The unbelievably accurately named Madoff

I have posted several times on the eerie syndrome the New Scientist has dubbed "nominative determinism," in which a person's name matches their profession or personality. With the name Sunshine, I can't help but be interested in this. I've seen so many of these so-called "aptonyms" that I've become rather used to them, but even I was floored by the news that a man named Madoff, which is pronounced "made off," was arrested for a giant Ponzi scheme in which he, yes, made off with $50 billion of other people's money. What can I say? I wish that my sunny, upbeat personality was all my own doing, just as Bernard Madoff must wish that he can throw all the guilt off himself by pleading nominative insanity. Whatever the answer to all this, it has already proven wonderful fodder for late night comedians. I think Jay Leno said it best: "Shouldn't the first clue have been the guy's name? Madoff, you know, as in 'made off with the money,' you know? I mean, who were his partners, Pilfered and Swindled?"

Crestor Study - What does it really mean?

The headlines are screaming that Crestor is the best when it comes to reducing heart disease. But before we all start buying AstraZeneca stock (not that this is a bad idea), maybe we should take a look at what the news actually is here. The study, named JUPITER, was designed to test Crestor's effect on those who have elevated levels of C-reactive proteins--or actually high sensitivity, or hsCRPs to be perfectly accurate. Researchers have begun to suspect that heart disease is not caused by a gunky build-up of cholesterol in the arteries, but rather is a far more dynamic process. Yet, when one reads the coverage of this study, it's clear that no one is actually getting this key point. And here's another issue--the results trumpeted from the rooftops are simply not as good as they first appear. One issue to consider is that the trial was stopped early, because of its favorable results. Thus, a trial that was expected to measure heart disease results over several years was stopped after less than two years. How much can we really garner from such a short term study? And, despite the impressive sounding reduction--50% overall, and 38 percent for those with normal cholesterol, the actual numbers are a lot less exciting.

As pointed out in a nice BusinessWeek story on the topic:

"Dr. Andrew Tonkin, head of cardiovascular research at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, cautioned that the actual number of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events was low, even in the study participants that were taking placebos. There were 83 cardiac events of all types in the Crestor group, an 0.9% actual risk, compared with 157, or 1.8%, in the placebo group. 'You would have to treat 180 people for two years to prevent one death," he said.'"

Ummm. Okay, sorry to be a party pooper here but ... are you telling me that they stopped the study based on a 74-person, .9% difference? What if the results were reversed in the second two years? There's no reason that couldn't happen, is there?

Believe me, I'm glad this study was done, because first of all it could save some lives, which is the most important thing. Secondly, it is yet another nail in the coffin of the cholesterol theory--though of course few people recognize this. And finally, it's important that statins be tested on wider populations. This was the first study that included a signficant number of women. But for pete's sake, can you at least finish a study before you declare victory? On such a short term, there's a good chance these were spurious. Don't you agree?

My Ironic Name

Back in January 2007, writer Nicholas Carr described me on his "Rough Type" blog as the "ironically named" Sunshine Mugrabi because, according to him, I was just one of several reporters falling into a trap he was calling "The Cassandra Meme." The silly idea I was floating back then? In light of early evidence that there were not enough exits to justify the mass investment in Web 2.0, there was a good chance that we could be heading for another fall--one not all that dissimilar to the dot com bubble.

As my Red Herring article at the time read: "Layoffs and debt-ridden companies abound in a dire sign of another dot-com bust." Well, here's hoping he was right to mock me, and further, here's hoping that I was wrong. Unfortunately, I don't think I was. TechCrunch has been posting a Layoff Tracker, with companies being added each day. Yahoo's 10 percent cut is the least of it--a lot of the companies that are hitting this list are the ones we were assured had rock solid business plans. In any case, Carr was wrong about my name being ironic--I'm as sunny and optimistic as you can get. The difference is, I don't see a correction as a bad thing. The dot com meltdown didn't hurt Amazon and it positively made Google. I have no doubt that this time around, the companies that will make it will be the ones that have something truly innovative to offer. I personally gained a great deal during the dot com crash--I got out of tech for a while and went to work for a daily paper in a small town. That was the best education I could've imagined, as I had editors who had been doing the same thing for decades. They'd seen enough stuff come and go that they were rarely if ever fooled by something that looked too good to be true.

Green IT - high tech greenwashing?

