabled person, provide enough money to buy healthy food.

The government has since ordered welfare workers to scrutinize special diet allowance applications more closely and has launched an internal review of the program.

The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons is investigating Toronto family doctor Ronald Wong for allegedly filling out hundreds of special diet application forms for people on welfare without confirming whether they suffer from a medical condition that qualifies for the extra cash.

Social Services Minister Madeleine Meilleur told the legislature last week that the Human Rights Commission ruling could have a “significant fiscal, policy and regulatory impact,” on the program, adding that she has received “good advice from the Auditor General.”

An internal ministry memo to front-line staff acknowledging rumours of the program’s demise is ominous, says Jennefer Laidley of the Income Security Advocacy Centre, a clinic that advocates for people on social assistance.

And rumours that the government may axe the allowance in favour of a 3-per-cent or 4-per-cent welfare increase for everyone are particularly alarming.

An extra $18 for a single person on welfare and $31 for someone on disability supports would be welcome, says Laidley. But not at the expense of cuts to those who rely on the special diet allowance.

“You shouldn’t be improving (welfare) rates by taking money away from poor, sick people,” she says. “Someone who gets $240 a month for Ensure to prevent dangerous weight loss will be at serious risk if that’s replaced with $18 or $31 a month.”

It is the wrong message to be sending at a time when the province is committed to poverty reduction and is reviewing social assistance, she adds.

Sauve already knows what it is like to lose the special diet allowance.

In 2005 when Ontario tried to rein in costs by creating a list of more than 40 illnesses that qualify for the allowance, MS was excluded. Sauve lost $177 a month.

In 2008, Sauve and more than 100 others on disability supports took the province to the Human Rights Commission over the policy. In January 2009, MS and lupus were added to the list of qualifying illnesses.

Since then, Sauve has received an extra $240 a month to spend on food and has gained 12 pounds – just 4 pounds short of her ideal weight of 130 lbs for her 5-ft 6-in frame. Her deteriorating eyesight has also stabilized.

Sauve’s health has improved so much that she’s hoping to go back to work part time.

“I feel so much better,” she says. “I account most of this to the fact that I can eat properly again. I’ve been getting better and better and better and it’s because of what I’ve been eating.”

Sauve can’t believe she may lose this key support again.

“It would be devastating,” she says. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

Quote of the day - supportive environments

2010-02-10T11:08:00.001-08:00

"This is always the conundrum. The solutions are easy but in many ways not supported by the world in which we live."

Perfect? Hardly. But getting there.

2010-02-07T07:15:00.000-08:00

Perfect? Hardly. But getting there.

The story about the friendship between Drew Brees and Peyton Manning.

"I have known Drew since I joined the Colts in '99," says Manning. "I followed his great (college) career at Purdue. Drew came down to one of our games and I remember going up to Purdue to play golf with him up there. Long driver, he can hit the golf ball, I will say that."

Manning kept in touch with his young friend, forging a mutual admiration society.

"Our relationship has grown since then. I have always said that quarterbacks ... stick together. It is a unique fraternity. Drew is a guy I have kept up with throughout his career. I see him at off-season events. Certainly have always had each other's phone number.

"Now that he is in New Orleans, he's a neighbour of my brother Cooper. My parents have gotten to know Drew and his family. I just have an appreciation for guys that play for the New Orleans Saints, that live there in the off-season, that commit to the city year-round as opposed to just playing there during the fall."

Brees still can hardly believe Manning's generosity of spirit and brotherly advice (aside from older brother Cooper, Manning, of course, has brother Eli, the starting quarterback for the Giants).

"One time, specifically, we came back and beat Ohio State my senior year, and sure enough I have a message on my phone from Peyton saying, `Hey, I had a chance to watch the game. I'm really happy for you. Way to battle.'

"For a young college player, here's Peyton Manning, second or third year in the league, already kind of coming into his own, Pro Bowl player, one of the best in the league, and for him to kind of reach out to me like that meant a lot to me as a young player.

"Who would've thought 10 years from then we'd be sitting here playing in a Super Bowl against one another?"

Stop making excuses

2010-01-27T15:57:00.001-08:00

Don't let anything be an excuse to say no!!!

All you do is complain!!!!

2010-01-21T17:48:00.001-08:00

Wow, when are you going to stop complaining and placing the blame on everyone else?

Trusting in others

2010-01-19T18:34:00.000-08:00

Try to think positively. Cynicism and suspicion can unravel you.

So you really don't care???

2010-01-19T18:02:00.000-08:00

Yeah. Attitude counts!!

sas macro quote %nrquote

2010-01-14T11:37:00.001-08:00

%let myprov=NFLD & LAB;

%macro test;
%if %nrquote(&myprov)=%nrstr(NFLD & LAB) OR %nrquote(&myprov)=NEW BRUNSWICK %then %put atlantic;
%else %if %nrquote(&myprov)=ONTARIO %then %put ontario;

%mend test;
%test;

SAS macro loop: SCAN

2010-01-11T06:38:00.000-08:00

Using the SAS macro %scan, to go through a string of words.

The program:

%macro myloop(mystring=);

%let k=0;

%do %while(%qscan(&mystring,&k+1,%str( )) ne %str());
%let myword=%qscan(&mystring,&k+1);

%let k = %eval(&k+1);
%put Word &k is &myword;

%end;

%mend myloop;

%myloop(mystring=blue mountain ski resort);

The results:

1 %macro myloop(mystring=);
2
3 %let k=0;
4
5 %do %while(%qscan(&mystring,&k+1,%str( )) ne %str());
6 %let myword=%qscan(&mystring,&k+1);
7
8 %let k = %eval(&k+1);
9 %put Word &k is &myword;
10
11 %end;
12
13
14 %mend myloop;
15
16 %myloop(mystring=blue mountain ski resort);
Word 1 is blue
Word 2 is mountain
Word 3 is ski
Word 4 is resort

Problem Solving on the Spot

2010-01-10T20:21:00.003-08:00

The boss doesn't need to know the truth...

Spanish word of the day

2010-01-08T07:45:00.000-08:00

I like this work because it relates to my work situation

January 04, 2010

cotorrear

koh-toh-rreh-ar'

(transitive verb) to chatter, to babble

Examples

No paraban de cotorrear por todo el dia. - They wouldn't stop chattering the entire day.
Cuando me pone nerviosa, siempre cotorreo y murmuro. - When I get nervous, I always babble and mumble.

Funny Christmas comic strip

2010-01-03T15:14:00.001-08:00

Ever froze to death while taking picture outside in the winter?

Technology: A tool to liberate or a tool to control?

2010-01-03T15:09:00.001-08:00

Will that be 'cinematophote' or videoconferencing?

January 03, 2010

Author EM Forster predicted in his 1909 novel "The Machine Stops" that future generations will be bound by th

Christine Sismondo

"The Machine Stops," by E. M. Forster (left) and "The Tyranny of E-Mail," by John Freeman.

"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee."

That's the opening line of The Machine Stops, a short science fiction story set somewhere in the future. As we read on, we discover that the problem with the cell is that the character who lives there almost never gets to leave.

Instead, characters of this fictional world communicate almost entirely via video chats, video conferencing and virtual lectures. Peoples' virtual social lives are rich – they have thousands of friends and communicate with them on an almost daily basis – but they live in almost total isolation. Bodies have atrophied and civilization is utterly dependent on technology.

E.M. Forster wrote this. In 1909.

The Machine Stops, which celebrated its 100th birthday last fall, is notable both for being one of Forster's few pieces not adapted as a Merchant-Ivory period piece (A Passage to India, A Room With a View, Howard's End) and its remarkable prescience.

In an age when the radio was still in its infancy and the telegraph a luxury, Forster foresaw ubiquitous computing, video conferencing, and a society's near total immersion in virtual communities and a cult of efficiency which demands more and more time spent in front of "the machine" keeping up with correspondence.

Which brings us to the here and now and, to email. It's hard not to notice it getting worse. Even if you don't have a job that brings you more than 200 emails a day, you've probably heard the war stories.

And we see further evidence out on the streets with seemingly sub-mental people trying to walk or drive while catching up on email via the machines that are increasingly attached to our persons. Those intent upon putting a positive spin on this talk about the potential of an interconnected race of cyborgs. Others, however, see it as a slavish dependency. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

HOVERING AROUND the latter camp is John Freeman, Granta editor and author of The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, a long complaint about email. Freeman contends that the volume of email threatens to crush us.

In 2007, 35 trillion emails were sent and the numbers are increasing every day. So are the number of people logging on. If left unchecked, Freeman argues we may one day look back at the quaint old days of 200 emails with fondness.

Obviously, this interferes with productivity. For many, half of an average workday is devoted to email and, with a constant barrage of queries and demands interrupting the work day, our ability to concentrate on larger products is shot. Freeman also argues that email contributes to an increasingly narcissistic, irritable and illiterate society. It's had a hand in the slow, painful erosion of newspapers and also threatens community and family relationships, since, in our quest to collapse space and time, we have voluntarily accepted solitary confinement in our cells.

Our conversations are fraught with misunderstandings stemming from the missing tone of voice and facial gestures that help us to interpret meaning. Add to this the zombiefication of those who are only ever half with us — their minds instead focused on trying to answer that text discreetly under the dinner table. This was precisely what Forster foretold a century ago. When mother and son speak over the cinematophone (for the five minutes she can spare away from her virtual life – "My time is too precious," she says), he complains that he is not seeing her through the machine but, instead, some "likeness" – the machine cannot transmit what Forster calls "the imponderable bloom."

What this remarkable story tells us, however, is not that Forster was the real Nostradamus. Rather, it demonstrates that these anxieties have always been with us. Or, at least for the past hundred years. It's hard, therefore, not to be suspicious of the argument that we must resist the tyranny of a machine forcing us to hit "send" all day long, in order to keep it running. The machine, after all, doesn't really want us to do anything. It's the people working the buttons who are the problem – even in the cases where the problem is systemic, like free web mail programs, which profit from email addicts and not from occasional users.

But Freeman is more than aware of the history of our tortured relationship with communications technology. The first three chapters of his book are a brief and selected history of reading and the post office and Freeman manages to walk a careful and considered line between the "Kids, get off the lawn" crankiness and the outright technological determinism that pervades a lot of thinking about new communications technology.

In short, we think we mostly all agree that, for many, email is careening out of control. In addition, Freeman provides a reasoned and thoughtful opening bid for whipping it back into shape and reclaiming it as a useful tool with his closing chapters, a "Manifesto for a Slow Communications Movement."

The steps are fairly simple: send less, think more. Use it appropriately and efficiently and carve space in your office and day for media-free interludes.

DESPITE THE DOOM and gloom of rising narcissism and declining literacy, Freeman's something of an optimist.

He doesn't think resistance is futile and provides some ideas for how we can all avoid being assimilated, a refreshing argument compared with much of the other stuff we regularly read decrying the death of the newspaper and civilized interaction, which tend to make us feel so hopeless that the deep woods start to look like an appealing option.

And a fix for our email and a little resistance might well be necessary – that is, if we want to avoid the isolated hexagonal cells where we consider the loss of the "imponderable bloom."

ubc trek greatness

2009-12-17T20:28:00.001-08:00

Story about laundromat owner's tenacity.

Teaching quotes

2009-12-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others. ~Author Unknown

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. ~William Arthur Ward

A teacher's purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image. ~Author Unknown

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people. ~K. Patricia Cross

The mole rat's immunity to cancer

2009-10-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

This was excerpted from the New York Times Science column on October 27, 2009.

Mice are very prone to cancer; in some strains, 90 percent of them die of tumors. People have stronger defenses against cancer, as is necessary for a long-lived animal: the disease accounts for 23 percent of human mortality. But the mole rat has taken its anticancer defenses even further: it seems not to get the disease at all. “These animals have never been observed to develop any spontaneous neoplasms,” Vera Gorbunova and colleagues said in an article in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Gorbunova, who works at the University of Rochester, has taken a first step toward understanding the genetic basis of the mole rat’s surprising immunity to cancer. She and her colleagues have found that the rats’ cells have a double system for inhibiting irregular proliferation, compared with the single system in human cells.

Normal human cells grown in a lab dish show behavior known as contact inhibition. Once the cells come in contact with one another, they form a single layer and stop dividing. Cancer cells, however, have thrown off that restraint and keep proliferating, forming one layer on top of another.

Dr. Gorbunova has found that both mole rat and human cells have the same system of contact inhibition, mediated in both species by a gene known as p27. But mole rats, in addition, have an early acting version of the same system and presumably use the p27 system just as a backup.
When mole rat cells in glassware make just a few contacts with one another, they stop growing and dividing. This early contact inhibition system is mediated by a gene called p16-ink4a. People also have the p16-ink4a gene, but it seems to play almost no role in contact inhibition of cells. The mole rat’s double system may be part of the reason for its remarkable immunity to cancer.

Another cell-level difference between the species is that mole rat cells maintain an active system for letting cells divide. Called telomerase, this system is switched off in mature human cells, presumably as a defense against cancer. Dr. Gorbunova believes the mole rat can afford to keep telomerase switched on, because its anticancer defenses are so good, and that the active telomerase may confer longer life on stem cells, which are responsible for repair and maintenance of the body’s tissues.

Quote of the day

2009-10-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

University of Toronto psychology professor Steve Joordens is skeptical that the distracted-driving law will have much impact because most people simply won't get caught. "Humans are very good at learning the difference between the law as written and the law as enforced," he said, pointing to the fact that most drivers routinely speed on highways with no expectation they'll be pulled over for exceeding the limit by 10 or 20 kilometres an hour.

That could change – as it did with seat belts, where it got to the point people thought anyone who didn't wear one was an idiot, he said.

Doctors and Society

2009-10-24T08:11:00.001-07:00

I thought doctors were supposed to put the patient ahead of personal interests. Who knew that doctors could be so territorial and hostile towards other professional in healthcare? Its a shame that doctors have a personal agenda when it comes to their profession.

Hospitals in a public fight with doctors over work reform

October 24, 2009

Theresa Boyle

Health Reporter

In an unusual public battle, the gloves have come off between Ontario hospitals and doctors, with one group accusing the other of protecting its turf and obstructing reform.

At issue is Bill 179, which would let non-physicians do some of the work doctors currently perform. The Ontario Medical Association, the doctors' lobby, is fighting government plans to let nurse practitioners lead local health clinics and to allow pharmacists to prescribe some medications.

The Ontario Hospital Association supports the proposed changes and charges that the OMA is more interested in turf protection than in changes that would improve access to health care while allowing doctors to focus time and talents on more complex cases.

"The (medical association), in our opinion, has a recent history of being opposed to significant health system change," Tom Closson, president of the hospital association, charged in a recent interview.

The war of words has recently erupted in the op-ed pages of the Toronto Star, with the OMA president, Dr. Suzanne Strasberg, writing that Closson's assertion that doctors aren't providing leadership is insulting.

Dr. Michael Rachlis, a private health policy consultant, observed that while the two organizations have had disagreements in the past, their differences have never spilled over so publicly before.

"It's unusual in the health policy landscape to have the OMA and the OHA go at it in public like that," he said, adding that the OMA's position isn't finding much resonance in the health sector.

"The OMA seems very offside compared to everyone else," he said.

Rachlis said the OMA section on general and family practice fanned the flames when it launched an aggressive ad campaign, warning that patient safety would be risked unless physicians reviewed the diagnosis and treatment decisions of nurse practitioners. The ads also questioned whether pharmacists have the necessary education and training to prescribe certain drugs.

Rachlis called the ads offensive: "When doctors go out and scare the public (by saying) that being a nurse or a pharmacist could be dangerous to your health, I have to check which decade I'm living in."

The campaign shows that the OMA is "very out of step with its younger members," he charged, noting that physicians coming out of medical school today are trained to work in teams with other health professionals, all of whom practise to the full scope of their expertise.

Closson also accused the OMA of being out of touch with its members.

Strasberg denied that charge, pointing out that the OMA's approval rate was almost 70 per cent last year in an annual satisfaction survey of its 26,000 active members.

