Is Data Speech?
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Passions & Prejudice : the Constitution and Same-Sex Marriage
City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Student Theses Baruch College 1-1-2012 Passions & prejudice : the constitution and same-sex marriage James Meyers Baruch College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/bb_etds/43 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] PASSIONS & PREJUDICE: THE CONSTITUTION AND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE By James Meyers Submitted to the Committee on Undergraduate Honors at Baruch College of the City University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with Honors. Submitted Fall 2012 Approved by the Department of Political Science _________________________ Dr. Thomas Halper Mentor and Faculty Sponsor _________________________ _______________________ Dr. Benedetto Fontana Dr. Randolph Trumbach Committee Member Committee Member TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT: . 3 Part I INTRODUCTION: Folk Devils and Moral History . 4 CHAPTER 1: The Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty . 19 CHAPTER 2: In Pursuit of Judicial Restraint . 28 CHAPTER 3: Inevitable Evolution & Epistemology . 49 Part II CHAPTER 4: Passions and Prejudice . 61 CHAPTER 5: The Geometry of Law . 76 CHAPTER 6: Arguments . .87 CONCLUSION: The Subjection of Gays and Lesbians . 105 BIBLIOGRAPHY: . 110 2 ABSTRACT Viscerally divisive sociopolitical issues with clear boundaries often raise questions of constitutional legality. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not offer guidance on a preferred method of interpretation, and so legal scholars and Supreme Court justices alike have yet to reach a consensus. -
The Opportunities and Challenges of Pragmatic Point-Of-Care Randomised Trials Using Routinely Collected Electronic Records: Evaluations of Two Exemplar Trials
HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT VOLUME 18 ISSUE 43 JULY 2014 ISSN 1366-5278 The opportunities and challenges of pragmatic point-of-care randomised trials using routinely collected electronic records: evaluations of two exemplar trials Tjeerd-Pieter van Staa, Lisa Dyson, Gerard McCann, Shivani Padmanabhan, Rabah Belatri, Ben Goldacre, Jackie Cassell, Munir Pirmohamed, David Torgerson, Sarah Ronaldson, Joy Adamson, Adel Taweel, Brendan Delaney, Samhar Mahmood, Simona Baracaia, Thomas Round, Robin Fox, Tommy Hunter, Martin Gulliford and Liam Smeeth DOI 10.3310/hta18430 The opportunities and challenges of pragmatic point-of-care randomised trials using routinely collected electronic records: evaluations of two exemplar trials Tjeerd-Pieter van Staa,1,2* Lisa Dyson,3 Gerard McCann,4 Shivani Padmanabhan,4 Rabah Belatri,4 Ben Goldacre,1 Jackie Cassell,5 Munir Pirmohamed,6 David Torgerson,3 Sarah Ronaldson,3 Joy Adamson,3 Adel Taweel,7 Brendan Delaney,7 Samhar Mahmood,7 Simona Baracaia,7 Thomas Round,7 Robin Fox,8 Tommy Hunter,9 Martin Gulliford10 and Liam Smeeth1 1Department of Non-Communicable Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK 2Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands 3York Trials Unit, York University, York, UK 4Clinical Practice Research Datalink, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, London, UK 5Division of Primary Care and Public Health, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK 6The Wolfson Centre for -
Homeopathy Works, Then Obviously the Less You Use It, the Stronger It Gets
http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo "...for the purposes of popular discourse, it is not necessary for homeopaths to prove their case. It is merely necessary for them to create walls of obfuscation, and superficially plausible technical documents that support their case, in order to keep the dream alive in the imaginations of both the media and their defenders." --Ben Goldacre If homeopathy works, then obviously the less you use it, the stronger it gets. So the best way to apply homeopathy is to not use it at all. --Phil Plait http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo “Alternative Medicine” - Homeopathy - Supplementary Material for CFB3333/PHY3333 Professors John Cotton, Randy Scalise, and Stephen Sekula http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo ● FRINGE ● The land of wild ideas, mostly untested or untestable. Most of these will be discarded as useless. Only some of these will make it into the frontier. ● FRONTIER ● CORE Tested (somewhat or better) ideas that could still be wrong or require significant modification. ● CORE FRONTIER ● Very well-tested ideas that are unlikely to be overturned. They may FRINGE become parts of bigger ideas, but are very unlikely to be discarded. A Depiction of Science Thanks to Eugenie Scott http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo HOMEOPATHY A LOOK AT THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo Claim and Assessment ● Claim: homeopathic medicine can treat the diseases it claims to treat ● there are many more medicines than there have been scientific tests of those medicines, which should already tell you something. Homeopathy is like a hydra. ● Tests: ● Gold-standard medical testing: randomized, double/single-blinded, placebo-controlled, large-statistics trials http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo ● Findings: ● 8 studies in the review fulfilled their review criteria ● Only about half of those were more akin to gold standard, and they tended to show no effect over placebo. -
