A couple of people have emailed me about this story. In 2001, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published a study in which a group of women who wanted to become pregnant by in vitro fertilization were prayed for, without their knowledge, by others. Astonishingly, the paper found that being prayed for doubled your chances of getting pregnant. We all know that praying for oneself can have positive medical consequences if it makes you happy, relaxed and gives you a positive outlook on life. But this paper got a lot of coverage at the time because, obviously, it went so far beyond this. The authors were Daniel Wirth, a lawyer and believer in the supernatural, Kwang Cha who directs a fertility clinic in L.A., and Rogerio Lobo, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Lobo is also on the board of the journal. This week, taking time off from his scholarly research, one of the authors pled guilty to federal charges of fraud.

Daniel P. Wirth … was accused of conspiring with another man to defraud several banks, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and Adelphia Communications, a cable-television company. According to the charges, the two men bilked Adelphia of $2.1-million. They pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit mail fraud and bank fraud. Both men will face as much as five years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines when they are sentenced, in September. They have agreed to forfeit more than $1-million seized during an investigation of the case.

The fraud case isn’t about the paper. But what do Wirth’s co-authors think now? Well, in the best traditions of being the Senior Author, Lobo now denies all knowledge of the research:

Dr. Lobo’s secretary, Reba Nosoff, described Dr. Cha as a visiting professor and said he had completed the study without Dr. Lobo’s help … Dr. Cha, said Ms. Nosoff, “brought this study to Dr. Lobo to go over because he could hardly believe the results. Dr. Lobo said it’s a good study, and it is proper. So he put his stamp of approval on it, that’s all.” … [The DHHS’] research-protections office said in the letter that it would not take action against Columbia in part because Dr. Lobo “first learned of the study from Dr. Cha 6-12 months after the study was completed. Dr. Lobo primarily provided editorial review and assistance with publication.”

Ah, the old stamp of approval. I need to get one of those, to increase my publication count. Dr Cha was not available for comment. As Bellesiles had his Cramer and Lott his Lambert, these guys had Bruce Flamm, an OB/GYN who teaches at Irvine. He wrote letters to the journal, but didn’t get any satisfaction so he wrote an article for Skeptic Magazine instead. Apparently he and others had complained about the paper, which had a bizarre and indefensible research design on top of everything else. The Journal dropped the paper from its website after Flamm published his article and are claiming the “paper is being scrutinized, and there will be a statement that will appear in a forthcoming issue.” Meanwhile, both Cha and Lobo have managed to avoid getting quoted directly about their role. I pray that we’ll hear from them soon.

For a few years in graduate school I wrote a regular column for the Daily Princetonian, Princeton’s main student newspaper. I got into a bit of trouble once or twice over it, notably for a piece I wrote out of irritation with the local chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ.

I was reminded of this when I learned, via Billmon, of the strong Christian beliefs of General Counsel Mary Walker. She led the legal team that wrote the recently leaked memo arguing that there were no legal considerations, domestic or foreign, that prevented the President from authorizing torture. She is also a co-founded of the Professional Women’s Fellowship, an offshoot of the CCC. Philip Carter at Intel Dump has described the memo as ‘a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct’. Here is Walker in an interview about her beliefs, followed by a snippet of her report:

Walker: “Making moral decisions in the workplace where it is easy to go along and get along takes courage. It takes moral strength and courage to say, ‘I’m not going to do this because I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.’”
The report: Officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders “may be inferred to be lawful” and are “disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.”

With just a little more effort here, we could push through to the world of Jack Lint, the character played by Michael Palin in Brazil.

It’s fifty years since the death of mathematician, code-breaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing. Turing committed suicide after being forced to take estrogen for a year to “cure” him of his homosexuality. I read Andrew Hodges’ excellent biography of Turing when I was in College. I remember Hodges noting that from about 1935 to his death he had a new and basically unprecedented idea about every five or six years. A remarkable character.

With all the hoopla over D-Day remembrances, I found myself wondering whether remembering the anniversary had become more or less important in the last twenty years. To this end, I spent twenty minutes getting LexisNexis to email me New York Times stories mentioning D-Day since 1980, running it through the world’s kludgiest Perl script to clean it and drop irrelevant entries¹, and looking at the data in R.