She said doctors are very much in favour of the team approach to providing health care to patients and noted that she works as a family doctor at Jane and Finch with a team that includes a nurse, chiropodist, dietitian and social worker.

"What we don't want to see are silos of health care being provided such as nurse-led independent clinics," she said. "We think that all health-care providers should work together under one roof. That way we all know the patient well and we can all provide the patient with the best quality of care that's available. That's the goal of Ontario's doctors."

That wasn't always the case. Not that long ago, the OMA lobbied against the team approach to providing primary care.

"Doctors have come a long way in the last four to five years. If you ask most doctors out there today, they want to work in teams," Strasberg said.

Closson emphasized that his criticisms were directed not at front-line doctors but the OMA, which he describes as a "union."

When the province is faced with a growing deficit and health-care costs are growing at an unsustainable rate, major reform is necessary, he said.

NDP health critic France Gélinas, who supports Bill 179, credited Closson for taking on the OMA. Both nurses and pharmacists have made noise about the OMA, but because they have a vested interest in Bill 179, Closson's words have more bearing, she said.

Inspirational quotes

2009-10-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

“Be the change that you want to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gandhi

"You see things and you say, 'why?' But I dream things that never were and say why not?"
George Bernard Shaw

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“To err is human, to forgive is divine.”
Alexander Pope

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“What the mind can conceive, it can achieve.”
Napolean Hill

"Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today."
Abraham Lincoln

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage”
Anais Nin

Quote of the Day - laughter and reality

2009-09-26T17:35:00.001-07:00

“I’m going to smile and make you think I’m happy, I’m going to laugh, so you don’t see me cry, I’m going to let you go in style, and even if it kills me- I’m going to smile”

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”

How BMI became a statistic

2009-07-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

A few extra pounds can extend your life. Or so chirped the press, reporting on a recent study from the journal Obesity. The new research, which supports earlier findings that being slightly overweight is associated with living longer, has added to an ongoing controversy over how we measure obesity. At the center of this debate is the body mass index, a simple equation (your weight in kilograms divided by the square of your height in meters) that has in the last decade claimed a near-monopoly on obesity statistics. Some researchers now argue that this flawed and overly reductive measure is skewing the results of research in public health.

For years, critics of the body mass index have griped that it fails to distinguish between lean and fatty mass. (Muscular people are often misclassifed as overweight or obese.) The measure is mum, too, about the distribution of body fat, which makes a big difference when it comes to health risks. And the BMI cutoffs for "underweight," "normal," "overweight," and "obese" have an undeserved air of mathematical authority. So how did we end up with such a lousy statistic?
Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet devised the equation in 1832 in his quest to define the "normal man" in terms of everything from his average arm strength to the age at which he marries. This project had nothing to do with obesity-related diseases, nor even with obesity itself. Rather, Quetelet used the equation to describe the standard proportions of the human build—the ratio of weight to height in the average adult. Using data collected from several hundred countrymen, he found that weight varied not in direct proportion to height (such that, say, people 10 percent taller than average were 10 percent heavier, too) but in proportion to the square of height. (People 10 percent taller than average tended to be about 21 percent heavier.)
The new equation had little impact among the medical community until long after Quetelet's death. While doctors had suspected the ill effects of obesity since at least as far back as the 18th century, their evidence was anecdotal. The first large-scale studies of obesity and health were conducted in the early 20th century, when insurance companies began using comparisons of height and weight among their policyholders to show that "overweight" people died earlier than those of "ideal" weight. Subsequent actuarial and medical studies found that obese people were also were more likely to get diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.

By the early 1900s, it was well-established that these ailments were the result of having too much adipose tissue—so the studies used functions of height and weight as little more than a proxy for determining how much excess body fat people had. It would have been more accurate for the actuaries to compare longevity data with more direct assessments of body fat—such as caliper-measured skinfold thickness or hydrostatic weighing. But these data were much harder for them to obtain than standard information on height, weight, and sex.

The insurance tables gave us correlations between these physical characteristics and expected lifespan. But medical researchers needed a standard measure of fatness, so they could look at the health outcomes of varying degrees of obesity across an entire population. For decades doctors couldn't agree on the best formula for combining height and weight into a single number—some used weight divided by height; others used weight divided by height cubed. Then, in 1972, physiology professor and obesity researcher Ancel Keys published his "Indices of Relative Weight and Obesity," a landmark study of more than 7,400 men in five countries. Keys examined which of the height-weight formulas matched up best with each subject's body-fat percentage, as measured more directly. It turned out that the best predictor came from Quetelet: weight divided by height squared. Keys renamed this number the body mass index.
The new measure caught on among researchers who had previously relied on slower and more expensive measures of body fat or on the broad categories (underweight, ideal weight, and overweight) identified by the insurance companies. The cheap and easy BMI test allowed them to plan and execute ambitious new studies involving hundreds of thousands of participants and to go back through troves of historical height and weight data and estimate levels of obesity in previous decades.

Gradually, though, the popularity of BMI spread from epidemiologists who used it for studies of population health to doctors who wanted a quick way to measure body fat in individual patients. By 1985, the NIH started defining obesity according to body mass index, on the theory that official cutoffs could be used by doctors to warn patients who were at especially high risk for obesity-related illness. At first, the thresholds were established at the 85th percentile of BMI for each sex: 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women. (Those numbers now represent something more like the 50th percentile for Americans.) Then, in 1998, the NIH changed the rules: They consolidated the threshold for men and women, even though the relationship between BMI and body fat is different for each sex, and added another category, "overweight." The new cutoffs—25 for overweight, 30 for obesity—were nice, round numbers that could be easily remembered by doctors and patients.

Keys had never intended for the BMI to be used in this way. His original paper warned against using the body mass index for individual diagnoses, since the equation ignores variables like a patient's gender or age, which affect how BMI relates to health. It's one thing to estimate the average percent body fat for large groups with diverse builds, Keys argued, but quite another to slap a number and label on someone without regard for these factors.

Now Keys' misgivings are gaining traction across the world of medicine: BMI simply doesn't work when it comes to individual measurements. Whether that's a problem worth worrying about is another question. Some researchers say BMI's inaccuracies in individual measurements result in little actual harm, since an attentive doctor can spot outliers and adjust her diagnosis accordingly. But this begs the question: If a doctor's eye is better than BMI at determining a patient's healthy weight, then why use BMI for individuals at all?
No matter how attentive they might be, health professionals have increasingly used body mass index to justify lifestyle recommendations for their patients. And online BMI calculators—there's even one hosted by the NIH—invite people to diagnose themselves without any medical supervision whatsoever. Faulty readings could promote a negative self-image among healthy people and lead them to pursue unnecessary diets. Or the opposite problem: People with a little too much body fat might be lulled into a false sense of complacency by a misleading BMI.
A recent critique (PDF) of the body mass index in the journal Circulation suggests that BMI's imprecision and publicity-friendly cutoffs may distort even the large epidemiological studies. (There's no definitive count of how many people are misclassified by BMI, but several studies have suggested that the error rate is significant for people of certain ages and ethnicities.) It's impossible to know which studies have been affected and in what direction they might have been skewed.

Our continuing reliance on BMI is especially grating given there's a very reasonable alternative. It turns out that the circumference around a person's waist provides a much more accurate reading of his or her abdominal fat and risk for disease than BMI. And wrapping a tape measure around your gut is no more expensive than hopping on a scale and standing in front of a ruler. That's why the American Society for Nutrition, the American Diabetes Association, and other prominent medical groups have lately promoted waist circumference measurements as a supplement to, or replacement for, the body mass index.

Yet few doctors have made the switch. The waist measurements require slightly more time and training than it takes to record a BMI reading, and they don't come with any official cutoffs that can be used to make easy assessments. The sensitivity of doctors to these slight inconveniences signals just how difficult it will be to unseat Quetelet's equation. The body mass index is cheap and easy, and it has the incumbent advantage. In short, BMI is here to stay—despite, but also because of, its flaws. Jeremy Singer-Vine is a former Slate intern.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2223095/

Is aid helpful or harmful?

2009-06-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press
updated 7:00 p.m. ET, Thurs., June 18, 2009

In the last two decades, the world has spent more than $196 billion trying to save people from death and disease in poor countries. Millions of people are now protected against diseases like yellow fever, sleeping under anti-malaria bed nets and taking AIDS drugs.

But there isn't much proof that pricey programs led by the United Nations and its partners are responsible, according to two studies published Friday in the medical journal, Lancet. Trying to show health campaigns actually saved lives is "a very difficult scientific dilemma," said Tim Evans, a senior World Health Organization official who worked on one of the papers.

In one paper, WHO researchers examined the impact of various global health initiatives during the last 20 years. Some programs hurt careThey found some benefits, like increased diagnosis of tuberculosis cases and higher vaccination rates. But they also concluded some U.N. programs hurt health care in Africa by disrupting basic services and leading some countries to slash their health spending. In another paper, Chris Murray of the University of Washington and colleagues tracked how much has been spent in public health in the last two decades — the figure jumped from $5.6 billion in 1990 to $21.8 billion in 2007 — and where it’s gone. Much of that money is from taxpayers in the West. The U.S. government was the biggest donor, contributing more than $10 billion in 2007.

They found countries don't get more donations even if they're in worse shape. Ethiopia and Uganda both receive more money than Nigeria, Pakistan or Bangladesh, all of whom have bigger health crises. Some experts were surprised how long it took simply to consider if the world's health investment paid off. Richard Horton, the Lancet's editor, labeled it "scandalous" and "reckless" health officials haven't carefully measured how they used the world's money.
Experts said that in some cases, the U.N. was propping up dysfunctional health systems. "If you've got rotten governments, no amount of development aid is going to fix that," said Elizabeth Pisani, an AIDS expert who once worked for the U.N., citing Zimbabwe as a prime example.

Murray and colleagues also found AIDS gets at least 23 cents of every health dollar going to poor countries. Globally, AIDS causes fewer than 4 percent of deaths. "Funds in global health tend to go to whichever lobby group shouts the loudest, with AIDS being a case in point," said Philip Stevens of International Policy Network, a London think tank.

In WHO's study, researchers admitted whether health campaigns address countries' most pressing needs "is not known." When Cambodia asked for help from 2003-2005, it said less than 10 percent of aid was needed for AIDS. But of the donations Cambodia got, more than 40 percent went to diseases including AIDS.

WHO acknowledged change was necessary, but insisted it needed even more money, warning fewer donations would jeopardize children's' lives. U.N. agencies, universities and others working on public health routinely take from 2 to 50 percent of a donation for "administrative purposes" before it goes to needy countries. Others said there is little incentive for health officials to commission an independent evaluation to find out what their programs have achieved.

"The public health community has convinced the public the only way to improve poor health in developing countries is by throwing a ton of money at it," Stevens said. "It is perhaps not coincidental that thousands of highly paid jobs and careers are also dependent on it."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31427832/ns/health-infectious_diseases/

The Need for Electronic Health Records

2009-06-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

Losing track of big picture at eHealth TheStar.com - Opinion - Losing track of big picture at eHealth

While MPPs squabble, Ontario patients suffer due to lack of electronic health records
June 12, 2009

Michael Rachlis

With the headlines screaming scandal at eHealth Ontario and the media and opposition sensing blood, Ontario risks falling further behind on electronic health records. Of course, I understand how people who are losing jobs and savings can be angry at the symbolism of consultants who make more than $300 an hour billing for muffins. And there has been a lot of money spent on electronic health records in the past without much to show for the expenditures. But let's remember that so far we have allegations. Consultants usually have legal contracts that include payment for food on the road. Dr. Alan Hudson, Sarah Kramer and her team were incredibly effective in their previous work at Cancer Care Ontario and the provincial wait times initiative. And they had already accomplished a lot in their first six months at eHealth, including launching a pilot project to track prescriptions for 80,000 patients in Sault Ste Marie and Collingwood. Finally, top-notch private sector IT people make a lot more than Kramer ever did.

Full disclosure: I have met Hudson and Kramer but never worked for or socialized with either of them.

Now let's take a look at the bigger picture. You need high-quality, integrated electronic records to run a safe, efficient health system. On a 1981 visit to a Havana community health centre I was struck that each doctor had a binder with lists of patients with different chronic diseases. In what might have been an apocryphal story, a physician told me that in his guerrilla days, Fidel Castro saw a child die from asthma. Fellow guerrilla and physician Che Guevara informed Castro that the death could have been prevented with appropriate care prior to the attack. With a voice swelling with pride, the doctor said that Castro had created a world-class health-care system. And El Commandante insisted on the regular follow-up of all patients with asthma and other chronic diseases to prevent unnecessary deaths, such as the little boy's he had witnessed.

When I got back to my practice, I bought a binder and started keeping track of all my patients who needed routine follow-up. I discovered that I had more than twice as many patients with these conditions as I had suspected. My patients got better care. Probably some of them avoided heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure. The following year, I visited Seattle's famed Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. Established in 1948 and still run as a cooperative, Group Health has spawned innovation after innovation. In 1982, they had a fully integrated electronic health record with terminals in every office hooked up to an IBM mainframe computer. The possibilities astounded me. As I returned to my practice I thought it would be just a few years before I had an electronic system on my desk. It would track patients and automatically alert them and me about needed follow-up care.

According to the Ontario Health Quality Council's annual report released Tuesday, 27 years later only 25 per cent of Ontario family doctors have electronic records compared with 50 per cent in Alberta and 98 per cent in the Netherlands. It gets worse. Only 8 per cent of Ontario family doctors use their electronic records to follow up patients. Thousands of patients with diabetes and other chronic conditions are dying unnecessarily. Thousands of X-rays are being redone every year because the one done a few days earlier isn't available. Castro would not be impressed.

Why do Ontario and Canada lag behind other jurisdictions? First, electronic health systems cost money. Federal agency Canadian Health Infoway estimates capital expenditures of $10 billion for an integrated health record for the country. However, to put this figure in perspective, Canada's health system spends that every three weeks. No Martha, we shouldn't put electronic records back on the shelf for another 25 years and spend the money on more doctors and nurses working in an uncoordinated, unsafe system.

Second, Americans refer to our medicare as socialized medicine. But we've really only socialized the funding. Most of Ontario's 20,000 doctors are in private practice and Ontario's 140-plus hospitals are still private, albeit non-profit, corporations with independent boards.

In the U.K., the government paid for the electronic systems in hospitals and doctors' offices. Providers and practitioners had little choice about their systems. Doctors and hospitals can communicate with each other. In Ontario, the government has balked at paying. More than a dozen systems are approved for doctors' offices but most will be unable to communicate with the various systems being bought by hospitals, which in turn will be unable to communicate with each other.

Where do we go from here? Ontario and other governments have to suck it up and pay the money. Governments have to get together with providers and ensure nobody wastes money on any more systems unless they are fully interoperative.

Regarding the muffins at Tims, let's allow the auditor general to do his good work. We need to ensure that every Canadian has a secure electronic record to keep their care safe and sustain medicare for the next generation.

Dr. Michael Rachlis is a health policy analyst and an associate professor at the University of Toronto.

Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: newyorker.com

2009-06-07T10:38:00.001-07:00

Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: newyorker.com

Shared via AddThis

Oprah's influence on the public: does she have the facts straight?

2009-06-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

Is Oprah Winfrey giving us bad medicine?

TheStar.com - Insight - Is Oprah Winfrey giving us bad medicine?

Here is "the perfect face to put on the problem that we supporters of science-based medicine face," writes Dr. David Gorski. He says Oprah uses her influence in aid of "what can only be characterized as dubious medical therapies at best and quackery at worst."

We've all speculated about why the anti-scientific emotion-based notion that vaccines somehow must cause autism persists in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary, but I think the question goes much deeper than that. The anti-vaccine movement is but one of the most visible components of a much deeper problem in our public discourse, a problem that values feelings and personal experience over evidence, compelling stories and anecdotes over science.
I'm referring to the Oprah-fication of medicine. Why Oprah? you may ask. I'm happy to tell you. Oprah Winfrey has been the host of the highest-rated syndicated talk show in television history. She has developed a media empire that few single individuals can match or beat. Clearly, she is a talented and savvy TV host and businesswoman.

