Weekend reads: Top researchers resign over publishing issues; organized crime meets publishing; infamous fraudster rides in on a horse

retractionwatch

Ah yes, the Ethics of Science.

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The week at Retraction Watch featured a look at authors who publish once every five days, a revoked PhD following a retraction, and a case of what sounds like irony. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

• A top cancer researcher resigns  after reports that he failed to disclose millions in payments “from health care companies in dozens of research articles.” That prompts our co-founders to ask, “Why do medical journals keep taking authors at their word?” (STAT)
• H. Gilbert Welch, a top health care policy scholar, has resigned from his faculty position at Dartmouth, after an investigation concluded that he had committed research misconduct in a paper. Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine is again refusing to retract the article, even after the Committee on Publication Ethics suggested they should consider it. (STAT)
• “Organised crime in certain countries has realised there is a lot of money to be made here.” Our Ivan Oransky talks to ABC News Australia about the black market in China and elsewhere.
• “Once Implicated in Cloning Fraud, This Scientist Now Wants to Bring Back an Extinct Ice-Age Horse.” Hwang Woo-Suk rides in on an…Ice-Age horse. (David Grossman, Popular Science)
• “So what’s with the talk of burning things to the ground?” Tom Bartlett of The Chronicle of Higher Education visits the annual meeting of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. He also profiles James Heathers and Nick Brown, whom we wrote about in February.
• An investigation into the work of Olivier Voinnet “uncovered manipulation of certain figures. However, the commission’s report confirms that Voinnet did not personally initiate this manipulation.” However, “since Voinnet implicitly trusted his former employees at IBMP and saw no reason to be suspicious up to the summer of 2016, some manipulated data may also have potentially crept in to the corrections that he made to the research articles. Voinnet will now rectify these immediately.” (ETH-Zurich) As of now, Voinnet has 8 retractions, 4 expressions of concern, and 24 corrections, according to our database.
• “Journals shouldn’t shrink from offering criticisms that may be considered inconvenient, say the editors of a BMJ journal in the latest round of a dispute over the quality of a Cochrane review.” (Nigel Hawkes, The BMJ; sub req’d)
• “Should We Still Cite the Scholarship of Serial Harassers and Sexists?” asks Nikki Usher. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Some thoughts on the EU’s Plan S for open access: “Open access will curtail profits but not quality or freedom,” says Lenny Teytelman in Times Higher Education. “Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free,” says George Monbiot in The Guardian.
• The Netherlands has a new Code For Research Conduct.
• A new policy from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) “lays out the expectation that our awardees will make the data from their PCORI-funded research projects available to third-party requestors. Very importantly, it provides funding to our awardees for their time and effort in preparing the data to be shared.” (PCORI)
• Should the UK create a new committee to ensure that misconduct investigations are done properly? The government says it will look into the possibility.
• “In a letter sent to NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins on Thursday, alcohol researcher Dr. Michael Siegel of Boston University School of Public Health called on NIH to retract and apologize for a statement on the website of NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism,” reports Sharon Begley. (STAT)
• “A University of Bristol lecturer has resigned after admitting that he fabricated his research.” (BBC)
• A new grant from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity will be used ‘to develop a data-searching tool that will boost the scale at which articles are automatically searched to detect figure reuse, thus finding cases of potential inauthenticity and inappropriate reuses much more quickly and across broader repositories of information.” (press release)
• Spanish Health Minister Carmen Montón has resigned after allegations of plagiarism in her master’s degree. (El Pais)
• “Publication pressure and scientific misconduct: why we need more open governance.” (Simon Gandevia, Spinal Cord)
• “In a bid to make it easier for university and college teachers to earn points to enhance their research score for recruitment and promotion, the University Grants Commission has decided to treat all peer-reviewed journals at par with its own list of approved journals.” (Vikas Pathak, The Hindu)
• Who are the world’s top reviewers? Find out who Publons ranked.
• “How Would You Ensure Diversity In Peer Review?” asks The Scholarly Kitchen. PLOS Blogs talks to Cassidy Sugimoto about the same issue.
• “Academic publishing is a mess and it makes culture wars dumber,” says Rob Beschizza of some recent controversial cases. (BoingBoing)
• Thou shalt not steal — nor plagiarize. A Christian counseling organization leader faces plagiarism charges. (Michael Gryboski, Christian Post)
• “Twitter Is Denying Access To Its Data To A Prominent Opioid Sales Researcher,” Dan Vergano reports. (BuzzFeed)
• “You are correct in pointing out that we mistakenly identified a significant difference … These [corrected] results suggest that education, while highly effective for engendering healthy life behaviors, had no effect on controlling the BMI of the participants (Table 3).” (The Journal of Nursing Research)
• A scientist at GlaxoSmithKline has pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets to use at a Chinese startup. (Mark Reisch, Chemical & Engineering News)
• “Research fraud should incur suspension of the license to practice.” A new white paper in Intensive Care Medicine.
• According to prosecutors, a former Washington University employee “committed mail fraud through a variety of means, including seeking reimbursement from the university for contract work she had done for her personal benefit, charged gift cards to a fellow employee’s university account, and traveled around the world using falsified invoices.” (Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed)
• “Peer reviewers in developing nations are underrepresented,” suggests a new report. (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science)
• A look at the overrepresentation of review articles in citations, and the effect of that phenomenon on the literature. (RubenMiranda and Esther Garcia-Carpintero; Journal of Informetrics; sub req’d)
• How often do dental journals pull papers? Sorry, couldn’t resist. (Journal of Dentistry, sub req’d)

