University of Michigan Press Blog

WSJ Marketplace Praises 'Open Wound'

Marketwatch, part of the Wall Street Journal family of web sites, featured Jason Karlawish's Open Wound as the only fiction title on its list of "Health Books That Get Your Blood Pumping."

"Health care is likely to resurface next year as a major topic ahead of the presidential election," the article begins. "A handful of books published this year seek to challenge or explain how our standards of medical care in the U.S. have emerged."

Listing Open Wound among several recent non-fiction books, reviewer Kristen Gerencher says of Karlawish's book, "In this historical novel, [Beaumont and St. Martin] become entwined in each other’s lives medically, financially and even legally. Karlawish sketches their fraught relationship in the ensuing decades artfully, with clear relevance to the ethical questions of modern medicine."

Open Wound is available now from the University of Michigan Press.

Citing Recent Court Cases, Professor Praises U-M Press Title

In a recent blog post considering high court decisions in the United States and Britain, Michael Smithson, Professor of Psychology and Decision Sciences at Australia National University, called Stephen T. Ziliak and Deidre N. McCloskey's Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives "a swinging demolition of the unquestioned application of statistical significance in a variety of domains." Like Ziliak and McCloskey, Dr. Smithson notes that there are meaningful applications of statistical significance, but context is important--what is being measured, what is the sample size, and what a non-significance finding might actually mean are all important factors. To illustrate this, Smithson gives an unusual example:

For a quick intuitive, if fanciful, example let’s imagine randomly sampling one person from the world’s population and our hypothesis is that s/he will be Australian. On randomly selecting our person, all that we know about her initially is that she speaks English.

There are about 750 million first-or second-language English speakers world-wide, and about 23 million Australians. Of the 23 million Australians, about 21 million of them fit the first- or second-language English description. Given that our person speaks English, how likely is it that we’ve found an Australian? The probability that we’ve found an Australian given that we’ve picked an English-speaker is 21/750 = .03. So there goes our hypothesis. However, had we picked an Australian (i.e., given that our hypothesis were true), the probability that s/he speaks English is 21/23 = .91.

In the case of drug manufacturers involved in the Supreme Court case Smithson cites (and for which Ziliak contributed an amicus brief), it is also essential to take into account the severity of side effects, whether or not they occur with a frequency that is statistically significant. 

New York Times calls Karlawish's historical novel "marvelous"

The New York Times reviewed Dr. Jason Karlawish's historical novel Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont, praising its precise treatment of the doctor/patient relationship--in particular, the unique doctor/patient relationship that existed between frontier physicial Dr. William Beaumont and gut-shot trapper Alexis St. Martin in the early 19th century.

Setting the unusual circumstances of Beaumont's care in the context of more familiar terms--and suggesting that, despite radical advancements in the fields of medicine, some things never change--the Times said:

The relationship between doctor and patient is hard enough to parse when both are in the same room. When one opts out, it becomes even harder. And of the gallons of ink spilled over the centuries in attempts at clarification, few efforts in recent memory lay out the frustrations and confusions and crystalline moments of grace better than Dr. Jason Karlawish’s marvelous new book “Open Wound[.]”

Karlawish also dicussed his book on the Times' Science Times podcast -- listen here in your browser or click here to download in iTunes. His segment begins at 9:34.

In 1822, St. Martin came under Beaumont's care when an accidental gunshot left St. Martin with a hole in his abdomen. Though St. Martin recovered, the wound never fully healed, giving Beaumont the (ethically dubious) opportunity to observe the human digestive system at work. St. Martin, unsurprisingly, was not always entirely pleased with this arrangement.

Karlawish's Open Wound, bringing the conflicts, responsibilities, and interdependencies between Beaumont and St. Martin to life, is available now from the University of Michigan Press.

Tamara Piety Discusses Implications of First Amendment on Pharmaceutical "Speech"

Tamara Piety, author of the forthcoming University of Michigan Press title Brandishing the First Amendment: Commercial Expression in America, recently spoke with the Pharmalot blog on the implications of expanding First Amendment protections to corporate marketing speech, specifically as it relates to the pharmaceutical industry. At the heart of the discussion is a Supreme Court decision striking down a Vermont law that restricted data mining--in this case, records of which doctors prescribe which medicines--for marketing purposes.

Piety explained that "the data mining and pharmaceutical companies argued that Vermont’s singling out of marketing for different treatment than say, research or law enforcement was discriminatory," a tactic that serves to "leverage the language of civil rights and political speech to suggest that somehow the regulation of marketing is discriminatory." She went on to say that, even in the doctrines establishing protections for commercial speech in the mid-1970s, marketing speech was considered under a different set of standards due to the inherent financial incentive in such speech. While these standards are nominally in effect today, this and other recent court decisions have gone a long way toward eroding the boundaries that separate marketing from other speech under the First Amendment.

"For most of our history, we have thought it appropriate to regulate marketing and to treat commercial speech differently than expressive or political speech," Piety said. "This ruling suggests it’s not appropriate to make that distinction."

Brandishing the First Amendment will be published in February 2012.

Stephen T. Ziliak Discusses ‘Cult of Statistical Significance’ on BBC Radio 4

Stephen T. Ziliak, co-author with Deidre N. McCloskey of The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s More or Less with Tim Harford to discuss the problems with significance testing. Harford’s program focuses on the way numbers and statistics are used and misused in the public realm, and for the April 15 episode he spoke with Ziliak about a recent Supreme Court decision that hinged on whether statistical significance was a meaningful standard by which to assess a company’s liability for a potentially dangerous product.

