word of the day: adjutant

The word of the day is adjutant:


a staff officer in the army, air force, or marine corps who assists the commanding officer and is responsible especially for correspondence (Merriam-Webster)


"Klay writes with a powerful restraint about the inversion of normal reality called combat, its permanent effects on bodies and souls, but the best stories in 'Redeployment' look at war from a slight distance.  The narrator in 'Unless It's a Sucking Chest Wound,' a battalion adjutant, has the inglorious job of writing up the heroics of other marines being nominated for medals...

"The adjutant is one among many troops−their numbers grew over time−who spent their war almost entirely within the confines of an American base."

 - George Packer, "Home Fires: How soldiers write their wars", 7 April 2014 The New Yorker

phrase of the day: scare quotes

The phrase of the day is scare quotes:


quotation marks used to express especially skepticism or derision concerning the use of the enclosed word or phrase (Merriam-Webster)


"'Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,' Paul Fussell wrote in 'The Great War and Modern Memory,' his classic study of the English literature of the First World War...

"Here's Kevin Powers, who joined the Army out of high school and ended up as a machine gunner in the same region of Iraq as Turner: 'I had by then inferred that the military was where a person went to develop the qualities that I had come to admire in my father, my uncle, and both of my grandfathers.  The cliché, in my case, was true: I thought that the army would "make me a man".'  The scare quotes suggest Fussell's wised-up irony, but they weren't enough to keep Powers home."

 - George Packer, "Home Fires: How soldiers write their wars", 7 April 2014 The New Yorker

molecule of the day: lysergic acid

The molecule of the day is lysergic acid:

(PubChem)

"In the context of their species, these flamingos were like space voyagers, those who'd return with tales beyond telling.  Except that they'd never return.  You might as well have immersed the birds in a bathysphere and introduced them to the orcas, or dosed their food with lysergic acid."

 - Jonathan Lethem, "Pending Vegan", 7 April 2014 The New Yorker


Lysergic acid is closely related to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

(PubChem)

Recent blogging activity

My most recent piece for the Transcript, the Hopkins Biotech Network's newsletter, is on non-competition agreements, and my most recent blog post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community on the ACS Network shares some statistics from my job search.

The Two-Body Problem

This week's post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community is up, on the two-body problem.

formatting the resume

This week's post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community is up, on what I've learned about how to format my resume.

word of the day: quisling

The word of the day is quisling:

Etymology:  < the name of Major Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), Norwegian officer, diplomat, and fascist leader, who collaborated with the German forces during their occupation of Norway from 1940 to 1945 (from 1942 as Minister President).

 

A person cooperating with an occupying enemy force; a collaborator; a traitor. Also in extended use.

SHRDLU:  Greetings, fellow quadrupeds.  Peace be upon you.
LADY CHARM:  Peace?  You ride with the enemy.
SHRDLU:  Tom Taylor is no threat to you.  He means to save our world.  And he has the power to do so.
LADY CHARM:  What do we need to be saved from, if not the scourge of man?  Stand aside, quisling, or with one gesture, I'll put you among the things that were.

 - "Wheels Within Wheels, Fires Within Fires", The Unwritten Volume 8: Orpheus in the Underworld, Mike Carey and Peter Gross


I think this is an anachronism.

Word of the day: cold-cock

The word of the day is cold-cock:
  
to knock (a person) unconscious (U.S. slang). (OED)


"The guy with the hand is Lucas Filby.  I was about to arrest him when he cold-cocked me.  Next thing I know, I'm here."

 - Didge, "Live Like Lazarus", The Unwritten Volume 8: Orpheus in the Underworld, Mike Carey and Peter Gross

starting salary data

In this week's post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community on the ACS Network, I discuss the latest starting salary data for new chemistry graduates.

On the culture of getting paid for work

My latest blog post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community in the ACS Network is up, on the culture of getting paid for work.

How do you decide what work you should be paid for (and pay for), and what work should be an unpaid extracurricular, hobby, or favor? What kind of compensation besides money would you accept or have you accepted for work?  Are unpaid internships “engines of inequity” that exploit young people, or they a good way to help young people get real work experience before they know enough to actually contribute to a company’s success?

