Senator’s Daughter Found – Mrs. Hallowell Irwin, daughter of the late Senator Thomas B. Harper, who mysteriously disappeared from her home in Jenkintown, several weeks ago, was found in a hotel in New York and brought back to home at Jenkintown on Saturday. Although no reason is ascribed for Mrs. Irwin’s absence, which kept her relatives worried for some time, it is believed that she became despondent immediately after her father’s death and wandered away.

Two sentences, but a whole world of mystery.

Also, unrelated but in the same article:

Boy Dies of Lockjaw – Valek Dranaka, aged 17 years, of Bridgeport, died on Saturday in the Norristown Hospital of lockjaw, which developed from blood poisoning, following a wound on the leg near the ankle, the result of having been struck with the iron point of a bobbin while at work in Loes’ mill, Bridgeport.

Just a reminder that life was harder, death more frequent. This young boy, who should have been in high school, but was working in a mill, killed because his nicked ankle became infected. Think about that the next time you hear someone cranking on about modern medicine.

…and when I get one, it’ll have this:

Hokey smokes!

I can draw a direct line between this interest and the fact that both times my parents took me to Walt Disney World as a kid (at age 5 and again at 10), we stayed at the Polynesian Resort. Something about the combination of indoor fountains and air conditioning still gets to me. (I can draw a similar line to my love of monorails.)

That’s why I loved this quick review of the “Boutiki” shop at the resort. I won’t steal any of Shawn Slater’s images, so you’ll have to click the link yourself.

WikiAnswers: What are the advantages of a saltwater swimming pool? I had my first saltwater pool swim this weekend. My god, it is a thing of beauty.

Kayak.com’s Explore feature: One good reason to have tactical pants is traveling. I mean, really, why look like a chump when traveling? This is a nice feature for midafternoon daydreaming.

It is from a collection of portraits of rabid animals from a Mexican school lesson sheet

The baby teeth are still nothing to sneeze at

But this isn’t that story. No, this is a story about how these gigantic predatory, be-toothed demon creatures loved their babies.

Yes, gentle reader, scientists publishing in the Public Library of Science describe the discovery of Megalodon nurseries (awww!) where hatchling sharks were protected by their enormous mothers until they themselves were big enough to swallow an entire Grateful Dead cover band in one go (including their van, most likely). How sweet.

(via Everyone PLoS ONE’s community blog)

I’ve been thinking about doing this for some time now, ever since I first heard that Donald Rumsfeld used one, not that I plan to model myself off of Rumsfeld. The truth is, my job involves a lot of staring at the computer, which is a lot like most jobs nowadays. Unless I’m off to meetings, where I then sit, I’m not moving around much at all during the workday. Add the fact that I’m no longer biking into the office, and this means more expandable-waist khakis in the near future.

Of course, the danger here is that, as the new guy, everyone will think I’m nuts, no matter how many times I send around links to stories about the benefits of standing desks. But people have questioned my sanity in the past. I’m not terribly worried.

I explain it to folks this way, not only is standing healthier for you, people tend to think better on their feet. I have always stood while making phone calls, it is just easier for me to think that way…and yes, I tend to wave my arms a bit. After a few hours in a chair, I begin to feel tired, dull and stupid. That’s just how it is. For me at least.

Already I have found that typing is just as comfortable while standing. I’ve also taken off my shoes so that I can bounce on the balls of my feet when I feel the need to stretch a bit. Of course, this means I’ll have to be more attentive to the holes in my socks…and I probably should buy an air freshener…

The desk in question is by Safco (here), and it was entirely up to the facilities people. There was discussion of building a shelf or an adjustable arm, but a new desk was likely the best solution.

Truth be told, it wobbles a bit when I start typing, which is due, in part, to the inherent bounciness of keyboard trays. They facilities folks will be screwing it to a cleat in the wall for more stability, but I have a feeling I’ll need to take the keyboard off the tray and a put it in front of the iMac for comfort as well.

Here’s a picture of the setup from earlier this morning:

I think I’m going to need to put together a little arm or shelf to hold my phone.

Next, of course, is installing a treadmill.

Of course, the beauty of mucking about on my little netbook is that my boot USB drive makes all mistakes forgivable…provided I remember to save my documents on the SD card.

Sometimes I think it you are less likely to see an exaggeration in a corporate release about a clinical trial than in an academic press release. The corporate flack is beholden to a separate set of rules much stricter than those seen in non-profit academic centers. (In general, however, they overcompensate their bland, corporate releases by being complete PsITAs when it comes to pitching their stories. What isn’t generally well known is how hard they try leaning on academic flacks to do their dirty work for them. In my experience, at least. )

According to Goldacre, among the chief flack crimes is not correctly depicting the size and quality of the research described. I know from experience that some press release editors frown on including such materials, assuming that good journalists would follow up and actually read the study and speak to the reporters. That might have been a safe assumption at one point, but no longer, since many press releases get picked up and used online (and often in print) verbatim.

Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire took one year’s worth of press releases from 10 medical research centres {The Annals tipsheet, quoted below, mentions 20, hmmm… –Greg}, a mixture of the most eminent universities and the most humble, as measured by their US News & World Report ranking. These centres each put out around one press release a week, so 200 were selected at random and analysed in detail.

Half of them covered research done in humans, and as an early clue to their quality, 23% didn’t bother to mention the number of participants – it’s hard to imagine anything more basic – and 34% failed to quantify their results. But what kinds of study were covered? In medical research we talk about the “hierarchies of evidence”, ranked by quality and type. Systematic reviews of randomised trials are the most reliable: because they ensure that conclusions are based on all of the information, rather than just some of it; and because – when conducted properly – they are the least vulnerable to bias.

He is absolutely right of course, depicting the quality of the study is every bit as important as spelling the lead researchers name correctly. (To be totally honest, I’ve probably failed on both accounts in the course of the hundreds of clinical science releases I’ve written.) And I couldn’t imagine writing a release that didn’t report the number of people in a study. However, it is entirely appropriate for such information to be placed further down in the release. Not buried, mind you, along with the boilerplate and the acknowledgments-you-know-people-won’t-read-but-you-add-anyway-to-appease-the-scientist’s-collaborators. It is also very tricky to explain studies in terms lay audiences might understand without including a few extra paragraphs explaining what a P value means. Again, there is a middle ground, but it behooves flacks to mention the statistical significance of the study they’re promoting. Even a small study with few people can be significant, a fact lost on most folks, flacks especially.

Probably a bigger crime, one that Goldacre doesn’t address directly and is probably not part of the study, is the inability to distinguish between animal and human trials. Many institutions shy away from mentioning animal models as a rule, since people often react angrily — even violently — to the shocking news that you may be working on lab rats. In the past, I’ve used the term “animal model” instead of specifying rat or mouse, which were usually the animal involved. If the study involved a primate, I would have to say something and risk the reaction.

I haven’t read the Dartmouth study myself, but it doesn’t appear that the sin of omission isn’t the only source of exaggeration noted in releases. Here is how the Annals of Internal Medicine’s press tipsheet summarized it:

The news media is often criticized for exaggerating science stories and deliberately sensationalizing the news. However, researchers argue that sensationalism may begin with the journalists’ sources. The researchers reviewed 200 press releases from 20 academic medical centers. They concluded that academic press releases often promote research with uncertain relevance to human health without acknowledging important cautions or limitations. However, since the researchers did not analyze news coverage stemming from the press releases, they could not directly link problems with press releases with exaggerated or sensational reporting. The study authors suggest that academic centers issue fewer releases about preliminary research, especially unpublished scientific meeting presentations. By issuing fewer press releases, academic centers could help reduce the chance that journalists and the public are misled about the importance or implications of medical research.

The problem is that the act of sending out a press release fundamentally risks exaggeration by calling attention to something. Even if you are perfectly clear that the study is small and adds but an incremental bit of information to the larger scientific world, the very fact you are writing a release is calling attention to it. And, of course, you can write the least sensational press release in the world and still have it taken out of context by a reporter looking for lurid headlines.

I’d also like to know what the researchers consider cautions or limitations. According to the Goldacre piece, 58% of releases lack these sorts of things. That’s a fairly high number that, doing the gut check, might be a matter of perspective. Would an un-read disclaimer — in the “forward-looking views”-sense — be viewed as proper caution? Were some releases entirely “cautious” while others not so complete in their cautioning?

So, should institutions send out fewer releases? Some, perhaps, but that’s a superficial answer. I know some places that have instituted a quota system on public relations people and use press releases as a measure of productivity. I think that is a poor practice that practically guarantees shoddy releases, of course. Then again, I’ve worked in places where I would have sent out twice the amount of news releases if I had the time, because the science there was just that plentiful and interesting. It isn’t all that cut and dry.

Press officers are always told to look for clinical relevance in basic science stories. They are told that journalists won’t write about it otherwise. This has a certain bit of truth to it, of course. The journalist you pitch must often, in turn, pitch an editor, who will generally ask about “the point of it all.” The horror.

The majority of biomedical press releases I have written have been about laboratory results. Basic science stuff, molecules bopping into each other, and all. And here you must work hard not to exaggerate the potential clinical use of those findings. Releases like these are often written with the trade press in mind as often — if not more often — than the popular press.

Why? Because, when done well, it helps establish researchers and their institutions as productive and interesting. Because basic science does, in fact, lead to advanced medicine. Because the noise beats signal out there and someone must shepherd the good science around the din.

Still, it is up to the press officer to be an advocate for their institution as well as responsibly advocate the science. That’s where it helps to find a useful story angle to pitch…which, when done thoughtlessly, inevitably leads to the use of the words “holy grail” or, worse, a reference to Star Trek. The trick is to pitch the story behind the science as well as the science itself in order to find the relevance, a feat that is far easier said than done.

With fewer science reporters out there it has become — for better or worse — incumbent upon public affairs people (PIOs, Flacks) to tell the story right the first time.