Harford began using an example of a bowl full of Smarties candy with colors other than orange and blue removed, from which the host would take a sample to determine which color was present in greater quantity. A random sample found 2 blue, 8 orange, which led Harford to ask, “Does that prove that there are more orange than blue Smarties in the jar?” As Harford munched away on his sample, co-host Hannah Barnes explained that statistical significance testing would assume an equal number of orange and blue Smarties and then calculate the likelihood of drawing 8 orange or more in a sample of ten.

“One reason I do not like the test of statistical significance,” Ziliak told BBC Radio 4, “is that it doesn’t tell you what you want. What you want to know is the probability of your hypothesis being true, given the available evidence. That would be very useful, for example, when you’re taking a pain relief pill. You’d like to know the probability of the benefits and costs of taking that medicine when that effect is actually there. The test of statistical significance does not give us that information. It reverses the problem entirely and says the following: what is the probability of seeing the data given that there’s no difference between the two medicines we’re examining?”

Inside Higher Ed piece by 'Mad at School' author is on scholarly job hunt for those with mental disabilities

Margaret Price, author of Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, recently had a piece in Inside Higher Ed on how difficult the academic job search process can be for those with mental disabilities and how it might become more accessible.

"If this system were revised to become more accessible for academics with mental disabilities, all members of the academic world would benefit," she wrote. "A few relatively simple changes would have dramatic impact."

The full article is available online.

Price has been in the news recently, with a story about her work appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education and a blog response of her own to discussions about mental disabilities in an academic setting.

'Mad At School' author responds to debate over mental disability on campus

This blog entry, written by Mad at School author Margaret Price, is the second of three posts on mental disabilities in the college setting. For the first post on the Chronicle of Higher Education story, please click here.

Killer Dichotomies: Ir/rational, Crazy/Sane, Dangerous/Not

There are a number of conversations about Mad at School going on now. I am happy to see all of them—even those that contain opinions I strongly disagree with—because at least we are now having this conversation.

Over the past week, I’ve been reading Benjamin Reiss’s "Campus Security and the Specter of Mental-Health Profiling," along with its comment stream; also comments on Facebook; and other conversations on listservs such as DS-HUM.

And while I am not a fan of dichotomies—those “killer dichotomies,” in Anne Berthoff’s wonderful phrase—I do think I am beginning to perceive a divide.

On one side are those who have some direct experience or knowledge of mental disability. These folks include clinical psychologists or mental-health administrators on campus. They include professors who live with major depression, or bipolar disorder—or some other lurid diagnosis—carefully, and in secret. They may include teachers who have walked a crying student to the campus mental-health center. This group includes those who have a loved one—a brother or sister, a child, a close friend—who experiences significant mental health distress.

These people, in my experience, understand that mental health, mental unhealth, and the torturous framework of diagnosis, money, and human rights that lurches along with these concepts, are vastly complicated. Empirical studies tell us that many of our students, many of our faculty colleagues, we ourselves, are mentally disabled in large numbers. This group is interested in finding ways to improve access to all kinds of spaces, including academe.

Students and faculty with mental disabilities find their privacy under fire; new book, Chronicle of Higher Education story cover the issue

Mental disability is a topic of fast-growing interest in all spheres of American culture, including popular, governmental, aesthetic, and academic. Margaret Price's Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life explores the contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness in the setting of U.S. higher education. Scholar and disabilities activist Margaret Price asks: How might our education practices change if we understood disability to incorporate the disabled mind?

In an article published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, professor and author Benjamin Reiss writes, "Margaret Price makes clear in her book, Mad at School, influential voices are arguing that we should try to get around the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act regulations, which protect the privacy of student education records, in order to monitor and sequester potentially 'dangerous' students."

Economist blog quotes UM Press author in billion-dollar cold medicine case

A letter from author Stephen Ziliak has been quoted extensively in The Economist’s View blog posted by Mark Thoma, in regards to the amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on November 12, 2010.

Ziliak’s brief claims that the very popular cold and flu relief medication, Zicam, has been found to cause users to permanently lose their sense of smell. The amicus brief filed by Ziliak is regarded with high importance, and “it is said to be one of the top ten cases of the year as the Court's decision has general and large implications for liability, regulation, and reporting by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Billions of dollars are at stake, true. But so are billions of lives - live smells included.”

Ziliak is co-author of The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, with Deirdre N. McCloskey.

The full text from the Economist’s View blog can be found here: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/01/does-statistical-significance-stink.html

Read the original UM Press blog entry on the case here: http://umichpress.typepad.com/university_of_michigan_pr/2010/12/the-cult-of-statistical-significance-author-stephen-t-ziliak-challenges-cold-medecine-in-supreme-cou.html

"The Cult of Statistical Significance" authors challenge cold medicine makers' math in Supreme Court case

In supposedly one of the top ten cases of the Supreme Court this year, authors of The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey have filed a case involving Zicam, a common cold medicine from Matrixx which evidently causes users to permanently lose their sense of smell. The case will have general and large implications for liability, regulation and the Securities Exchange Commission. In addition, at least two of the other briefs filed for this case cite Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) to support their argument against the Court's use of a bright line 5% standard.