"At the University of Florida, our professors do fearless research" -- title to a piece by the UoF PR department, milking an easy win for all it's worth.
You can’t eat PR.
You can't eat dermatology products either.
I don't think it is reasonable to require research conclusions to be censored or changed just because big money is involved.
Why don't the opposition fund some independent research or independent replication study if they believe so strongly that this research needs to be shown incorrect.
Agree. Related thought: the influence of lawyers in tech firms - witness the draconian EULAs users are 'forced' to accept with a false binary choice of accept or not - and the role that corporate law staff have had in software development, by effectively limiting the rights of users. It seems to me that many technology firms copy-and-paste the soul of EULAs to protect themselves (against the worse cases that may aris…
I think this legal arms race is a consequence of America's overly-litigious and profitable legal system. These EULAs are the equivalent of warning labels on soda bottles that loosely read "Warning: Contents under pressure, don't point at your eyes"... who is that written for? We laugh and call it unnecessary, but that warning exists because there is precedent that must now be defended against. When those ludicrous ca…
Corporations (and their shareholders oh god) are not poor persecuted victims. Corporations govern our lives. They should not be free to do whatever they want. With the intentional erosion of most means to settle civil disputes, the court is the last refuge for the individual against a private group. The people behind tort reform (you know who they are) don't even care about the specific "frivolous" lawsuits themselves. They care about getting rid of environmental, consumer, and worker protections in general. Because they stand in the way of profits.
Very few physicians are tenured professors today. Many stay at the associate or assistant level.
At most American institutions, associate professors are tenured.
Thanks for the correction. However, many doctors that are in mainly clinical practice but publish occasionally under the university umbrella do not generally on a tenure track. So their title may be associate professor, but they are not generally tenured. However, if they spend a significant amount of time in research they may still have tenure track.
After just finishing "Bad Blood", the book by John Carreyrou on the Theranos fraud, this particular passage in the article had me incensed: > This week a lawyer for Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery, which is backed by private equity and is the largest dermatology practice in the United States, called the general counsel at the University of Florida, where two of the authors are employed, demanding specific c…
This isn't really about the lawyers though. It's about industries getting so large and so centralized that it becomes economical to throw money (aka. lawyers) at quieting a dissenting paper.
It might not even be to try to get changes made, it might have its value in researchers thinking about how irritating and time consuming and possibly stressful it is to speak up next time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest... That woman burned the skin off her genatalia when McDonald's served a far too hot coffee. After they refused to pay a small amount to cure her injuries (remember, no socialized health care in USA), she sued. She offered to settle, again for a small amount to cover expenses, and McDonald's refused again McDonald's launched a massive PR campaign to mock he…
Nobody like to remember that folks went there because the coffee was extra hot. She didn't get burned because McD's served hot coffee - she'd been drinking that for years? She got burned because just as she took the top off to put in sugar, her grandson gunned the motor and spilled it. So who's 'fault' is all this? In law you can sue for money from anybody even remotely connected with an injury. So she chose McD's in…
"her grandson gunned the motor and spilled it."
Source? Everything I have read said the car was parked.
After just finishing "Bad Blood", the book by John Carreyrou on the Theranos fraud, this particular passage in the article had me incensed: > This week a lawyer for Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery, which is backed by private equity and is the largest dermatology practice in the United States, called the general counsel at the University of Florida, where two of the authors are employed, demanding specific c…
There is nothing “thuggish” about demanding corrections of factual errors, and it’s not “gross and morally bankrupt” to engage to talk about those changes instead of waiting for the damage to be done after inaccurate facts are published. The law protects you from that. I suspect that you’re presupposing, without a basis, that the cited errors are not errors but rather unflattering characterizations.
He had a long and successful career under the patronage of eugenicists and scientific racists who hung on to obsolete ideas after their time had past.
I'm not sure that knee-jerkingly smearing him (by association) as a racist eugenicist quite disproves the point that tenure is not protection from misguided attacks.
Shockingly, very few things protect you from people saying bad things about you on the Internet.
After just finishing "Bad Blood", the book by John Carreyrou on the Theranos fraud, this particular passage in the article had me incensed: > This week a lawyer for Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery, which is backed by private equity and is the largest dermatology practice in the United States, called the general counsel at the University of Florida, where two of the authors are employed, demanding specific c…
>> I'm disgusted by these high-powered law firms... It's not the lawyers so much as the private equity folks who hired them. Asking lawyers to forego business on [subjective] moral grounds is similar to doing so for engineers - like recent refusals to work on government projects. Some will, some won't.
This is the moral equivalent of "I was just following orders." You always have a choice whether to engage in unethical behavior, and subverting the scientific process certainly qualifies as such.
> So who's 'fault' is all this? Uh, it was McDonald's fault, as proven by the several legal battles this woman won. This continuous questioning of settled arguments is absurd. They served the woman boiling hot coffee - it's simply not drinkable or safe to handle at that temperature (and shouldn't even have been brewed over 180...)
Yet she had handled it before, as had millions of other people. No, this was a case of 'who can I sue to get paid for my injury', which is an epidemic these days. That's also well known, and its disengenous (and massively naieve) to assume that winning a legal battle means you are in the right
I believe if you are recieved dangerously hot beverages(that could melt your skin) where there is no context to expect the beverage could harm you, and are injured from it, then it shouldn’t be your fault. If I ask for a glass of water from a restaurant, should I handle the glass of water as if it could give me frostbite? What if they handed me super cooled water that damaged my hand as I accidentally touched the surface as I ate food? How can it be my fault when there is no reasonable danger to be aware of?