Unfortunately, Oprah displays as close to no critical-thinking skills when it comes to science and medicine as I've ever seen, and uses the vast influence her TV show and media empire give her in order to subject the world to her special brand of mystical New Age thinking and belief in various forms of what can only be characterized as dubious medical therapies at best and quackery at worst. Naturally, Oprah doesn't see it that way, and likely no one could ever convince her of the malign effect she has on the national zeitgeist with respect to science and medicine. Consequently, whether fair or unfair, she represents the perfect face to put on the problem that we supporters of science-based medicine face when trying to get the message out to the average reader about unscientific medical practices, and that's why I am referring to the pervasiveness of pseudoscience infiltrating medicine as the "Oprah-fication" of medicine.

Over the years, Oprah has promoted a wide variety of pseudoscience and mysticism on her show. Indeed, just last week, Newsweek ran a long article entitled "Live Your Best Life Ever! Wish Away Cancer! Get A Lunchtime Face-Lift! Eradicate Autism! Turn Back The Clock! Thin Your Thighs! Cure Menopause! Harness Positive Energy! Erase Wrinkles! Banish Obesity! Live Your Best Life Ever!" It reveals just how forcefully Oprah and her credulous belief in New Age nonsense are reflected in her show.

It starts with the example of Suzanne Somers, who in January appeared on Oprah to talk about what she does to stay young. As Newsweek (whose story merits quoting) reported, "Each morning, the 62-year-old actress and self-help author rubs a potent estrogen cream into the skin on her arm. She smears progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month. And once a day, she uses a syringe to inject estrogen directly into her vagina." The article continues, "The idea is to use these unregulated `bio-identical' hormones to restore her levels to what they were when she was in her 30s, thus fooling her body into thinking she's a younger woman." It is noted that Somers claims the hormones, synthesized from plants, are natural and risk free; Newsweek's writer rightly takes issue with the last point. Somers told Oprah that every day she takes some 60 vitamin pills – 40 supplements in the morning, 20 more before going to bed. She begins the day with injections of vitamin B12, the human growth hormone and, Newsweek reports, "wears `nanotechnology patches' to help her sleep, lose weight and promote `overall detoxification.'" After drinking wine she boosts her liver by taking vitamin C intravenously; Somers has chelation therapy to clean her blood if she breathes cigarette smoke.

The actress makes remarkable claims for hormones' ability to aid the human body. "I know I look like some kind of freak and fanatic," she is quoted saying. "But I want to be there until I'm 110, and I'm going to do what I have to do to get there." By Newsweek's account, "That was apparently good enough for Oprah. `Many people write Suzanne off as a quackadoo,' she said. `But she just might be a pioneer... ' " Oprah's show gave doctors several chances to respond, but they were in the audience while Somers, Newsweek reports, sat onstage with Oprah, who defended her. Oprah is quoted saying "Suzanne swears by bioidenticals and refuses to keep quiet."

I've known for a while that Somers promotes so-called "bioidentical hormones." I've also realized that it is the height of stupidity for a woman who has survived breast cancer to pump herself full of estrogen in the futile and pathetic quest to reclaim her lost youth. It's just begging for a recurrence of her breast cancer. Somers epitomizes the cliché of "I'd rather be lucky than good." Either that, or her cancer was estrogen receptor-negative, but even in that case it's definitely pushing her luck to be bathing in "bioidentical" estrogens.

Oprah, reported Newsweek, "told her audience that she found Somers's bestselling books on bioidentical hormones `fascinating' and said `every woman should read' what she has to say. She didn't stop there. Oprah said that although she has never had a hot flash, after reading Somers she decided to go on bioidenticals herself. `After one day on bioidentical estrogen, I felt the veil lift,' she wrote in O, The Oprah Magazine. `After three days, the sky was bluer, my brain was no longer fuzzy, my memory was sharper. I was literally singing and had a skip in my step.' On the show, Oprah had her own word of warning for the medical establishment: `We have the right to demand a better quality of life for ourselves,' she said. `And that's what doctors have got to learn to start respecting.'"

That statement epitomizes the attitude that infuses The Oprah Winfrey Show when it comes to medical issues and science. Anecdotes trump science, and scientists should "respect" pseudoscience because of feelings and a desire for "quality of life." Indeed, these are exactly the attitudes that permeate the Complementary and Alternative Care movement and the anti-vaccine movement. But Somers says it's mainstream medicine that doesn't have the facts. "The problem is that our medical schools do not teach this," she is quoting saying in a February interview in Newsweek. It reported that Somers "believes doctors, scientists and the media are all in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry," and that "Billions are spent on marketing drugs, and these companies also support academic research." Without such conflicts, "Somers can see things clearly. "I have spent thousands of hours on this. I've written 18 books on health. I know my stuff."

No, Somers does not know her stuff. Writing books is no guarantee that she "knows her stuff," particularly given that she clearly does not understand science and cherry-picks references to support her viewpoint, ignoring those that do not. Somers also thinks her self-taught knowledge trumps the understanding of scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying such questions deeply.

The absolute worst of Oprah's protégées is the celebrity spokesmodel for the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny McCarthy. Beginning in the fall of 2007, McCarthy, characterized as having "warrior spirit" and as a "warrior mom," has been a regular guest on Oprah, where she's been given more or less free rein to spread her gospel of vaccines causing autism and her claims that biomedical quackery can "cure" or "recover" autistic children. McCarthy's promotion of anti-vaccine propaganda and pseudoscience is, quite simply, so egregious and such a threat to public health that even the Oprah-friendly (or Oprah-intimidated) media has become alarmed.

Reporters have tried to get a statement from Oprah. From an article on a recent TV documentary, The Oprah Effect: "Asked if Oprah or her show endorses McCarthy's views, a representative for Oprah's program said, "We don't take positions on the opinions of our guests. Rather, we offer a platform for guests to share their first-person stories in an effort to inform the audience and put a human face on topics relevant to them." When McCarthy's views have been discussed on the air, statements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics saying that there's no scientific evidence of a vaccine-autism link have been read."

And from the Newsweek cover story: She declined to be interviewed for this article, but in a statement she said, "I've been saying for years that people are responsible for their actions and their own well-being. I believe my viewers understand the medical information presented on the show is just that – information – not an endorsement or prescription. Rather, my intention is for our viewers to take the information and engage in a dialogue with their medical practitioners about what may be right for them." In other words, Oprah washes her hands of responsibility for spreading misinformation under the guise of trusting her audience to be able to distinguish good advice from bad advice.

It apparently matters not that McCarthy's claims are based on her belief in autism quackery and anti-vaccine pseudoscience. All that matters is that, by her own narrative, McCarthy has "triumphed" over the odds for the sake of her son. The compelling personal story of "empowerment" thus trumps science, and the only "balance" Oprah feels compelled to provide is a dry statement from the CDC and AAP. Philosopher and ethicist (not to mention blogger) Janet Stemwedel asks: "Is it acceptable to give any guest you please a soapbox without taking a position on the opinions they voice from that soapbox? Is reading official statements from the CDC and AAP enough `balance' to Jenny McCarthy's views on vaccines ...?"

"And, if Oprah and her producers are aware of the Oprah effect (which, really, they have to be, right?), should that awareness of their reach lead them to try to meet a higher ethical standard as far as the foreseeable consequences for giving Jenny McCarthy a soapbox?" I have two answers to those questions: my answers in an ideal world and my answer in the real world.

In an ideal world, my answers would be: No, simply reading an official statement from the CDC and AAP as "balance" to Jenny McCarthy's idiotic and dangerous views on vaccines, which have led her to a know-nothing activism based on the arrogance of ignorance that is already eroding faith in vaccines. She uses emotion and her son to argue falsely that vaccines cause autism and that various quackery "cured" him (and, by inference, can cure other children with autism, too). Reading a dry statement from the CDC is utterly useless in combating this message. It is nothing more than what I like to call the "token skeptic" who trots out the skeptical viewpoint briefly in a formulaic method. "Balance," after all, implies that there is enough scientific validity to a view that it is somewhere on the same planet with science. There is no "balance" between Jenny McCarthy and scientists. Jenny McCarthy is, quite simply, completely wrong about vaccines and autism. "Balance" is a sham used by promoters of pseudoscience and quackery to claim a legitimacy that they don't deserve.

In the real world, unfortunately, my answer would be this: If it gets ratings, it interests Oprah. If it fits into her apparent "spiritual" world view, it's all good to her. If it fits in with the "alternative" medical beliefs of her audience, she likes it. If it provides a message of "empowerment" (whether real or not), it is good. The bottom line is that, when it comes to medicine and science, she is a force for ill. Her intentions may be the best in the world, but that is only why she is the living embodiment of the cliché that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That's especially true when that same road is also paved with no mental filter of critical thinking to keep out nonsense. With great power comes great responsibility, indeed.
Unfortunately, given the infiltration of quackery into academic medicine, I'm having a hard time determining if Oprah is a symptom or one of the causes of the rise of pseudoscience and quackery over science-based medicine.

David Gorski is a surgical oncologist specializing in breast cancer and an associate professor of surgery at the Wayne State University School of Medicine based at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute.

This story is adapted from a longer piece on sciencebasedmedicine.org.

Addictions: Environmental or Biological pressure?

2009-05-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

Addiction: Could it be a big lie? TheStar.com - Insight - Addiction: Could it be a big lie?

KEITH BEATY / TORONTO STAR
A Harvard psychologist's new book argues that addiction isn't really an illness, infuriating the medical establishment. We examine his incendiary hypothesis

May 16, 2009 Daniel DaleStaff Reporter

Go ahead. Judge drug addicts. Call them selfish. A Harvard psychologist gives you permission.
You do not have to be mean to them, he says. Just do not treat them as if they have some sort of, you know, illness.

Gene M. Heyman's book Addiction: A Disorder of Choice comes out this week. Like several other books released this decade, it disparages the overwhelming scientific consensus that addiction is an involuntary disease. Supporters of the overwhelming scientific consensus are not amused.

"His argument crashes and burns," says Tony George, the head of addiction psychiatry at the University of Toronto. "I don't think there's too many self-respecting scholars in the addiction field who would agree with him. I'm shocked that Harvard University Press would publish that."

"These guys – I don't know, academia, they just kind of take what they want, and they don't care about the truth, or what the studies show," says Norman Miller, a professor of medicine at Michigan State University. "What aspect of disease," says Norman Hoffman, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University, "does he not understand?" Heyman, a Harvard lecturer in psychology, did not expect to be lauded by the medical-scientific establishment. His book indicts its members. Appealing to an eclectic mix of studies and examples – Philip Roth's impotent alter ego Nathan Zuckerman makes a brief appearance – he attempts to persuade us that we have been persistently deceived by so-called addiction experts who do not understand addiction.

If hardly a controversial topic to those other than the small group of dissidents who want it to be, the semantic disease-or-not debate has important practical implications. How addiction is viewed affects how addicts are treated, by the public and by medical professionals, and how government allocates resources to deal with the problem. Heyman, who says he was once reluctant to share his conclusions, now makes his case forcefully.

Can humans be genetically predisposed to addiction? Sure, he writes, but this does not mean addicts' drug use is not a voluntary behaviour. Are addicts self-destructive? Of course, he writes, but this does not mean they do not respond to the costs and benefits associated with their decisions, even when addiction has changed their brains. Is addiction a chronic, lifelong disorder? No, he concludes. Most experts, he argues, do not understand just how many addicts quit for good.

Addiction draws heavily on behavioural economics, a field that fuses psychology with economic theory to predict human behaviour. The book is complex. It is fundamentally based, however, on that last, simple point: Addicts quit. Clinical experts believe addiction cannot be permanently conquered, Heyman writes, because they tend to study only addicts who have entered treatment programs. People who never enter treatment – more than three-quarters of all addicts, according to most estimates – relapse far less frequently than those who do, since people in treatment more frequently have additional medical and psychiatric problems.
Miller says Heyman has misinterpreted the data to which he points. George says studies of non-treatment-seeking people contradict Heyman's conclusions. Says Hoffman about those conclusions: "Yeah, so?"

Many addicts, Hoffman agrees, can indeed quit of their own volition. But some people live long lives with cancer. This is not proof that cancer is not a disease, he says, merely that some people suffer from more severe cases of diseases than others. "If you compare Type 2 diabetes to Type 1 diabetes, one is much more virulent, more difficult to control. But we call them the same; we call them both diabetes," he says. "Since we're talking about a plethora of genes involved in addiction, we may also be looking here at a variety of illnesses that we're labelling the same but are really very different."

Heyman concurs with the expert consensus on the nature of addicts' thinking at the time of a relapse. The addict, he writes, does not choose to be an addict; he or she merely chooses to use the drug one more time, nothing more, and thus ends up an addict unintentionally.
The question is why the addict chooses to use the drug one more time. "The evidence from neuroimaging, animal studies, genetic association studies, clinical trials, is overwhelming," says George: The addicted brain is a changed brain. It is simply incapable of resisting a desired drug. But Heyman argues that addicts with sufficient self-control can organize their lives so that they are not directly confronted with an abstain-or-succumb decision.

People who have stronger incentives to remain clean, such as a good job, are more likely to make better lifestyle choices, Heyman writes. This is not contentious. But he also argues that the inability to resist potentially harmful situations is a product of others' opinions, fear of punishment, and "values"; it is a product of a cost-benefit analysis. He does not dispute that drug use alters the brain. He does not dispute that some people have genes that make them more susceptible to addiction. He disputes that the person who is predisposed to addiction and the person whose brain has been altered are not able to ponder the consequences of their actions. In other words, he disputes that biological factors make addicts' decisions compulsive.
This is where the experts he maligns begin to grumble again. In the changed brains of many addicts, says George, the capacity for voluntary behaviour with regard to drugs has been overwhelmed. It is as if the brakes that might allow them to stop before using have ceased functioning.

While addicts may not ignore the consequences of their actions, many – even people with families, good jobs and a lot to lose – are unable to make those consequences the basis for their actions. "Where (Heyman) loses the argument," George says, "is that there are clearly both biological and environmental or contextual factors involved, but he's basically saying that the context and the environment are everything and the biology is irrelevant. Well, what we know about the brain, and the brain on drugs, is startling."

Heyman knows he is a heretic. The book jacket on Addiction calls his thoughts "radical"; in the book, he writes that "most people believe the disease interpretation of addiction is the scientific, enlightened, and humane perspective." Changing minds will be difficult. Then again, some people manage to quit drugs.

The FLORIDA tattos

2009-05-04T18:25:00.000-07:00

Marquis Daniels and Udonis Haslem are letting the world know that they represent the state of Florida.

beauty transformations?

2009-04-28T16:57:00.001-07:00

its hard to realize how thin someone has become until they've seen a pre/post photo of themselves!!

http://www.usmagazine.com/photos/incredible-shrinking-stars

Quote of the day: irony of fashion

2009-04-27T17:43:00.000-07:00

While beautiful women may be the face of fashion, it's the less fortunate ones who keep it ticking.

Scam of the Year

2009-04-27T17:37:00.001-07:00

Sex and charity: James Arion profits from both TheStar.com - GTA - Sex and charity: James Arion profits from both

April 25, 2009 Kevin DonovanSTAFF REPORTER

Want to have sex with a high-priced call girl without your wife or boss knowing? Or, how about actually earning money by making charitable donations? James Arion, formerly James Aryan, formerly Eleftherios "Terry" Kambouris, is your man. The Canadian government lets this 48-year-old twice-bankrupt con artist run a multimillion-dollar charitable foundation that boasts it is helping AIDS victims overseas and the disabled at home. In reality, the Orion Foundation is part of a tax shelter scheme that deprives government accounts of millions of dollars. It has also left thousands of Canadians in trouble because the whopping federal tax credits they received – which earned them more than $2,000 for every $1,000 they donated – are being challenged or outright disallowed by the taxman.