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Thank You Retractionwatch.

Kavanaugh Sends Defiant Letter To Grassley, Feinstein: ‘I Will Not Be Intimidated’

Righteous!

dailycaller
Benny Johnson | 9/24/18

Brett Kavanaugh sent a defiant letter Monday to the Senate in the wake of a new sexual misconduct allegation brought against him Sunday. Kavanaugh sent the scathing letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein on Monday afternoon.

Kavanaugh wrote that he will not be “intimidated” by the “smear” accusations against him.

“I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out. The vile threats against my family will not drive me out. The character assassination will not succeed,” Kavanaugh said.

The letter called the accusations against him a “grotesque and obvious character assassination.”

“There is now a frenzy to come up with something—anything—that will block this process and a vote on my confirmation from occurring. These are smears, pure and simple. And they debase our public discourse. But they are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Such grotesque and obvious character assassination—if allowed to succeed—will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service. As I told the Committee during my hearing, a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure. That is the kind of judge I will always be.”

Kavanaugh directly addressed the original allegation him by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. “All of the witnesses identified by Dr. Ford as being present at the party she describes are on the record to the Committee saying they have no recollection of any such party happening.”

Cracks Appearing in the Psychological Trojan Horse of 'Social Justice'. . . . FINALLY!

Social Justice in plain and simple English means Collectivism.

For Collectivism to work society must have Governments multiple times the size and number of the governed. That equation never breeds anything but corruption and repression. 

If history teaches us anything about Collectivism, it is the unrelenting truth that special rights for anyone come at the cost of the deprivation of everyone else's Rights, which becomes the round robin of ever increasing calls for More of the Social Justice Rot which caused it in the 1st place.



"Governments are instinctively, automatically, and inevitably, Tyrannies. There's no question about it."

Social Justice requires more, and ever more, Government to rip more Special Rights out of their Vote Whoring butts to snooker the electorate into 'Feeling Better', about what they've been Promised.

madinamerica

Zenobia Morrill

September 24, 2018

In a new article, published in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, scholars Erin Thrift and Jeff Sugarman present a thoughtful analysis of the term social justice and its use in the field of psychology. They outline the term’s multifaceted and complex history, illustrating that its usage today by psychologists may be reductive and problematic.

“History should give pause to psychologists who claim social justice as their mission,” Thrift and Sugarman write. “Social justice has become a ‘cultural keyword’ and, consequently, whether psychologists realize it or not, invoking the term thrusts them and the discipline into a broader debate about human freedom, individual and collective responsibility, and the role of the state.”

The meaning of the term “social justice,” in Western, democratic states, has shifted throughout history.  It has transformed alongside cultural developments and milestones and has garnered increased attention in recent years. Thrift and Sugarman point out that the definition of social justice lacks specificity, clarity, and consensus. Nevertheless, the field of psychology has aligned itself with a social justice mission, leaving some to wonder what exactly that mission means and entails.

“Although many psychologists proclaim social justice as central to their disciplinary and professional mission, it is not at all clear what psychologists mean by ‘social justice’ and how they contribute to its aims,” Thrift and Sugarman write. “Without clarity as to the meaning of social justice, we are no further ahead.”