Transparency in the Time of Constant Change
PhUSE 2014 Paper RG02 Transparency in the Time of Constant Change Todd Case, Biogen Idec, Cambridge MA, USA ABSTRACT The time has come, after years of hard work, to submit your application to the regulatory agency for review and possible approval! What a relief to be able to finally hand off all of your hard work and, wait a minute, ensure that all data can be reproducible?!? While CDISC has been widely adopted and its SDTM and AdAM models widely implemented, there is still the need to understand the process of ensuring that all the data is a reflection of how it was originally collected, which in some cases can be very challenging. This paper will discuss some more trending ways of both creating and presenting data in ways that ensure it is consumable and can be understood not only for analysis/submission purposes but also that post-approval it is transparent and that everyone who has a vested stake can review the data in an appropriate way. INTRODUCTION With the publication of Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken , and How We Can Fix it, by Dr. Ben Goldacre in 2013 a bright spotlight was shone on the data behind/supporting clinical trials. A large part of his thesis is that pharmaceutical companies exaggerate the efficacy of successful trials and that, in addition to drug companies, regulators , physicians (who are educated by the drug companies) and even patient groups have failed to protect us. Another rather striking revelation was that a clinical trial with positive results is twice more likely to be published than one with negative results (although it should be noted that this specifically is related to results – the protocol is always provided). -
Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre
RCSIsmjbook review Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients by Ben Goldacre Reviewed by Eoin Kelleher, RCSI medical student Paperback: 448 pages Publisher: Fourth Estate, London Published 2012 ISBN: 978-0-00-735074-2 Dr Ben Goldacre earned his reputation for his 2008 book Bad to affect doctors’ prescribing habits (although most doctors claim Science and his column in the Guardian newspaper of the same that their own practices have never been affected, just those of their name. In both he provides an entertaining, accessible and colleagues). Even journals, which are considered to be an unbiased well-researched exposé of poor scientific practices. Compared to source of medical knowledge, are not free from this – journal articles his first book, which played charlatans such as Gillian McKeith are regularly ghost-written by employees of drug companies and an and homoeopathists for laughs, Bad Pharma is a much more eminent academic is invited to put their name to it; this appears in sombre read. However, as a piece of investigative journalism, and the journal, again without disclosure. a resource for students, doctors and patients, it is invaluable. Drugs are tested by the people who Food for thought Goldacre opens by making a claim that: “Drugs are tested by the manufacture them, in poorly designed people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on trials, on hopelessly small numbers of hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and unrepresentative patients, and analysed analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that exaggerate the benefits of treatments. -
Drugs, Money and Misleading Evidence
Books & arts tallying up the inequalities. She recruited colleagues to gather much more data. The culmination was a landmark 1999 study on gender bias in MIT’s school of science (see go.nature.com/2ngyiyd), which reverber- ated across US higher education and forced many administrators to confront entrenched discrimination. Yet Hopkins would rather have spent that time doing science, she relates. The third story comes from Jane Willenbring, a geoscientist who in 2016 filed a formal com- plaint accusing her PhD adviser, David March- ant, of routinely abusing her during fieldwork in Antarctica years before. Marchant, who has denied the allegations, was sacked from his post at Boston University in April 2019 after an inves- tigation. Picture a Scientist brings Willenbring together with Adam Lewis, who was also a grad- uate student during that Antarctic field season and witnessed many of the events. Their conver- sations are a stark reminder of how quickly and how shockingly the filters that should govern work interactions can drop off, especially in UPRISING, LLC Biologist Nancy Hopkins campaigned for equal treatment at work for female scientists. remote environments. Lewis tells Willenbring he didn’t realize at the time that she had been as they admit on camera. scientists. Its two other protagonists are white bothered, because she did not show it. “A ton The iceberg analogy for sexual harassment is women with their own compelling stories. of feathers is still a ton,” she says. apt. It holds that only a fraction of harassment — Biologist Nancy Hopkins was shocked In stark contrast, the film shows us obvious things such as sexual assault and sex- when Francis Crick once put his hands on Willenbring, now at the Scripps Institution of ual coercion — rises into public consciousness her breasts as she worked in the laboratory. -
Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, New York: Verso, 2013
Book Review Symposium Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, New York: Verso, 2013. ISBN: 9781781680797 (cloth); ISBN: 9781781683033 (ebook); ISBN: 9781781683026 (paper) Author’s response I want to thank Antipode and the four participants for lengthy reactions to my book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. I think it is apparent it was written in a funk of distress; and the reviewers here invite me to step back from all that, and reflect on how it has been regarded by various readers who do not necessarily share my own particular chagrin nor my axes to grind. The experience has been salutary, and evokes a few short responses. One theme present to a greater or lesser extent in all the reviews is that, as Nick Gane puts it, I never tell the reader “what should happen next”; or, as Geoff Mann writes, “OK. So what now?”. I should confess I also get this a lot when I give talks concerning the subjects in the book. When that happens, I take the occasion to suggest that one of the primary lessons of the book directly informs my self-denying ordinance: the prohibition of offering any ‘remedies’ as conventional bullet points, like those which fill the last chapters of the torrent of crisis books which have fallen from the presses clonedead since 2008. When the Neoliberal Thought Collective (NTC) began to organize itself in the 1930s/40s, it found itself stranded in the intellectual wilderness, exiled from political power by Depression and war, and suffering internal disarray, much as the Left has experienced now. -
Histories of Medical Lobbying’
‘Histories of medical lobbying’ The lobbying of government ministers by medical professionals is a live issue. In Britain and around the world medical practitioners have become active in the pursuit of legislative change. In the UK, the AllTrials campaign co-founded by the physician-researcher Ben Goldacre continues to exert pressure on parliamentarians in a bid to force greater transparency in the publication of clinical trial results. Meanwhile, the California Medical Association advocates the legalisation of the recreational use of marijuana, and doctors in Australia refuse to release child refugees from hospital into detention centres damaging to their mental health. It was precisely the lobbying of medical humanitarians such as Médecins sans Frontières in France that effected a change in the law there in 1998, permitting undocumented immigrants with life-threatening conditions to remain in the country for medical treatment. Each of these examples represents an organised attempt on the part of medical professionals to change government policy on matters related to public health – in other words, lobbying. Yet a recent announcement by the UK cabinet office suggests that henceforth recipients of public funding will be banned from directly lobbying government ministers in the hope of changing public policy. When questioned in parliament David Cameron stated that charities should be devoting themselves to ‘good causes’ rather than ‘lobbying ministers’. Unless some qualification is forthcoming, medical researchers too will be proscribed from carrying out such activity. This insinuates that lobbying is in some way outside the proper remit of researchers, medical or otherwise. Yet even a cursory glance at the history of the medical profession’s engagement with public health reveals a longstanding and significant engagement with the political process. -
On the Clear Evidence of the Risks to Children from Non-Ionizing Radio Frequency Radiation: the Case of Digital Technologies in the Home, Classroom and Society
On the Clear Evidence of the Risks to Children from Non-Ionizing Radio Frequency Radiation: The Case of Digital Technologies in the Home, Classroom and Society Professor Tom Butler Contents Abstract ........................................................................... 2 Introduction ...................................................................... 3 Do existing Standards on Wireless Digital Technologies protect Children? ........................................................................ 3 Why are Independent Scientific Studies more Trustworthy? .. 4 What is the Reaction to the Mounting Evidence? .................. 5 How can we make Sense of Difference of Opinion among Scientists? ...................................................................... 5 What is the Significance of the U.S. NTP Study? .................... 6 What is the Proof of the Potential Toxicity and Carcinogenicity of RFR? .......................................................................... 7 What is the Evidence from Epidemiological Studies? ............... 8 What are Implications for Childhood RFR Exposure? ........... 11 What are the Risks to Children of RFR Exposure In Utero? .. 11 What are the Biological Mechanisms that Produce Ill-health in Children and Adults? ........................................................ 12 What is the Evidence that Microwave RFR Promotes the Development of Existing Cancers? ..................................... 14 Why are Existing Standards Unsafe? .................................. 15 Here be Dragons! ......................................................... -