The result is the figure to the right, which shows the number of stories per year over a 25-year period, though of course the 2004 data only go to June 6th of this year. The number of stories per year varies from zero to 120 with a median of about 17. The two biggest years by far are 1984 and 1994, the 40th and 50th anniversaries respectively. A smoothed regression line picks out a gentle but consistent upward trend in coverage. There are more stories as time goes by. It’s not surprising that the big anniversaries are the most covered. Beyond that, coverage seems to be increasing as the D-Day cohort ages. The contemporary political benefits of making a big deal of such a praiseworthy event probably amplify this trend. This would lead us to expect the D-Day commemorations to decline as time goes by, though on the other hand World War II lives on in our culture (as a good war as well as the biggest one) in a way that most other wars do not.

Of course none of this tells us anything about the substance of the commemoration and whether that’s changing over time. Historical events are remembered in the light of present-day concerns, and very well-commemorated events or major monuments are reinterpreted or forgotten as circumstances change. I wonder how long this upward trend will continue: it’s a question of whether D-Day is tied to the cohort who fought it, or whether its commemoration is attached to its veterans or whether it will become a more general event as time goes by. Probably the former, but it’s hard to say.

¹ Mainly paid death notices of people who had served on D-Day — casual Lexis-Nexis queriers should beware of this kind of thing.

The best-selling song in Ireland at the moment is a strike for local terms of abuse over international ones. A group from Cork — Ireland’s second-largest city, its real capital, and my home town — is dominating the charts with “The Langer,” outselling such international cursers as Eamon and Frankee. “Langer” is a Cork term meaning — well, it can mean a lot of things, but this clip from the song gives you the primary meaning. The song itself isn’t destined to be a classic of contemporary folk music, but seeing as recent political events have caused me to use the word myself a few times to uncomprehending Americans, I can now point them towards this. The song is also notable for being the first with a full verse as Gaeilge to reach number one in Ireland. Appropriately the verse is about langers who think only they can speak Irish. Full lyrics are below the fold, courtesy of The Cork Diaries.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden takes a contrarian line on a story about Michael Gunn, an English student who got caught for plagiarism but is now suing because claims he was not informed it was wrong and was shocked — shocked — to be told it was. “I hold my hands up. I did plagiarise. I never dreamt it was a problem” says the guy, “but they have taken all my money for three years and pulled me up the day before I finished. If they had pulled me up with my first essay at the beginning and warned me of the problems and consequences, it would be fair enough. But all my essays were handed back with good marks, and no one spotted it.” Teresa says:

My first reaction was “Nice try, kid.” On second thought, he does have a point. It’s not enough of a point, but he has one.

I don’t think he has a point.

As a devotee of structured procrastination I am constantly on the lookout for things to be doing instead of whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. As long as what you’re doing has some value (even if it has less value than what you’re supposed to be doing) then you can end up accomplishing a reasonable amount, except for that thing you avoided doing. But I’ve learned the hard way that installing and, especially, upgrading software does not fall into the category of Inadvertently Productive Activity. Upgrading is basically guaranteed to not work properly, break something or otherwise create some unexpected and unpleasant effect. Upgrading can be perversely satisfying because you then have to fix whatever it is that got broken, which can involve a considerable amount of clever diagnosis and problem-solving to bring you back to the point where you were a yesterday, before you upgraded. But this is not a healthy approach to life.

This is all common knowledge amongst software developers so I’m surprised that no-one told The Royal Bank of Canada about it. They upgraded some software and now “today is the fifth day in which [it] cannot tell its 10 million Canadian customers with any certainty how much money is in their accounts.” The bank can’t process automatic payroll deposits. Sadly, though maybe not surprisingly, this isn’t a symmetric error: the bank still knows who owes it money.

The stories are vague about what bit of software went wrong exactly. It would be nice to think that Microsoft is somehow to blame, but this is very unlikely. Although Microsoft’s products are up to trivial tasks like writing letters or making dogs fly or running the electronic voting systems of the United States, no-one would trust them with something like a transactional database, an air-traffic control system or an electricity grid. Applications for stuff like that are usually written in languages you have never heard of, like APL. I only know about APL because my colleague Ron Breiger uses it to write routines to do social network analysis. He gave me a tutorial in it once. Unlike most languages, APL has more than a hundred primitive operations, each with its own symbol. You need a special keyboard to work it. Ron insists that it’s really quite intuitive, but alas unlike most professors he is a genius. Because it has so many primitives, APL is a pithy language. Here is a sample APL program to find all the prime numbers less than or equal to a specified integer:

That’s the whole thing. A full explanation is available, but not from me. I recommend this page which contains opinions about APL and better-known languages like C (“A language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language”), C++ (“an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog”) and FORTRAN (“Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice”).