The Graduation Ceremony Paradox

My graduation ceremony was on Thursday, and I blogged about it for the ACS Chemical Biology Community on the ACS Network.

VAJC, week 2: aluminum adjuvants, ASD, and Hill's criteria (Tomljenovic and Shaw)

-->

Welcome to the second installment of the Vaccine Autism Journal Club project!

Today we’ll be discussing “Do aluminum adjuvants contribute to the rising prevalence of autism?”, by Lucija Tomljenovic and Christopher A. Shaw, Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry 105:1489-1499 (November 2011).

Disclaimer:  I am not an epidemiologist or statistician.  If you have expertise in these fields, and I get the analysis completely wrong, please let me know in the comments!

Question this paper is trying to answer:  Does the increasing use of aluminum adjuvants in vaccines meet Hill’s criteria for causation of autism?

 

 

Background:  An adjuvant is a substance added to a vaccine to increase the body’s immune response to the vaccine.  In the United States, adjuvants contain aluminum.  You can read the CDC’s frequently asked questions about adjuvants here.

 

In 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill proposed a set of criteria to consider when trying to decide whether the most likely interpretation of an association is causation, especially in the context of environmental factors and disease.

 

 

Methods:  The authors gathered data for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence from several countries.  They also gathered data on the recommended vaccine schedule for each of those countries, and the amount of aluminum that a child would be exposed to if they followed the schedule.  Different brands of vaccines contain different amounts of aluminum, so they calculated the minimum exposure (if you followed the schedule using the brands with the least aluminum), the maximum exposure (if you followed the schedule using the brands with the most aluminum), and the average exposure.  The average is quite literally an average: if there are three brands of DTaP vaccine, they add up the aluminum content and divide by three.  This method of averaging seems silly to me: just because there are three brands doesn’t mean that each brand holds exactly one third of the market.  But as we will see, this is hardly the greatest weakness of the paper, so I’m not going to dwell on it.

 

The authors also assume that aluminum exposure accumulates: i.e., that the human body eliminates none of the aluminum, even over the course of months and years.  Their main justification for assuming an elimination of zero is that “Al [aluminum] has been shown to persist at the site of injection from several months up to 8-10 years following vaccination in patients suffering from macrophagic myofasciitis, an autoimmune disease linked to Al vaccine adjuvants”.  MMF is an extremely rare disease characterized precisely by an abnormal response to aluminum adjuvants.  The idea that you would use aluminum metabolism in these patients as a way to estimate aluminum metabolism in people without MMF is crazy.

 

The authors then look at how aluminum exposure over time correlates with ASD prevalence over time.

 

 

Results:  The authors find an excellent correlation between aluminum exposure (which has been increasing in recent years) and ASD prevalence (which has also increased in recent years), in the population as a whole.

 

The authors go on to claim that the strength and consistency of the correlation, plus the appropriate temporal relationship between the proposed cause and outcome (children are vaccinated as infants; ASD symptoms appear later), plus what they call “a biologically plausible mechanism by which it can be explained”, all meet Hill’s criteria for causation, causing them to conclude that aluminum adjuvants should be seriously considered as a cause of ASD.

 

 

Discussion:  Correlation does not imply causation.  Correlation doesn’t even imply a relationship.  The famous example the great evolutionary biologist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould gives in his book The Mismeasure of Man is that he can find an excellent correlation between his age, the population of Mexico, the price of Swiss cheese, his pet turtle’s weight, and the average distance between galaxies.  The true relationship between all of these variables, of course, is that they’re all increasing with time.  To conclude that the reason the average distance between galaxies is increasing because Stephen Jay Gould’s pet turtle is gaining weight, and to propose that putting the turtle on a diet will cause the galaxies to move closer together, is insane.