At the same time, Arion secretly operates a scheme that uses mundane company names to process prostitution payments from johns to many of Toronto's top escort agencies. A $400 charge for an hour of sex from Cachet Ladies appears on the john's credit card statement as a computer-consulting contract with Neodec Services. Remarkably, the Canada Revenue Agency has not taken action against Orion and the tax shelter it works with – the Canadian Institute of International Philanthropy (COIP) – despite determining a year ago that the scheme was bogus. In the Star's ongoing charity investigation, this is the most glaring example yet of poor government regulation and no background checks. Arion's businesses are run out of his two-house country complex in Stouffville, north of Toronto.

The Star was able to do a brief interview with Arion. "You are not a very nice person," he told me. "I am trying to help a whole lot of people and you are stopping me," he said, then asked for written questions. The Star complied. A week later, Arion said he would not answer questions, but in a brief written note said his charity is helping 10,000 AIDS sufferers in Africa and a group of disadvantaged people in Cuba.

• The Escort Scheme

Growing up on the Danforth in Toronto's east end, Arion never liked his family name – Kambouris. It reminded him of the Greek word for hunchback and of his grandfather, whose Communist Party background in Greece he disliked. While studying economics at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s he changed his name to James Aryan, saying he favoured the pure Caucasian race. When friends complained the name kindled thoughts of Aryan Nation white supremacists, he modified it to Arion. His early work life was quiet – a computer-consulting job servicing dentists. In 1985 he registered a charitable foundation with the federal government, saying he planned to set up an orphanage. He first called it the Aryan Foundation, then renamed it the Orion Foundation. The charity lay dormant for almost two decades.

Several years passed and Arion's habit of spending beyond his means built up a $42,000 personal debt. He declared bankruptcy for the first time in 1989, wiping his debts clear. A single-vehicle car accident resulted in a $200,000 insurance settlement and Arion, who said he was disabled, stayed home to raise his young children. By 1998 Arion was ready to work again. He traded on an idea picked up while chatting with strippers at a club he frequented.
The profitable Toronto escort industry had a problem. People who pay by credit card don't want a sex company name on their Visa bill. "James's idea for the credit card business was that if a consulting company shows up on the Visa statement, the wife, the boss and accounting won't ask any questions," said Igor Tsyganok, a former associate of Arion's in the escort business.
The idea was embraced by escort agencies, which had a tough time convincing credit card companies to issue the "merchant numbers" needed to process payments. Visa, Mastercard and American Express typically do not grant them to firms that provide prostitution. Dozens of expensive charges at 2 a.m. also raise alarms with credit card security staff.

Arion's solution was to create a string of dummy computer consulting firms and then obtain merchant numbers for them from the big credit card companies. He runs the scam to this day.
Among the dummy names he registered are Informega, Solomon Manheim Corporation (borrowing his late father's first name), and Neodec Services. "Neodec is a hub of computer professionals with expertise in specific fields," states the ho-hum Neodec website.

In reality, Neodec is James Arion sitting at his computer in one of two Stouffville country homes he owns with his wife (along with two Toronto condominiums on Scollard St.). There's a pool and a tennis court on the recently renovated property. At various times, Arion has counted many of the big (and some small) escort agencies as clients. Cachet Ladies, Cupid Escorts, Lady Godiva, Dangerous Curves, Executive Choice, Richard's Affordable Escorts, and Budget Escorts – all companies whose websites feature beautiful women available for sex.
Here's how it works: The john arranges for an escort with a telephone call or email to an agency. He dictates his credit card number, just as if he was ordering a pizza. The escort agency, using the Neodec merchant number, checks to see if the credit card is good. If it is, the escort is sent to the john's hotel room, house or apartment. Once inside the door, but before the sex, the escort checks to see if the card matches the numbers given over the telephone. The escort takes an imprint of the card using a credit card slip from one of Arion's companies, and nervous Johns can view the company name on the slip. Later, the escort agency boss emails the credit card details to Arion in Stouffville, with hard copies couriered once a week. To process the payment, Arion submits the transaction information to the credit card company during regular business hours and receives payment. Arion deducts his 20 per cent commission and pays the balance to the escort agency.

For just one agency, a typical week would see Arion processing $20,000 in charges, pocketing a commission of $4,000. Despite this healthy cash flow, Arion declared bankruptcy again, this time in 2001, owing $597,000 after a failed investment in a Greek restaurant in Florida. Creditors wound up with a meagre $1,730 to split and Arion plowed ahead with the escort/credit card business, more profitably this time. Current owners of escort companies were shy about discussing Arion's service, or even admitting that they were in the escort business. Michael Michails at Cachet Ladies Vancouver (his nickname is Jake Drake) spoke briefly to the Star but said "I only want to deal with positive stories about Cachet Ladies," and hung up. Cachet Toronto, Budget, Cupid and others did not agree to interviews.

In addition to johns hiding hookers from their wives, the Star's investigation found that some people expensed the encounter to their company as if it was a consulting contract.
In one situation, the executive of a large Ontario electric power utility was caught by company auditors when the employee could not explain $6,458 in charges to Neodec Services. Auditors at the utility sought "itemized receipts" for the services. The utility executive is no longer with the company and could not be reached. The utility would not comment. For several years, Arion also ran his own string of escorts, called Sweet Dreams, out of a Toronto apartment building in the Yonge-Eglinton area. His aunt, Cleo Pilleteri, who worked the phones, saw the credit-card scheme in action. "He somehow convinced me to work there," said Pilleteri.
"When you think about it, what James is doing is like money laundering," she said.
It was Pilleteri who caused Arion's dormant charity to become involved in a much more lucrative scam, this one at the expense of Canadian taxpayers.

• The Charity Scheme

On one slow day in the escort business in 2005, Pilleteri was chatting with Ray Warren, a driver who worked for several escort services. Warren mentioned he had a business acquaintance involved in a tax shelter who was looking for a new charity to join the scheme. The tax shelter offered donors a charitable tax receipt for five times the value of the cash donation, which would have the effect of reducing the donor's income taxes to the point where they actually made money.

"I remembered James (Arion) had a charity he wasn't doing anything with because he was so busy with the escort services and the credit cards," said Pilleteri. She told Warren about the Orion Foundation, the charity he had registered 20 years earlier. Warren arranged a meeting between Arion and Rob Steen, who ran the tax shelter Canadian Organization of International Philanthropy (COIP). "Steen said he wanted to meet people with charities he could use," Warren recalled. What happened next shows how easy it is to corrupt charities that are federally licensed to do good works. With 83,000 charities in Canada and 40 auditors, it's tough for the federal charities directorate to police the entire sector. The Star's ongoing investigation shows no background checks are done on people who set up new charities, or on those running existing charities.

"It's such easy money, it is going to make us rich," Arion said enthusiastically to people in his home office as he discussed teaming up with COIP. Steen was delighted to hear from Arion. The former stock promoter needed Arion's charity because the one he had used for several years (the tiny All Saints Greek Orthodox Church in North Toronto) was getting too hot. The church's receipts had gone from $7,000 per year to a staggering $273 million in four years. The Canada Revenue Agency was telling donors their donations were bogus and they would have to repay taxes owed, possibly with penalties. The Orion Foundation, which bills itself as "the charity for kids and people with disabilities" took over from the Greek Church. Orion's annual receipts zoomed from $6,000 in 2006 to $91 million in 2007. Orion has not provided the taxman with updated figures but its own website says total donations now stand at $200 million.

According to COIP's promotional documents the scheme, sometimes called "Fight AIDS Save Taxes," works like this: The donor pays $1,400 to COIP, which gets the Orion Foundation to issue a tax receipt for $7,000 – five times the donation amount. The high tax receipt more than makes up for the fact that Canadian tax policy waters down the effect of a charitable donation.
COIP says the $1,400 pays the interest on a long-term $7,000 loan used to buy life-saving medication. The loan is from an offshore company registered in Costa Rica that will, the Star found, never ask for its money back.

COIP and Orion say they will then purchase AIDS drugs. It's unclear whether they actually do buy the drugs, but if they do, they're highly overvalued. COIP says the per-dose value for its drugs is $12, but the Star found the real cost paid by the World Health Organization and other relief groups is 30 cents a dose. This overvaluing of the product leaves lots of profit in the pot for both COIP and Orion. If you are a donor who wants to reduce your taxes and make a charitable donation it sounds like a good deal – until you get audited. In a letter to all COIP clients in 2008, the federal taxman says the deal is bogus and that it corrupts the whole concept of charitable donations. That letter deals with clients who donated in 2006, when Orion was just starting as a partner charity, and the Greek church was issuing the bulk of the tax receipts. The Orion/COIP scheme is identical and CRA has recently sent out letters to all donors requesting information, the first stage in the investigation. The CRA's analysis says people are not supposed to make money by donating to charity. "For every dollar paid into the program, the (donor) received $2.11 from the Government of Canada," says the 2008 letter.
Steen, at COIP, did not respond to several interview requests.

Arion refused to give responses to questions about his escort business or the charity.
However, he sent an email claiming his charity was helping 10,000 AIDS patients in Africa live an extra three years and assisting impoverished people by paying the shipping costs to send 15 containers of bicycles and wheelchairs to impoverished people in Cuba. He would not provide evidence of his claims, though the Star found that his charity did pay $5,000 to ship a container of bicycles to Cuba assembled by former 680 News weatherman Harold Hosein's non-profit group Recycle your Bicycle. "I collect all the material and they paid to ship it," Hosein said. Meanwhile, one donation Arion's charity did make was a $6,000 payment in 2007 to the Amity Masonic Temple near Niagara Falls. The donation was to make some part of the building wheelchair accessible. Shortly after, Arion was promoted to Worshipful Master, the top position at the Temple.

• Epilogue

With the CRA now taking an interest in the Orion/COIP scheme, both groups are preparing for the next phase. COIP is changing its name to the Relief Lending Group, offering donors a modified plan. And James Arion? He is trying to have CRA register the Eden Foundation. Eden's application to the government says it is "promoting sound choices to get Mankind back to the Garden." And over at Cupid Escorts, where customers are offered a wide range of women, along with "Celebrity and Public Figure Confidentiality Agreements," Arion's influence is clear. "We bill very discreetly, under a consulting firm name based in Ontario," Cupid's instructions to customers read.

Kevin Donovan can be reached at 416-869-4425 or kdonovan@thestar.ca.

The Misguided Quest for Universal Coverage

2009-04-09T06:14:00.000-07:00

April 9, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor

By RAMESH PONNURU

AMERICA’S dysfunctional health care financing system needs to be reformed. But the goal should not be universal coverage. Reform should simply aim to make health insurance more affordable and portable.

Universal coverage has so dominated the health care discussion that even some Republicans have tried to devise market-friendly ways to achieve it. The case for doing so is presented in practical, moral and political terms.

The practical case is that uninsured people raise premiums for everyone else. But such cost shifting raises premiums by 1.7 percent at most, according to a 2008 study published in the journal Health Affairs. Reforms that increase the number of people with health insurance, while stopping short of universal coverage, would presumably make that small percentage even smaller.

Efforts to eliminate this relatively tiny expense, on the other hand, would surely generate new costs. To mandate that everyone purchase health insurance, as many have suggested, would require that the government specify what constitutes adequate coverage — in other words, what health conditions an insurance policy would need to cover. Every provider group with a lobbyist, from massage therapists to fertility specialists, would want in. The result would be expensive insurance policies and costly government subsidies to help people buy them. Young and healthy people, especially, would be forced to overpay. So we would end up with more cost-shifting, and no savings.

This is another way of saying that universal coverage cannot be achieved using free-market methods — a point that many liberals correctly make. A bipartisan bill in the Senate introduced by Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, purports to use the market to provide universal coverage. It would keep insurance companies in business, but only by converting them into regulated and subsidized public utilities, eliminating most existing insurance plans and expanding the I.R.S. by a quarter. It owes more to Rube Goldberg than Milton Friedman.

The moral case for universal coverage is that we have an obligation to see to it that the poor and the near-poor have access to good health care. But universal coverage is only one way of realizing that goal, and not necessarily the best one. For people with pre-existing health problems, for example, direct subsidies would probably be more efficient than rigging insurance markets to make sure they are covered. As Michael Cannon, a health policy analyst at the Cato Institute, has written, “There is no evidence that a dollar spent on universal coverage will save more lives than a dollar spent on clinics, or reducing medical errors, or nutrition, or fighting poverty, or even improving education.” And if universal coverage generally reduces the quality of care or retards medical innovation, it could end up being bad for everyone, including the poor.

The political case for universal coverage is based on the assumption that voters want it. But people’s preference for universal coverage is not as great as their desire to reduce health care costs, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found in late 2007. So it’s not clear that people would accept higher taxes, mandates or the prospect of rationing health care one day just to make sure that every individual is covered. During the Democratic presidential primaries, Hillary Clinton repeatedly attacked Barack Obama’s health care plan for not covering everyone — and as you may have noticed, he survived. If Democratic primary voters are not wedded to universality, the larger public surely is not.

An alternative approach would be to make it easier for people to buy insurance that isn’t tied to their employment. The existing tax break for employer-provided insurance could be replaced with a tax credit that applies to insurance purchased either inside or outside the workplace. At the same time, state mandates that require insurers to cover certain conditions, which make it expensive to offer individual policies, could be removed.

These two reforms would address most people’s anxieties about the health care system. Insurance would be more affordable, especially for people who cannot get it through an employer, so the number of people with insurance would rise. Indeed, this would enable more than 20 million more Americans to get insurance, according to a model created by Steve Parente, a health economist at the University of Minnesota.
More important, people would own their insurance policies and thus be able to take them from job to job. They would no longer need to worry about losing their job and their insurance at the same time, or feel they need to stay with a job they dislike because they need the benefits.

Critics of this free-market solution have argued that it would cause the current employer-based health insurance system to unravel. But that system is already unraveling, and if public health plans are created, as called for under President Obama’s proposal, they would unravel further as employers dumped their workers onto the public plans. A second argument is that people with pre-existing conditions would find it hard to get coverage. In fact, in the long run, the option to buy renewable policies that people could take from job to job would keep most people from needing to face this problem. Direct government subsidies could help the remainder.

The third complaint against free-market health insurance is that it wouldn’t cover absolutely everyone, because it would neither force people to buy insurance nor require the government to provide it. Pharmaceutical companies and other provider groups would make a bit less money than they would if there were universal coverage — although they would probably be better off than they are now.

For most people, though, especially those in the middle class, it would mean paying less for health insurance. Some people, of course, would still choose to go without it. But that would be their call, as it should be in a free country.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review.

The pros and cons of legalizing marijuana

2009-04-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

Pro Legalization: Joe Klein, Time Editorial

So why not do it (legalize marijuana)? There are serious moral arguments, both secular and religious. There are those who believe — with some good reason — that the accretion of legalized vices is debilitating, that we are a less virtuous society since gambling spilled out from Las Vegas to "riverboats" and state lotteries across the country. There is a medical argument, though not a very convincing one: alcohol is more dangerous in a variety of ways, including the tendency of some drunks to get violent. One could argue that the abuse of McDonald's has a greater potential health-care cost than the abuse of marijuana. (Although it's true that with legalization, those two might not be unrelated.) Obviously, marijuana can be abused. But the costs of criminalization have proved to be enormous, perhaps unsustainable.

There are also big issues here, issues of economy and simple justice, especially on the sentencing side. As pointed out in a cover story in Parade magazine, the U.S. is, by far, the most "criminal" country in the world, with 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public. (See the top 10 ballot measures.)

Would legalization be any worse?

Anti Legalization: Alison Stateman, Time Editorial

Despite the need for the projected revenue (via taxes of legalization), opponents say legalizing pot would only add to social woes. "The last thing we need is yet another mind-altering substance to be legalized," says John Lovell, lobbyist for the California Peace Officers' Association. "We have enough problems with alcohol and abuse of pharmaceutical products. Do we really need to add yet another mind-altering substance to the array?" Lovell says the easy availability of the drug would lead to a surge in its use, much as happened when alcohol was allowed to be sold in venues other than liquor stores in some states.