Logic and the Common Law Trial
University of Kentucky UKnowledge Law Faculty Scholarly Articles Law Faculty Publications Summer 1994 Logic and the Common Law Trial Richard H. Underwood University of Kentucky College of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub Part of the Legal Profession Commons, and the Litigation Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Richard H. Underwood, Logic and the Common Law Trial, 18 Am. J. Trial Advoc. 151 (1994). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Faculty Publications at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Law Faculty Scholarly Articles by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Logic and the Common Law Trial Notes/Citation Information American Journal of Trial Advocacy, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 151-199 This article is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub/261 Logic and the Common Law Trial Richard H. Underwoodt The only certain ground for discovering truth is the faculty of discriminat- ing false from true.... Otherwise, I can assure you, you will be led by the nose by anyone who chooses to do it, and you will run after anything they hold out to you, as cattle do after a green bough.' I. Introduction Throughout history, right up to the present day, there have been persistent, if somewhat contradictory, attempts by members of the legal guild to attribute to the practice of law some of the characteristics of religion and science.' Fortunately, references to the trial lawyer as "the priest in the [T]emple of [J]ustice" 3 have pretty much disappeared from the literature. -
The Moral Economy of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Legitimising Prices
The moral economy of the pharmaceutical industry: Legitimising prices Joan Busfield University of Essex, UK Joan Busfield, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, Essex, UK. Email: [email protected] Abstract The practices of pharmaceutical companies have been widely criticised by researchers and investigative journalists, yet their conduct has mostly escaped significant moral opprobrium from the wider public, health professionals and governments. This article examines one reason for this by exploring the techniques companies use when seeking to justify and legitimise their conduct – legitimising techniques that help to render their failures to adhere to accepted standards less visible. It explores these techniques by examining four cases involving pricing where the companies’ conduct has, nonetheless, been questioned. It is divided into three parts. The first looks at the various publicly -stated standards that provide the moral context for the industry’s activities. The second examines four cases, each involving pricing, where companies’ prices have been challenged as morally unacceptable, each leading to a US Government investigation. These provide a means of exploring how companies seek to justify their actions in order to maintain the appearance of conformity to accepted moral standards. The third considers some reasons why the industry’s efforts at legitimation have considerable force. The analysis shows not only the character of the claims made by pharmaceutical companies in defence of their practices – claims about the health benefits of the medicine, access to it, and research and development costs, which are all often exaggerated. It also shows why the companies’ legitimising tactics are typically effective. -
Ben Goldacre
BUILDING EVIDENCE INTO EDUCATION BEN GOLDACRE MARCH 2013 PHOTO REDACTED DUE TO THIRD PARTY RIGHTS OR OTHER LEGAL ISSUES 2 Background Ben Goldacre is a doctor and academic who writes about problems in science and evidence based policy, with his Guardian column “Bad Science” for a decade, and the bestselling book of the same name. He is currently a Research Fellow in Epidemiology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. To find out more about randomised trials, and evidence based practice, you may like to read “Test, Learn, Adapt”, a Cabinet Office paper written by two civil servants and two academics, including Ben Goldacre: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/test-learn-adapt-developing- public-policy-with-randomised-controlled-trials 3 4 Table of contents Background 3 Building evidence into education 7 How randomised trials work 8 Myths about randomised trials 10 Making evidence part of everyday life 15 5 6 Building evidence into education I think there is a huge prize waiting to be claimed by teachers. By collecting better evidence about what works best, and establishing a culture where this evidence is used as a matter of routine, we can improve outcomes for children, and increase professional independence. This is not an unusual idea. Medicine has leapt forward with evidence based practice, because it’s only by conducting “randomised trials” - fair tests, comparing one treatment against another - that we’ve been able to find out what works best. Outcomes for patients have improved as a result, through thousands of tiny steps forward. But these gains haven’t been won simply by doing a few individual trials, on a few single topics, in a few hospitals here and there.