 

Similarly: the prevalence of ASD has increased in recent decades.  You will find an excellent correlation, therefore, between ASD prevalence and anything else that has also increased in recent decades: not just aluminum adjuvants, but also organic food sales, car seat use, and, I dare say, my age, the population of Mexico, the average distance between galaxies, and the weight of a living pet turtle.  All that should be concluded from these observations is that all of these depend on time, not that there’s any causal relationship between any of them.

 

 

The authors claim that the correlation between aluminum adjuvant exposure and ASD prevalence meets several of Hill’s criteria, the first being the strength of the correlation.  It is true that the authors’ confidence in the correlation is quite high (p < 0.0001): but that is not what Hill meant by the strength of the correlation.  The example Hill gave in his remarks to the Royal Society of Medicine is as follows:

 

prospective inquiries into smoking have shown that the death rate from cancer of the lung in cigarette smokers is nine to ten times the rate in non-smokers and the rate in heavy cigarette smokers is twenty to thirty times as great. On the other hand the death rate from coronary thrombosis in smokers is no more than twice, possibly less, the death rate in non-smokers. Though there is good evidence to support causation it is surely much easier in this case to think of some feature of life that may go hand-in-hand with smoking – features that might conceivably be the real underlying cause or, at the least, an important contributor, whether it be lack of exercise, nature of diet or other factors. But to explain the pronounced excess of cancer of the lung in any other environmental terms requires some feature of life so intimately linked with cigarette smoking and with the amount of smoking that such a feature should be easily detectable.

 

When Hill talks about the strength of the association, he doesn’t mean the confidence: he means the magnitude in the increase in risk.  In order to say that the correlation between aluminum adjuvants and ASD prevalence meets Hill’s criterion of strength, then the authors would have to show that an x increase in aluminum adjuvant exposure leads to a y% increase in ASD risk, where y is some large number.  The authors, of course, cannot do that with the data they’ve collected, because they’re not comparing children with different amounts of aluminum exposure: they’re just looking at entire populations over time.

 

A much better analysis would have been to compare children who had gotten the minimum dose of aluminum adjuvants (based on the brands of vaccine they happened to be vaccinated with) to children who had gotten the maximum dose of aluminum adjuvants, and to see whether the risk in ASD differed between these two groups of children.  The authors, of course, did not do that analysis.  In fact, this paper has no controls at all.

 

 

The second of Hill’s criteria the authors claim that the association between aluminum adjuvants and ASD prevalence meets is consistency.  I’m not entirely sure what they mean: the best I can come up with is that they were able to find a correlation between aluminum adjuvant exposure and autism not just in the US, but also in the UK, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Ireland, and Finland.  But once again, repeating the same method in multiple data sets and getting the same result is not what Hill meant by consistency.  According to Hill,

 

the same results from precisely the same form of inquiry will not invariably greatly strengthen the original evidence. I would myself put a good deal of weight upon similar results reached in quite different ways, e.g. prospectively and retrospectively.

 

This paper does not use “quite different ways” to try to find a correlation.  Indeed, even a single paper cannot provide Hill’s criterion of consistency, which would be an affirmative answer to “Has it been repeatedly observed by different persons, in different places, circumstances and times?”, because a single paper cannot be observed by “different persons”.  Only if the result is found by multiple groups of researchers can it really be said to be consistent.

 

 

I could go on about the other criteria they claim, but I think you get the point.

 

 

Conclusion:  This paper is completely bogus.

 

 

Please leave your comments and questions below.

Our next paper will be “A positive association found between autism prevalence and childhood vaccination uptake across the U.S. population”, Delong, Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A 74:903-916 (May 2011).

 

I will be away from my computer during the next couple of Fridays, so I will tentatively schedule the next installment of the Vaccine Autism Journal Club project to appear on or about May 23.  See you then.

The importance of industrial experience

My latest post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community on the ACS Network is up, on commonly cited reasons why industrial experience is key, and why I think my academic research experience addresses those points.

VAJC, week 1: hepatitis B vaccination in the first month of life among boys born before 1999 (Gallagher and Goodman)

Welcome to the inaugural posting for the Vaccine Autism Journal Club project!