Joel W. Hay, professor of pharmaceutical economics at USC, also foresees harm if the bill passes. "Marijuana is a drug that clouds people's judgment. It affects their ability to concentrate and react, and it certainly has impacts on third parties," says Hay, who has written on the societal costs of drug abuse. "It's one more drug that will add to the toll on society. All we have to do is look at the two legalized drugs, tobacco and alcohol, and look at the carnage that they've caused. [Marijuana] is a dangerous drug, and it causes bad outcomes for both the people who use it and for the people who are in their way at work or other activities." He adds, "There are probably some responsible people who can handle marijuana, but there are lots of people who can't, and it has an enormous negative impact on them, their family and loved ones."

Anti Legalization: Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon

The first is that marijuana isn't really very good for you. True, there are health benefits for some patients. Several recent studies, including a new one from the Scripps Research Institute, show that THC, the chemical in marijuana responsible for the high, can help slow the progress of Alzheimer's disease. (In fact, it seems to block the formation of disease-causing plaques better than several mainstream drugs.) Other studies have shown THC to be a very effective antinausea treatment for people--cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, for example--for whom conventional medications aren't working. And medical cannabis has shown promise relieving pain in patients with multiple sclerosis and reducing intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients. See Sanjay Gupta's column Fit Nation.

But I suspect that most of the people eager to vote yes on the new ballot measures aren't suffering from glaucoma, Alzheimer's or chemo-induced nausea. Many of them just want to get stoned legally. That's why I, like many other doctors, am unimpressed with the proposed legislation, which would legalize marijuana irrespective of any medical condition. Why do I care? As Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, puts it, "Numerous deleterious health consequences are associated with [marijuana's] short- and long-term use, including the possibility of becoming addicted."

What are other health consequences? Frequent marijuana use can seriously affect your short-term memory. It can impair your cognitive ability (why do you think people call it dope?) and lead to long-lasting depression or anxiety. While many people smoke marijuana to relax, it can have the opposite effect on frequent users. And smoking anything, whether it's tobacco or marijuana, can seriously damage your lung tissue.

The Nevada and Colorado marijuana initiatives have gained support from unlikely places. More than 33 religious leaders in Nevada have endorsed the measure, arguing that permissive legalization, accompanied by stringent regulations and penalties, can cut down on illegal drug trafficking and make communities safer.

Perhaps. But I'm here to tell you, as a doctor, that despite all the talk about the medical benefits of marijuana, smoking the stuff is not going to do your health any good. And if you get high before climbing behind the wheel of a car, you will be putting yourself and those around you in danger.

My Conclusion:

Maybe the best solution is the hiring of Gil Kerilowske as the new "Drug Czar" under president Obama's administration: Kerlikowske's possible role in shaping drug policy for the Obama administration was applauded Tuesday by local medical-marijuana advocates.In 2003, Kerlikowske opposed a city ballot measure, approved by voters, to make marijuana possession the lowest law-enforcement priority, saying it would create confusion. But in doing so, he noted that arresting people for possessing marijuana for personal use was already not a priority.

Kerlikowske knows the difference between cracking down on the illegal abuse of drugs and allowing the responsible use of marijuana. Not wasting federal money on crackdowns, which are ineffective and costly (see Joe Klein's argument), but not fully legalizing it by limiting its permitted uses for medical uses (see Sanjay Gupta's and Alison Stateman's argument) may be the middle ground solution that satisfies both parties.

What's the problem with eating meat?

2009-03-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

Hold the beef
National Post

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Red meat is not supposed to be very good for you. But on the other hand, it's what we're made of. So skepticism was our first response to the new headline-making study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, which comes with the appropriately grandiose title "Meat Intake and Mortality."

In most cases, it is difficult to study the health effects of different nutritional regimes: You can't lock people up for 10 years and monitor every bite they eat (you can't do it with very many people at a time, anyway), so you invariably have to count on self-reported recollections, which introduce bias and accuracy problems. And as everybody knows, there are plenty of natural confounding variables when it comes to a topic such as meat and health. A person who eats a lot of red meat is probably more likely to be the hedonistic sort who also enjoys the occasional cigar, the occasional motorcycle ride. But a vegetarian is more likely to be assaulted in public for intolerable smugness and sanctimony. (OK, we don't actually have a sciencey reason for believing that one, but we bet it's true.)

Some of the best existing research on meat intake has been inherently beset by confounders. We know, for instance, that members of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, who are vegetarians and who place a crushingly powerful emphasis on health and food purity, live remarkably long lives. But we also know that living in a tight-knit social network can be as important to longevity as diet; so do Adventists live longer because they eat well, or because they look after each other well?

In this world of epistemological fuzziness, "Meat Intake and Mortality" is big news. Literally big: The National Institutes of Health and the AARP assembled over half a million participants aged 50-71 and followed up with them 10 years later -- to see, essentially, how many had died, and of what causes.

The sample of roughly 545,000 Americans was split between men and women, and then the sexes were broken down into "meat intake quintiles" (statisticians' flashy word for "fifths"). When it comes to red meat, the lowest, most abstemious male quintile -- which would obviously include a tremendous number of outright vegetarians and vegans -- averaged barely a half-ounce per day. The most carnivorous quintile ate almost 10 times as much, devouring more than two pounds of red meat every week. Almost anybody would tell such a person to ease up on the porkchops a little (and yes, pork is red meat for purposes of nutritional analysis rather than marketing). The raw numbers bear that out alarmingly. Over the 10-year period, for example, 13,350 of the men in the top quintile died; the figure for the lowest quintile was just 6,437.

When you start controlling for those confounders, though -- and the authors of "Meat Intake" included 16 or more known ones in their model -- the figures get less dramatic. Big meat eaters were more likely to be current smokers, had less education, exercised less and ate less fruit. In the end, after correcting for such factors, the authors found only "modest increases in risk for total mortality, as well as cancer and [cardiovascular] mortality, with higher intakes of red and processed meat in both men and women. In contrast, higher white meat consumption was associated with a small decrease in total and cancer mortality in men and women." Surprisingly, the beneficial effects of eating more white meat seem to have been almost as strong as the negative effects of red meat.

But who knows what hidden confounders may remain to be discovered in the future? People who love red meat may still be doing something else to harm themselves that isn't yet seen as harmful.

And as the American Meat Institute points out, even though a prospective study like this minimizes recall bias, self-reporting on diet is still inherently unreliable: It would be natural to expect the low-red-meat quintiles to perceive eating meat as shameful, and to minimize their self-reported intake more than the carnivores. Still, all in all, "Meat Intake and Mortality" represents perhaps the strongest endorsement yet of the idea that one should be opting for a McChicken or a Filet-o-Fish instead of a Big Mac.

Statistics: Standard Deviation vs Standard Error

2009-03-25T06:11:00.000-07:00

If you've ever been confused by statistic "standard deviation" as opposed to "standard error" think back to your statistics class. You learned that any study/experiment is really a sample from the infinite population.

Population spread is described by SD and your point estimate from repeated sampling (eg. sample mean, sample total, sample proportion, etc.) has a spread referred to as the SE. The SE is dependent on the sample size you drew from your infinite population.

Places to walk in Toronto

2009-03-23T06:11:00.001-07:00

Inside the city there are still many green places...

http://www.toronto.ca/parks/maps.htm

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/606556

Poverty and Fairness: a debate.

2008-12-30T08:04:00.000-08:00

TheStar.com - Opinion - Name a poverty czar for Canada

December 30, 2008

Gerry McCarthy

Ending poverty isn't likely to be a top priority for the Harper Conservatives as they prepare their Jan. 27 budget. But it should be. That's why Prime Minister Stephen Harper should appoint a poverty czar. That individual would be given a specific mission: To build a single, comprehensive and concrete plan to end poverty.

It's estimated that 11 per cent to 12 per cent of Canadians live in poverty today. The statistics for child poverty are even worse. Just recently the Community Foundations of Canada issued a report titled Vital Signs and said child poverty is virtually at the same level it was in 1989. The report said 1.6 million children (or 23 per cent of the child population) lived in poverty in 2006. A poverty czar would need to do many things, including: Increasing the working tax credit, revamping the Employment Insurance system and increasing the minimum wage. But most importantly, a poverty czar would have to find support for a guaranteed annual income.

Summoning that support will not be easy. Many say a guaranteed annual income is a "handout" and a disincentive to workers. Others find the idea has merit but say it's unaffordable. Yet as governments bail out financial institutions and auto makers, it's hypocritical to say helping the poor is a handout. In Poverty and Inequality, the legal scholar Martha Fineyard (name doesn't appear in google search?) addressed the issue of so-called handouts.
"In complex modern societies no one is self-sufficient, either economically or socially," she writes. "Whether the subsidies we receive are financial (such as in government transfer programs or favourable tax policy) or non-monetary (such as those provided by the uncompensated labour of others in caring for us and our needs), we all live subsidized lives. In fact, all of us receive both forms of subsidy during our lives."

It's morally objectionable that 23 per cent of Canadian children live in poverty. A decent society must not tolerate this situation. But let's not forget that tackling poverty is good for the economy too. Studies from other countries are instructive. In 2007, the Centre of American Progress laid out the serious costs to the U.S. economy in failing to tackle child poverty. And a recent Harvard University report said that hunger in the U.S. results in a cost burden on the American people of more than $90 billion. In the United Kingdom, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation released a report recently that said poverty costs the country approximately $25 billion. That works out to be an estimated 1 per cent of the gross domestic product.

The Rowntree report described two different ways child poverty imposes costs. First: Growing up poor is associated with a range of poorer outcomes in adulthood, and poor physical and mental health. That places extra burdens on public services. Second: The lost potential associated with growing up poor means the country loses out on productivity, earnings and taxation.

A poverty czar in Canada would need to set ambitious goals to combat poverty. Why not pledge to cut poverty in half within five years and eliminate it completely by 2020? That may seem too optimistic. But we're talking about the future of our children. Why has poverty been allowed to exist in Canada for so long? The reasons are complex. But it's usually about attitude. For example: People say the poor make bad decisions, and are the authors of their own misfortune. Others say welfare creates dependency. But the more we use these terms, the more cynical we become.

Perhaps the words of the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard will urge us on: "If I were to wish for something," he said. "I would wish not for wealth or power but the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally open, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere." Canadians haven't lost that sense of possibility. We desire a just society. But we need renewal. That should start with a rejection of clichés about the poor. Only then can we reimagine what a decent society would look like.

Gerry McCarthy is editor of The Social Edge, an online social justice and faith magazine.

Inaccessible coverage or lack of access: incomplete picture when it comes to colorectal cancer rates

2008-12-15T16:56:00.000-08:00

Since the 1980s, the gap in colorectal cancer incidence/mortality rates has been widening between African Americans and Whites even though rates in both races have been decreasing over time. One explanation is that whites are have better accessibility to care and therefore receive better screening services, which leads to better survival rates and long term outcomes.

On the other hand, Hispanics have the one of the lowest colorectal incidence/mortality colorectal cancer rates in the United States, yet they fare similarly in terms of accessibility to services and lack of coverage compared to African Americans.

If accessibility explains the disparities for the African American population, what are the factors behind low rates for Hispanics?

Original story:
Mon., Dec. 15, 2008

ATLANTA - The racial gap in colon cancer death rates is widening, a new report says, and experts partly blame blacks' lower screening rates and poor access to quality care.

Colon and rectal cancer death rates are now nearly 50 percent higher in blacks than in whites, according to American Cancer Society research being released Monday. The gap has been growing since the mid-1970s, when colon cancer death rates for the two racial groups were nearly equal.

"We have seen this enormous progress in whites. We could be seeing the same progress in blacks, if we could overcome disparities in access to health care," said Elizabeth Ward, who oversees surveillance and health policy at the cancer society.

Colorectal cancer is the third leading cancer killer in the United States. About 50,000 Americans will die of the disease this year, the cancer society estimates.
Last month, researchers reported the rate of new cancers in general is inching down and death rates continue to decline in the United States — important good news in the fight against the dreaded disease.

But when it comes to colon cancer, progress has been greater for whites than for blacks, the new report says. Diagnoses, death higher in blacks. The rate of diagnoses in blacks was about 19 percent higher than it was for whites in 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The death rate difference was even more pronounced. Among blacks, there were about 25 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to 17 per 100,000 in whites — a 48 percent difference.

The two groups' death rates were similar until the 1980s when colon cancer began to kill blacks at a higher rate than whites. Researchers say it's not clear why black mortality jumped in the 1980s, but it started a gap that continued to widen even after the black rate began to fall again.

Colon cancer deaths can be prevented by early diagnosis through screening and quality care. The screening rate for whites is 50 percent compared to just 40 percent for blacks.

The screening rate for Hispanics is an even-lower 32 percent, but the death rate for Hispanics — fewer than 13 per 100,000 — is lower than it is for whites.
That paradox is not unique to colon cancer: Poorly insured Hispanics have fared better than whites and blacks in several measures of cancer and heart disease. "It's a mystery," said Dr. Daniel Blumenthal, chair of the Morehouse School of Medicine's Department of Community Health and Preventive Medicine.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28223503/

Diabetes vs Cancer...why cancer receives more attention

2008-12-14T06:48:00.000-08:00

Richard Smith on why diabetes envies cancer
11 Dec, 08 by BMJ Group

Those who campaign on diabetes envy those who campaign on cancer because cancer gets so much more attention than diabetes. Indeed, the diabetes campaigners are very frustrated that diabetes is so consistently neglected. Around 250 million people globally have diabetes, and because of the pandemic sweeping the world that number will increase to 380 million by 2025.

Then at least half of the people who have diabetes are undiagnosed, and in countries like Nigeria and India around 90% are undiagnosed. How is that governments can be so lackadaisical?The diabetes campaigners are driven to grand statements. The pandemic of chronic disease is as bad as anything the world has seen since the plagues of the 14th century, says John Bell, regius professor of medicine in Oxford. More people have diabetes than have AIDS, says Charlotte Ersboll, a corporate vice president of Novo Nordisk, a company that makes many products for people with diabetes.

In doing so she opens herself up to the objection that one disease shouldn’t do down another. She insists that she isn’t doing so, but in a world of finite resources she is. “Diabetes takes off more legs than land mines,” says David Mathews, professor of diabetes medicine in Oxford, presumably remembering Princess Diana in her flak jacket with the world’s press at her heels. Diabetes seems to lack a glamorous celebrity, although it does have my brother, an ugly (but still very attractive to women) comedian.

These statements don’t do the trick so now Novo Nordisk, the International Diabetes Federation, and the Oxford Health Alliance (both of which are funded by Novo Nordisk) are trying measurement. That was the point of the “Changing diabetes barometer international seminar” that I’ve attended in Oxford this week. Some 120 people from 20 different countries were there. The mantra is that “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it,” a favourite saying of the business world and more true than untrue.

Measurement was on of the factors that helped get cancer to the front in the disease stakes. Chris Carrigan, head of the UK National Cancer Intelligence Network co-ordinating team, explained how cancer registeries had been going for 30 years and how international comparisons of cancer survival showing that Britain did badly had goaded the British government into producing the national cancer plan.

He also conceded, however, that cancer has a special status as a dread disease and a considerable grassroots movement. Diabetes isn’t dreaded in the same way. Lots of people think of it as a raised blood sugar in people who though moral weakness have let themselves get too fat. Plus it affects largely old people—as does cancer, of course, although many people think that breast cancer is commoner in young women than in older women.

Measurement of prevalence, outcomes, costs, and quality of care of patients with diabetes could help shove diabetes up the national agenda, and through sharing the information, and experimenting with improvements it could help produce better outcomes for patients and slow down the pandemic. Because we know well that intensive lifestyle changes can reduce diabetes incidence by 50% and that effective treatment can both dramatically reduce complication rates and reduce overall costs. We are less sure, however, about how to implement lifestyle changes in whole communities and even in our own children (guilty as charged).

Unfortunately measuring diabetes is much harder than measuring cancer, and international comparisons are difficult—and can be dismissed as wholly unreliable by the pernickity. Plus there doesn’t seem to be an obvious link between measurement and the likelihood of governments acting. Thus the UK, which has the lowest prevalence in Europe (4% among adults), has a national plan for diabetes, whereas Germany, which has the highest prevalence (11.8%), does not. Indeed, many of the 13 member states of the European Union that do not have plans have the highest prevalences—not only Germany but also Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, and Slovenia.