There is a broader point here about the sociology of credit and confidence in highly-automated contexts that are subject to failure. But mainly I think the lesson is, Don’t Upgrade.

Cribbed from Dirk Eddelbuettel’s email signature on the R-help List …

FEATURE: VW Beetle license plate seen in California

Well I thought it was funny.

Draft Syllabus for Soc 508, a graduate seminar/survey course in the Sociology of Culture. Coming this Fall¹ to a University of Arizona near you. Comments welcome.

¹ If August 24th can count as the Fall. The University of Arizona thinks it can.

Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor whom Richard Nixon attempted to fire in the Saturday Night Massacre has died at the age of 92. I use a video about those events in my social theory class, when we read Weber, because it nicely illustrates Weber’s views about authority and bureaucracy.

As the video goes on, you can draw an organizational chart of the official relationships between the main players — Nixon, Agnew and Haig in the White House; Cox, Elliott Richardson, William Ruckleshaus and Robert Bork at the Justice Department — and see how Nixon’s efforts to fire Cox were, in effect, an effort to act like he was the King rather than the President. Nixon didn’t have the authority to fire Cox even though he had the authority to fire Cox’s superiors. After Attorney General Richardson and his deputy Ruckleshaus had refused Nixon’s demands and themselves been fired, Robert Bork — then Solicitor General and third in line at Justice — agreed to do the job. Weber’s analysis of office-holding is nicely illustrated in Richardson’s refusal: “Methodical provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfilment of these duties and for the execution of the corresponding rights … When the principle of jurisdictional ‘competency’ is fully carried through, hierarchical subordination — at least in public office — does not mean that the ‘higher’ authority is simply authorized to take over the business of the ‘lower.’ ” In the video, Bork is interviewed about his decision and in his defence says “Cox had done nothing wrong, but the President can’t be faced down in public by a subordinate official.” When paired with Cox’s famous statement that night — “Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people” — you get a perfect articulation of the difference between traditional and legal-rational authority in a democracy.

The interesting thing is that you don’t have to stop there. Because it’s clear from the video that Richardson’s great personal integrity (Nixon called him a “pious son of a bitch”) carried him through Nixon’s efforts to pressure him, and the following day Richardson got a standing ovation from the staff at Justice as he formally announces his resignation. So two other Weberian ideas — that office-holding is a vocation, and that charisma can persist in bureaucracies — are also relevant.

It’s an effective way to teach this bit of Weber, because he isn’t the most charismatic writer in the world himself, and although the students have heard of Watergate, the details of the constitutional crisis that culminated in the Saturday Night Massacre are new to them.

Eugene Volokh has an interesting post about unsolved or unexplored issues in First Amendment doctrine. His topic is Professional-Client Speech:

Many professional-client relationships — lawyer-client, psychotherapist-patient, accountant-client, even often doctor-patient — mostly consist of speech. Sometimes, of course, they involve physical conduct (surgery) or the submission of statements to the government (a lawyer arguing in court). But often they consist solely of two people talking with each other, one asking questions and the other giving advice. And yet this communication is often subject to speech restrictions and speech compulsions that would generally be forbidden in other contexts.

He gives five examples, including professional negligence, professional advice being dependent on a license (a prior restraint in other contexts), and banned sexual relations between professionals and clients (doctors, etc). “What should be the proper analysis be under the First Amendment?” he asks. I have no idea, of course, because I’m not a lawyer. But sociologically, these restraints are generally self-imposed should be seen as constitutive of professional authority in the first place. A professional association that endorsed this kind of lawsuit would be making a big mistake.

Professions claim a monopoly on legitimate knowledge or expertise about something — medicine, dentistry, the law and so on. Professional societies organize to establish and enforce a monopoly on this knowledge. They do it in various ways: by setting up professional schools, by licensing practitioners, by lobbying the state to formally recognize and guarantee their legitimacy while banning their competitors, and so on. Because there are often multiple claimants to professional experise, the system of professions is a complex ecology of social actors trying to establish or entrench their professional status while fighting against those whom they want to label as quacks or impostors. The fringes of professional life are full of the authority-claims of upstart semi-professions (chiropractors, homeopaths, economists¹) and concomitant efforts to leverage existing professional authority into new areas (intellectual property law, bioethics, social work).