The authors begin by outlining the multifaceted history of the term “social justice” in English speaking Western democratic countries and follow this with an analysis of its meaning within the field of psychology. They trace back the usage of the term to debates concerning the fair economic distribution of material goods and power and the reduction of the risks inherent in the capitalist political system. The term social justice was not originally used in reference to movements for gender or racial equality, as those injustices were said to have “remained invisible” until around the 1970s. The meaning of social justice shifted around this time, and it began to be applied to inequalities in nonmaterial goods, such as the recognition of difference and identity issues.
Thrift and Sugarman argue that the term has been misappropriated with the rise of neoliberal economics in the 70s and 80s. In this context, its meaning has been employed to refer to social justice as an individual virtue rather than a collective endeavor, a usage antithetical to the term’s original purpose. This shift in meaning transforms social injustices into conflicts reconcilable by private charity practices and self-care rather than movements for accountability and the reformation of systems and corporations. Discussing the neoliberal usage of the term social justice, Thrift and Sugarman write:

“Concepts can be reinterpreted over time. However, in this case, such a severe break with historical meaning is more likely opportunistic coopting of the term than a shift legitimately warranted by judicious conceptual analysis.”

Despite its origin, the differing views and conceptualizations of social justice now represent “the nexus of a struggle among different political factions,” they write. Not all views and conceptualizations sufficiently address the term in its complexity, however. Thrift and Sugarman argue that for the term social justice to be consistent with this complex history, its utilization must acknowledge (1) its historical development and meaning, and (2) the contemporary challenges that surround its usage.

“The history of social justice points to the necessity of understanding its complex and multifaceted nature,” they write. “Therefore, any accounts of social justice that are overly narrow (e.g., attending only to the redistribution of material goods or to identity politics) cannot adequately represent the concept.”

According to the authors, psychology, as a field, has aligned itself more closely with some conceptualizations of social justice than others. Psychologists have been criticized for adopting a more “identity politics” approach to social justice in which they reductively attend to issues of identity and recognition while overlooking the intersection of identity with economic inequalities and broader structural concerns. It is not just that the privileging of identity-focused views of social justice obscures economic inequities associated with capitalism, but, as Thrift and Sugarman emphasize, it takes a complicit stance that allows for the perpetuation of these injustices. In this sense, psychologists have predominantly aligned with a reductive approach to social justice and in doing so have undermined their stated mission.
Claiming expertise in defining and treating psychological problems, the field of psychology has considerable influence on the use and understanding of social justice. As a result, “confusion over the meaning of social justice has implications for psychologists interested in pursuing this aim, but also has broader political, social, and economic consequences,” Thrift and Sugarman argue. When psychologists promote the idea that psychological suffering is a state resolvable exclusively through individual interventions, such as psychotherapy, behavior changes, or drug treatments, structural issues can be ignored and perpetuated.

“Psychological explanations often have diverted attention from social, political, and cultural injustices and, in so doing, at least deflected, if not prevented, individuals from political participation, “they write.

The authors go on to outline how specific psychological explanations have deflected individuals from political participation and prevented systemic reforms. For instance, the suffering and subjugation of women was explained by hysteria, racial discrimination was justified by the inferior intelligence of people of color, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder in the DSM, non-Western families are described as “enmeshed,” and the negative impact of poverty on childhood academic achievement has been recast as a lack of self-discipline or as deficits in other internal characteristics.

Not only are structural problems obscured in these explanations, but they are replaced with interpretations that exclusively place responsibility on individuals or individual characteristics. The authors write:

“A widespread error in psychology is that failing to recognize the constitutive force of our sociopolitical and economic institutions has led to fixing features of persons to human nature rather than to the institutions within which they become persons.”

Further, they illustrate that this approach is antithetical to social justice, as it was initially conceived, and contributes to neoliberal economics and the injustices that arise from current economic and political systems.

“Psychologists’ endorsement of social justice may not only disguise the social and political sources of many mental health problems,” they write, “but also further bolster the neoliberal ideal of individuals as self-responsible, competitive, enterprising, risk-seeking, adaptable individuals, who bear sole responsibility for their circumstances, who do not require or even eschew government support, and whose freedom is manifested by their capacity for choice.”

Thrift and Sugarman point out that psychologists benefit from an individualized promotion of social justice. Psychology as a field is “embedded in the market economy,” they write, so framing problems as arising from the individual may increase demand for psychological services. “Consequently, there may be little professional or economic incentive for psychologists to conceptualize personal difficulties other than in terms of the individual.”