I believe strongly that governments — and employers, schools, and others — should pay more attention to diabetes and that measurement is essential. But as I sat among the converted in an overheated room in the Said Business School I imagined a whole series of rooms full of campaigners on cardiovascular disease, dementia, sexual health, respiratory disease, kidney disease, maternal and child health, and a thousand other conditions all scrambling for attention and resources.

And I imagined harassed government officials meeting with group after group and needing a strong group at the end of the day. Truly, as the American politician Daniel Moynihan said, “We live in a world of competing sorrows.”

I also need to declare that together with other authors I have just submitted an article to another journal that identifies “Competing interest bias,” whereby those with private sector connections are deemed to have competing interests, whereas those who work for universities do not — which is clearly nonsense.

Tobacco bars in Boston

2008-12-07T18:39:00.000-08:00

Boston considers ban of tobacco bars

The Associated Press

updated 2:47 p.m. ET, Sun., Dec. 7, 2008

BOSTON - Sometimes Justin Hegarty savors his cigars by himself, and sometimes he enjoys them in a cigar bar with friends. "Either way, it's relaxing," said Hegarty, soon after an afternoon smoke at Churchill's cigar lounge.

Hegarty may need to find a new city where he can wind down with his cherished stogies.

The Boston Public Health Commission is scheduled to vote soon on expanded smoking restrictions that would be among the nation's toughest. The proposal would ban cigar bars and hookah bars, which currently enjoy exemptions from Boston's four-year-old workplace smoking ban. It would also eliminate sales of tobacco in pharmacies and on college campuses.

The commission gave preliminary approval to the rules in September, and is scheduled for a final vote Thursday.

Boston would be the largest city, by far, to outlaw smoking bars. Hegarty was baffled about what the city hoped to accomplish and said it seemed almost unconstitutional.

"The framers would err on the side of freedom when it comes to issues like this," Hegarty said. "People are free to enter (cigar bars) or not enter."

Roger Swartz, director of the community initiatives bureau at the Boston Public Health Commission, said the dangers of tobacco are so great, significant steps are needed to protect public health.

"Regulations based on data are not done just to kind of hassle people," he said. "For a product like tobacco ... even if someone was doing it voluntarily, there is no safe exposure level."

Right now, there are no state bans on smoking bars; 52 communities nationwide have bans that include private clubs and cigar bars, according to Americans for Nonsmokers Rights. Fort Wayne, Ind., is among the largest communities with such a ban, and smaller cities in Massachusetts such as Pittsfield and Lynn also have it.

But a ban in Boston could have "a ripple effect" around the country because of the size and influence of the city, said Chris McCalla, legislative director of the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association. The ban would not go into effect for five years.

The proposed ban on tobacco sales in pharmacies is not as unique in big cities; a similar ban went into effect in San Francisco in October, despite a pending court challenge.

Bill Rennie, vice president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, which represents pharmacies, said prohibiting the sale of tobacco products there is unfair because nearby competing business could still sell them.

"It's not eliminating the sale of tobacco by any means," he said. "It's just picking winners and losers in terms of who's allowed to sell it and who isn't."

But Margaret LaCroix of the American Lung Association said a tobacco ban is common sense in pharmacies, which by nature sell health products, because "we know that (tobacco) kills."

If the expanded ban passes, the tobacco sales bans on campuses and pharmacies would go into effect in 60 days. Since the smoking bars have five years to shut down, that could leave time for compromise. Mayor Tom Menino supports the expanded ban because of a commitment to stopping youth smoking, said spokesman Nick Martin. But Menino is open to compromise with the city's six cigar bars because they're neighborhood businesses and attract an older audience than the hookah bars, Martin said.

Swartz said the unexpected rise in license requests for the hookah bars was a major reason the city moved to lift the exemption for smoking bars. Just one hookah bar was licensed when the smoking ban went into effect in 2004, but now five hookah bars have permits. The bars are popular near college campuses, and offer tobacco in various flavors, including watermelon and chocolate chip. People use a hookah pipe — common in Asia and Africa — to inhale smoke filtered through water.

Swartz said the hookah is a serious health hazard, and its appeal to young people is alarming.

"It's becoming sort of trendy and you can sit around with a group of people and share and it has sort of a social quality to it," he said, adding it's "viewed as though you're being exposed to other cultures in a way that is fun and exciting."

Eric Kahn, president of the Sherlock Holmes Pipe Club of Boston, says people should be allowed to enjoy smoking. His club has met in various spots around the city over the years, including Cigar Masters cigar bar. Members discuss everything from politics to pipe carvers, and relish the taste of the tobacco. They shouldn't feel like outcasts because the government doesn't approve, he said. They'll smoke elsewhere if Boston bans the smoking bars, but it's the wrong the thing to do, Kahn said.

"It adds to the image of the pariah. It adds to the image that smokers are evil and doing terrible things to the world," Kahn said. "They like what they're doing."

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28097922/

Word of the day: obfuscate

2008-11-20T17:43:00.001-08:00

OBFUSCATE

–verb (used with object), -cat⋅ed, -cat⋅ing.

1.	to confuse, bewilder, or stupefy.

2.	to make obscure or unclear: to obfuscate a problem with extraneous information.

The consequences of too much corn

2008-11-15T08:31:00.000-08:00

The real enemy? Corn TheStar.com - Ideas -

EATING BETTER:Five ways to eat organic on a budget:
• Cook. Meals prepared at home are cheaper than those bought at restaurants and allow you to control which ingredients you use.
• Buy local. The strong dollar makes local organic produce cheaper than produce trucked in from California. (And it's better for the environment.)
• Visit local farmers' markets, especially near the end of the day, when deals on produce are common.
• Follow the Environmental Working Group's guidelines to which fruits and vegetables you should buy organic – and which are okay to buy non-organic, based on pesticide levels. (Buy organic apples and peaches, but non-organic broccoli is fine, for example.) Download the guide at www.foodnews.org/walletguide.php.
• Go vegetarian or vegan – organic meat (and meat in general) is more expensive.

As a recession looms and junk profits boom, a study sheds new light on what makes us fat

November 15, 2008

Locally grown, organic heirloom tomatoes: $8.59 a kilogram.
One box of organic, low-fat, seven-grain cereal: $5.45.
Double cheeseburger at your favourite fast-food joint: $1.59.

It's an equation that U.S. corn farmers couldn't be happier about. Yes, you read that right – corn. "The first step in making fast food is to grow an ear of corn," says A. Hope Jahren, the researcher behind a study that found an undeniable link between the two.

In a climate of recession, North Americans are increasingly turning to cheap food alternatives to feed their families. But they are heading to the drive-through just as evidence has emerged that those discount meals are based almost entirely on corn – a dependence that critics argue is wreaking havoc on our health and the environment.

The love affair between corn growers and fast-food chains – long asserted, but never proven, by food activists and writers such as Michael Pollan, the bestselling writer who has slammed North America's obsession with fast food in his books In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma – was given scientific backing this week with the publication of a paper that showed that corn is implicated in the production of nearly everything sold at fast-food counters in America.

"Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics," says Jahren, who is a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Jahren, trained in soil and plant chemistry, may seem an odd candidate to spend her time analyzing Burger King patties. But she realized her expertise in the carbon signatures of plants gave her an advantage in solving a problem nutritionists hadn't yet been able to crack – how much corn is in fast food.

The study, published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, involved visiting the U.S.'s top three chains – McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's – in several geographic locations around the country and taking samples of hundreds of burgers, chicken sandwiches and fries. By looking for the carbon signature for zea mays – it has two enzymes instead of one, making it unusually conspicuous – Jahren was able to determine that, of hundreds, only 12 servings of beef and none of chicken were derived from animals that had a food source other than corn. Wendy's fries were also found to be deep-fried in corn oil.

Staggeringly, that meant that two animals that have not evolved to eat corn at all live exclusively on it. Corn fattens up cows prior to slaughter at a higher rate than grass, their natural diet, but it also causes them a number of health problems. Cows' stomachs in particular do not react well to corn – it makes them susceptible to the deadly bacteria E. coli – so their feed has to be spiked with antibiotics to prevent them from getting sick.

"Our team worked for years to try to get this information from the fast- food outlets themselves," Jahren explains. But her team's attempts were stymied by fast-food websites that said only that their patties were made with "the finest cuts of meat," 1-800 numbers went nowhere, and researchers were hung up on. When provided, ingredient lists weren't helpful. "I'm a chemist and I can't make it though these information lists," she says. "They're very sloppy. Organic sweeteners, fruit sweeteners, corn syrup, vegetable syrup, fructose, glucose – there are a million different ways to say a million different things and nothing. "Why do you need sophisticated atomic chemistry to find out what's in your food?"

Not knowing what's in our fast-food combos certainly makes it easier to scarf them down. Corn-fed beef has been found to have higher levels of saturated fats than grass-fed beef (corn also increases cows' flatulence, which contributes to global warming). Worse is high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which studies have shown we metabolize differently than other sugars, making it bad for us to eat in large quantities. HFCS happens to be the prime sweetener used by soft-drink and snack manufacturers in North America.

It seems counter-intuitive, but corn is not a simple crop to grow. It requires high levels of pesticide and nitrogen fertilizer, both of which are highly unsustainable because they are made from oil. Pesticides flow from cornfields into rivers and groundwater, taking a toll on marine life and drinking-water supplies. One popular herbicide used on U.S. corn, Atrazine, has been shown to emasculate frogs – it makes them produce eggs – at concentrations as low as 0.1 part per billion.

Critics have long spoken out against the large U.S. farm subsidies they say have led to the overproduction of corn-derived products such as HFCS, animal feed and ethanol. And while Canadian corn farmers don't get a fraction of the subsidies of their counterparts to the south, corn and soy are still the biggest crops in Ontario.

Of the more than 263 million bushels of corn produced in this province this year, 55 to 60 per cent of it will go to make to animal feed, 15 to 20 per cent will become ethanol, and much of the rest is used to manufacture, yes, the ubiquitous corn sweeteners found in soft drinks and snacks. (The iconic, butter-smeared, sweet cobs most of us picture when we think of corn accounts for only a tiny, specialized sliver of corn production in North America.)

Most feed rations for meat grown in Ontario are corn-based, confirms Larry Cowan, a corn farmer who sits on the board of directors of the Ontario Corn Producers Association for Middlesex County. So while Jahren's study did not include Canada, the notion that much of Ontario's fast food is made of corn is not much of a stretch. "One has to wonder whether corn hasn't at last succeeded in domesticating us," wrote Pollan back in 2002. In the recession of 2008, it seems our dependence on zea mays to cheaply fatten our cows and chickens and sweeten our snack food can only deepen.

If stock data are any indication, fast food has already begun to rush into the gaps in our diets as we try to tighten our belts. Unlike most companies, McDonald's stock outdid expectations this quarter, boosted by a 7-per-cent jump in global sales. It has already become a tidbit of financial wisdom that McDonald's stock is "recession-proof."

Walking into Noah's Natural Foods at Bloor St. and Spadina Ave., you're greeted by piles of fresh, mainly local fruits and vegetables. The ingredients list for a box of Late July Dark Chocolate Sandwich Cookies list "organic evaporated cane juice" and "organic brown rice syrup" as its sweeteners (indeed, the front of the package proudly displays the words, "No trans fats or HFCS"). On shelves near packages of raw sugar are a multitude of alternative sweeteners that proponents claim are better for the body, including agave syrup, derived from cacti, and stevia, derived from a kind of leaf. "You'd be hard-pressed to find something with corn syrup in it," says Angel Riccio, a longtime Noah's employee. "Definitely no refined sugar."
But the store has recently seen distributors begin to raise prices of many of their organic goods, something they say hasn't affected their customers yet – but will soon, perhaps as soon as January, according to Riccio.

So is the plight of Canadians trying to save money and eat well at the same time hopeless? Hardly, says Riccio. "Go vegetarian," she says. "Organic is more expensive if you eat meat." She says there are plenty of ways to eat healthy, even organic food on a budget. But it won't be easy – it will take work, planning and time. For many, it will be far simpler to throw up our hands and bring home the burger, chicken nuggets or bottle of soda that corn makes so ubiquitous.

Gentrification in Toronto

2008-11-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

What if it's not really gentrification? TheStar.com - Ideas -

This week's conflict in Leslieville could inspire a whole new taxonomy of neighbourhood development

November 08, 2008

Kenneth KiddFeature Writer

Anger can be a great motivator, and so it was with a British sociologist named Ruth Glass. In 1964, she was so appalled at what she saw as the baleful transformation of working-class London neighbourhoods that she invented a word for the process: gentrification.

That expression, now so freighted with (mostly nefarious) meaning, has been like a spiked cudgel ever since. So there was scarcely any surprise when the "g" word loomed over Leslieville this week, where anonymous posters instructed all yuppies to take long walks on short piers, although not in those exact words.

But is gentrification what's really going on in neighbourhoods such as Leslieville or Parkdale? Or is it a different kind of change? Do we, in other words, need to come up with a whole new taxonomy of neighbourhood development?

Those who study gentrification have gradually added adjectival qualifications, such as "stalled" or "arrested," usually due to local politics or recession or both. But those terms still come with the assumption that full-blown gentrification is the only endgame. The goal posts have not been moved or altered, just the amount of time needed to reach them.

The basic narrative of gentrification runs something like this:
Hip, artistic people move into a poor, inner-city area, lured by cheap rents. Trendy cafés, bars and galleries follow, which start attracting middle-class, urban professionals as recreation-seeking tourists. In time, those professionals start moving into the area, accelerating the transformation until the original, trendy occupants are forced out amid rising rents and soaring house prices. What used to be cheap and shabby digs for artists become expensive lofts filled with lawyers, architects, media people and the like.

For those opposed to gentrification, the whole process is said to visit a kind of civic violence on stable, low-income neighbourhoods. And it does so in the name of "gentry" – a word Glass clearly chose because it conjures images of 19th century "society" people worried more about their inheritances and "station" rather than wages down the mill. They are, almost by definition, unworthy and frivolous.

But what if what looks like the early stages of gentrification is something else? What if it's just – for want of a better word – trendyfication? Some artists have moved in, maybe even the odd professional, all of them seeking a shabby-chic aesthetic.

And what if they seek out that area precisely because, by some light or instinct, they know the area will never be truly gentrified? They know, somehow, they will feel at home.

Take, for a convenient instance, Leslieville. This is, admittedly, an invented name for the neighbourhood. Torontonians – or more precisely, East-Enders and East Yorkers of a certain vintage – used to refer to the area (in grander moments) as South Riverdale or (with no such Romantic connotations) the Lower East Side. So, yes, there is that. It sounds like gentrification.

Yet it's hard to imagine that what's happening in Leslieville is anything like true gentrification. Michael McClelland, a principal at E.R.A. Architects Inc., knows a lot of people who have moved into that neighbourhood in the last five to 10 years. They don't see themselves as a gentrifying army. "They kind of like the shabbiness of the area," he says, "the rough edges.

"It's odd to say that any change is gentrification. There's a negative connotation, but what's happening in Leslieville is pretty nice. I don't actually see much conflict with the folks who are moving in."

These are probably the kind of people who, even if they could afford it, would never dream of moving into, say, The Beach or Bloor West Village – precisely because they deem those areas to be a little too clean, a little too precious in a neo-Disney sort of way. Which is to say, false. If those areas ever were trendy, they long since ceased to be so. What they are is gentrified.

Leslieville certainly doesn't qualify, or at least not now. A walk through the latest census data reveals the neighbourhood to be more Anglo than the Toronto average, with proportionally fewer immigrants and lower education levels, much lower median incomes, and house prices that run between two-thirds and three-quarters the city average.

A walk through the streets, on the other hand, does reveal some trendyfication, with the odd art gallery, the Tango Palace Coffee Company, the Leslieville Cheese Market, and the sales office for something dubbed the Stagefest Lofts.

But the area is also home to a lot of industry, auto-repair shops, a Weston bakery, used-appliance outlets, a massive TTC streetcar yard and sprawling postal station, along with pawnshops, a Value Village, and the decidedly downmarket Duke of York, outside of which a woman was recently killed.