Today we’ll be discussing “Hepatitis B Vaccination of Male Neonates and Autism Diagnosis, NHIS 1997-2002”, by Carolyn M. Gallagher and Melody S. Goodman, Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A 73:1665-1677 (November 2010).

Disclaimer:  I am not an epidemiologist or statistician.  If you have expertise in these fields, and I get the analysis completely wrong, please let me know in the comments!

Question this paper is trying to answer: Is there a difference in the risk for autism diagnosis among boys vaccinated against hepatitis B in the first month of life as compared to later- or never-vaccinated boys?

Background:  Each year, between 3,000 and 5,000 people in the United States die from liver damage or liver cancer caused by the virus hepatitis B.  Vaccination against hepatitis B reduces the risk of infection.  Universal vaccination against hepatitis B was first recommended for U.S. newborns in 1991, and is still recommended today.  You can read the CDC’s fact sheet on hepatitis B and the vaccine here.

Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative.  Mercury is obviously something you want to limit your exposure to.  On the other hand, bacteria can grow in multi-dose vials of vaccines without preservatives, and vaccines contaminated with bacteria have killed people.  As a precautionary measure, thimerosal was removed from hepatitis B vaccines in the U.S. in 1999, and today the hepatitis B vaccine is given only from single-dose vials.  You can read the FDA’s statement on thimerosal in vaccines here.

Methods:  The authors started with the files of 79,883 children using the National Health Interview Survey’s dataset.  This sounds like a big number.

Of those 79,883 children, the authors looked at children who had vaccination records.  This makes sense, because in order to look for an association of autism risk with vaccination against hepatitis B, we need to be able to say with confidence whether a given child got the hepatitis B vaccine or not, and when.

Of the children with vaccination records, the authors looked at children who were born before 1999.  If the hypothesis is that the mercury in thimerosal might be contributing to any correlation between autism and vaccination, it makes sense to only look at thimerosal-containing vaccines, which is to say, vaccines from before 1999.

Of the children in the sample with vaccination records born before 1999, the authors looked at just boys.  Boys have more than a fourfold risk for autism compared to girls.  Because of this discrepancy in autism risk, it’s not unreasonable to think that the factors influencing autism susceptibility might differ between boys and girls.  In order to get cleaner data, then, it makes sense to look at the sexes separately.

From the original sample, after selecting only the boys born after 1999 with vaccination records, the sample size is now 7,399, which still sounds like a big number.  The incidence of autism is low, however, so of those 7,399 boys, only 31 had autism.¹

The authors then looked at how many of the boys had received their first dose of hepatitis B vaccine during the first month of life.  The authors have a funny way of calculating that: “Birth month and year were equal to vaccination month and year for observations identified as having been vaccinated as neonates,” which means that if you were born at 11:55pm on April 30, and were vaccinated ten minutes later at 12:05am on May 1, you would be scored as not having been vaccinated in the first month of life.  As a result, some of the boys who are scored as not having received the vaccine as newborns actually could have received their vaccines earlier than some of the boys scored as having received the vaccine as newborns.  I can understand the limitations presented if vaccination records have only months and years without dates: but if a later cutoff point had been chosen (vaccination within the first two or three months of life, for example), the data would be cleaner.  I wrote to the authors asking why they chose the first month of life as their cutoff: they haven’t written back to me yet.

If the risk of autism is associated with receiving the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine during the first month of life, then we would predict that the boys without autism will have a lower rate of receiving the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine during the first month of life than the boys with autism.

Results: Of the 7,368 boys born before 1999 with vaccination records without autism, 1,258 (17%) received the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine within the first month of life (using this funny definition).  If there’s no association between autism and vaccination as newborns, we therefore expect 17% of the 31 boys with autism to have received the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine as newborns, which comes out to 5.3 boys.  (Obviously, we can’t observe 5.3 boys: we expect to see either 5 or 6 boys.)  If a significantly higher number of boys with autism received the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine as newborns, then we’ll conclude that autism is associated with receiving the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine within the first month of life.

9 boys with autism received the first dose of hepatitis B vaccine within the first month of life, which comes out to 3.7 unexpected additional cases of autism.