Now that my job is to help companies get the word out about what they have to offer, I'm finding that it's not as easy to dismiss them with a snarky line or two. Such is the case with a word that I used to let roll off my tongue on a regular basis: greenwashing. I still use it in regards to, say, BP's claims of ecosensitivity. But the latest eco-efforts in the information technology space are trickier to debunk. Some are highly suspect, of course--I've seen far too many broad claims from companies that, say, spin storage disks down, about how much they're doing for the planet. But the fact is that the IT sector needs to take steps to reduce its energy and materials usage, and there are some legitimate efforts in that arena, particularly among companies in the UK.

In representing a storage company with a green and cost-saving agenda, Ocarina Networks, I have gotten to know Doug Washburn, an analyst at Forrester Research who specializes in greening IT departments. Ocarina, we both agree, is a legitimate green business, in that its technology reduces the amount of space that's needed to store all the millions of photos, documents, videos and other data-intensive files being shared around the internet. And in talking to him, I've started taking a much closer look at the emerging category of Green IT. What I'm finding is that - first and foremost - there is a huge and growing need to take energy and materials usage into account when it comes to determining the resources allocated to IT for companies of all sizes. Cloud computing -- which for some looks like a panacea--actually raises even more questions. Just because someone else is handling some or all of your IT needs doesn't mean they're doing it in a way that is less wasteful. In looking into this emerging Green IT space, I've found some interesting sites:

Energy Matters - Green Storage Blog
Sustainable IT
Greener Computing

All food for thought, I'd say.

RIP Bell Labs Physics Research Lab

Like so many people, I was saddened and shocked to read on Wired.com that Bell Labs is shuttering its fundamental physics research lab. As a little kid, I learned the name "Shockley" before I'd heard of Abe Lincoln. (This is what happens when you're raised by an IBM Fellow.) It's just weird to think that the place that yielded the transistor and six Nobel prize-winning innovations could roll over and die. Yet, for all the uproar over it, I wonder if anyone has considered that perhaps it's time to pass the torch. Maybe this country needs to become a follower in the global race for innovation, instead of the leader as it once was. Patriotism aside, it seems to me that it's too late to bemoan the fact that the U.S. has fallen behind. Take our automobile industry. Other than the strange and elitist Tesla Motors, when was the last time we heard that anyone from our shores had made a leap forward in that arena? So there you go. And if you're not quite ready to dry your eyes, check out this multimedia presentation, also on Wired.

Statins for 8-year-olds: can it get any worse?

I haven't been posting much lately, but today's news story that the world has gone mad ... I mean, that the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending statins for children as young as eight with high LDL cholesterol spurred me to action. This is truly a chilling story, worth of the most terrifying of Stephen King horror novels. Why? Because of the way that statins work on the body. In adults, they can wreak quite a bit of havoc (see Space Doc for lots of stories on this), but in developing bodies, we're talking about a whole 'nother level. Statins, derived from poisonous mushrooms, do a whole lot more than just lower cholesterol. They act on what is known as the mevalonate pathway, which is key in the development of the basic building blocks of the body, such as proteins and hormone regulators. The idea of inhibiting this pathway in a person who is still growing goes so completely against anything resembling the Hippocratic oath that I am frankly shocked and appalled that any pediatrician, much less the national representative body of these physicians, could possibly advocate this, especially in children who are largely healthy except for their cholesterol and weight levels. It's as if they're suggesting cutting out a child's eyes in case they may some day go blind in old age. Usually I try to put a note dry humor into my blog posts, but today I can't even bring myself to do that. This is just too depressing for words, witty or otherwise.

Twitter--the "huh?"-mobile

I like Twitter. I love that there is a now a place where I can "follow" someone I once met at a party or saw on a webcast from some random social networking conference. It all taps into the deepest, darkest part of my psyche. To whit, my inner stalker is sooo excited about this site. And yet, I must ask this question: what the heck is everyone talking about? A few random examples of Twitter tweets I've seen recently are....

LuisRivera all the geeks were inside the cafeteria. Free food too at WhereCamp. (Robert Scoble).

at dan huards bday party dinner, dan just ordered the 05 stags leap artemis cab, soo good (Kevin Rose),

and finally the most eloquently indecipherable of all:

I never listen to branding police. :-) But Bwana points out it's Blu-ray. Heheh. (Two-time winner Robert Scoble)