"If you drive along Eastern Ave., I don't see many upscale merchants," notes retail analyst John Winter. "And driving along Queen St., there aren't too many upscale merchants, either." Will that change?

David Ley, research chair in geography at the University of British Columbia, has spent much of his career studying gentrification but has lately turned his attention to the anomalies – neighbourhoods that seem prime for gentrification yet remain stubbornly resistant. The reason, he argues, has a lot to do with "incompatible land uses" and "incompatible lifestyles."

If the neighbourhood is home to active industry, replete with filth, fumes and trucks, then the area might become trendy on some level but won't easily progress to anything recognizably gentrified. Ditto for areas that have a high proportion of public housing, or social housing for the mentally handicapped. "That creates unpredictable street life," says Ley. "So you're walking down the street and someone who is mentally disadvantaged does something entirely inappropriate to an urbane, middle-class lifestyle. These seem to be deterrents."

Consider what used to be the poster child for gentrification in Toronto: Don Vale, the area east of Parliament St. that eventually adopted the name of neighbouring Cabbagetown. In the late 1960s, urban professionals started moving into the area, buying up and renovating what used to be Victorian-era rooming houses. Today, Cabbagetown is home to some spectacular, multi-million-dollar dwellings. But the neighbourhood still has a great many rental properties. Regent Park lies just to the south, and the towers of St. Jamestown loom to the northwest.

You mix all that together and you end up with a Parliament St. that still looks as comfortably shabby as it did a half-century ago – scarcely a totem of gentrification. But maybe that's part of the point, a quality that doesn't quite get captured by "gentrification," with its implied unravelling of every thread in a neighbourhood's social fabric.

Ley notes, for instance, that a recent condo project in Vancouver's gritty east side used the area's shabbiness and danger as a selling point. The marketing slogan: "Be bold, or move to the suburbs." That sentiment is certainly true to the original, guiding spirit of gentrification as a denial of all things suburban. But is it really gentrification, per se?

And how to account for what's happening in actual suburbs such as North Surrey, a working-class Vancouver neighbourhood now sprouting swish condos around a transit station? It's certainly change. But maybe we need a new word for that kind of development, too.

Disparities in Health

2008-08-28T18:25:00.000-07:00

Japan (80 year life expectancy)
Botswana (40 year life expectancy)

This is a health disparity. Read the article and see some interactive maps:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26438376/

Ideas at Work

2008-08-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

Like a flight simulator for hospitals TheStar.com - Opinion - Like a flight simulator for hospitals

August 01, 2008 Carol Goar

Summer jobs don't get much better than this.

A team of six students from different faculties at the University of Toronto has spent the past nine weeks developing Pulse Check, an online emergency room simulator – a glorified video game – that allows doctors, medical students and hospital managers to test changes in procedures, technology and staffing without putting patients' lives at risk.

They can see what works – and what backfires – as they attempt to shorten wait times, reduce overcrowding and improve patient care.
"Pilots don't learn how to fly in stormy weather. They do it in a flight simulator. This is the same idea," says medical student Kelly Emms, a member of the design team.

The project was the brainchild of Dr. Dante Morra, medical director of the Centre for Innovation in Complex Care at the University Health Network, and Dr. Brian Golden, chair of the Centre for Health Sector Strategy at the Rotman School of Management.

They recruited six top students – two industrial designers, an engineer, a doctor working toward his MBA, a social worker and a medical student – and told them to use their skills, their training and their imagination to turn the concept into a reality by the end of July.

None of the students knew each other at the outset. Some weren't even sure what a change simulator was. But they tackled their task with enthusiasm and a deadline-driven sense of urgency.

They began by figuring out what each person brought to the table and agreeing that, while there would be differences of opinion and approach, they wouldn't allow any conflict to become personal.

"Teamwork is hard. We did have arguments about how to do things, but there was no rivalry," Emms says. "And we had mentors. Dr. Morra was there every day."

A software company, ExperiencePoint, was also on hand to coach the students on game-creation. The firm specializes in computer simulations for business decision-making.

Once the project began, time flew. "It was nine weeks of craziness," Emms says. "I looked at my calendar and said: `Where did July go?'"
Yesterday, the students officially unveiled Pulse Check at Toronto General Hospital. Today, the team disbands.

But the friendships will last. The lessons in interdisciplinary co-operation will last. And the simulator will certainly last. ExperiencePoint plans to sell it to health-care institutions around the world. The students won't get any royalties, but they're all fine with that. They didn't invent the game to make money.

There will be other paybacks. Next year, Pulse Check will be introduced into the third-year medical curriculum at the University of Toronto. The Mayo Clinic has expressed an interest. Word is spreading through the health-care community that innovative things are happening at the University Health Network.

As their last collective act, the students decided to showcase their creation. They were eager to let people try it, meet the virtual characters and see how each decision triggers a chain of consequences, some intended, some not.

A game takes about three hours. It begins with sirens wailing. A stroke patient almost dies waiting in the emergency room. The chief executive officer of the hospital comes onscreen and says: "You've been hired to this fix this."

Resources are limited. There are no empty beds or spare nurses. But there are 50 options, which can be tried in any combination. The video is meant for teams of doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, hospital administrators and social workers. The objective is to come up with a strategy that speeds up admissions, provides high-quality care and wins the support of management, the medical staff and the board.

"Web-based simulations are an excellent educational tool," Golden says. "Students are able to grasp complicated concepts in a short amount of time." They're also fun. Almost no one would say that about introducing change into a rigidly structured hospital. It is one of the hardest organizational challenges there is.

Pulse Check will make the job easier. But it is just a tool. Health-care leaders will have to supply the judgment and humanity.

Carol Goar's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Training Day style.

2008-07-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

You wonder why cops like Denzel Washington in Training Day want to take things into their own hands. Well corruption may be rampant, but other laws (severely outdated) are hindering police officers.

The exclusionary principles states that any evidence obtained illegally - eg. founding 100 lbs of cocaine in someone's basement from an illegal search without an approved search warrant - must be disregarded or ignored in court.

Conversely....In Canada this is what happens:

Perjury: Is it different for cops?

VINCE TALOTTA/TORONTO STAR

SIU is looking into case of Shayne Fisher, with mom Lynn Fisher and lawyer, after judge slammed police testimony.

Cases show double standard, critics say

August 02, 2008

Betsy Powell
Peter Small
Staff reporters

A Toronto judge acquits two men of firearms charges, finding that police testimony was "unreliable, likely false." In another courtroom, a judge convicts a prominent community activist of perjury, ruling that she deliberately misled the court.

These two recent court cases highlight the rarely prosecuted offence of perjury. For some in the legal community, they also raise questions about double standards, how often police lie on the stand and how infrequently they face charges.

This past week, supporters of activist Valarie Steele, found by a judge to have lied to get her son released from custody, wondered aloud if she should have been charged at all.

Also this week, the province's Special Investigations Unit announced it is probing the case of Shayne Fisher, 24. Fisher and another man were acquitted after Superior Court Justice Brian Trafford ruled in June that the men were "physically abused" by Toronto police drug squad officers during a raid.

"Important parts of the evidence tendered against the defendants, at the preliminary hearing and at trial, have been found by the court to be unreliable, likely false," Trafford wrote.

Defence lawyers point to other examples of judges acquitting people because of unreliable testimony from police. It even has a name: testilying.

A case often cited is that of Kevin Khan, acquitted on drug charges by Justice Anne Molloy in 2004. She found two Toronto police officers, including Det. Glenn Asselin, used racial profiling when they stopped Khan and later "fabricated" evidence.

"I quite simply do not believe the evidence of the officers," she wrote in her judgment.

Asselin was investigated internally and cleared. He remains with the force as a detective.

Then there's the high profile case of the three officers who testified at the 2005 assault trial of Toronto police officer Roy Preston.

Ontario Court Justice Peter Wilkie convicted Preston after finding him to be "neither credible nor reliable."

Wilkie also found the evidence of the three officers who testified on Preston's behalf to be "vague," "contradictory" and "fundamentally unreliable."

Preston went to jail after losing his appeal. He is suspended without pay and faces disciplinary charges and could be fired.

The three officers were investigated and cleared by their superiors.

In the Steele case, police wiretaps caught the activist saying her son, a witness in the Jane Creba murder case, wasn't adhering to his bail conditions on unrelated charges. In court, she had indicated the opposite and was subsequently convicted of perjury.

Supporters argued she was being punished for her son's unwillingness to co-operate.

Academics throughout North America have found the police culture encourages lying.

"When officer self interest, and/or the bond of the `thin blue line is challenged,' as in a disciplinary proceeding, overt lying is widely recognized as a common occurrence," Dianne Martin, the late Osgoode Hall law professor, wrote in a 2001 paper.

Defence Lawyer Edward Sapiano says police knowingly commit perjury because of what he calls "noble-cause perjury."

"Police knowingly give false testimony to facilitate the prosecution and to ensure the conviction of persons the police 'know' are guilty. Because police so easily get away with noble-cause perjury ... police quite reasonably believe they are being encouraged to lie by the administration of justice itself."

An assistant Crown attorney, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, didn't disagree.

"You would expect ... police witnesses to have a stronger regard for the oath but people lie in court all the time, police officers included."

"There is an attitude that the legal system is just a bunch of bulls--- invented by lawyers and ... the oath doesn't really bind anyone's conscience, in some quarters. I'm not saying every cop is like that but I've certainly had the impression over the years that there are many that do feel that way."

Gary Clewley, a defence lawyer who often represents police officers charged with crimes, says it's "ridiculous" to suggest that judges and Crowns tolerate police perjury because officers perceive it to be a legitimate means to an end.

And just because a judge finds an officer "likely" gave false testimony, doesn't mean he or she lied.

"There's a world of difference between saying `I'm not satisfied sufficiently to deprive somebody of their liberty based on the evidence' and the officers are outright liars."

Sapiano says it's rare police are charged either internally or criminally, "even when sufficient evidence exists, and apparently only ... when a defence lawyer catches them lying and it makes the front page of the newspapers."

Christopher Downer, a former Toronto detective who used to investigate allegations of misconduct against court officers, remembers a case where two police "buddies" of a court officer charged with assault lied on the stand. "I sent a package off to internal affairs: nothing was ever done.

"No one's aggressively going after anyone and at the end of the day nothing happens."

"That's not the case at all," responds George Cowley, director of legal services for the Toronto Police Service. He points to the case of Amar Katoch, a veteran Toronto officer charged with assault, perjury and attempt to obstruct justice by his employer after a videotape of an anti-poverty protest in 2003 showed him punching a protester.

"There's no apathy at all. We're very concerned about comments made by judges," Cowley said.

Katoch was acquitted by a jury last fall. The Crown is appealing.

In the Khan case, Molloy's comments about Asselin were "troubling," Cowley says. "We thoroughly looked into the entire matter and it was determined that there was no evidence to support either criminal or Police Services Act charges."

While the Ministry of the Attorney General failed to respond to questions about the number of perjury charges laid against police, two Ontario police officers facing perjury charges will be in court this fall.

This month, OPP Det. Sgt. John Cavanaugh goes on trial in Toronto. In September, a preliminary hearing is scheduled in the case of Peel Region Const. Sean Osborne.

Despite these cases, the reason so few perjury charges are laid is because "it's only in the most clearest of cases when the evidence is there" that it's worth pursuing, says Avtar Bhangal, the lawyer who represented Sunny Bains, who Osborne is alleged to have assaulted.

"There are lots of cases where people are found to fudge the truth – it's a different standard to actually prove that they intentionally did perjure themselves."

New York Times OP-ED Columnist

2008-07-19T07:44:00.001-07:00

Today I just learned of a new OP-ED writer for the NY Times: Bob Hebert.

For the past couple of years, I've disregarded Al Gore's missionary and zealous dreams of transforming the energy consumption in the US towards a carbon free source. I viewed it as unrealistic, preachy, and too lofty. After reading this commentary by Herbert, I've changed my view about Gore to be more moderate.

Word of the day: culpable

2008-07-19T07:32:00.000-07:00

culpable - adj. deserving of blame or censure as being wrong, evil, improper, or injurious.

Example
While the asbestos industry has been brought to its financial knees, too many culpable companies responsible for poisoning our air, water, homes and workplaces escape.

Word of the Day: Excoriate and Discomfit

2008-07-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

Excoriate - verb. to denounce or berate severely; express strong disapproval of.
Jon was excoriated by his coach for revealling the playbook to the opposing team.

Discomfit - verb. deject; disconcert; To make uneasy or perplexed. A boy who can dodge over the roofs of Lahore city on a moonlight night, using every little patch and corner of darkness to discomfit his pursuer, is not likely to be checked by a line of well-trained soldiers.

5 minute office workout

2008-07-11T05:39:00.001-07:00

http://officeworkout.msn.com/default.aspx?source=email&section=workouts&contentType=office&contentId=27

The Veggie Van

2008-07-06T14:18:00.000-07:00

Across the United States, health promotion activities such as "Veggie Vans" (in Albany, NY) are helping to deliver fresh fruits and vegetables to communities titled as 'food deserts'.

These food deserts appropriately describe both urban and rural areas that are underserved by large scale supermarkets that have the capacity to provide communities with a stock of fresh fruits and vegetables at a lower cost.

Some of the initiatives are headed by "The Food Trust" - an organizatio n which helps to expand the supply of food resources available to low-incomecommunities through advocacy, by creating model programs, and by undertaking research studies on food disparities and disseminating theirfindings to government officials and policy-makers.

Read the article:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25479068/

More about the Food Trust:
http://www.thefoodtrust.org/

Dilemma: economic growth or public health?

2008-07-02T06:46:00.000-07:00

The dilemma: let the economy of Curacao suffer with the consequence of greater poverty, or allow the oil refinery that upholds nearly 100% of the economy to keep operating with the consequence of severe public health risks???

Oil toxins in island paradise TheStar.com - Business - Oil toxins in island paradise

Curacao needs the jobs, so pollution-spewing refinery still in business despite health concernsJuly 02, 2008 Brian EllsworthReuters News Agency

CURACAO FACTS

Curacao, just off the coast of Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea, is the largest and most industrialized island in the Netherlands Antilles.

A self-governing part of the Netherlands, Curacao is a major tourist destination boasting white-sand beaches, crystalline waters and popular casinos.

The Isla oil refinery, operated by Venezuelan state company PDVSA, generates heavy oil-shipping traffic. Residents have repeatedly said the refinery causes environmental and health damage.

Once the centre of the Caribbean slave trade, Curacao was hard hit by the abolition of slavery in 1863. Prosperity returned in the early 20th century with the construction of refineries to service the newly discovered Venezuelan oil fields.

The official languages are Dutch, Papiamentu and English.
On the east end of the island is the colonial-style capital and major port of Willemstad.

Reuters News Agency

WILLEMSTAD–An oil refinery dating from World War I billows toxins over the Caribbean island of Curacao, but under the pressure of local economic need, Curacao allows the plant to continue operating.

The Isla refinery, operated by Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, faces growing complaints by residents and several lawsuits charging its industrial emissions cause health problems ranging from chronic coughing to cancer.

A Curacao court last year threatened to close the plant if it cannot meet emissions standards, citing a study estimating that each year 18 people die prematurely from exposure to contaminants.

Curacao commissioned the study from Dutch consulting company ECORYS in 2005, but didn't make the report public. ECORYS declined to provide a copy, citing an agreement with the client.
PDVSA has said it prides itself on social responsibility. But the company is under pressure to keep the 320,000 barrel per day facility running in the face of repeated outages at refineries in Venezuela.

With little money or support for upgrading Isla and needing the jobs generated by the refinery, Curacao seems content to let PDVSA keep running the plant as long as the courts allow.
"There is no scientific study whatsoever that the refinery is causing death or anything like that," said Charles Cooper, a Curacao legislator whose party is allied with Curacao's governing party and who also works for PDVSA.

Public health commissioner Humphrey Davelaar, along with other officials, said they couldn't comment or didn't respond to requests for comment.

