Okay, okay, I’m more than two years behind schedule. But we’ve finally managed to upload links to most of the papers, documents and visuals referenced in The Wisdom of Whores.

You can find anything referenced in the Footnotes here (that’s the notes labeled with asterisks which appear at the bottom of pages in the text). You can find anything referenced in the Endnotes here (that’s the notes labeled with numbers which appear at the end of the book). Links to full text versions of most of scientific papers and reports referenced in the book are also provided in the Bibliography.

Happy Christmas, and all other holidays. And thanks to MP and NL for their help with this, as well as for enriching my life.

A handful of politicians have proposed a bill (HR6845) (pdf) which would prohibit NIH and other government bodies from demanding that taxpayers have free access to the results of research they pay for. We’re not talking about access to data, only to copies of papers published with results. We’re not even talking about instant access — journals can hoard papers for up to a year before they have to post them to Pubmed Central. But still the journals are kicking up a fuss.

One hopes that this absurd rear-guard action will be laughed out of the committee room. If you want to help make sure that it is, please let Congress know that you think taxpayers have a right to share in the knowledge that they pay for

“Scientists accuse Tories of ‘despicable’ interference”, yells a headline in the Globe and Mail. “An article published in the International Journal of Drug Policy charges that the Conservative government interfered in the work of independent scientific bodies, attempted to muzzle scientists and deliberately misrepresented research findings because it is ideologically opposed to harm-reduction programs,” reports Andre Picard. (I’d love to provide you with a link to the original article; the IJDP is the official journal of the International Harm Reduction Association, but they’ve decided to limit their policy impact by publishing through a restricted access Elsevier journal.)

At issue, on the face of it, is funding for research and a continuation of an exemption from national law that allows the safe injecting site to operate as a research site. But the real issue is, as always, whether the conservative government wants science or political expediency to inform its drugs policy.

Last month, an independent committee published a very detailed report about the impact of the Insite safe injecting space, which serves around 600 people a day, has helped over 300 people stay alive after an overdose, and overseen 220,000 safe injections. Fans of the programme cherry-pick the positive findings: more hard-core users getting into treatment, fewer people shooting up in public, less needle sharing, while opponents of harm reduction highlight the downsides. They revolve mostly around our inability to prove the effect of the programme, the usual chestnut of public health prevention. They complain too about the limited impact of the programme — it reaches only five percent of injectors in Vancouver’s downtown east side. But that’s in part the tyranny of a “pilot” set-up. It seems to me that should be a reason to expand the programme, not to pull it.

We’re nowhere near the last word on this, but for today let it go to the eminently sensible Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia, “I’m a realist enough to know that public policy is not based solely on science, but you would hope that policy would be strongly swayed by science, particularly in health care,” he told the Globe and Mail. “”If there was a validated intervention for hernia repair would we accept that the government step in and say: ‘We don’t like hernia repair’? I don’t think so.”

Such as this study from the University of Toronto, which shows that mice behave just the way lad mags would have us believe humans do, and sing about it. The researchers were listening to the sounds mice make as they have sex, or even contemplate it. Mice communicate in two ways: squeaking (which more or less means unhappy mouse) and ultrasonically (which tends to mean happy, excited mouse). Give a male mouse a whiff of female urine or pheromones, and he makes happy sounds. Give him a female to have sex with, and he gets happier still. Ultrasonic communication zinging all around the place. Female mice, on the other hand, squeak away like mad. They’d rather stay in and wash their hair, obviously. As for other laddish behaviour, well, give a mouse amphetamines, and they go all ultrasonic with delight. But female mice — not even a squeak.

“The rise of electronic publishing [1], preprint archives, blogs, and wikis is raising concerns among publishers, editors, and scientists about the present day relevance of academic journals and traditional peer review [2]. These concerns are especially fuelled by the ability of search engines to automatically identify and sort information [1]. It appears that academic journals can only remain relevant if acceptance of research for publication within a journal allows readers to infer immediate, reliable information on the value of that research.”

But the discussion (which is usually the Plain English section of a paper) veers deep into the Land of Nerd. For example:

Our finding that the distribution of number of citations is log-normal is in agreement with recent generative models of the citation network [21], [22] that predict a log-normal distribution for subsets of papers related by content similarity. Note that this result is not in disagreement with prior claims about the power-law behavior of the citation distribution [23], as the convolution of many log-normal distributions with different means can yield a distribution that can be hard to distinguish from a power law….

Our findings thus suggest the possibility of ranking journals according to q̅(J). To this end, we turn to a heuristic used in information retrieval called the Probability Ranking Principle [24]. This principle dictates that the optimal ranking of a set of journals will be the one that maximizes the probability that given a pair of papers (a,b) from journals A and B, respectively, q(a)>q(b) if A is above B in that ranking. This probability is also known as the multi-class “area under curve” (AUC) statistic [25]–[27]

The role of open access publishing in a changing scientific landscape is an important one, and good bloggers can increase its importance. But if we want to push that role with a wider public, we’re going to have to summarise our findings in some way that everyone can understand.

The response to placebo in these trials was exceptionally large, duplicating more than 80% of the improvement observed in the drug groups.

PsyBlog notes that Irving Kirsch has made a career out of studying the placebo effect, so he may be grinding his axes in this study. But overall, it looks to me like great news. It means that people who are feeling a little grotty about life can take more or less any pill and feel better. (People who are feeling very grotty about life still do better on antidepressants, the analysis found). The paper is guarded in its discussion of how decisions about drug approval and prescription are made, but they give some very interesting insights into how drug companies try to stack the jury in favour of a new drug. Here’s an example:

“Replacement of patients who investigators determined were not improving after 2 wk was allowed in three fluoxetine [Prozac] trials and in the three sertraline [Zoloft] trials for which data were reported. The trials also included a 1- to 2-wk washout period during which patients were given placebo, prior to random assignment. Those whose scores improved 20% or more were excluded from the study prior to random assignment.”

If I understand that correctly, it means that in these (mostly 6 week) trials, researchers could kick out the people who weren’t doing well right away (thus stacking the jury in favour of those who do well on Prozac), having already kicked out those who did too well before even getting the drug (this stacking the jury against those who do well on the placebo). These are the rules by which we allow the pharmaceuticial industry to operate? Honestly, it’s enough to drive you to anti-depressants.

The drugs included in the meta-analysis were: fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone)