DrugMonkey

Here we go again. Ecstasy, death...unsubstantiated claims.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:07:07 -0500

A 20-year-old male had been found unconscious by friends. When police arrived, Whistler Fire Rescue Service and Emergency Health Services personnel were performing CPR, but failed to revive the victim, who was pronounced dead a short time later at the Whistler Health Care Centre, Wright said.
A second male who was at the same home was hospitalized after he, too, suffered an apparent overdose of MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine). He is expected to make a full recovery, Wright said.

Both men had ingested the drug in powdered form.

aaaand...

Earlier last week, a 17-year-old Fernie male who had also ingested MDMA in powered form almost died, Wright said, emphasizing that there was no connection between the two incidents.

Three overdoses requiring medical intervention, one death.

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Continuous submission of NIH grants for reviewers: Something is odd.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:01:14 -0500

The NIH rolled out a new plan* to make the lives of investigators who serve on study sections slightly easier about two years ago. The plan permitted appointed study section members to submit their own grants after the standard receipt dates for R01, R21 and R34 applications.

My prior thoughts were enthusiastic:

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The #retweetFAIL

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:05:06 -0500

I know, I know. A diversion from our usual. I'm actually not making fun of WEb2.0AwesomeszEleven!!!w00t!!! for once.

This thought connects, however, to a frequent problem I have with software companies. See this complaint about a cockup pulled by my favorite reference manager software, EndNote.

Endnote version X2, however, pulls a Microsoft-esque blunder in screwing with one of the fundamental features dear to this user. And they have the nerve to tell others who complained that it is the user who is just not giving this kewl new approach a chance! 'sclowns...

Now Twitter is pulling the exact same crap with their #retweetFAIL debacle.

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The face of medical marijuana: doc420

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:15:55 -0500

Sigh.

This, my friends, is a medical marijuana providing doctor. She is doing very little to reassure that this is a serious area of care. Starting with the website, www.doc420.com. You know, 4:20.

The jezebel article concentrates on the sexy pictures of the good doctor.

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Repost: A Modest Proposal on Impact Factors

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:48:42 -0500

Answering my question from yesterday it appears that I have done relatively little bashing of the Impact Factor in recent months. Odd that. And since our beloved commenter whimple is stirring up trouble I thought I'd repost something that appeared Sept 21, 2007 on the old blog. I also ran across this post relevant to the malleability of the IF.

People argue back and forth over whether Impact Factor of journals, the h-index, Total Cites, specific paper cites, etc should be used as the primary assessment of scientific quality. Many folks talk out of both sides of their mouths, bemoaning the irrelevance of journal Impact Factor while beavering away to get their papers into those journals and using the criterion to judge others. In this you will note people arguing the case that makes their CV look the best. I have a proposal: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

A counter to all the whinging about New Investigator affirmative action at the NIH

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:40:46 -0500

Finally.

An opinion bit written by a senior investigator who actually seems to have a brain in his head and is not blinded by selfishness.

The argument that grants should be funded only on the basis of priority scores is fallacious. There is only a rough correlation between the quality of the science in an application and the priority score. As anyone who has ever served on a study section will attest, a host of different--and sometimes scientifically irrelevant--criteria can creep into play when arriving at a priority score, such as whether there are lots of typos in a grant (even the most accomplished scientists are not always great spellers). This is not because reviewers are vindictive or evil. Just that they are emotional and human. Until human judgment is perfected, granting agencies will always need to consider more than the priority score in making funding decisions.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Go Play.

[h/t: @BoraZ]

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When was the last time I bashed the Impact Factor, anyway?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:37:58 -0500

There's a new entry up over at the Golden Thoughts blog (she's a nephrologist, so..yes) that talks about the all important journal Impact Factor, Harold Varmus' opinion of same and journals gaming the system.

Dr. Varmus pointed out that many of his most significant works appeared in "lesser" journals that served the appropriate audience for the science. ... However, like all numbers, the IF can be gamed, and its validity has been questioned: ... Dr. Varmus plead for an end to IF insanity. ... The IF works about as well right now as the Bowl Championship Series algorithm does for college football.

Ouch, that last one is an insult that goes farther than I ever have.

Go Read.

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On Developing a Research Grant Proposal

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:18:42 -0500

Some time ago SciWo laid out her approach to developing a proposal for research funding in "Eight Easy Steps". You can dash over and read it yourself I won't try to summarize. What emerged in the comments is that people have very different approaches to this topic. For example Comrade PhysioProf opined:

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Discussing Talent and Luck

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:58:39 -0500

Some Twitt chain or other that I was following had me eventually landing on a NYT book review by Steven Pinker which takes a critical approach to Malcolm Gladwell's new book of essays "What the Dog Saw: and other adventures". I was particularly struck by this passage:

The common thread in Gladwell's writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarterback's rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don't predict a teacher's effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in "Outliers") that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

Not only because it is the source of some of my own queasiness when reading (and trying to discuss) Gladwell, but also because I fall into this trap when talking about science careers.

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Not a very "SMART Plan", no.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:57:15 -0500

PhysioProf has the call on a letter published in Science Magazine. One Professor Debomoy K. Lahiri, Ph.D. (Univ website; Research Crossroads) is kvetching about the NIH policy to support previously unfunded investigators and as usual comes off looking idiotic.

Increasing the grants funded below the quality cutoff to nearly one-fifth of all funded grants will not serve the goal of helping new investigators. If such applicants are not held to the stringent process of producing a grant that meets R01 quality requirements, what will happen to them when they are no longer new investigators and are then subject to the same rigors as the rest of the field?

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The doctorate is the new bachelor's?

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:29:38 -0500

Commenter qaz raised an issue the I think I last took up following an observation of Larry Moran. That was also in the context of discussing so-called over-production of PhDs. The new comment from qaz frames the issue as follows:

I AM advocating graduate PhD-level science training for the rest of the population - imagine if our politicians actually understood science (or even critical thinking) for example. A lot of professions would be improved by having scientific training. (But they don't need it, you say. I say, why can't they have it? Why can't spending five years doing some good science not be a part of someone's path in life, even if they don't go on to do NIH-R01-Research?)

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Speaking of Rich-Get-Richer in NIH Land

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:53:55 -0500

Oh this is rich. More money to consolidate ~~boondoggle~~ service cores?

Consolidation...to me that connotes a cost savings. Efficiency. And somehow even more cash is required to gain this efficiency?

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I like the new Summary Statement Format

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:18:54 -0500

So the new bullet-point NIH grant review format has been in place for two rounds and I am finally hearing a bit of feedback from friends and colleagues. I also have had a chance to be subjected to a nonzero number of reviews as an applicant, instead of only as a reviewer.

Some of the chatter I am hearing reflects confusion.. with a lot of comment that the person (applicant) can't tell how to interpret things. Even more frightening is one report of a Program Officer making the same complaint-after all the new format was supposed to be to help the POs make their decisions! That's not a good thing.

From my small sample, I think it is perfectly fine. I mean, I used to go through the old summary statements with two highlighters- one for positive comments and one for negative comments -in the past. This just distills the process. The comments I've received are no more confusing than in the past and a lot of extraneous nattering has been left off.

I like it.

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Thoughts on a proposal to escalate grant-acquisition difficulty

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:50:49 -0500

A recent post noted the decision by the NHLBI to adopt a payline policy that varied by grant revision status. The new R01 submissions would be subject to a 16% payline, the first revision to a 9% payline and any left-over grandfathered second revision A2 applications to a 7% payline.

In the course of discussion a reader proposed that what we really need is for the NIH to grade the payline based on how many grants a given PI already has. Commenter qaz said:

Maybe it would be enough to share the funding around better - make the first R01 easy to fund, the second harder, etc. If we made it possible for people to be funded at the 25% range (or even below that) if they didn't have any other grants, then maybe it wouldn't be a problem.

This idea was seconded by Principle Investigator.

Knowing a landmined topic when I see it, I had a few observations.

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Comparing SfN Social Media Experiment with a BlogTwitty Meeting

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:12:00 -0500

As I noted previously The Society for Neuroscience encouraged its members to blog and Twitt the annual meeting in Chicago (Oct 17-22, 2009). The experiment was far from a smashing success although I do believe that there were some hints of what could / should be for the future. The main problem* was, I wager, one of numbers. It was a meeting that registered some 30,000 attendees. I counted something maybe on the order of 30 people actively trying to Twitt or blog the meeting. I think you have to have a bit higher participation for the conversation to really take off, but that's just speculation.

At any rate, I had a thought today. The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism is holding an event that provides an interesting contrast.

USC Annenberg's California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships program is holding a day-long brainstorming event aimed at helping Annenberg leaders launch a new, all-expenses-paid, professional seminar series to educate and encourage dialogue among health professional bloggers and Health 2.0 visionaries. The attendees, who include leading Health 2.0 professionals Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog and Dr. Val Jones of BetterHealth.com, will discuss the best ways to promote transparency, credibility, accuracy and journalistic principles for the emerging health blogosphere, as well as exposure to larger public health and community health policy issues. This event is by invitation only.

Follow the Twittering on this meeting by the #uscblogcon hashtag. I think this may give you some ideas of what could be, if you are on the fence as to whether Twittering/blogging scientific meetings would have value.
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*apart from some technical difficulties with WiFi coverage and too many iPhoners loading up the AT&T network.

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