Curacao became an affluent trading port in connection with the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, Curacao is a territory of the Netherlands and attracts tourists with beaches, scuba diving and the Dutch colonial architecture of the capital, Willemstad. Shell opened Isla on the site of a former Willemstad slave market in 1918 to process Venezuela's first crude oil, and the refinery supplied the Allies in World War II.

By 1985, Isla was obsolete and plagued by environmental woes. Shell sold the refinery to Curacao for a symbolic $1. The island quickly leased the plant to Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, which has made few major investments to reduce emissions.

Marisela Cijntje, who teaches Spanish at the Maria Immaculata Lyceum, downwind from the refinery, says the stench is sometimes so overwhelming the school has to suspend classes.
"Sometimes I get out of my car and I can see the smoke or I can smell it," said Cijntje. "It gives me a headache really quickly, but most of the time I just have to keep teaching."

Humane Care Foundation, a local environmental group, said emissions of sulphur dioxide, which can cause permanent lung damage, are about twice the limit allowed by Isla's licence, according to data collected by the refinery itself. The group also said refinery emissions of particulate matter, fine dust that can cause cancer, are dangerously high. Isla has denied excessive particulate-matter emissions.

Critics also say PDVSA, which has been in talks to buy the refinery for two years, provides few benefits to the island.

This accusation mirrors Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's charges that private oil companies "looted" his country by dodging taxes and failing to make investments that would have curtailed environmental damage.

Curacao took in less than 1 per cent of Isla's 2007 sales of $5 billion (U.S.), receiving a rent payment of less than $20 million and almost no taxes. By contrast, PDVSA has said that, in Venezuela, some 45 per cent of 2007 sales went to government coffers and social programs.

"Nowhere else in the world could a multi-million-dollar company like PDVSA come and do something like this," said Maurits Martis, who runs a construction-equipment shop across from Isla.

White People

2008-06-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

Like, dude - that's way cool
TheStar.com - News - Like, dude - that's way cool

June 28, 2008 Nick KyonkaStaff Reporter

White people.

They recycle and drink coffee. They listen to indie music and watch Arrested Development. They like Barack Obama and Noam Chomsky, and have bad memories of high school and their parents.

So what do white people do when their 15 minutes of fame stretches to six months and reaches out to more than 30 million people?

Well, apparently they write books. At least, that's what Christian Lander did. The author of the popular blog "Stuff White People Like," Lander will be returning to his native Toronto next week to promote his new paperback by the same name.

But, at the same time, he may be looking for ideas for his next post, or even his next book. After all, he says, Toronto's white yuppie crowd has been "a source of constant inspiration" for his work so far.

Living by the water, expensive sandwiches, and nonmotorized boats are just a few of the Toronto-esque things that white people apparently like and that Lander has chronicled on his blog.

"Everything is inspired by the life I lived growing up in Toronto," he said. "For some of the entries, it's sort of easy to visualize the Beaches on a Saturday morning with lineups for Sunset Grill."

Caught from his Los Angeles home for a telephone interview last week, Lander reflected on his Riverdale upbringing in Toronto's east end. At the time, he said, the city was going through a period of transition and most middle-class white families were moving out to the suburbs. This demographic shift left the downtown core full of visible minorities and upper middle-class yuppies who dress head-to-toe in Roots gear and drink fair-trade coffee. "These were the only kind of white people you'd encounter," Lander said.

Most of the kids from these families would grow up without ever having to worry about money, he noted. This gave them time to set other, more lofty goals in life, such as maintaining a healthy body-mass index, building their library, or trying to protect the planet.

All of these objectives mean so much more when you can brag about how much better off you are for having done them, he said. That's apparently another thing white people love to do.
"It's the whole concept of post-wealth," he said. "It's all a competition: who's the greenest, who's the best-read, who eats the best food. It's very important that the stuff you like can be quantified and measured against other white people."

And while this element exists in the white populations of many major urban centres, some of his posts and book entries are particularly reflective of Torontonians, the 29-year-old copywriter-turned-author said.

Take entry number 61, for example: Bicycles. While bicycling is a popular healthy recreational activity for white people in other cities, it's mainly in Toronto that suit-wearing businessmen can be seen on the pedal-powered vehicles going to and from work, Lander said.

Others are also Toronto specific. Number 67 – Standing Still at Concerts – was inspired by countless shows he attended at the Opera House and the Warehouse (now the Kool Haus). Number 71 – Being the Only White Person Around – was inspired by frequent trips to east Chinatown as a teenager, where he would often spot a lone white person sitting at a restaurant.
"That one is very Toronto," he noted with a laugh.

Yet despite the 150 posts that found their way into Lander's new book – to be released by Random House July 1– there is still a score of other stuff white Torontonians like that didn't make it in. Breakfast diners, bars with patios, and the Horseshoe Tavern are among them. So are clothing items from Roots, Lululemon, the Beaches Lacrosse league, and, above all, Mountain Equipment Co-op, which caters to people who just want to be outside, something Lander repeatedly insists white people love.

"The Mountain Equipment Co-op on Queen West is about as accurate a research spot as you can go to in the world," Lander chuckled. "It's camping and other outdoor crap. It's like it's required gear for white people."

Lander pointed to the popularity of the Toronto Islands. "The presence of a Frisbee golf course pretty much locks that one into place," he said. "It's like golf, which is already pretty white and taking it to the next level."

And then, of course, there are weekend trips to Montreal.

"A big Toronto thing is going out there for weekends and then returning home to Toronto and complaining that it's not as good as Montreal."

Growing up in Toronto, of course, also had the opposite effect on a few things other people have told Lander should be on his directory. Hockey, for one, is something his Toronto heritage has long kept off the list. While hockey may be a particularly white thing in the United States, "that's not the case in Toronto," he said, because here, everybody plays the sport.

How hasToronto's white crowd responded to his musings? Mostly favourably. "Torontonians, as I've witnessed, are pretty good at taking insults," he said.

Education and Words of the Day: disaffect, pedantic, and ostensible

2008-05-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

There is a need for students to be engaged in learning. Teachers should be concerned about their methods of instruction, if they are pedantic; their knowledge and experience appearing ostensible; and their students disaffection for the classroom.

1. Pedantic
Definition: overly concerned with minute details or formalisms, esp. in teaching.
Example: a pedantic writing style; a pedantic attention to details, etc.

2. Ostensible
Definition: outwardly appearing as such; professed; pretended.
Example: His ostensible purpose was charity, but his real goal was popularity. An ostensible cheerfulness concealing sadness

3. Disaffect
Definition: to alienate the affection, sympathy, or support of; make discontented or disloyal.
Example: The dictator's policies had soon disaffected the people.

Warfare terminology

2008-05-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

Attrition warfare is a military tactic in which one side attempts to win a war by wearing down its enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses. This can result in a pyrrhic victory (a victory with devastating cost to the victor, "win the battle, but lose the war").

Examples: vietnam war

Word of the Day: diatribe

a bitter and abusive speech or writing
ironic or satirical criticism

UBC

2008-04-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

UBC is an excellent university and requires their students to do a lot of things.

Women and Aging & Idioms

2008-04-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

A great article about the realities of women who choose to undergo facial surgery to slow the signs of aging:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23359042/

Plus, the article is loaded with many idioms:

1. "Spring chicken"
Defnition: to not be young any more.
Example: He must be ten years older than Grace, and she's no spring chicken.

2. "Not see the forest for the trees"
Definition: Focus only on small details and fail to understand larger plans or principles,
Example: Alex argues about petty cash and overlooks the budget--he can't see the forest for the trees.

3. "Win the battle only to lose the war"
Definition: A victory that is offset by staggering losses,
Example: The campaign was so divisive that even though he won the election it was a Pyrrhic victory. This expression alludes to Kind Pyrrhus of Epirus, who defeated the Romans at Asculum in a.d. 279, but lost his best officers and many of his troops.

Example: This figure has often been used by environmentalists, who have often won when a case was brought to court (the battle), but have too little money and too few legal tools to stem the overall downward spiral caused by loss of habitat, overfishing (and sometimes overhunting), pollution, and other threats to the ability of our environment to support trees and wild animals as well as people (the war).

Who is God and what do we think of him?

2008-04-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

God is both salutary (favorable to or promoting health) and omnipotent (almighty or infinite in power).

Quote of the Day:

2008-04-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

DeShawn Stevenson says Lebron James is "overrated".

The appropriate response back to Stevenson would be:

OKAY YEA HOMEBOY IS SMOKING SOME OF THAT REALLY GOOD SHIT. LETS SEE WHERE THIS NIGGA IS AT NEXT YEAR!!!!!

(2) Word of the day: stridency and exigency

2008-04-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

1. Stridency

My understand of the word: voicing out your opinion forcefully and loudly (an outcry!)

strident (FORCEFUL) adjective
Definition:
expressing or expressed in forceful language which does not try to avoid upsetting other people:a strident newspaper article.

Examples:
They are becoming increasingly strident in their criticism of government economic policy.

She has always stridently denied the accusations against her.

He is stridently opposed to abortion.

As the situation becomes more desperate, there is a growing stridency in the appeals for aid.

2. Exigency

My understanding of the word: a desperate situation; dire straits.

Definition:
the difficulties of a situation, especially one which causes urgent demands.

Examples:
The exigencies of war; an exigent problem; an exigent manager.

Economic exigency obliged the government to act.

Health videos of the day

2008-04-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

1.

Gene discovery key to lung cancer mystery?April 2: Research has uncovered a gene that may explain why only some smokers get lung cancer. NBC Chief Medical Correspondent Robert Bazell reports. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23921641#23921641

2.

Is inequality making us sick?April 2: Executive producer Larry Adelman discuss a new documentary, which explores how where you live and how much you make could impact your life expectancy. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23916953#23916953

3.

You might also be interested in the following articles:

Can't quit smoking? Blame your genes
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23919596/

Concern over cancer study’s ‘Big Tobacco’ ties
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23818053/

Why I want to be an academic research...

2008-04-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

...so that I can conduct leading research in the following common sense areas:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23901272/

Health Innovations & Epidemiology

2008-03-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

1. An innovative way for protecting the health of premature babies in neonatal intensive care units. Non-intrusive and efficient:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23835342/

2. Don't blame the rising popularity of spinach and lettuce for the rising increase in cases of e-coli and salmonella outbreaks:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23689559/

Are public office women prone to sex scandals?

2008-03-28T12:05:00.001-07:00

Why do fewer public woman fall to sex scandals?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/128621

Word of the Day: PROMULGATE

2008-03-18T19:27:00.000-07:00

The FDA tried to promulgate tobacco products regulation.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/promulgate

President Bush and his presidential vetoes

2008-03-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

Today president Bush vetoed a bill from Congress that would have limited the ability of the CIA to use torture techniques in its interrogations of captured terrorists:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/washington/09policy.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

He argues that these are the only ways to effectively stop terrorism from expanding.

Hilary Clinton's advocacy work

2008-02-02T11:18:00.000-08:00

A concise background about Hilary's Clinton experience in fighting for Civil Rights.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/us/politics/02race.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th

How did blue eyes happen?

2008-01-31T17:27:00.000-08:00

According to scientists, blue-eyes are a genetic mutation. Apparently everyone had brown eyes 10,000 years ago. The role of natural selection: blue-eyed individuals are hotter, thus are selected.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22934464/

What goes on in the mind of an anorexic?

2008-01-20T11:43:00.000-08:00

A moving story about a husband who simulates anorexia to understand what his wife went through...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22688706/page/2/

You can't stop science from progressing...

2008-01-19T14:08:00.000-08:00

The first human embryo has been successfully cloned by a small company in Southern California. The researchers claim that if this human embryo is inserted into a woman's womb, it will develop into a baby.

1. Lab clones human embryo, Jan. 17: A California laboratory claims to have achieved this controversial scientific breakthrough. NBC's Robert Bazell reports.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/22706693#22706693

2. Dr. Snyderman on human cloning, Jan. 17: NBC's chief medical editor discusses this controversial breakthrough and what it may mean for science and ethics.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/22707028#22707028

3. More on the first cloned human, Jan. 17: Dr. Nancy Snyderman discusses what this scientific breakthrough means for the future of medicine and people.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/22707944#22707944

America is undergoing a baby boomlet...

2008-01-18T10:45:00.001-08:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22670983/?GT1=10755

A Cheap way to get high

2008-01-11T21:00:00.000-08:00

"Syrup" aka "Purple Drank" aka "Lean" all these are merely cough syrup cocktails — prescription codeine-laced cold medicine mixed with soda or sports drinksthese concoctions first gained fame in Southern rap circles.

As the trend spread to fans, teens started using the more readily available over-the-counter versions of cough suppressants.

Among those ages 12 to 17, abuse of these drugs was most common among girls (exactly the kind of girl Lil Jon' would hit if he was jacked up from 'purple drank'....)

Summarized from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22577005/

The scandals behind a drug rehab program

2008-01-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

This drug rehab company, Hythiam Corp., paid scientists to fabricate results (impartiality); had poor scientific definitions of "drug recovery"; used testimonials rather than randomized double-blinded experiments; ignored non-response in their survey samples; fraudulent activitiy that involved key county and state officials who had heartily endorsed the program all had purchased stock in the company.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22315918/

Background information about the drug treatment intervention known as Prometa:

One addict's story: In a last-ditch effort to get clean, Suzanne Younker tried a controversial new protocol, Prometa, through a treatment center in Tacoma, Wash.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/15504594#15504594

What's the deal with milk?

2008-01-06T13:12:00.000-08:00

1. Milk is good for muscle building (especially whole milk).
2. Drinking milk is better than taking calcium supplements.
3. Whole milk vs skim milk. Skim is preferable for decreasing calories than whole; whole milk does not significantly increase LDL counts. Overall both are better for heart health than no milk at all.
4. Bovine injected cows do not produce harmful milk.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22349307/

Saudi Arabian law: will someone figure this one out for me?

2007-11-26T14:15:00.001-08:00

The group of men who raped a woman and the man she was cheating with were sentenced to 5 years in jail.....however, the women herself was punished by being whipped 200 times. The reason: she was committing adultery!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7112999.stm

Choosing the lesser of two evils.

2007-11-19T23:22:00.000-08:00

Should we provide condoms to inmmates.

Evil #1: If we don't provide condoms, prisons become a breeding ground for HIV, and when these inmates get out they contaminate their wives.

Evil #2: If we provide condoms, they can be misused. It encourages more sex and even rape (as there is less evidence, no mess to clean up...). Condoms can also be used to hide and transport drugs?

Which option is better?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21887503/

When religion and culture override common sense

2007-11-15T10:35:00.000-08:00

A 22 year women died. In her case, the fetus developed outside the uterus, could not survive and caused bleeding that endangered the mother. But doctors seemed afraid to treat her because of the anti-abortion law....

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21601045/wid/11915773/

Public Health: Ban on Smoking in West Virginia Restaurants

2007-11-10T22:47:00.000-08:00

Good arguments for and against banning smoking in public restaurants:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXEFC1zc3po

Interactive lesson that teaches how smoking causes lung cancer:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21440637/

If you win the battle against smoking, you can win the battle against cancer?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21440637/

However, the battle against smoking seems to have come to a standstill. The prevelance rate has stalled at 21% since 2004 (CDC):
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21694180/

Encouraging Drug Use?

2007-10-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

San Francisco wants to try a "safe injection site" for heroin users:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21367579/

Feel Good story of the year

2007-10-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

if this 30 year old guy can turn it around, anything is possible! What a great tale!

http://health.msn.com/dietfitness/weightlossstory.aspx?cp-documentid=100162710

Health Care Ethics: Women dies from gene therapy

2007-09-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

The 4 principles of health care ethics:

1) nonmalefficence - do no harm
2) benefficence - do good if possible
3) autonomy - respect the patient's preference
4) justice - equal opportunity and treatment

what happened?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20730647/

Is it really that cool to smoke up?

2007-08-31T10:18:00.000-07:00

Scientists say smoking weed is worse than smoking cigarettes. The researchers said cigarettes caused emphysema, a crippling lung disease; however, marijuana was worse because it completely disabled the lung.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20052489/

Scientists also say smoking weed may increase the risk of psychosis. The most chronic psychotic disease is schizophrenia.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19980923/