Is this impressive?

If the rate of first-month vaccination among boys with autism is also 17%, we can work out the mathematics of how likely it is that we would randomly pick 31 and have 9 or more of the 31 boys we picked be vaccinated in their first month.  If we did that experiment many, many times, we would observe such a result 3.8% of the time, just by random chance alone (this is what is meant by the p value of 0.038 in Table 2).  Is 3.8% a sufficiently low probability to reject the hypothesis that the rate of first-month vaccination among boys with autism is the same as the rate of first-month vaccination among boys without autism?

The convention among statisticians is that a p value of less than 0.05 (5%) is considered significant, but that’s all it is: a convention.  If we accept the 5% threshold, then we’re also accepting a false positive rate of 5% (because 5% of the time, the sample sorted randomly will give you a p value less than 0.05, even though it does in fact have the same incidence).

Discussion:  One major question I have about this paper is the question of testing multiple hypotheses.  If the probability of any one hypothesis’s appearing statistically significant by random chance alone is 5%, then as you test more and more hypotheses, the odds increase that any one of them appears statistically significant gets higher and higher.  If you test 100 hypotheses, then on average, you’ll expect 5 of them to have a p of less than 0.05, just by random chance alone, so you wouldn’t be able to conclude that there’s actually a statistically significant difference for those five hypotheses.

When I make a quick count of the hypotheses tested in this paper², I come up with at least nine.  The probability that none of the nine hypotheses would have a p of less than 0.05, by random chance alone, is only 63%: 37% of the time (more than one in three), when you test nine hypotheses, you’d expect at least one of your nine hypotheses to have a p of less than 0.05.  I suspect there were even more hypotheses tested in this paper that weren’t mentioned (the authors, for example, look at boys, and also look at girls: I suspect they looked at both boys and girls together, but didn’t mention that explicitly, so I’m not including that in my conservative count): if there were, that would make it even more likely that any one of them appear significant when no correlation exists in reality.

I’m disinclined to question the statistical methods of either the senior author, who earned a PhD in biostatistics from Harvard, or the corresponding author, who at the time was earning a PhD in population health and clinical outcomes research: the authors almost certainly know more about statistics than I do.  As I said, I’m not an epidemiologist.  On the other hand, papers making these kinds of basic statistical errors have made it through peer review before, so this kind of error is always something worth considering.

I wrote to the authors asking whether the correction for testing multiple hypotheses was included in their statistical model used to calculate their p of 0.038: they haven’t written back to me yet.

More seriously: just weeks before this paper was published in November 2010, the journal Pediatrics published a paper also addressing the question of whether autism incidence was associated with vaccination with the hepatitis B vaccination during the first month of life.  The Pediatrics paper found no such correlation.  Their methods were somewhat different: they used a case-control approach rather than a probability sample-based approach; they looked at both boys and girls rather than just boys; they were looking at other thimerosal-containing vaccines in addition to hepatitis B vaccines, etc.  All the same, if early vaccination really did increase the risk of autism by threefold, that should have been apparent in the data shown in the Pediatrics paper, and it wasn’t.  I see no reason to think that the Pediatrics paper should be any less trustworthy than the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A paper.

Was the representation in the blog post fair?  The title of the blog post that sparked this project was “22 Medical Studies That Show Vaccines Can Cause Autism”.  The authors are very clear in their concluding paragraph: “As with all cross-sectional secondary data analyses, causality cannot be determined, and this study is subject to bias from unmeasured or uncontrolled confounding factors” (emphasis mine).  Even if you accept the authors’ conclusion that there’s a correlation between vaccination and autism, correlation is not the same as causation.  Are families of higher socioeconomic status more likely to get their children vaccinated early, and are they also more likely to seek out an autism diagnosis, especially for children on the less severe end of the spectrum?  Autism incidence is correlated with higher maternal education: are families with more educated mothers more likely to get their children vaccinated early?  (I would have appreciated a more detailed discussion of what the “unmeasured or uncontrolled confounding factors” might be in the paper’s discussion section, but I understand that sometimes space is limited.)

