CAN A CHEESEBURGER BE A PLACEBO?
This is really hard to believe. You’re all familiar with the placebo effect, I imagine. Patients engaged as subjects in a study to test the effectiveness of a new medication routinely receive one of two regimens: half get the actual medicine; half get a placebo that looks like the real thing but contains no medication. If the medicine is effective, of course, the half that got it get better. But just as often, the half that took the placebo also achieve some improvement in their condition because they believed they were taking medication that could cure them.

It has always been assumed that the patients’ belief that they were receiving curative doses contributed to their healing. But a new study suggests that even patients who are told they’re receiving the placebo can be cured. Let me say that again. Study participants who are told they’re taking useless pills nonetheless gain a therapeutic benefit from participating in the study.

Which prompts me to ask, if participation is the key and the pill is useless, couldn’t I swallow a button instead of a pill and still be cured? Or better yet, couldn’t I eat a cheeseburger each time I was supposed to take a pill?

Here’s the story from the December 27, 2010 New York Times.

A FOOTBALL STADIUM FOR AN ONLINE UNIVERSITY?
Buying Legitimacy: How A Group Of California Executives Built An Online College Empire
Huffington Post March 10, 2011
by Chris Kirkham

CLINTON, Iowa — Inside the red brick campus of Ashford University, perched on a bluff above the Mississippi River, the door marked “President’s Office” remains perpetually shut. Telephone calls to the university’s head are swiftly transferred to a corporate office some 2,000 miles away, in San Diego.

A new, 500-seat football stadium adorns the campus, and is featured prominently in Ashford’s promotional literature, though the university has no football team. Signs around campus proudly read “Founded 1918” and “90 Years Strong,” despite the fact that Ashford — one of the nation’s fastest-growing for-profit colleges — has existed for less than a decade.

The perplexing campus landscape here in Iowa amounts to an elaborate stage set for a lucrative, online education empire that uses these trappings to sell itself to students as a traditional college experience. That strategy was the brainchild of the corporation behind Ashford: Bridgepoint Education Inc., a publicly traded venture started by a group of former executives from the University of Phoenix, a name now synonymous with for-profit higher education and the controversial marketing practices that have brought the industry crosswise with federal regulators.

Six years ago, Bridgepoint purchased what was then called Franciscan University of the Prairies, a near-bankrupt, 300-student college that for decades had been run by a local order of Franciscan nuns. The school delivered a crucial commodity: legal accreditation. That enabled Ashford’s students to tap federal financial aid dollars, the source of nearly 85 percent of the university’s revenues — more than $600 million in the last academic year. Ashford now counts nearly 76,000 students, 99 percent of whom take classes online.

Link to the full story, including video tours of the campus less than 1% of the student body ever see in person.

NUKES IN JAPAN
I find it hard to imagine anything more counterintuitive than the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe in Japan.

The only place in the world that has suffered nuclear attack is Japan. The only people on earth who have ever been fired on by nuclear weapons were Japanese. The country on earth that should be most terrified of nuclear power is Japan. The country on earth most vulnerable to earthquake is Japan. The most dangerous place to site a nuclear power plant is wherever earthquakes are likely. WTF are nuclear power plants doing in Japan?

The only species of life on the planet that would contemplate (let along follow through on) a plan so patently suicidal as to locate a nuclear reactor in the place most likely to be rocked by earthquake is homo sapiens. The translation for “homo sapiens”? Wise man, or knowing man.

I’m certainly not the only, nor the first, writer to object to the whole idea of nuclear power plants, but I’m proud to be among them. My argument against them is quite simple. 1) They can release as much radioactivity into the atmosphere as nuclear bombs. 2) We should avoid massive releases of radioactivity. 3) The chance of a meltdown is small but measurable. 4) The more plants we build, the more we increase the odds of a meltdown. 5) Eventually (and especially if we build them where earthquakes are likely) one will fail and melt down, and the containment building will be so compromised it can no longer contain anything. 6) As bad as they are, coal burning plants never release radioactivity.

Here’s how Greenpeace feels about it at the moment.