In their efforts to establish legitimacy, particularly in the eyes of the state, professions adopt codes of conduct that bind their members to standards of practice. Professions agree with Superman that with great power comes great responsibility, with the caveat that with great responsibility comes the ability to police oneself. The benefits of being licensed to practice law or medicine by the state are paid for, in part, by deliberately giving up some of the opportunities that come one’s way as a consequence of holding that license. This contributes to the legitimacy of the field as a whole and provides further ammunition to fight charlatans and quacks who can now be identified by the absence of such codes and their attendant willingness to go into business, party or sleep with their clients. You see this clearly in cases where professionalization hasn’t happened. Management is a good example. Despite the proliferation of business schools and MBA programs, you don’t need a license to be a manager. As Rakesh Khurana — whose book I warmly recommend, and who, I’m delighted to discover, has a weblog — commented in last week’s Economist, professions are all about renouncing something, and managers in the U.S. haven’t shown much interest in giving things up in the past few years.

So, First Amendment Law in this area is probably unexplored because the kind of professional who would take a First Amendement case because she wasn’t allowed to knowingly give bad advice, lie to and sleep with her client, and then blab to her friends about his medical condition, is ipso facto likely to have her license revoked for unprofessional conduct. Moreover, the desire of professions to police themselves leads to systems of internal review and the like aimed at preventing cases of misconduct from making it to the courts. This isn’t to say that such cases are unheard of, though I imagine it’s much more likely that it would originate from an incompletely institutionalized profession, or perhaps one presently in conflict with a competitor. Indeed, one of Eugene’s examples concerns bad advice given by marriage counselors.

All of which says nothing about the legal questions of First Amendment Doctrine, I suppose, but as I say I’m more interested in the sociology of professions. Note that the ability to pose questions like this — that the First Amendment might impinge on, and take precedence over, professional rules of conduct — is itself an aspect of the professional power of the law. Lawyers are in the happy position of being able to sit in judgment on themselves, and have the unique capacity to regulate and adjudicate disputes between other professions. And all billable by the hour, too. But of course it would be wrong to abuse that power.

¹ Sorry, sorry.

The incomparable Fafblog interviews Donald Rumsfeld:

FAFBLOG: Great to have you here Donald Rumsfeld! Lets get right to it an start by askin: what is with this torture thing, and how long have you known about it?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Good gosh, that’s a tricky one there. Was it torture? Were detainees indefinitely held for days with bags over their heads? Yes. Were testicles electrocuted? You bet. Were orifices molested, flesh ripped by dogs, and nostils raped? Almost certainly. But torture? Hard to say.
FB: Wow - that IS hard to say.
DR: It sure is.

There’s plenty more.

Successful commencement speakers are notoriously difficult to find. If you’re not boring people to death you are likely to be ticking someone off. With this in mind, the Crooked Timber Talent Agency is pleased to announce its list of 2004-2005 Commencement Speakers to the Administrations of all interested degree-granting institutions of higher learning, high schools, kindergartens, day-care centers and also right-wing think-tanks posing as any of the above. A brief selection of our speakers follows.

Saddam Hussein. Bio: Former President of Iraq. Speech topics: The glorious history of Iraq; the importance of law and order; outdoor living and survival skills. General theme: The importance of following your dreams; bouncing back from unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: Like Ted Nugent, but with broader musical fan base.

Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Richard Foster and Larry Lindsey. Bio: Former administration officials now collectively known as “The Mayberry Quartet.” Group bookings only. Speech topics: The meaning of loyalty; public service as its own reward; starting a new career later in life. General theme: The importance of following your dreams; bouncing back from unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: Barbershop quartet numbers at post-commencement reception.

John Lott. Bio: At various times very nearly on the faculty of several major universities, currently at the American Enterprise Institute. Speech Topics: Gun control in the United States and elsewhere; public policy; the dangers of the Internet. General theme: The importance of believing your dreams rather than the evidence, or presenting the former as the latter; bouncing back from unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: Much loved by graduands who faked all their physics problem sets in sophomore year.

Ahmed Chalabi. Bio: Future President of Iraq. Speech Topics: The glorious history of Iraq; the importance of law and order; indoor living and survival skills. General theme: The importance of being able to get other people to follow your dreams; causing unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: None.

Judith Miller. Bio: New York Times reporter who as recently as a month ago was personally storing Saddam Hussein’s WMD stocks in her basement at home, according to one Iraqi scientist. Speech Topics: The overwhelming danger posed by Iraq; compromised sources I have known but not suspected. General theme: The importance of believing other people’s dreams; bouncing back from unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: Sincerity above all.

Many other speakers available for booking, most at short notice. Reasonable rates. Speeches guaranteed short. Email for details today.