Secondly, if you’re going to accept that this paper shows a correlation between early hepatitis B vaccination and autism incidence, then you must also accept that this paper shows no correlation between varicella (chicken pox) vaccination and autism, or measles-mumps-rubella vaccination and autism.

Thirdly, even if you accept the results of this paper, remember that this correlation was shown only for boys born before 1999.  This paper does not provide evidence that vaccination since 1999 is in any way correlated with autism incidence, and should not be cited as evidence to defend a decision not to vaccinate children today.

Conclusion:  I don’t think this study was fundamentally flawed.  They took a reasonable approach to a difficult problem.  They started with a seemingly large sample of children, but because the incidence of autism is low and apparently the rate of keeping vaccination records is low, they ended up with only 31 boys born before 1999 with vaccination records and autism.  Nine of those boys were vaccinated within the first month of life, a few more than expected.  Any argument that there really is a correlation between first-month hepatitis B vaccination and autism incidence would have to account for the results of the Pediatrics paper, which found no such correlation with a larger sample size of autistic children.  I think this study just suffered from bad luck: it happened to be the 3.8% of the time that that difference in vaccination rates among boys with vs. without autism would appear statistically significant without any actual difference between the two populations.  I also think the representation of this paper’s findings in the blog post was misleading, for the reasons discussed in the previous section.

Please leave your comments and questions below, but please also make sure you make your comments in a spirit of honesty, fairness, kindness, respect, and trust.

Next week’s paper will be “Do aluminum vaccine adjuvants contribute to the rising prevalence of autism?”, Tomljenovic and Shaw, Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry 105:1489-1499 (November 2011).  See you then.

Endnotes:

1.  Autism diagnosis was scored as follows: “The outcome variable was a dichotomous (yes/no) variable created in response to the following survey question and presentation of a card with a choice of diagnoses: ‘Looking at this list, has a doctor or other professional ever told you that [sample child’s name] had any of these conditions…(i.e., autism)?”  This approach seems perfectly reasonable to me: however, I think an important limitation of this study is that the authors did not follow up to confirm diagnosis or lack of diagnosis.

2.  Hypotheses tested in this paper:

·      Boys born before 1999 with known vaccination status, with vs. without autism

o   Hepatitis B vaccination

o   Non-Hispanic white

o   Two-parent household

o   Maternal education

o   Varicella vaccination

o   Measles-mumps-rubella vaccination

·      Hep B vaccination

o   Girls born before 1999 with known vaccination status, with vs. without autism

o   Boys born before 1999 with known vaccination status, with vs. without Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, congenital or other heart problems

§  (Note: it’s not clear to me whether these were all counted together or individually.  I’m giving the authors the benefit of the doubt here, but it seems likely that these were actually four different hypotheses, one for each condition.)

o   All boys (born both before and after 1999) with known vaccination status, with vs. without autism

The Rejection Letter Honor Roll

My latest post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community blog is up, on why I like getting rejection letters and honoring the very few companies who have sent them to me.

Vaccine Autism Journal Club announcement

The question of vaccines and autism came up again on Facebook, as it often does.  I made my usual comment: the key study that supposedly linked vaccines and autism was falsified; many other studies have tried to reproduce its results, and failed; if you know of a study that does show a link between vaccines and autism, please post a link to it.  Obligingly, someone did post a link to a blog post listing 22 studies that supposedly link vaccines and autism.  There's no shortage of problems with the blog post, but that's not the fault of the authors of the 22 studies.

I'm therefore launching a vaccine autism journal club project.  I will read each of these papers, one per week, and invite you to read them along with me. Each week, I will post my thoughts on the paper here, and we can have a discussion in the comments section. We'll discuss whether the evidence the authors show justifies the conclusions they draw, whether there are any other interpretations that explain the data equally well, and whether the representation of the authors' findings in the original  blog post is fair.

So next week, we'll start with the first paper.  See you then.

Recent ACS Chemical Biology Community blog posts

This week's post is about what I've found most surprising in my experiencing tutoring undergraduates in chemistry.  Hint: I spend about as much time tutoring math as I do chemistry.