“Thus, psychologists aspiring to work for social justice should be judicious in their use of the term and cognizant of the political consequences they are promoting (even inadvertently).”

The authors observe this pattern in contemporary psychology practice. For example, lowered diagnostic thresholds and loosened criteria support claims that 46.6% of the U.S. population will experience a mental illness in their lifetime.  As demand increases, so does the value of psychological services. Thus, psychology profits from promoting a reductive form of social justice that is contrary to its perceived aims.
One way to address the issue of harmful practices in the name of social justice is to develop greater clarity and consensus around the term. The authors argue that there is currently no coherent framework for evaluating and implementing social justice claims. In response, they propose adopting a structure promoted by Fraser (2009), which addresses three fundamental questions:

1. “What is the good of social justice?” (principle of participational parity)
2. “Who is owed social justice?” (all-affected principle)
3. “How are we to make decisions related to all aspects of social justice?” (all-subjected principle)

Fraser argues for a “principle of participatory parity,” meaning that all injustices should be considered as violations of social justice. Social justice and violations of social justice are evaluated in this framework “in terms of their effect on a person’s ability to participate socially and politically on equal grounds with their peers.” To address contemporary issues that surround social justice claims, the authors argue that globalization of social justice pursuits must be framed beyond the interest of a nation-state and must be able to recognize global injustices committed by transnational corporations.
For the field of psychology to apply social justice in terms of the principle of participational parity, Thrift and Sugarman suggest reflection on the following question:

“How does psychological theorizing, research, or interventions help create social, cultural, political, and economic arrangements that permit individuals to participate on an equal level with their peers?”

They argue that the response from the field must go beyond simply promoting and increasing access to psychological services. Social justice calls for a large-scale reshaping of psychological services to address rather than undermine sociopolitical and economic issues.

“If psychologists are to serve the interests of social justice, they cannot take their responsibility simply as helping individuals manage their anxiety in an unjust economic order,” Thrift and Sugarman write. “Psychological services that merely help individuals adjust to circumstances of poverty and inequality, without doing anything to change these conditions, is a disservice to social justice. It perpetuates the role of psychologists as ‘architects of adjustment’ who preserve and protect the status quo, rather than as advocates for sociopolitical reform.”

****

Thrift, E., & Sugarman, J. (2018, September 13). What Is Social Justice? Implications for Psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Advance online publication. (Link)


Thank You Zenobia Morrill and MIA.

Hilary Hahn - Prokofiev - Violin Concerto No 1 in D major, Op 19

20th Century Classical Music: Prokofiev: Dance of The Knights

Hospitals’ Secret Contracts With Insurers Are Keeping Health Care Expensive: Report

dailycaller
Evie Fordham Sept 22/2018

Hospital systems are making secret contracts with insurers that are keeping health care costs high, a Wall Street Journal report revealed, prompting alternative health care advocates to point out the flawed nature of the U.S. health care system.

“Health care is the only industry I can think of where technology is used as an excuse for price to go up and productivity to go down because of these perverse incentives,” The Health Rosetta founder Dave Chase told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The perverse incentives at a high level are generally, either directly or indirectly, the worse job [the hospitals] do, the more they get paid.”

TheWSJ’s Tuesday report detailed “dozens of contracts with terms that limit how insurers design plans” so they cannot exclude powerful hospital systems, which when included in health plans can drive up costs for employers and employees.

These secret contracts often include clauses that mandate insurers steer consumers away from less costly health care providers or give hospitals the ability to “mask” their prices, according to TheWSJ. If plans did not include these more costly health care systems, they could be up to 10 percent cheaper, the report stated.

Some major health care systems with insurer contract clauses that could be driving up health plan costs reportedly include:

• Johns Hopkins Medicine in Maryland
• Northwell Health in New York
• OhioHealth in Ohio
• Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin
• Atrium Health in North Carolina
• Sutter Health in California

Atrium Health is facing a civil antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice, and Sutter Health is facing an anticompetitive practices lawsuit from the California attorney general. Both Atrium Health and Sutter Health say the lawsuits have no basis, TheWSJ reported.

Hospital systems have increased their leverage with insurers through mergers and takeovers, often becoming the only providers in certain areas. There was “the highest number recorded in recent history” in 2017 with 115 of these types of deals, a 13-percent increase from 2016, according to a report by health care forecasting firm Kaufman Hall.

“It’s the insurers that retain the greatest leverage,” Melinda Hatton of the American Hospital Association told TheWSJ.