Last week's post was about email management systems.  If you scroll down to the comments, you'll see that my email management problem may be solved.

The week before that's was about questions raised by a recent talk I attended on quality control.

Happy reading.  If you have any feedback for me (you'd like to see more of this or less of that), please leave a comment either here or at the blog itself (you'll need to make an ACS Network ID, but it's free).

Neither "skateboarding" nor an "accident"

Letter submitted to the Baltimore Sun:

***

Dear Baltimore Sun,

I was disappointed to see your headline for the story about U.S. Naval Academy midshipman Hans Loewen's untimely death ("Midshipman dies after skateboarding accident", March 30).  From the family memorial, it sounds like Mr. Loewen was run over by a car.

Americans consistently and significantly underestimate the dangers posed by motor vehicles, and headlines like this one contribute to this public misperception and the consequent underinvestment in public transit infrastructure, difficulty in passing distracted driving laws, and, of course, tragic and entirely preventable deaths of pedestrians, cyclists, and skateboarders, not to mention occupants of other motor vehicles.

***

(As far as my own title, I certainly don't mean to suggest that whoever was driving the car intended to kill anyone, but I do very much want to reinforce that crashes aren't accidents.)

To wink, or not to wink: Or, How long should I really spend on that job application?

My second post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community, "To wink, or not to wink: Or, How long should I really spend on that job application?", is up.

new ACS Chemical Biology Community blogging gig

I'm very honored to be blogging for the ACS Chemical Biology Community on the ACS Network (and no, you don't have to be an ACS member to read my blog posts).  My first post, "So you're just going to sit at home?", is all about how looking for a job is a full-time job.

word of the day: confrere

The word of the day is confrere:

Etymology:  Middle English confrere (compare frere, Friar), < French confrere (13th cent. in Littré) = Provençal confraire, Catalan confrare, Spanish co(n)frade, Italian confrate, medieval Latin confrāter, < con- together with + frāter brother. As a naturalized English word (of which the pronunciation would now be /kɒnˈfrɪə(r)/ or /-ˈfraɪə(r)/ ) it appears to have become obsolete in 17th cent.; but it has been taken back into frequent use as a borrowing from modern French, and is usually written confrère. 

1. A fellow-member of a fraternity, religious order, college, guild, etc., a colleague in office. 

2. A fellow-member of a learned profession, scientific body, or the like.  [ < modern French.] (OED)

"The paradox is that, just as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo dramatizes paranoia with a texture of specificity, the paranoid types are, in their own way, often much more empirically minded - willing to follow the evidence where it leads, even if that is right through the looking glass - than their more cautious confreres.  it is, in other words, possible to construct an intricate scenario that is both cautiously inferential, richly detailed, on its own terms complete, and yet utterly delusional."

 - Adam Gopnik, "Closer than that: the assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later", 4 November 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: fantod

The word of the day is fantod:

Etymology:  ? An unmeaning formation suggested by fantastic adj. and n., fantasy n., etc.: compare fantigue. 

A crotchety way of acting; a fad. (OED)

"I do care about them, but what they don't know, and I would never have the heart to tell them, is that the idea of their no longer being a married couple bothers me not at all.  My only fear is that, separate, no one else would have them, that I'd get stuck with them one at a time or have to watch them wither away in solitude.  These scenarios give me the fantods.  Am I selfish?  Yes and no.  I'm a bachelor and hope someday to be an old bachelor."

 - Thomas McGuane, "Weight Watchers", 4 November 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: bentonite

The phrase of the day is bentonite:

Min.

A clay found in the Fort Benton strata of the Cretaceous of Wyoming. Also, any of several clayey deposits containing montmorillonite which have various practical applications. (OED)

"The doctor who'd hired me wanted a marshy spot behind the house excavated for a pond, and I had my Nicaraguan, Angel, out there with a backhoe, trying to find the spring down in the mud so that we could plumb it and spread some bentonite to keep the water from running out."

 - Thomas McGuane, "Weight Watchers", 4 November 2013 The New Yorker