Many in the hospital industry maintain that insurers have controlled the game for a long time, and these secret contracts are just a way to gain a little bit of control back. But hospitals are already “the largest single component of health-care spending in the U.S.” at over $1 trillion each year, TheWSJ reported.

Because of this dichotomy, some predict major changes in how consumers pay for health care coming down the pike. CNBC columnist Jake Novak predicted a rise in hospital systems offering their own insurance plans in a 2017 article. (RELATED: Big Pharma Making Big Money With Illegal Kickbacks? Drug Companies Face More Scrutiny After News Of Humira Lawsuit)

“The insurance industry gets its justification to exist by selling the idea that only it can help make those mysterious health care costs affordable,” Novak wrote. “If the bean counters figure out a way that hospitals can do better without the private insurers around, it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t simply sweep them away faster than Amazon put an end to your local book store.”
Follow Evie on Twitter @eviefordham.
Send tips to evie@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Thank You Ms Fordham and the DC.

Groucho Marx, The Laws of My Administration

Hat Tip to American Greatness

Great column on the Democrat Punch and Judy fits of hysteria trying to Bork the confirmation of Trump's 2nd Supreme Court nominee: Brett Kavanaugh. 

The Playbook, the Press, the Plan, and the Patsies

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/19/the-playbook-the-press-the-plan-and-the-patsies/

Are Drug Side Effects Driving Depression Rates?

madinamerica
By Peter Simons September 18, 2018

According to new research, between 2013 and 2014, 38.4% of adults took a medication that lists depression as a potential side effect, and 9.5% received three or more such medications. About 23.5% took a drug that listed increased suicidality as a side effect. The researchers found that the use of these drugs was associated with people developing depression and suicidality.

“Use of prescription medications that have depression as a potential adverse effect was common and associated with greater likelihood of concurrent depression,” the researchers write.

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was led by Dima M. Qato, PharmD, MPH, PhD, at the Department of Pharmacy Systems, Outcomes and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, and also included Katherine Ozenberger, from that same institution, as well as Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist and public health specialist from Columbia University, New York.

Numerous medications include depression and suicidality as a potential side effect, including hormonal contraceptives, beta-blockers, proton pump inhibitors, anti-anxiety medications, and, paradoxically, “antidepressants” themselves.

The researchers found that rates of depression were higher in those taking medications that listed depression as a side effect. They controlled for numerous other factors, including gender, race, age, education level, socioeconomic status, marital status, employment, and multiple medical conditions (e.g., hypertension, cancer, diabetes, and many others).

The authors also controlled for potential confounds and reverse causality by using a statistical method called sensitivity analyses. For instance, the researchers conducted additional analyses to test if removing those who used psychotropic medications would alter the outcome, or if removing those who had hypertension (which is also associated with depression) would alter the outcome. In all of these cases, the association between medication use and depression continued to be statistically significant.

These results indicate that even when removing potential confounding cases (such as other psychotropic drugs, or people with illnesses linked to depression), there was still a link between medication use and the development of depression.

The connection between these drugs and depression were even more powerful for people who took three or more medications that had depression as a side effect. In fact, according to the researchers, about three times as many people who took three or more of these drugs developed depression when compared to those who were not on such medications:

“The estimated prevalence of depression was 15% for those reporting use of 3 or more medications with depression as an adverse effect vs 4.7% for those not using such medications.”

Their finding was not merely due to medication use in general—there was no difference in depression symptoms between those who took no medication and those who took even three medicines that did not have depression as a side effect. Thus, only drugs with depression listed as a side effect were associated with the development of depression.

According to the researchers, some of these medications are available over-the-counter (such as proton pump inhibitors and emergency contraceptives) in the US, and their packaging is often not thorough enough to describe the association of these drugs with depression and suicidality. Thus, consumers may not be aware that the medications they are taking could be responsible for their altered emotional state.

Additionally, the researchers note that calls for screening for depression have expanded considerably—yet screening instruments do not ask about potential medication side effects. Thus, screening for depression may result in someone receiving a diagnosis of depression (and potentially receiving antidepressants) when what is happening is that they are experiencing the side effect of another medication.

****

Qato, D. M., Ozenberger, K., Olfson, M. (2018). Prevalence of prescription medications with depression as a potential adverse effect among adults in the United States. JAMA, 319(22), 2289-2298. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.6741 (Link)



Thank you Mr Simons and MIA.